Profile
Karla Rothstein is an architect, licensed in Berlin Germany, and an educator. A graduate of the University of Maryland School of Architecture, and the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University, she also holds certificates of study from the Moscow Institute of Architecture and the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich, Switzerland. She was a Jacob K. Javits Fellow in Fine Arts from 1988–1992, and a William Kinne Traveling Fellow in 1992. After working in a sculpture atelier in Munich, Germany and architectural offices in Zürich and New York City, she founded the multidisciplinary architecture practice of SR+T with Joel Towers in 1992. From 1993 to 1996 she was a member of the design faculty at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York. Since 1997 Rothstein has taught both core and advanced design studio in the Graduate School of Architecture at Columbia University. She has also taught an urban design seminar focusing on strategies of housing in contemporary global cities. In 2003 Columbia Books of Architecture published process is the pollywog, a studioworks edition of work from Rothstein's design studios accompanied by her writing on architectural pedagogy. Her areas of research span from the intimate spaces of urban domestic life, death and memory to intersections of social justice and the built environment.
kmsr@srtarchitects.com
Joel E. Towers is the Dean of Parsons The New School For Design and Associate Professor of Architecture and Sustainable Design at the school. A practicing architect, Towers has held several positions at Parsons and the university since joining the faculty during the 2003/04 academic year. In 2007 he has appointed Dean of the School of Design Strategies [SDS]. SDS houses Parsons’ programs in Design and Management, Foundation, Integrated Design, as well as new initiatives in environmental and sustainable design, urban design, and transdisciplinary design. Prior to SDS, Towers established and directed the Tishman Environment and Design Center [TED] at The New School and held the position of Associate Provost for Environmental Studies at the university. TED supports a new, university-wide BA and BS Environmental Studies degree and is unique in its approach to design-led research in tandem with historical and social inquiry, placing an emphasis on innovation within the context of cultural, economic, and ecological factors. Towers also served as Parsons’ first Director of Sustainable Design and Urban Ecology.
Towers is a founding partner of SR+T Architects. He received a B.S. in Architecture from the University of Michigan School of Architecture and a Master of Architecture from Columbia University. In 1992, after working with William McDonough Architects where he directed projects including The Hannover Principles: Design for Sustainability that helped codify that firm’s environmental thinking, Towers formed SR+T with Karla Rothstein. Towers’ focus on ecological issues and their relationship to both design conceptualization and construction methodology is the foundation of his research and his teaching. It is also central in the work of SR+T. Towers was previously a member of the faculty of the Graduate School of Architecture at Columbia University where he taught advanced architecture and urban design studios and developed and taught a seminar exploring critical ecologies and environmentally reflexive architecture.
joel@srtarchitects.com
Salvatore Perry is an architect, builder and developer. Perry has been affiliated with the work of SR+T since 1997. His independent real estate development work was initiated with the renovation of a converted Armenian church while he was an architecture student at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He founded Latent Productions, LLC in 1999 to develop his first NYC building in West SoHo. Following several NYC residential projects, Latent was most recently awarded a 30,000 SF development site in Brownsville Brooklyn through NYC HPD’s ‘New Foundations for Home Ownership’ program. The project, BK_INT, will produce a community of 25 affordable condominiums available to qualified buyers in 2008. In an evolution of their on-going collaboration, Perry became an associate at SR+T in 2007.
sal@srtarchitects.com
SR+T Architects
Formed as a design studio in 1992, SR+T has become a multidisciplinary architecture practice with a comprehensive approach to making space. The built work and projects of SR+T Architects explore and interpret spatial relationships, tectonic practice, and social structures, and have been published in Casabella, Architecture, and L’industria Italiana del Cemento magazines, im Detail: Einfamiliehäuser / In Detail: Single Family Houses, The New York Times, the forthcoming expanded edition of Kenneth Frampton's American Masterworks, and exhibited at Max Protetch gallery in NYC.
In 2000 Rothstein and Towers were awarded a Joint Fellowship in Architecture from the New York Foundation for the Arts, supporting their work investigating ways in which architecture can engage in political and social organizational strategies to develop new models for the making of public space. In 2002 SR+T Architects was awarded a citation in the 49th Annual P/A Awards sponsored by architecture magazine. Their project, 20+22 Renwick, an eleven story hybrid residential, environmentally advanced development in NYC critically engaged the zoning regulation to choreograph 20 live-work lofts with a commercial base.
In 2003 Rothstein and Towers expanded their NYC practice, opening a European competition office, SR+T/Berlin, pursuing architectural propositions focused on the interface between public and private realms.
SR+T’s attention to the intricate exchanges across urban public and private space is currently being realized in the construction of a new multifamily dwelling in Prospect Heights, and the design of 25 units of affordable housing on 5 development sites awarded by NYC HPD in Brownsville, Brooklyn. The Brownsville project is one of a series of development collaborations between SR+T and Latent Productions, LLC.
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