Michael Bell is Professor of Architecture at Columbia University. Bell chairs the Columbia Conference on Architecture, Engineering and Materials and is also Director of the Master of Architecture Program Core Design Studios.
Between 2000 and 2002 Bell lead a team of architects and desginers to provide research, urban planning and design for 2100 units of mixed income housing on a 100-acre parcel of oceanfront land owned by the city of New York. The research and design was funded to assist in the city’s future planning and development goals. Bell also founded “16 Houses,” a low income housing design program in Houston, Texas.
Bell’s design work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Venice Biennale; The Yale School of Architecture; The University Art Museum at Berkeley; and at Arci-Lab, France. Bell has received four Progressive Architecture Awards, and his work is also included in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Bell’s recently completed Gefter-Press House (The Binocular House) is featured in the January 2008 “Metropolis” magazine and will appear with criticism by Joan Ockman in “Casabella”, and the new edition of Kenneth Frampton’s American Masterworks Houses.
Books by Michael Bell include Engineered Transparency: the Technical, Visual and Spatial Effects of Glass; Michael Bell: Space Replaces Us: Essays and Projects on the City, 16 Houses: Designing the Public’s Private House, and Slow Space. Bell is a founding editor with Yung Ho Chang and Steven Holl of the urbanism journal “32.” Bell has also served on the faculties of the University of California at Berkeley, Rice University, and has also taught at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.
Bell is a graduate of The Catholic University of America, Washington, DC and also the University of California at Berkeley. He has received two Graham Foundation grants as well and the Emerging Voices Award from the Architectural League of New York.
