Chris Perry
Associate Professor
Associate Dean for Graduate Education
Co-Director, Master of Science in Architecture Program
Greene Building, Room 105
518-276-8435
Master of Architecture, Columbia University; Bachelor of Arts, Colgate University
Chris Perry is Associate Professor and Associate Dean for Graduate Education at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s School of Architecture where he oversees the school’s professional and research graduate programs and is Co-Director of the Master of Science in Architecture program.
He received a Master of Architecture from Columbia University, for which he also received an Honor Award for Excellence in Design, and a Bachelor of Arts in philosophy from Colgate University where he was set designer for the student-led Kinetic Theatre Company. Prior to becoming a full-time faculty member at Rensselaer, Chris was a Presidential Fellow in MIT’s doctoral program in architectural history, theory, and criticism.
Prior to Rensselaer, Chris was the Louis I. Kahn Visiting Assistant Professor at Yale University’s School of Architecture, an endowed professorship, and prior to that appointment he held an endowed professorship at Rice University’s School of Architecture. He has also taught at Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell University, the University of Toronto, RMIT in Melbourne, Pratt Institute, Barnard College, and Parsons School of Design.
Chris is co-recipient of the Architectural League of New York’s Young Architects Award, co-editor of AD: Collective Intelligence in Design published by Wiley-Academy, co-chair of the ACADIA (Association for Computer-Aided Design in Architecture) 2015 Annual Conference, as well as co-editor of its proceedings, and a former member of its Board of Directors.
In 2011, Chris co-founded pneumastudio with Cathryn Dwyre. An art, design, and research practice situated between architecture and landscape, pneumastudio’s art and design work has been exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Tallinn Architecture Biennale, the Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens, the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York, the Design Museum of Barcelona, and the Gallatin Galleries in New York. Publishers that have featured pneumastudio’s art and design work include Routledge, Actar, Prestel, and Wiley-Academy.
pneumastudio’s research work takes the form of curatorial and editorial projects. Examples of the former include the exhibition and symposium Ambiguous Territory: Architecture, Landscape, and the Postnatural which brings together over sixty works of art, architecture, landscape architecture, and scholarship. Examples of the latter include a book that features the content of the Ambiguous Territory exhibition and symposium published by Actar Publishers with a launch event at Rizzoli Bookstore in New York, as well as a special section of PAJ: A Journal of Performance Art published by MIT Press titled Performance and Architecture.
Additionally, pneumastudio conducts research through travel fellowships and artist residencies, the latter of which include MacDowell in New Hampshire, Château de Monthelon in Burgundy, and the Santa Fe Art Institute in New Mexico.
Prior to pneumastudio, Chris was co-principal of the design practice servo, which he co-founded in 1999. Group exhibitions featuring servo’s work include the Venice Architecture Biennale, Centre Pompidou, SFMoMA, Wexner Center for the Arts, and the Cooper-Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. The group’s work has been featured in numerous books by MIT Press, Princeton Architectural Press, Thames & Hudson, Rizzoli, and Phaidon, including a monograph edited by Chris and titled servo: networks and environments published by DAMDI Publishers in Korea. servo’s work is part of the private collections of SFMoMA and the Frac Centre in Orleans, France and was featured in Architectural Record’s annual Vanguard issue.
Following graduate school at Columbia and prior to servo, Chris worked for Stan Allen for two years as a project designer and was involved with a wide variety of projects ranging from commissions and competitions to publications, including Allen’s book Points + Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City published by Princeton Architectural Press.
