Adam Dayem
Assistant Professor
Greene Building, M112
518-276-4060
Master of Architecture, Columbia University; Bachelor of Arts in Architecture, University of California Berkeley
Adam Dayem is an architect and educator based in Brooklyn, New York. He is the principal of Actual Office Architecture PLLC, an architecture and design studio that takes on a variety of work including residential, retail, and exhibit design. Actual Office has won awards for theoretical and built architectural projects including Second Place in the American Architects Building of the Year Competition, and a Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture and Design American Architecture Award, both received for the Sleeve House, a single-family residence in upstate New York. Actual Office has recently completed the New York City flagship retail store for the Japanese fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto.
Dayem received a Bachelor of Arts in architecture from the University of California Berkeley and a Master of Architecture from Columbia University where he was awarded the McKim Prize honoring the year’s most outstanding graduate in Architecture. He subsequently worked at Bernard Tschumi Architects as a designer on projects around the world including buildings including the New Acropolis Museum in Athens and the Blue Condo Tower in New York City, as well as winning competition entries including the Alesia Museum in Alesia, France, and the West Diaoyutai Tower in Beijing.
Dayem is currently Assistant Professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute where he teaches design studios and visual studies courses while serving as the Second-year Design Studio Coordinator and the Director of Publications for the School of Architecture. In parallel with his professional pursuits, Dayem has developed a line of academic research focusing on evolving potentials for representation to address contemporary issues confronting the discipline and practice of architecture. His experimental drawings have been included in group shows in the United States and internationally. He is the editor of Imaginary Wilds: Architectural Interventions for the Thomas Cole National Historic Site (ORO Editions, 2024), which presents and investigates work of Rensselaer Architecture students through the lens of Cole’s representations of nature in the American landscape. Dayem has previously taught architecture and design at Pratt Institute, University of Pennsylvania, The New School for Design, and Columbia University. He is a registered architect in New York State.
