The 2021 Herbert Baumer Memorial Seminars will focus on the work of Michael Murphy, founding Principal and Executive Director of MASS Design Group. The Baumer Seminar offers advanced architecture students an in-depth look at the work of noted architectural practitioners and theorists from inside and outside the field.

Michael Murphy, Int FRIBA, is a Founding Principal and Executive Director of MASS Design Group, a collective of architecture and design advocates dedicated to the construction of dignity. Since MASS’s beginnings, Murphy’s portfolio documents work in over a dozen countries and spans the areas of healthcare, education, housing, urban development, food systems, Indigenous sovereignty, and the public monument. His 2016 TED talk has reached over a million views, and he was awarded the Al Filipov Medal for Peace and Justice in 2017. Murphy has taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, University of Michigan, Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation and was recently awarded the position of Thomas W. Ventulett III Distinguished Chair in Architectural Design at Georgia Institute of Technology. Murphy holds a Master of Architecture from Harvard Graduate School of Design and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Chicago.

Under Murphy’s guidance, MASS has been awarded globally and featured in over 900 publications. Most recently, MASS was recognized as the winner of the AIA 2021 Collaborative Achievement Award and Wall Street Journal’s 2020 Architecture Innovator. MASS’s design of the National Memorial for Peace and Justice was named the “single greatest work of American architecture in the 21st century” by Mark Lamster from the Dallas Morning News.

Architecture graduate students in the Baumer Seminar will focus on the values present in MASS Design Group's work and how their buildings, organizations, studies, and projects are “purposeful, healing, and hopeful.”

Michael Murphy will participate in the Baumer Series Monday, November 8. He will deliver a talk followed by conversations between the speaker and respondents from the Knowlton faculty. The event will be streamed live on the Knowlton YouTube channel.

Herbert Baumer Memorial Seminars

Since 1998, the Knowlton School has hosted the Herbert Baumer Memorial Seminars, a series of interactions between Knowlton students and seminal practitioners in architecture and related disciplines. Based on a significant amount of research, students lead a series of discussions that encourage visiting practitioners to position their work within a broader disciplinary context and to reveal their motivations and techniques. These interactions are recorded and transcribed and become the basis of the Source Books in Architecture Series.

Murphy joins a long list of prominent practitioners and scholars as Baumer Professors, including Stan Allen, Zaha Hadid, Steven Holl, Eric Owen Moss, Greg Lynn, Sylvia Lavin, Preston Scott Cohen, Neil Denari, Ryue Nishizawa, Sanford Kwinter and 2019’s Baumer Professors Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee.