Robert Somol is the Spring 2016 Baumer Distinguished Visiting Professor

Design critic and theorist Robert Somol is the Knowlton School’s Spring 2016 Baumer Distinguished Visiting Professor.

Robert Somol is the Spring 2016 Baumer Distinguished Visiting Professor

Design critic and theorist Robert Somol is the Knowlton School’s Spring 2016 Baumer Distinguished Visiting Professor. Somol joins a long list of prominent practitioners and scholars as Baumer Professors since the program’s inception in 1996, including Stan Allen, Zaha Hadid, Steven Holl, Eric Owen Moss, Greg Lynn, Sylvia Lavin, Preston Scott Cohen, Benjamin Bratton and Neil Denari. During the course of their time at Knowlton, Baumer Professors lead a graduate design seminar and present a public lecture as part of the School’s Baumer Lecture Series.

Somol’s lecture, entitled “See What I’m Saying” will take place at 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday, February 3 in Knowolton Hall’s Gui Auditorium.

Robert Somol has been the Director of the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) since 2007. He is the editor of Autonomy and Ideology and has served on the editorial boards of Any and Log, as well as the soon-to-be-launched Flat Out. His writings have appeared in publications ranging from Assemblage to Wired, and will appear in his collection of essays, Nothing to Declare.

For the 2015-16 academic year, Somol will be a Fellow at UIC’s Institute for the Humanities completing his book manuscript, This Will Cover That: Writing and Building from the Death of Corbusier to the End of Architecture.

Somol holds an A.B. from Brown University, a J.D. from Harvard Law School and a Ph.D. in the history of culture from the University of Chicago.