Michael Bell

Michael Bell is a Professor of Architecture at Columbia University. Bell’s teaching, research and practice focus on housing and urbanization as well as materials and engineering innovations. Bell is founding Chair of the Columbia Conference on Architecture, Engineering and Materials and was Director of the Columbia Master of Architecture, Core Design Studios (2000-14) and the Columbia Housing Studios (2000-11). Bell was a Fellow at the Joint Center for Housing Studies, Harvard (2011-13).

Bell has been a faculty member at Berkeley and Rice University and taught at Harvard, Cornell and the University of Michigan as the Eliel Saarinen Visiting Professor of Architecture. In 2015 Bell served as the Friedman Visiting Professor of Practice at Berkeley. Bell was a Visiting Professor of Engineering at Stanford University, Center for Design Research in 2016/17.

Books by Bell include: Engineered Transparency: The Technical, Visual, and Spatial Effects of Glass; Post-Ductility: Metals in Architecture and Engineering; Permanent Change: Plastics in Architecture and Engineering; Michael Bell: Space Replaces Us: Essays and Projects on the City; 16 Houses: Designing the Public’s Private House and Slow Space.

Bell’s practices architecture with Eunjeong Seong and is a founder of Visible Weather, a research/design collaboration with partners in engineering, energy and housing economics. Bell’s architectural design has been commissioned/exhibited by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and is included in the Permanent Collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Bell’s Gefter-Press House (Binocular House) is featured in Kenneth Frampton’s American Masterworks: Houses of the Twentieth & Twenty-first Centuries.