Andrew Holder has been named chair of the Graduate Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Design (GA/LA/UD) department in the School of Architecture after a competitive international search. With more than 20 years of experience in academic and professional settings, Holder joins Pratt from the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), where he served as Associate Professor, MArch I Program Director, and MArch Thesis Director, and the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design, where he served as a Visiting Critic and Visiting Associate Professor. He will assume his new role at Pratt on July 1, 2025.
“In practice and academia, Andrew has shown a commitment to explorations on how architecture’s form relates to its participation in both timely cultural conversations and larger historical discourses,” said School of Architecture Dean Quilian Riano. “His extensive academic, professional, and administrative leadership experience will be invaluable to the department and school, especially as we go into a school-wide strategic planning process.”
As chair, Holder will oversee around 144 faculty and 235 students within GA/LA/UD, which encompasses four programs: Master of Architecture, Master of Landscape Architecture, Master of Science in Architecture (Post Professional), and Master of Science in Urban Design (Post Professional). Together, these programs are dedicated to the pursuit of design inquiry across complex and evolving fields of study and are structured to cultivate students’ ability to ask challenging questions that deepen their understanding of building and living environments.
“I’m honored to join the students and faculty of Pratt’s School of Architecture. It has long been an institution where practice and the academy combine to make the contemporary,” Holder said. “How should representation, form-making, technology, and discourse change in answer to the overriding concerns of the present? My role is not to dictate these answers, but to design platforms that foment strong positions and new proposals.”
Holder joined Harvard in 2015. He assumed leadership roles in the GSD beginning in 2017 and set out to improve the school’s admissions process, increasing the size of applicant pools and the breadth of outreach to prospective candidates. He also led the realignment of the GSD’s Core Curriculum to introduce new climate change standards and integrate more closely with the History/Theory curriculum. He previously taught at the University of Michigan, and has been a lecturer at the University of California, Los Angeles, the Southern California Institute of Architecture, and the Otis College of Art and Design, as well as a visiting lecturer at the University of Queensland.
In 2018, Holder was the co-curator, along with K. Michael Hays, of Inscriptions: Architecture Before Speech, a survey exhibition of contemporary architecture featuring work from more than 100 practices. A book of the same name, published in 2022, articulated a theory of contemporary architecture rooted in a return to archetypes and manual practices. He also created a Queer in Design symposium modeled after a “Family Dinner,” along with a 4-year series of salons called “Alice,” and the GSD architecture lecture series entitled “_positions.”
His research, writing, and private practice strive to make the assembly of architecture, its techniques and forms, more legible to the public. His extensively cited articles and essays have appeared in the Architectural Record, A+U, Domus, Harvard Design Magazine, New York Review of Architecture, Pollen, Log, and more.
In 2006, Holder co-founded The Los Angeles Design Group (LADG), an award-winning firm that has taken on a variety of housing, commercial, and arts and exhibition projects. The LADG has recently worked on a project called “houses in Los Angeles,” a series of commissioned buildings that reconsider the forms, organizations, and notions of family in areas zoned for single-family homes. A forthcoming book on this series entitled Five Houses in Los Angeles uses the commissioned houses as the basis for speculative proposals.
Holder has frequently collaborated on interdisciplinary projects. His practice recently completed “Eternal Medium” at the Los County Museum of Art (LACMA), an exhibition that surveys decorative hardstone carvings across cultures from 18th Century Florence to the Mughal Dynasty. At Harvard, he has collaborated with both the Harvard Dance Center and the Loeb Library Special Collections on different projects. The latter collaboration produced an exhibition pairing contemporary design with the library’s holdings of William Gilpin’s books on the English Picturesque landscape. His interest in landscape and the Picturesque began with another special collections collaboration at the University of Michigan called “In the Garden Grows a Lump.”
Holder earned his Master of Architecture from the University of California, Los Angeles, and his Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from Lewis and Clark College.