Karen Bausman

Recipient of the Rome Prize, Karen Bausman is a research-based visual artist, architect, and theorist of architecture and urbanism. She has researched, published, and exhibited her work extensively over her academic and professional career. She first garnered international recognition with her Performance Theater for Los Angeles, which won the Progressive Architecture Award from Architecture magazine, marking the first time a woman leading a design practice was recognized with the honor. This breakthrough commission and other works that push the boundaries of structural and visual poetry formed the basis of “Karen Bausman Supermodels,” a solo exhibition of her building designs and working methods at Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

Academic Influence named Karen one of the top women leaders in STEM in 2020 in recognition of her achievements in teaching architecture through the intersection of crucial disciplines. Her design research has been supported by a Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome, two New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowships in Architecture (NYFA), the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the New York State Council for the Arts (NYSCA), Creative Time, Artists Space, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

Karen leads Women-Owned Business Enterprise (WBE)-certified Karen Bausman + Associates. The firm is the current A/E Prime holder of multiple, multiyear Design Excellence contracts supporting New York City’s ambitious effort to bring new ideas, technology, and environmental soundness to the design of city-financed infrastructure and buildings. Her expertise is currently being applied to numerous major building projects at waterfront sites in The Bronx and Manhattan, spanning multiple federal, state, and city agencies. Karen, as Prime Architect, engages teams of environmental scientists, marine engineers, geotechnical engineers, structural engineers, and landscape architects to execute her firm’s projects.

She co-leads Wind Power NYC, a research consortium she co-founded with fellow faculty member Maria Sieira at Pratt Institute through a 2020 Pratt grant to focus on wind power’s cultural and design implications in New York City. She co-established Wind Power NYC Archive at Pratt. Her independent design research unit investigates the potential of renewable energy and wind power-related architectural infrastructure integrations across New York City waterfront sites.

She has been an Adjunct Associate Professor of Architecture since 2015.

B.Arch., The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, School of Architecture

Karen Bausman was the Eliot Noyes Professor of Architectural Theory at Harvard University Graduate School of Design and the Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor of Architectural Design at Yale University. She is the only American woman to have held both honorary teaching chairs. She taught an Advanced Architectural Design studio at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Preservation, and Planning (GSAPP) from 1990 to 2004.