Peter Macapia
Adjunct Associate Professor - CCE

Biography
Dr. Peter Macapia is an artist, architect, and scholar and founder and director of the experimental labDORA (Design Office for Research and Architecture) in New York and Paris. He started labDORA in 2003 after receiving his PhD from Columbia where he was the recipient of the Presidential Fellowships. His interests involve the problem of geometry in the age of computation, the geometry and topology of matter/energy relations and urban density, for which he has received numerous research grants. He has won distinction in international competitions and collaborated with engineers from Ove Arup and Buro Happold as well as attended numerous artist-in-residencies. His work and writings have been published in Log, Huffington Post, Monitor, A+U, Architectural Review, Architectural Record, Interior Design, Pin-Up and others. Macapia’s projects Dirty Geometry 1 and Dirty Geometry 2 were acquired by the FRAC Centre in Orleans France in 2007. Macapia’s Pavilion Seroussi, has been shown throughout France as part of the Dentelles d’architectures exhibition, which includes Nouvel, FOA, and Philip Morel. Macapia’s work has been exhibited in Basel, Miami, New York, Chicago, London, Paris, and Los Angeles including the recent solo shows titled Swarm, Ship of Theseus, Skullcracker, and The Birth of Physics. His work on Dirty Geometry, including the Dirty Geometry Pavilions, will be published in 2011 by the FRAC titled Architectures experimentales,1950-2010. Macapia began teaching at Columbia in 1999 and has since taught in both art and architecture at Sci-Arc, Pratt Institute, Parsons School of Design, the Ecole Special d’Architecture, Malaquais, TU Delft, School of Visual Arts and others. Macapia has also taught courses on Foucault and Justice at the Brooklyn Public Library and currently teaches advanced graduate studio at Pratt’s SoA as well as courses on power and space and critical discourses on race, gender, sexuality and space. He is currently Chair of the Pratt’s SoA Committee and serves on the Institute’s IAC. Currently Macapia is working on the relation between law, space, and witness in ancient Greece, the development of generative architecture since the 19th Century, and collaborations with civil rights lawyers on space and conflicts in justice. Between 2020 and 2025 Macapia collaborated with civil rights lawyers and scholars Katherine Smith, Alexis-Hoag Fordjour, and Derecka Purnell for his studio course Architectures of Abolition where students design alternative court houses and community justice centers.
Education
B.F.A., Rhode Island School of Design;
M.A., Harvard University;
Ph.D., Columbia University: