New faculty

Rice Architecture is pleased to welcome nine new faculty members this fall. They include our newest assistant professors, Shantel Blakely and Maggie Tsang, as well as visiting faculty members: Luis Barajas (Lecturer), Bárbara Barreda (Visiting Scholar in Technology and Culture), Adam Frampton (Visiting Critic), Ali Karimi (Visiting Critic), İpek Mehmetoğlu (Lecturer), Falon Mihalic (Lecturer), and Nicola Springer (Visiting Critic).

“We are delighted to welcome so many new faculty members to M.D. Anderson Hall this year,” said Igor Marjanović, the William Ward Watkin Dean of Rice Architecture. “From their important work here in Houston to farther afield places such as Bahrain, Canada, Chile, Mexico, and beyond, they bring an unprecedented diversity of voices, backgrounds, and research interests to our school, linking the global and the local in the most powerful ways. We are grateful for their participation and we look forward to their contributions to the collective conversation of our faculty.”

Shantel Blakely works on the intersections of architecture and philosophy; she is a recipient of the 2022 Getty Research Fellowship and the author of the forthcoming book, Marco Zanuso (MIT Press, 2024). Maggie Tsang is a registered architect based in Houston working on the intersections of design, urbanism, and ecology; with her firm Dept., she is a recipient of the 2022 Prize of the Architectural League of New York. Originally from Mexico, Luis Barajas is a scholar of energy and building performance. Bárbara Barreda is an architect and principal of BASE Studio in Santiago, Chile working on complex geometries and material research. An accomplished practicing architect, Adam Frampton is the principal of the Brooklyn-based firm Only If. Ali Karimi joins Rice Architecture from Bahrain, where he is the co-founder of Civil Architecture, a firm that explores working on the intersections between architecture, culture and curatorship. Joining us from Montreal, İpek Mehmetoğlu is a an architectural historian of global modernism. Falon Mihalic is a landscape architect in Houston, with particular interest in public art and plants of the Gulf Coast. An alumna of Rice Architecture, Nicola Springer is a leader in the Houston design community and at Kirksey Architecture, where she leads the firm’s educational portfolio.  

Visit here to read their full bio and more about the work of our faculty.