Sam Chermayeff appointed professor

We are pleased to announce that Rector Petra Schaper Rinkel has appointed Sam Chermayeff as head of the I oA Architectural Design Studio 1, succeeding Cristina Díaz Moreno & Efrén García Grinda at the University of Applied Arts Vienna as of October 2024.

Sam Chermayeff is an architect, designer, and teacher undertaking projects worldwide. Trained in architecture at the University of Texas at Austin and the Architectural Association, London, Sam is a founding partner in the architecture firm June 14 Meyer-Grohbrügge & Chermayeff and Sam Chermayeff Office. With offices in New York and Berlin, the studios work on a wide range of design-driven projects ranging from large residential towers to community centers to kitchens and furniture. Clients include the state of Albania, the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum, FLOS, Knoll, and many more communities and private persons. Sam began his architectural career at SANAA Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa where he worked for more than five years on an array of projects across built and curatorial work including the Serpentine Pavilion and the Venice Architecture Biennale. He has taught at Columbia GSAAP, MSA Münster, The Royal College of Art, DIA Dessau, Cornell University and the Architectural Association.

“Architecture is not a profession on the margins. We have agency. We can work toward a celebration of the extraordinary in the ordinary. 

We are part of a cultural shift here and now. The 20th century was about serving, if not actually helping, masses of people, who were the same, a constituent community in the best sense. This notion gave rise to functional design aspirations. Now, a generation after Thatcher and Reagan, no one wants to be the same as anyone else. Our aspirations, for better or worse, are not about keeping up with our neighbors; they are about becoming singular. We need to embrace this in the hopes of making change in a diverse world. We do not all need the same (better) toaster. We must now grasp the agency afforded by our profession to think about different points of view and different ways of life. We need to address the particular and hopefully discover that the search is universally resonant. 

We will not have all the answers. We will be looking to new people with new points of view and new places with different needs. We are going to need artists, politicians and thinkers to help us understand the world as it is and to imagine how it might be different. 

We are weighing cultural perception along with metric tons of concrete or timber. We are considering the nature, shape, and size of consumption in our lives and by extension the life of things. Architecture and design tell a story about a life and vice versa. 

To be clear we are making physical things. We are designing propositions while researching the existing. Those things, interventions and buildings will be about people (and their impact on the environment) from a meal to the table, to the house, to the community, to the neighborhood and so on. ” —Sam Chermayeff

The Institute of Architecture (I oA) offers a three-year accredited master’s program featuring three design studios, led by Sam Chermayeff (Studio 1), Lara Lesmes and Fredrik Hellberg (Studio 2), and Sam Jacob (Studio 3). This English-language program focuses on progressive, experimental design in architecture and urban practices. The Institute is part of the internationally renowned University of Applied Arts Vienna (die Angewandte), which fosters interdisciplinary exchange, provides state-of-the-art education in the fields of arts and research, and promotes global collaboration. Students holding a bachelor’s degree in architecture can apply in January 2025.