Skender Luarasi
Biography
Skender Luarasi is an architect, educator and writer. His PhD, received at Yale in 2018, focuses on how design processes end, and how such question intersects with style, geometry and parametricism in history. Another research investigates the sustainability of urban form: how form anticipates and participates in the construction or erasure of the city. Luarasi has presented his research in numerous international conferences, and has published in Log, Disegnare, Bitácora, Haecceity, A+P Forum, and other Journals. He is the editor (with Adil Mansure) of the book Finding San Carlino: Collected Perspectives on the Geometry of the Baroque, published by Routledge last Fall. He is also the editor (with Gary Huafan He) of the book Collected Perspectives on the Contemporary Concepts of Organicism: The Limits of Self-generation, forthcoming from Routledge in 2021. Skender Luarasi holds a Master of Architecture from MIT, and a Bachelor of Architecture from Wentworth Institute of Technology. He is currently the Dean of the Faculty of Research and Development at Polis University in Tirana, Albania. He has previously taught at Yale, RISD, UMass Amherst, WSU, and MIT. He has worked for dEcoi architects/MIT Digital Design Group, Kennedy & Violich Architects Ltd, Finegold + Alexander Associates Inc., Weldon Pries Architects, and Phil Loheed Architects. His design practice is based in Boston and Tirana.
- Keynote Lecture for the eCAADe Regional International Conference in Tirana, October 7th, 2021: “Toggling Between the Formal and the Vernacular: Toward a Sustainability in an Expanded Field.”
- “Albanian Young Architect Prize for 2014,” issued by the Albanian Union of Architects.
- “Ideogramming,” exhibit, Herter Gallery, UMass Amherst Spring 2010.
- “Where is Tirana,” exhibit, invited by The Ministry of Culture of Albania, 2010
- “Expo-Polis,” exhibit, Invited by Polis University, Tirana, Albania, Summer 2010.
- Brain Gain Teaching Funds – United Nations Development Programme for teaching in Albania, 2009
- AIA Award: The Certificate of Merit from Henry Adams Fund for Excellence in the Study of Architecture, 2000
- First Prize for Architectural Proposal of the City of North Adams, Undergraduate Design Thesis