Rice University School of Architecture welcomes new dean and Wortham Fellows

Igor Marjanović is the new William Ward Watkin Dean of Rice University’s School of Architecture (Rice Architecture), while Nathan Friedman and Maggie Tsang join the school as 2021–2023 Wortham Fellows.

As an architect, scholar, and curator, Igor Marjanović brings a truly international background and many accomplishments to Rice Architecture. Before moving to Houston, he was the JoAnne Stolaroff Cotsen Professor and chair of undergraduate architecture program at Washington University in St. Louis. Trained as an architect at the University of Belgrade and the Moscow Architectural Institute, he received a master’s degree in architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago and a Ph.D. at the Bartlett School of Architecture, London. He practiced architecture in Serbia, Brazil, and the United States, before establishing the ReadyMade Studio with Katerina Rüedi Ray. His research integrates the teaching of studio and theory with historical scholarship on architectural pedagogy, practice, and identity formation, examining the role of drawings, exhibitions, and publications in the emergence of international architectural culture. His collaborative approach to scholarship has led to critically acclaimed books such as Marina City: Bertrand Goldberg’s Urban Vision and the exhibition Drawing Ambience: Alvin Boyarsky and the Architectural Association that travelled internationally to locations including the Jut Art Museum in Taipei. Other publications include Tomás Saraceno: Cloud Specific and On the Very Edge: Modernism and Modernity in the Arts and Architecture of Interwar Serbia (1918-1941) and, most recently, The Evolving Project: The Journal of Architectural Education and the Expansion of Scholarship. A series of Florence Studios that he taught, titled “Disegno: Encounters in Public Space,” used the medium of drawing to engage the global refugee crisis, migration, and decolonization, earning him the American Institute of Architects Education Honor Award. Read a recent interview with Marjanović in The Architect’s Newspaper here.

“Rice Architecture has always pushed the limits of our discipline—be it through the production of books, buildings, or discourses—and I am honored to join such a vibrant community of scholars,” said Marjanović. “I am also delighted to be accompanied by our new Wortham Fellows, Nathan Friedman and Maggie Tsang, who bring an immense diversity of thoughts and backgrounds to our school and our city, allowing us to expand the array of our cultural production even further.”

Nathan Friedman comes to Houston from Mexico City, where he runs the Departmento del Distrito together with Francisco Quiñones. He holds an S.M.Arch.S. from the Department of History, Theory, and Criticism of Architecture and Art at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a B.Arch. from Cornell University. Working at the intersection of politics, identity, and the built environment, his practice engages writing, speculative proposals, and architecture research in addition to commissioned projects. His research on the 19th-century constitution of the US-Mexico border and its material history has recently been presented through the exhibition Attending Limits at the WUHO Gallery, Los Angeles, and the Bibliowicz Family Gallery, Cornell University, with support from the Graham Foundation.

Friedman has previously worked for Eisenman Architects, SMAQ Berlin, and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam, where he collaborated on numerous projects for both OMA and AMO, including the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow.

Maggie Tsang is a co-founder of Dept., a landscape architecture and urban design studio in Houston, TX. She received her B.A. and M.Arch. from Yale University, as well as a M.Des. in Urbanism, Landscape, and Ecology from Harvard Graduate School of Design. Her research and practice focus on the impacts of climate adaptation and flood hazard mitigation on urban infrastructure and planning. A recent project with Dept., Good Neighbor Stormwater Park, a community retention basin in North Miami, won Fast Company’s Best of Urban Design Awards 2020 and the Florida Gold Coast APA Award for Innovative Design.

Prior to founding Dept., Tsang worked at WORK Architecture Company in New York and Utile Architecture and Planning in Boston, MA. She is a registered architect in Texas and Maryland, where she is originally from.