Stefan Gruber appointed director of Remaking Cities Institute

The Carnegie Mellon School of Architecture (SoA) is pleased to announce Stefan Gruber as the new director of the Remaking Cities Institute (RCI). Stefan is an architect, urbanist and associate professor in the SoA where he directs the Master of Urban Design program. He succeeds Ray Gastil in his new role, formally known as the David Lewis/Heinz Endowments Directorship of Urban Design and Regional Engagement.

Established in 2006, the RCI is the SoA’s think tank for urbanism, participatory action research and community design. Its mission is to catalyze spatial equity and resilience in the future of cities. It provides a forum for discourse and collaboration, radical imagination, creative advocacy and place-based activism in response to the most urgent contemporary issues in urbanism. It contributes to the Pittsburgh region’s revitalization and advances community leadership in that process.

Stefan brings a bottom-up leadership perspective to the RCI through his work on commoning and participatory design. His teaching at the SoA includes Commoning the City, which explores transitions towards more just, regenerative and self-determined communities beyond the paradigms of the market or the state. The design-based research studio has led to the exhibition An Atlas of Commoning by ifa (Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen) in collaboration with ARCH+ that is traveling internationally for ten years. Stefan also leads the Urban Collaboratory Studio that works with Pittsburgh communities on the tactical transformation of their neighborhoods through urban acupuncture.

“The Remaking Cities Institute provides a platform for building transformative community-university partnerships and leveraging design research to advance social, racial and environmental justice in the built environment,” said Stefan. “I’m looking forward to collaborating with many of my inspiring colleagues and students alongside community partners and bringing to bear transdisciplinary research resources of the university in tackling some of the most pressing urban challenges of our time.”

Stefan is a registered architect who has practiced internationally and holds architecture degrees from the Technical University RWTH Aachen, Germany and Columbia University GSAPP. Before joining CMU in 2016, Stefan was the professor for Geographies, Landscape and Cities and Associate Head of Architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, Austria. He founded STUDIOGRUBER in 2006, whose work spans design-build, urbanism and curatorial research, and has earned numerous awards and recognitions.