Alan Balfour

Dean and Professor
www.alanbalfour.com

Educated at Edinburgh and Princeton and a member of the Royal Institute of British Architects, Alan Balfour is Professor and Dean of the College of Architecture at Georgia Tech, a position he came to after serving as the architecture dean at Rensselaer. He was formerly chairman of the Architectural Association in London, and architecture dean at Rice University in Houston. Balfour was the year 2000 recipient of the Topaz Medal, the highest recognition given in North America to an educator in architecture.

Education

• Masters Degree in Fine Arts (Architecture),Princeton University, 1965.
• Diploma in Architecture, Edinburgh College of Art, Edinburgh, Scotland, 1961.
  
  

Positions Held

• July 1995 - 2008
  Professor and Dean, School of Architecture
  Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute,
  Troy, New York
  
  
• July 1991 - June 1995
  Chairman
  Architectural Association School of Architecture
  London, England
  
  
• July 1989 - June 1991
  Smith Professor and Dean, School of Architecture Rice University, Houston, Texas
  
  
• September 1978 - June 1988
  Professor and Director of Programs in Architecture Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia
  
  
• 1974 - 1978 Research Associate and Lecturer in Architecture
  Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
  Boston, Mass.

 

Publications (Selected)

Creating a Scottish Parliament (with David McCrone) Finley Brown, Edinburgh, 2005.

Shanghai: World City Academy Editions/J. Wiley and Son, New York, 2002

New York: World City Academy Editions/J. Wiley and Son, New York, 2001

Berlin: World City Academy Editions London, and Ernst & Sohn, Berlin, 1995.
Winner of the AIA International Book Award, 1997

Recovering Landscape edited with James Corner, Princeton Architectural Press, Princeton, spring 1999

Contributions to Cities of Artificial Excavation: The Work of Peter Eisenman 1978-1988 CCA Montreal, Rizzoli International Publications, New York 1994.

Contributions to The Edge of the Millennium Whitney Library of Design, New York 1993.

Berlin: The Politics of Order, 1737- 1989 Rizzoli, New York 1990.
Winner of the AIA International Book Award, 1991

Contributions to Contemporary Architects St. Martins Press, New York 1984, revised 1987.

Architectural Education Study MIT, Boston 1981 editor).

Rockefeller Center: Architecture as Theater McGraw-Hill, New York 1978.

Portsmouth Studio Vista, London 1970.

Contributions to Breakthrough to the Hudson Ottinger Foundation, New York 1964.

Essays in recent years have appeared in the Harvard GSD News and the Graz publication MDA, Dokumente zur Architektur 7 and the Journal of Architectural Education (JAE). His Harvard studio from 1996 was published in Studio Works 4 approaches.
From 1991 -1995 Balfour was publisher and had overall editorial responsibility for AA Publications, he also led the editorial board of AA Files.
He has served on the editorial boards of JAE, Cite, and was chairman of the board of the Atlanta based arts magazine, Art Papers.