Installation of Aki Ishida, AIA, LEED AP

Aki Ishida, AIA, LEED AP, is the Sam and Marilyn Fox Professor and Director of the College of Architecture and Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of Blurred Transparencies in Contemporary Glass Architecture: Material, Culture, and Technology (2020), a collection of six essays that challenge assumptions about fragility and visual transparency of glass and examine cultural meanings associated with the material. In both her writing and design work, she examines the temporal and mutable aspects of architecture, emphasizing the ways buildings change and adapt over the course of their lifespans.

Born in Tokyo, Japan, Ishida earned a Bachelor of Architecture in 1995 from the University of Minnesota Twin Cities College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture. She began her career with Rafael Viñoly Architects in New York as part of the core design team for a new stadium at Princeton University. She then earned a Master of Science in advanced architectural design in 1998 from the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation.

Ishida worked as an associate at James Carpenter Design Associates in New York, where she gained experience in the artistic and technical applications of glass, and then with I.M. Pei Architects on the Museum of Islamic Art in Doha, Qatar. In 2005, she co-founded Ishida/Crandall in New York and established Aki Ishida Architect in 2008. She is licensed in the states of New York and New Jersey and is a LEED-accredited professional.

Before joining WashU in 2024, Ishida served as interim associate director for the School of Architecture + Design at Virginia Tech, where she began her career as an assistant professor in 2012. Prior to that, she taught at Rhode Island School of Design, The Pratt Institute, The Parsons School of Design, and Konkuk University in Seoul, South Korea. For 15 summers, she taught architecture courses in Columbia University’s pre-college program.

In 2023, Ishida won a Creative Achievement Award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture. She previously won the group’s New Faculty Teaching Award in 2017 and was named one of 25 Most Admired Educators by DesignIntelligence in 2016. “Lantern Field,” an interactive audio-visual installation she led at the Smithsonian’s Freer Gallery in Washington, D.C., won a 2013 Architectural Lighting Design Award.

Ishida’s work has been supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, Japan Foundation New York, Graduate Kinne Traveling Fellowship from Columbia University, Stewardson Keefe LeBrun Travel Grant from the AIA New York Chapter, and fellowships from the Baer Art Center and MacDowell.