CannonDesign Lecture for Excellence in Architecture and Engineering: Thomas Phifer

Thomas Phifer of Thomas Phifer and Partners will deliver the annual CannonDesign Lecture for Excellence in Architecture and Engineering.

Since founding his firm in 1997, Phifer has completed an expansion of the Glenstone Museum in Potomac, Maryland; an expansion of the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, New York; the United States Courthouse in Salt Lake City, Utah; the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, North Carolina; an outdoor performance pavilion in Austin, Texas; the Raymond and Susan Brochstein Pavilion at Rice University in Houston, Texas; and numerous houses in the Hudson River Valley of New York State.

Ongoing projects include the TR Warszawa Theatre and Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, the Cine Colombia headquarters in Bogotá, the Indiana University Eskenazi School of Art & Architecture in Bloomington, and the South Battery Park City Resiliency Project in Lower Manhattan. Phifer is also engaged in private residences in Portugal, Texas, Maine, and New York.

Since 1997, Thomas Phifer and Partners has received four Design Excellence awards from the General Services Administration and more than 20 honor awards from the American Institute of Architects, as well as numerous national and international citations. His projects have been published and exhibited extensively in the United States and overseas. A monograph on the work of Thomas Phifer and Partners was released in 2010 by Skira Rizzoli.

Phifer received the prestigious Rome Prize in Architecture from the American Academy in Rome in 1995 and was awarded the Medal of Honor from the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects in 2004. He was elected as an Academician of the National Academy of Design in 2011. In 2013, Phifer received the Arts and Letters Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2016, he was honored by the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects with the President’s Award and by the Sir John Soane’s Museum Foundation. He also gave the 2016 keynote lecture at the Royal Institute of British Architects in London. In 2019, he was awarded the National Design Award in Architectural Design from the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. Phifer is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects and serves on the boards of the Architectural League of New York and the Sir John Soane’s Museum Foundation.

Phifer has served as a visiting professor at numerous architecture schools, including the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Cooper Union, University of Southern California, University of Texas, University of Pennsylvania, and Cornell University College of Architecture, Art, and Planning. He has been appointed the William Henry Bishop Visiting Professor of Architectural Design and the Louis I. Kahn Visiting Professor of Architectural Design, both at the Yale School of Architecture. He earned his Bachelor of Architecture in 1975 and his Master of Architecture in 1977, both from Clemson University. In 1976 he studied at the Clemson Architecture Center in Genoa, Italy.