William O’Brien

William is founder and principal of WOJR: Organization for Architecture and a tenured Associate Professor in the MIT Department of Architecture, as well as one of the founding members of Collective–LOK. Since 2019, he is also the Design Director of the Samara Project at Airbnb. He is the recipient of the 2012-2013 Rome Prize Fellowship in Architecture awarded by the American Academy in Rome. He was awarded the 2011 Architectural League Prize for Young Architects and Designers. He has taught previously at University of California Berkeley as the Bernard Maybeck Fellow and was the LeFevre Emerging Practitioner Fellow at The Ohio State University. Before joining MIT, he was Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where he taught advanced theory seminars and design studios in the graduate curriculum. At MIT, O’Brien currently holds the Cecil and Ida Green Career Development Chair and teaches design studios in the graduate and undergraduate programs. William pursued his graduate studies at Harvard GSD where he was the recipient of the Department of Architecture Faculty Design Award. He has been named a Fellow by MacDowell in Peterborough, New Hampshire, and a Socrates Fellow by the Aspen Institute.



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