Karen Bausman AR’ 82 is an architect and has been principal of her own New York City-based design practice since her graduation from The Cooper Union in 1982. Paralleling her career as an architect, she has made substantial contributions to architectural education. She has been the Eliot Noyes Visiting Design Critic in Architecture at Harvard and the Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor at Yale, the only American woman to hold both distinguished design chairs. She was a faculty member of Columbia’s Advanced Architectural Design Studio from 1990 to 2004. Her applied research into biological and natural structures during this time underlies her dynamic building designs and is featured in INDEX Architecture, published by MIT Press.
Her office, Karen Bausman + Associates, in 2005, 2010 and 2012 was awarded multi-year Design Excellence contracts as part of New York City’s ambitious effort to bring new ideas, technology, and environmental soundness to the design of city-financed buildings and other structures in New York. Her expertise is currently being applied to numerous large-scale coastal building projects at waterfront sites in the Bronx and Manhattan.
Karen Bausman received the Progressive Architecture Award for Performance Theater for Los Angeles, and Hamlin Library and Chapel was featured in the Architecture magazine Awards Issue. These breakthrough commissions and other works that push the boundaries of structural and visual poetry formed the basis of Karen Bausman: Supermodels, a solo exhibition of her building designs and working methods at Harvard University. A 60-page monograph of her work was published by A+U (Japan).
Recipient of the Rome Prize, Karen Bausman has twice been awarded Fellowships in Architecture from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She has also received Design Arts Grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
Karen Bausman received the 1994 President’s Citation of Outstanding Contributions in the Field of Architecture from The Cooper Union and was inducted into the Cooper Union Hall of Fame in 2009.