Michael Morris AR ’89 and Fulbright Scholar ’91 and the late Yoshiko Sato AR ’89 and Harvard MArch’96, co-founded their NYC based architecture practice– Morris Sato Studio in 1996. Michael Morris and Yoshiko Sato built and exhibited projects in North America, Europe, and East Asia. Presented in leading publications and periodicals Morris Sato Studio’s architecture, public art, design, and science collaborations have been widely recognized with professional honors, grants, and awards.
Notable among their residential projects include a pair of houses on Shelter Island, NY, showrooms and offices for the Dupont and American Express Corporation’s, multiple art museum, gallery, public art, and exhibition designs, including their award winning interactive installation ‘Lightshowers’, that was presented from 2007-2009 in seven international venues.
Yoshiko Sato authored articles concerning the WTC 9/11 disaster and the 1995 Kobe earthquake (the focus of her Harvard thesis) for leading Japanese newspapers and “Re-mediating Earth” for the Van Alen Institute’s exhibition and publication Renewing Rebuilding Remembering. Morris authored articles “Drawing on Earth” in 1997, and was both curator and designer for the widely recognized New York exhibitions “Sarajevo: Dream and Reality” in 1995 and “Renaissance and Reconstruction in the Balkans” in 1999.
Since graduating Cooper in 1989, Morris and Sato independently taught continuously at Columbia GSAPP, The Cooper Union, Harvard GSD, Parsons, and Cornell University.
After her passing in 2012, Michael took the helm of Yoshiko’s Space Architecture Studio and Space Exploration Research Lab (SEArc) at Columbia University to explore future the architecture for human life in outerspace. In 2008, with SEArc, Sato and Morris designed key costumes (Astronaut’s and Cyborg’s) for the Beijing Olympics Opening Ceremony, and in 2013 Morris participated as a Subject Matter Expert (SME) in NASA’s Net Habitable Volume Consensus Session.
Since 2015, Morris has greatly expanded SEArc as SEArch+, formed with Sato and his former space studio students. After winning multiple 1st prizes in NASA Centennial Challenge competitions and NASA Awarded X-Hab Studio’s at Pratt Institute, Morris and SEArch+ is presently developing habitats and infrastructure designs as part of NASA’s Moon to Mars Planetary Autonomous Construction Technology team to initiate 3D printing on the Moon by 2028, the site of Sato’s visionary Cooper Union 1989 thesis.
Michael Morris and Yoshiko Sata were awarded the CUAA John Q. Hejduk award in 2013. Michael Morris accepted the award during the Founder’s Day Dinner held at Gustavino’s on E. 59th Street, New York, NY.
