Stan Allen AR’81

Stan Allen AR’81 is an architect working in New York, and Dean of the School of Architecture at Princeton University.
After graduation from The Cooper Union in 1981, he worked for Richard Meier in New York and Rafael Moneo in Madrid. Since that time, he has pursued parallel careers as educator, writer and architect. He has taught at Harvard, Columbia and Princeton, and his architectural firm SAA/Stan Allen Architect has realized buildings and urban projects in the United States, South America and Asia. Responding to the complexity of the modern city in creative ways, Stan Allen has developed an extensive catalog of innovative design strategies, in particular looking at field theory, landscape architecture and ecology as models to revitalize the practices of urban design. Link to Stan Allen Architect site

Stan Allen established his own practice in 1990. His built work includes galleries, gardens, workspaces and a number of innovative single-family houses. He has designed a 45,000 square-meter Contemporary Music Center in Taiwan, buildings for the Botanical Garden of the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan, and at Paju Book City, an “urban wetland” outside of Seoul Korea.

Stan Allen has been awarded Fellowships in Architecture from the New York Foundation for the Arts, The New York State Council on the Arts, and a Design Arts Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1988 he was winner of the Young Architects Competition at the Architectural League of New York. A monograph of his work entitled Stan Allen Architect: Points + Lines, Diagrams and Projects for the City was published in 2004.

In 2008, Allen received a Progressive Architecture Award for the Taichung Gateway Park, and a Faith and Form Award for the CCV Chapel; in 2009, he received a Progressive Architecture Award for the Yan-Ping Waterfront in Taipei, an AIA Award for the CCV Chapel and an Architecture Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His architectural work was published in Points + Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City, and his essays in Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation.

Stan Allen received the 2002 President’s Citation and the 2009 John Q. Hejduk Award.  He was inducted into the Cooper Union Hall of Fame in 2009.