Education
- University of Virginia
- Yale University
Biography
Marion Weiss is cofounder of WEISS/MANFREDI Architecture/Landscape/Urbanism, based in New York City and the Graham Chair Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. Her multidisciplinary firm operates at the nexus of architecture, art, landscape, and urban design. Her firm’s Olympic Sculpture Park exemplifies this cross disciplinary design approach and the project has been recognized internationally through museum exhibitions and design awards. Time Magazine identified the park as one of the top 10 projects in the world, Barcelona’s World Architecture Festival selected the project as winner in the Nature Category, I.D. Magazine awarded it the highest Environment Design Award, and it was the first project in North America to win Harvard University’s Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design.
WEISS/MANFREDI received the American Academy of Arts and Letters award which acknowledged the distinct vision of the firm and was named one of North America’s “Emerging Voices” by the Architectural League of New York. The firm was also honored with the New York AIA Gold Medal and the Tau Sigma Delta Gold Medal, annually awarded to one individual or firm in the world each year.
The firm’s projects have been featured in exhibitions at The Museum of Modem Art, the Venice Architectural Biennale, the São Paulo Biennale of International Architecture and Design, the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the National Building Museum, Harvard University, the International Landscape Architecture Biennale in Barcelona, and the Design Centre in Essen, Germany. Their first monograph Site Specific and the more recent WEISS/MANFREDI Surface/Subsurface were published by Princeton Architectural Press.
Her firm’s Visitor Center at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden recently opened to the public. Other built work includes the Diana Center, a multi-use arts building at Barnard College whose design won a national design competition and a Progressive Architecture Award, establishes a new nexus for social, cultural, and intellectual life for both the campus and the city. The Diana Center also won the New York State AIA Best Building Award in 2010 as well as a National AIA Honor Award. WEISS/MANFREDI recently won a national competition to redesign the Washington Monument Grounds at Sylvan Theater. Other current projects include two new buildings for Novartis North America’s headquarters; Hunters Point South Waterfront Park, located on the East River in Queens, New York; and the Krishna P. Singh Center for Nanotechnology at the University of Pennsylvania.
Marion Weiss received her Master of Architecture at Yale University and her Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the University of Virginia. At Yale she won the American Institute of Architects Scholastic Award and the Skidmore, Owings and Merrill Traveling Fellowship. She has taught design studios at Harvard University, Yale University, Cornell University, and since 1991 has been a faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania’s Penn School of Design where she is currently the Graham Chair Professor of Architecture.