(email: felsen at urbanlab dot com)
Martin Felsen, AIA, is a registered architect, and Principal of UrbanLab. Since 1996, he has taught design studios and urban/environmental planning classes at the Illinois Institute of Technology’s College of Architecture. He was educated at Virginia Tech (BArch, 1991), and Columbia University (MS-AAD, 1994).
After working for Eisenman Architects, Stan Allen Architects and 1100 Architects in New York, he and partner Sarah Dunn established UrbanLab, a collaborative architecture and urban design firm in Chicago in 2000. UrbanLab strives to respond to the complexity, growth and unintended consequences of the modern city by developing a catalogue of architectural, infrastructural and urbanistic design strategies, in particular examining natural and artificial systems underpinning the built environment. Built work to date includes houses, housing, mixed-use commercial/residential buildings, restaurants, art/educational installations, and urban infrastructural projects such as recreational landscapes and a rowing course on the Chicago River. Parallel to this realized work, Martin is the Principal Investigator for research projects funded by organizations such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the American Institute of Architect’s College of Fellows. His research focuses on public space, public infrastructure and public resources in American (and American-style) cities and megaregions.
Martin's work and expertise in architecture and urban design has been highlighted in numerous publications, and he has received several honors for his work. He received the Dubin Family Young Architect Award in 2007 from the American Institute of Architects Chicago. Also in 2007 UrbanLab was named as the national winner of the History Channel’s “City of the Future” competition for a proposal titled “Growing Water.” UrbanLab won the American Institute of Architects College of Fellows Latrobe Prize in 2009, and UrbanLab’s architecture and urban design projects won recognition from the AIA in the form of design awards in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012. Martin was recently honored as a "Global Visionary" by Chicago Public Radio (WBEZ), and has been featured on WBEZ on several occasions. In 2010 UrbanLab was included in the Emerging Voices lecture series sponsored by the Architecture League.
Martin serves on the Board of Archeworks, a non-profit educational organization working on contemporary community-based urban design issues in Chicago. He also serves on the Board of Places: Design History Foundation, the Editorial Advisory Board of the Architect’s Newspaper, and the Board of Extension Architecture Gallery.
Sarah Dunn
(email: dunn at urbanlab dot com)
Sarah teaches design studios on complex building and landscape design in the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her work and expertise in integrated mixed-use building design has been highlighted in numerous publications, and she has received numerous honors for her work. Sarah graduated from the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) at Columbia University in New York City, with a M. Architecture. Currently, she serves as Director of Research at Archeworks, as a board member of Extensions Gallery, a not-for-profit architecture gallery, and is on the Editorial Advisory Board of The Architect’s Newspaper. Previously, Sarah has worked as a project architect/leader on large-scale public and private projects for the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) in Rotterdam, The Netherlands.
