Catherine Wilmes Catherine Wilmes

Catherine Wilmes is an Assistant Professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology College of Architecture. Her work focuses on the design of learning environments and the spatial and material systems that support education. She studies how schools, studios, and other instructional settings are organized, built, and represented globally. Her current research is informed by her professional practice designing educational buildings and environments. She worked on campus master plans, school interiors, classrooms, and didactic furniture.

As a Design Teaching Fellow at Cornell’s AAP, Wilmes developed a body of academic work on architectural pedagogy and representation. She taught seminars on photography, drawing, and visual analysis that examined the production of architectural knowledge through images. Within this work, she curated the exhibition Identity Crisis (2024) and directed SIGHTLINES (2025), a symposium on architectural representation and photography, among many other student exhibitions that she uses as pedagogical tools for collective learning.

She has previously taught core and advanced architecture studios, seminars in theory and representation, and media courses at Cornell University, Pratt Institute, and Syracuse University.