The College of Architecture’ spring 2021 lecture series kicked off on Wednesday, January 27, with a conversation with Michael Murphy, founding principal and executive director of MASS Design Group. Murphy is also a distinguished educator, having taught at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, the University of Michigan, and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation.
Murphy founded MASS Design Group in 2008 along with Alan Ricks, David Saladik, and Sierra Bainbridge. Today, MASS Design Group is an architecture and design collective with four offices and more than 130 employees. Their professed mission is to leverage buildings, as well as the design and construction process, to become catalysts for economic growth, social change, and the construction of dignity. Since MASS's beginnings, their portfolio of work has expanded to over a dozen countries and span the areas of health care, education, housing, and urban development.
MASS’s work has been published in more than 900 publications and awarded globally. Recently, MASS has been recognized as the 2020 innovator of the year by the Wall Street Journal Magazine. In 2017 it received the National Arts and Letters Award and the Cooper Hewitt National Design Award or Architecture. Murphy’s 2016 TED Talk, “Architecture That’s Built to Heal,” has been viewed over a million times, and MASS's project, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, was named one of “the greatest works of American architecture in the twenty-first century” by critic Mark Lamster.