Professor José Bernardi is originally from Argentina where he received a degree in Architecture from the School of Architecture and Urbanism at the National University of Córdoba. He was awarded a Master of Science in Architecture from the University of Cincinnati in 1988.

Professor Bernardi is noted for his interest in the poetic capacities of materials, community engagement and the transformative role of design thinking. He has published several essays on the relationship between design and ideas in cultural settings.  Among them, Luis Barragan: Architecture as Revelation, In The Religious Imagination in Modern and Contemporary Architecture: A Reader, Routledge 2011; edited by Renata Hejduk and Jim Williamson. He contributed several entries on Latin American architecture to the Encyclopedia of Twenty Century Architecture, edited by R.Stephen Sennott, Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, New York, London 2004. With the support of a Graham Foundation grant, he completed his research and published the essay Le Corbusier’s Curutchet House, The Center for Environment Design Research, the University of California at Berkeley. Also with support of the Graham Foundation he is currently working on a project entitled Designing Modernity in Argentina: 1880–1940.

Professor Bernardi was named Educator of the Year by the International Interior Design Association Southwest Chapter’s in 2008. Reflecting on the transdisiplinary nature of the learning experience, with Beth Harmon Vaughan, he published the essay Teaching Interior Design Studio, on Thinking Inside the Box, a reader in interiors for the 21st century, Middlesex University Press, 2007. In the fall of 2002 he was a Fellow Resident at the Charles Moore Center for the Study of Place, Austin, and spent a semester teaching at the School of Architecture at UT Austin. Committed to innovative design in Phoenix, he curated, in collaboration with Ricardo Flores and Eva Prats, from Barcelona, the exhibit and symposium  “Phoenix – Barcelona: Cities in Transformation” at the Gallery of Design at ASU, in February 2010. Together they also curated the exhibit and symposium “The Desert as a Client,” held in Barcelona, Spain, September–October 2008. He is also the curator of the Exhibitions “Process and Ideas in Architecture and Design in Phoenix,” dedicated to explore some of the most innovative practices and design ideas in the Phoenix metro area, and the series The Global and the Local in Design.

Professor Bernardi is willing to be a committee chair or member on graduate research committees focusing upon design and context; modernity and design; design practices Latin America; and sustainable practices in interior environments.