Academic Credentials

MArch	Harvard University
BArch	Tulane University
AIA

Research Interests

Urban forms, public art, and architecture

Bio

Wellington Reiter is the Dean of the College of Design at Arizona State University. In addition to his academic role, Dean Reiter is also responsible for shaping the future of the university’s Downtown Phoenix campus, which will accommodate some 15,000 students. Specifically, he is orchestrating a new relationship with the City of Phoenix that unites academic and civic agendas and will be a model of first-rate urban design. 

Previous to this appointment at ASU, he was a member of the faculty in the Department of Architecture at MIT from 1990 to 2003 and the Professional Advisor to the Career Discovery Program at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. He has also been a visiting professor at Harvard and the Rhode Island School of Design.

Dean Reiter studied for his undergraduate degree at Tulane University’s School of Architecture and North London Polytechnic, and was awarded the Master of Architecture from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. Reiter’s graduate design thesis was “Bridging History: A Monument for the City of New Orleans,” was on the very topic of geographical, historical, and architectural setting of the city. The project documented the continual struggle between the city's determination to function below sea-level and the topographic circumstances that would eventually be its undoing.

From 1981–84 Reiter was on a design team for the Louisiana World’s Exposition in New Orleans (which included the often pictured Convention Center in the media of late). The Exposition was an attempt to reconnect the city with its very reason for being—the Mississippi River. He designed several buildings and landmark elements for the exposition site and developed its graphic materials. Reiter also renovated some of the most prominent buildings in the warehouse district of the city.

Dean Reiter and his Urban Instruments office are the recipients of numerous awards including multiple AIA Honor Awards for Urban Design, the Kepes Prize for interdisciplinary design from MIT, and four awards from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture.

The work of Dean Reiter ranges from built works to museum installations and drawings. His drawings of speculative urban conditions are in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, San Francisco MoMA, and the Boston Athenaeum, and have been published widely throughout the U.S. and Europe. Vessels and Fields, a monograph on the work of Dean Reiter, is available from Princeton Architectural Press.

Curriculum Vitae