• VISIT
  • Tickets + Tours
  • General Visitor Information
  • Hotels + Restaurants
  • Trains + Parking + Directions
  • Private + Patron Tours
• PROGRAMS + EVENTS
  • Programs
  • Glass House Openings
  • Glass House Conversations
  • Glass House Reading
  • Oral History Project
• HISTORY + EXHIBITION
  • History
  • The Inaugural Year
  • Exhibit
  • Through the Lens
• SHOP
  • Glass House Shop
  • Commissions
  • Books + Accessories
  • Rare Books
  • Glass House Moleskine® Sketchbook
• ABOUT
  • About Us
  • Glass House Projects
  • Membership + Support
  • Message from the Director
  • Press Office
  • Staff

Design + Civic Leadership | Biographies

Michael Bierut is a Partner at Pentagram, a firm specializing in graphic design, architecture, and industrial design. Bierut has received hundreds of awards for his work at Pentagram.. His designs are represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, the Library of Congress, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Denver Art Museum; the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg Germany; and the Museum für Gestaltung in Zürich, Switzerland. Prior to his career at Pentagram, Bierut was Vice President of Graphic Design at Vignelli Associates. He also served as the President of the American Institute of Graphic Arts (AIGA) from 1998 to 2001, having served as President of the New York AIGA Chapter from 1988 to 1990. Bierut received the AIGA Medal, and is a member of the Alliance Graphique Internationale and the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame. He is currently a senior critic at the Yale School of Art, co-editor of the anthology series Looking Closer: Critical Writings on Graphic Design, co-founder of Design Observer, and a commentator on the Public Radio International Program “Studio 360.” Bierut’s latest book is Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design.

Maurice Cox was appointed Director of Design for the National Endowment for the Arts in October 2007. Formerly an Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Virginia, Cox is one of the country’s foremost practitioners of democratic design. After a decade of teaching and practicing architecture in Florence, he relocated to Charlottesville, VA where he served on the Charlottesville city council for six years before becoming the mayor of that city from 2002-2004. He was a founding partner of RBGC Architecture, Research and Urbanism, where the groundbreaking use of design as a catalyst for social change in the rural town of Bayview, VA, received national acclaim and has been featured on “60 Minutes,” in the documentary film, “This Black Soil,” in Architecture Magazine, and the book, Design Like You Give a Damn (2006). A recipient of the 2004-05 Loeb Fellow at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and the 2006 John Hejduk Award for Architecture, Cox lectures widely on topics of democratic design, civic engagement, and the designer’s role as leader.

Dorothy Dunn is Director of Visitor Experience and Fellowships at the Philip Johnson Glass House. She is responsible for all site interpretation and designs programs and strategic partnerships, including “Conversations,” to position the site as a catalyst for promoting innovation and change. Dunn was the recipient of the inaugural Smithsonian Education Achievement Award in 2004 in recognition of her leadership as Education Director for Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. While at the Smithsonian, from 1989 through 2004, she launched and directed the signature programs A City of Neighborhoods: Bridging School and Community, Summer Design Institute, and Design Directions and planned numerous international conferences including Design on the Ecological Frontier (1994), Designing for the Senses (2002) as well as invitational study tours Icons of Modernism: LA and Palm Springs (1999), The Architecture of Landscape and Light (2003), Salone Internazionale del Mobile, Milan (2004 and 2005) and the invitational retreat, Craft and Design: Hand, Mind and the Creative Process (2004). Dunn worked with AIGA, the professional association for design, to reposition the International Design Conference at Aspen, the Aspen Design Summit, the world’s oldest forum for business and design leaders. As program director for AIGA, Dunn produced the program content for the international conferences Gain: AIGA Design and Business Conference (2006) & Design Conference (2005).

Charles L. Granquist is Director of Pocantico Programs at the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, where he oversees the philanthropic programs at the Rockefeller family estate in Pocantico Hills, NY, as well as the site’s public visitation program. From 1985 to 1991, Mr. Granquist was President of the Connecticut Trust for Historic Preservation in New Haven, CT. Prior to that, he served as Assistant Director of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation in Charlottesville, VA. While at Monticello, Mr. Granquist was in charge of restoration, research, and curatorial matters in addition to administrative work. His own research centered on the furniture at Monticello with particular emphasis on those pieces made on the plantation. Mr. Granquist currently serves as Chairman of the Shelburne Museum board of trustees, a Trustee of the Mark Twain House, and a Director of the Greenrock Corporation.

 Paul Goldberger began his career as a writer for The New York Times, where he earned the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Criticism, the highest award in journalism, for his architecture criticism. Goldberger is now the Architecture Critic for the New Yorker and writes the magazine’s celebrated “Sky Line” Column. In recognition of his work, Goldberger has received the President’s Medal of the Municipal Art Society of New York, the Medal of the American Institute of Architects, the Medal of Honor of the New York Landmarks Preservation Foundation, and the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission’s Preservation Achievement Award; He is also a Literary Lion of the New York Public Library. Goldberger holds the Urban Chair in Design and Architecture at The New School in New York City and is a Trustee of Kenyon College, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, and the New York Stem Cell Foundation as well as a former Dean of Parsons School of Design. Mr. Goldberger’s most recent publications include, UP FROM ZERO: Politics, Architecture, and the Rebuilding of New York, The City Observed: New York, The Skyscraper, On the Rise: Architecture and Design in a Post-Modern Age, Above New York, and The World Trade Center Remembered.

Mark Harari is as Co-president\Founder of phbcatalystgroup, Inc., a construction services management company in New York City, and Executive Vice President of the development firm TriArc Catalyst Group LLC. Harari has dedicated his career to project management, construction consulting, and architectural design, focusing on strategic planning, feasibility analysis, budget and schedule development, evaluation of building systems, and other components of pre-construction preparation. Starting his career as a design architect for several architectural firms, Harari has been involved in high performance and green building issues since the 1970’s and is currently working with several high performance and green building projects and initiatives, developing solutions with his clients that balance the trade-offs, costs, and rewards of innovative building techniques.

Marilyn Jordan Taylor is Senior Partner, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill’s Urban Design & Planning practice. Her recent projects include Columbia University’s Manhattanville Master Plan, the East River Waterfront Master Plan, the reclamation of Con Ed’s East River sites for mixed-use development, the new research building at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, and the new urban campus for John Jay College. Taylor also founded and leads SOM Airports and Transportation, working on airport projects in the U.S and abroad. Taylor is deeply engaged in civic leadership and is an expert in using public space and infrastructure to shape urban districts and civic spaces. In July 2005, she became Chairman of the Urban Land Institute, a global research and education organization dedicated to the responsible use of land. She currently serves on the boards and steering committees of the Association for a Better New York, the Downtown Alliance, the Women’s Transportation Seminar (WTS), and the Forum for Urban Design.

Ben Karlin heads up a new production company, Superego Industries, where he develops TV, feature, and web projects for HBO. Karlin is the former executive producer of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report. Prior to that, he was editor of The Onion. Richard Lacayo is art critic and editor-at-large of TIME, writing about art, architecture, photography, and other cultural topics in his articles and on his daily blog Looking Around. Prior to focusing on art criticism, he covered law, social issues, and politics for TIME and wrote extensively on President Bill Clinton’s impeachment investigation. Lacayo has spent the last few years profiling artists David Hockney, Richard Serra, Olafur Eljasson, and Martin Puryear and architects Frank Ghery, Norman Foster, Daniel Libeskind, and Dillar + Scofidio as well as reviewing museum shows in the United States, Canada, and Britain and the 2007 Venice Biennale. Lacayo served as a fellow at the Franke Institute for the Humanities at the University of Chicago and was awarded the Deadline Club Prize for his piece Bad Boy of the School of Paris, about artist Amadeo Modigliani. He also co-authored Eyewitness: 150 Years of Photojournalism with George Russell.

Christy MacLear is the Executive Director of the Philip Johnson Glass House. She was brought to the National Trust for Historic Preservation to develop the strategy, hire all staff and prepare the site and Visitor Center to open to the public this past June 2007. With the goal to “reshape the historic house museum model”, Christy and the staff team of the Glass House have sold out tours through 2008, launched a survey of 90+ modern homes in New Canaan, structured a “center for Modernism” to co-lead the National Trust’s investment in Modernist preservation, managed the NTHP board approval to purchase adjacent properties to preserve the Glass House view in perpetuity, and developed the “conversations” series to continue the legacy of new ideas through diverse leaders on-site. Christy is known for her ability to conceive of and lead large scale projects through opening and on-going operations. She was the Manager of Strategy for the Walt Disney Company’s new town project called Celebration, was the Director of the Museum Campus in Chicago where she represented 3 museum boards through the movement of Lake Shore Drive and the creation of a lakefront park, and was an independent consultant in Strategy & Visitor Experience to such clients as the Field Museum, the Cleveland Clinic and the leaders of the UAE. She has a degree in Urban Design from Stanford University and an MBA from Wharton in Real Estate Finance where she received a Barnes fellowship. She has been a professor in the graduate program of Arts Administration for the School of the Art Institute in Chicago and has served on the boards of Chicago’s Three Arts Club, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and Steppingstones Museum for Children.

Deborah Marton has spent her career focusing on the development of public space in New York City. Currently, she is the Executive Director of the Design Trust for Public Space, a New York City non-profit, which she joined in 2002 as a project fellow. Prior to her career at the Design Trust, Marton worked with the landscape architecture firm Field Operations and served as Program Manager of the New York City Parks Natural Resources Group. At Field Operations, Marton helped win an international design competition for the Fresh Kills Landfill Master Plan, for which she later served as Project Manager. Ms. Marton was also an Associate with the law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher and has published numerous articles on urban landscape planning and design.

Chef Nils Norén is the Vice President of Culinary Arts of The French Culinary Institute (The FCI) and The Italian Culinary Academy (The ICA), at New York City’s International Culinary Center. An embodiment of the new international chef, disciplined in the classic sensibilities and driven by immense creativity, Norrin was appointed in 2006 to lead the schools’ culinary, pastry, bread and Italian programs. For the previous 10 years, he had been at Aquavit, where Marcus Samuelsson appointed Chef Nils to be Executive Chef in 2003. At Aquavit, under Marcus Samuelsson’s exemplary leadership, Chef Nils strove to solidify the restaurant’s place on the culinary map and to show the world what Swedish food and cooking techniques are all about. Prior to joining Aquavit, Chef Nils worked in Stockholm as Executive Chef at Restaurant Riche, which features a fine dining room, tapas bar and bistro; and as Chef de Cuisine at Restaurant KB, one of the country’s classic Swedish restaurants in the center of town. He also coordinated cooking classes for Restaurant Akademin. Chef Nils is a graduate of Culinary School in Gävle, Sweden.

Tom Wright is the Executive Director of Regional Plan Association (RPA), the nation’s oldest private regional planning organization. While working at RPA, Wright has planned and organized the Draft Vision Plan for the City of Newark, A Region at Risk: The Third Regional Plan for the New York-New Jersey- Connecticut Metropolitan Area, and Listening to the City, a forum on the World Trade Center Site. Wright has served as Director of Regional Plan Association’s New Jersey office and Governance Plan, Coordinator of the award-winning Mayor’s Institute on City Design, and Deputy Executive Director of the New Jersey Office of State Planning. Wright is a Visiting Lecturer in Public Policy at the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University and served as Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture (1998 – 2006), Associate Faculty for the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, Adjunct Professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology School of Architecture, and Resource Team member for the Governors Institute on Community Design. Wright is also a member of the Forum for Urban Design and the Riverside South Planning Corporation Board of Directors.