William O'Brien, Jr. William is principal of WOJR: Organization for Architecture and a tenured associate professor in the MIT Department of Architecture as well as one of the founding members of Collective–LOK. In 2013 Architectural Record awarded him with the Design Vanguard Award, a prize given to 10 practitioners internationally. The same year, Wallpaper* named him one of the top twenty emerging architects in the world, and included him in the 2013 Architects Directory. He is the recipient of the 2012 - 2013 Rome Prize Fellowship in Architecture awarded by the American Academy in Rome. He was awarded the 2011 Architectural League Prize for Young Architects and Designers. In 2010 he was a finalist for the MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program and was recognized as a winner of the Design Biennial Boston Award. His parallel collaborative practice, Collective–LOK won the Van Alen Institute international competition to redesign the institute’s headquarters in 2013, and was a finalist for the MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program in 2014. O’Brien has taught at The University of California Berkeley as the Bernard Maybeck Fellow and was the LeFevre Emerging Practitioner Fellow at The Ohio State University. Before joining MIT, for two years he was assistant professor at The University of Texas at Austin. At MIT O’Brien currently holds the Cecil and Ida Green Career Development Chair and teaches design studios in both the graduate and undergraduate programs. He was the recipient of the 2010 Rotch Traveling Studio Scholarship which funded research and travel for an advanced graduate design studio in Iceland. He was the recipient of the Hayward Prize for Fine Arts Traveling Fellowship in Architecture under the sponsorship of The American Austrian Foundation. He has been named a Socrates Fellow by the Aspen Institute.
William O'Brien, Jr.
Studios
Wood
William O'Brien, Jr. worked in the Wood studio.
Wood Studio, given to the residency program by Mrs. Frederick Trevor Hill, was completed in 1913 in memory of Mrs. Hill’s mother, Helen Ogden Wood. Like Schelling Studio, the building is sided with large, overlapping pieces of hemlock bark. When the studio was renovated in 1995, MacDowell staff researched the origins of this unusual building material and…