Lisa Findley

Professor Lisa Findley teaches MArch and BArch students in core studios, advanced design studios, and special topic seminars. She also leads frequent travel studios to China, where she has longstanding personal and professional connections. In 2017 Findley was awarded the title Distinguished Professor by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA).

Findley is a registered architect and an active architectural journalist who writes primarily in public venues to explore architecture and its position as a visual, material, and cultural practice in a rapidly changing world.

Her architectural education was underpinned by undergraduate work in environmental science and policy as well as political theory. As a result, her reading, research, and writing cross over into many other fields including cultural geography and anthropology, cultural and postcolonial studies, landscape architecture, natural history, and cartography.

She is a frequent participant in conferences related to architecture, geography, and cultural studies. In addition, she has delivered keynote addresses at symposia exploring making visible marginalized cultures in urban settings, including for the Aboriginal owners in Melbourne, Australia and for the Deaf Space Program at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C..

With this keen interest in travel and other cultures, Findley has taught and lectured at universities in Malaysia, Australia, and South Africa as well as throughout the United States, and has worked as an international workshop teacher in SE Asia with the Getty Conservation Institute.

She travels extensively as an architectural journalist and academic in pursuit of an ever-increasing understanding of the roles architecture and space play within dynamics of culture and power, and the role architects and their practices can perform in the exploration and manifestation of locally based responses to myriad challenges of climate, material constraints, and globalization.

Findley is author of the book Building Change: Architecture, Politics, and Cultural Agency (Routledge, 2005) and of numerous essays and book chapters. As an architectural journalist, she has written scores of articles for a wide range of publications including Architect magazine, Architecture magazine, Architectural Record, Harvard Design Magazine, World Architecture, Architecture Australia, Architecture South Africa, Baumeister and Places Journal. She is also author of introductions for monographs on buildings and architectural practices, and of catalog essays.

With co-editor, Marc Neveu, Findley was theme editor for the fall 2021 theme issue of the Journal of Architectural Education (JAE), Building Stories. In Spring 2010, with Marco Cenzatti and Abidin Kusno, she was theme editor for another volume of the Journal, Changing Asia. She served on the editorial board of JAE from 2004–10 and as a contributing editor to Architectural Record from 2003–10. Currently, she serves as a reviewer for Architecture_MPS, an online journal based in London.

Findley's recent research explores contemporary architects and architectural practices outside of Europe and North America that seek robust locally derived building technologies and formal, spatial and contextual building strategies that form a response to cultural and visual homogenization and to the capital intensive technologies of globalized practice, and to the realities of climate change.

Findley has taught architecture at CCA since 1994. She founded CCA's Graduate Program in Architecture, and served as interim chair for both the BArch and MArch Programs from 2005-8, chair of the BArch Program from 2009-12, and Interim Dean in 2017-18

Education

• Master of Architecture (MArch) UCLA
• BA University of California, Santa Cruz