Executive Director, MASS Design Group
Michael Murphy is the executive director and cofounder of MASS Design Group, an architecture and design collaborative with offices in Boston and Kigali, Rwanda. As a designer, writer, and teacher, his work investigates the social and political consequences of the built world. Murphy focuses on how environments shape behavior, and his research and writing advocate for a new empowerment in architecture that calls on architects to consider the ethical nature of their design decisions while simultaneously searching for beauty and meaning. Murphy has taught at Columbia’s Graduate School of Preservation and Planning, Wentworth Institute of Technology, Boston Architectural College, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design. His theoretical and historical essays on architecture have been widely published and MASS’s work has been featured in The New York Times, TIME, Fast Company, The Atlantic, Wired, Mark Magazine, Metropolis, Architectural Record, Detail, and many others. MASS was the recipient of the Zumbtobel Group Prize, shortlisted for the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, and a finalist for the TED Prize and the Buckminster Fuller Prize. Murphy recently gave a TED talk at the 2016 Annual TED Conference. He holds a Master of Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature from the University of Chicago.