Dirk Denison, FAIA
FOUNDING PRINCIPAL | MCHAP DIRECTOR | PROFESSOR, IIT
Since founding the firm in 1990, Denison has built a national practice recognized for design excellence across a range of building types and scales with a focus on residential, retail, hospitality, institutional, commercial, and campus planning projects.
He has been a leading member of the faculty in the College of Architecture at Illinois Institute of Technology for over thirty years, during which he has fostered a recommitment to the university’s urban setting and architecturally significant campus through his research, teaching, and service. His teaching has emphasized community-based design, housing, campus planning, and transit-oriented development. For more information about his teaching studios, see here.
Denison also served as Supervising Campus Architect at IIT for eleven years. Under his supervision, the IIT Campus Architects collective developed a master plan for the campus, completed an assessment of historic buildings, conducted a study for the Urban Land Institute, promoted a landscape improvement initiative, and created a framework for the trajectory of future development.
Under Denison’s direction, and with sponsorship by IIT, the biennial Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize (MCHAP) recognizes the best built work in the Americas. The prize serves as a platform for exchange and fosters a larger international dialogue among leading designers, scholars, and urban thinkers. For more information about MCHAP, see here.
Denison received his Master of Architecture from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, where he studied under Daniel Libeskind, Peter Eisenman, and Henry Cobb, and his Bachelor of Architecture from Illinois Institute of Technology. He grew up near Detroit, in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, and attended the Cranbrook Schools.
Denison is licensed in Illinois, New York, Michigan, Arizona, New Jersey, Washington D.C., and Wisconsin, and was elected to the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects in 2005.
selected projects
