Rafi Segal | Abend Family Visiting Critic Endowed Lecture

Rafi Segal is an award-winning architect and associate professor of architecture and urbanism at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he directs the SMArchS Urbanism program (Master of Science in Architecture & Urbanism). As both an architect and scholar, Segal’s work currently focuses on how mutualism and collectivity can impact the design of buildings and cities across architectural, urban, and regional scales. 

Segal’s key works include the Ashdod Museum of Art in Israel; Kitgum Peace Museum and War Archive in Uganda; the winning proposal for the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem; designs for affordable prototype village housing that the Rwanda Housing Authority uses to model and create housing for rural lands; Bight: Coastal Urbanism, a multi-scale urban design project for New York City’s flood zones to mitigate climate change, awarded and commissioned by the Regional Planning Association as part of the 4th  Regional Plan for the metropolitan area of New York. Segal’s entry into professional practice took shape under the mentorship of Zvi Hecker with whom he started working with during his last year of architectural studies at the Technion and continued for years after to become his collaborator on the Palmach History Museum built in Tel Aviv (1992-1999). Segal’s current work includes Carehaus: the U.S. first inter-generational, care-based co-housing project (carehaus.net), founded together with artist Marisa Morán Jahn and developer Ernst Valery.

Segal directs the MIT Future Urban Collectives, a design-research lab exploring how physical and digital strategies in architecture and urbanism can support cohabitation, coproduction, and coexistence. He is author and co-editor of various publications among them: Design & Solidarity (Columbia University Press, 2023), Space Packed: The Architecture of Alfred Neumann (Park Books, 2017), In Search of the Public: Notes on the Contemporary America City (CAUI, Island Press, 2012),  Cities of Dispersal (Architecture Design 2008), Territories — Islands, Camps and Other States of Utopia (Kunstwert 2003), and A Civilian Occupation (Babel, Verso 2003). He has also exhibited his work widely, most notably at Storefront for Art and Architecture; KunstWerk, Berlin; Witte de With, Rotterdam; Venice Biennale of Architecture; MOMA in New York; and at the Hong Kong/Shenzhen Urbanism Biennale.

Segal holds a PhD from Princeton University and received a B.Arch and M.Sc from Technion – Israel Institute of Technology. Prior to MIT, he taught architecture and urbanism at European and US schools among them the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Columbia University, the Cooper Union School of Architecture, Cornell University, and Princeton University. At MIT, Segal established a new graduate level courses: “Collectives: New Forms of Sharing” which explores the relationship between design and collectivity.