Lives of Consequence
William O'Brien Jr. '00
Founder and Principal, WOJR: Organization for Architecture
Associate Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning
Architectural Design Lead, Samara
Co-Founder, Collective–LOK
William O’Brien Jr. ’00 has been recognized internationally as one of the most innovative architects of his generation.
A tenured member of the MIT faculty, he is the founder and principal of WOJR, an award-winning independent design practice in Cambridge, Mass., which views architecture as “a form of cultural production” and takes on international projects that engage “the realms of art, architecture, and urbanism.” Architect Magazine has recognized WOJR with the annual Progressive Architecture Award three years in a row, most recently in February 2019 for House of the Woodland, following the 2018 project House of Horns and 2017’s Mask House.
Architectural Record awarded O’Brien the 2013 Design Vanguard Award, a prize given to 10 practitioners internationally. The same year, Wallpaper* named him one of the top 20 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.
O’Brien is also a cofounder of a parallel collaborative practice, Collective–LOK, which 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, where he taught advanced theory seminars and design studios in the graduate curriculum. 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.
O’Brien pursued his graduate studies at Harvard University where he was the recipient of the Master of Architecture Faculty Design Award. Prior to graduate school he attended Hobart College where he studied architecture and music theory and was the winner of the Nicholas Cusimano Prize in Music. After completion of his graduate work he studied in Austria as 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 MacDowell Fellow by the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, and a Socrates Fellow by the Aspen Institute.
In 2016, O’Brien edited his first monograph, Room for Artifacts, which contains a collection of 16 architectural artifacts designed by WOJR — a mask, a church, a labyrinth, a dwelling, a bust, and a series of totems, among others, presented in conceptual drawings, architectural drawings, and images.
O’Brien was named a 2017 Civitella Ranieri Fellow and awarded a six-week residency at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation’s 15th century castle in the Umbrian region of Italy. In 2018, WOJR established a partnership with the foundation to launch a new prize for architects. The Civitella Ranieri Prize for Architecture supports a six-week residency at the Umbrian castle and provides a $15,000 fund for the construction of an architectural installation on the castle grounds.