A design architect and teacher, in both practice and teaching Alan Chimacoff is dedicated to a clarity of purpose and ideas, to invention and excellence, and to the responsibility of architecture to its physical, social and cultural settings.  

Born and bred in New Jersey, he has lived all but fourteen years of his life in New Jersey, and believes New Jersey is a great place-naturally, socially, culturally, industrially, intellectually-an unsung national treasure.

 

Architecture and Planning.  Working principally with colleges and universities, his buildings and campus planning projects are at Arizona State, Columbia, Cornell, Duke, Johns Hopkins, Princeton, Rutgers, and Syracuse universities (among others).  They embrace a range of building types-business, law and architecture schools, libraries, academic and classroom facilities, science laboratories, undergraduate and graduate residential and related social and dining facilities.  Internationally, he designed Inanç Lisesi, a boarding school for gifted, disadvantaged Turkish children on a dramatic site overlooking the Sea of Marmara, and the International School of Prague in the Czech Republic. He led the architectural team in the design of the headquarters and conference center for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, at the time the largest private philanthropy in the United States.

 

Teaching.  Academically, over thirty years he was an assistant professor at Cornell University and a full professor and director of graduate studies in the School of Architecture at Princeton University.  He was a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania, UNC Charlotte, the first Sargent Visiting Professor at Syracuse, and Kea Distinguished Professor at the University of Maryland.  

 

Service.  Princeton, NJ Zoning Board of adjustment; Cornell University College of Architecture, Art and Planning Advisory Council; Cornell University Council; Cornell University Architecture Advisory Committee, and liaison between that group and the Building and Properties Committee of the Cornell University Board of Trustees.

 

Photography.  A serious photographer, with a perspective shaped by his knowledge, as an architect, of real and illusory space and a love of materials, his photographs seek abstraction in the constructed, natural and ordinary.  His photographs explore explicit geometries as well as the faceted, ambiguous spatial characteristics of cubism.