Rafi Segal leads an office engaged in architecture and urbanism as two inseparable preoccupations. An integrated approach to architecture and urbanism enables more impactful design projects that address the well-being of individuals and communities alike.
Urbanism is multi-disciplinary and system-based, addressing a wide array of scales, objectives and outcomes. The urban project today faces social-economic and environmental challenges that extend far beyond the city as an object of design. Architecture on the other hand is singular in its expression. It is the art that gives form to space of human habitation. The separation of the urban and the architectural can lead to misconceptions that buildings are independent, self-sufficient, and aesthetic objects disconnected from their urban context, and that urban design does not have a significant impact on the design quality of individual buildings. This disconnect disrupts our ability to address social, political, economic and environmental issues that impact the way we live.
The role of the architect-urbanist joins these fields to organize and shape collective space, prioritize critical connections and interactions and express notions of shared values and identities. Architecture in sync with its urban context facilitates the organization of a community and creates an expression of its collectivity.
Work involves design and research at the scale of the building, the neighborhood, the settlement, and the region, and results in the design of urban systems as well as individual buildings, where both are imbedded with civic value, contribute purposely to their larger urban context and express their essential place within it.
Among Segal’s projects: Villa 003 of the ORDOS 100 Project, the Ashdod Museum of Art, the winning proposal for the National Library of Israel in Jerusalem, and Bight: Coastal Urbanism a multi-scale urban design proposal that addresses climate change and forms part of the 4th RPA Regional Plan for the metropolitan area of New York. Professional experience includes the Palmach History Museum designed with Zvi Hecker and built in Tel Aviv.
Rafi Segal received his professional degree and M.Sc in Architecture from Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, and his PhD from Princeton University. He is co-editor of Cities of Dispersal (Wiley and Sons, 2008), Territories – Islands, Camps and Other States of Utopia (KW, Walther Konig, 2003) and A Civilian Occupation: The Politics of Israeli Architecture (Verso, Babel, 2003). His writings and exhibitions have provided a critical contribution to architecture’s role in the peripheries of our cities. His recent book Space-Packed (Park Books, 2017) brings to light the life and work of Czech architect Alfred Neumann. He has widely exhibited his work and curated exhibitions at Storefront for Art and Architecture (New York), KW Institute for Contemporary Art (Berlin), Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art (Rotterdam), Malmö Konsthall (Malmo), Wroclaw Museum of Architecture (Wroclaw) and more. Segal is Associate Professor of Architecture and Urbanism at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he directs the SMArchS Urbanism program (Master of Science in Architecture and Urbanism). Prior to MIT he taught Architecture and Urban Design at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Columbia University, and the Cooper Union School of Architecture, among others.