Lawrence Blough

Lawrence Blough is Professor with Tenure at Pratt Institute School of Architecture and Principal of GRAFTWORKS Design Research. In addition to being Head of the Core Design sequence in the BArch program, he is Co-Director of the SoA’s Housing Futures Research Lab. He has also held teaching appointments at Washington University in St Louis, Tulane and Catholic University. Before founding GRAFTWORKS, Blough worked in the offices of Peter Eisenman and Antoine Predock and was a Senior Associate at Architecture Theatre, a nonprofit architecture and urbanism foundation in New Haven, CT. His design work has been widely published both in the US and abroad including PLAT Journal, New York Times, Architects Newspaper, Interior Design, Architectural Record, and Space Magazine among others. Blough has developed a range of building types for institutions, nonprofits and private clients, from affordable housing and schools, to single-family houses and art spaces. His projects and collaborations have been exhibited at ‘T’ Space in Rhinebeck, Kenderdine Gallery in Canada, Temple University, Museum of Modern Art in New York, Locust Projects in Miami, CAUE 92 in France, Yale University, Pratt Institute and in 2005 GRAFTWORKS was a finalist in the prestigious PS1/MoMA Young Architects Program.

Blough is the recipient of multiple funding awards for design research. In 2024-25, Blough and Deborah Gans were together awarded funding from PennPraxis at the Weitzman School of Design to conduct a case study of Church Grove, a community-led housing project and land trust in London. In 2018-20, he was the inaugural Structurist Fellow, a juried prize from the University of Saskatchewan awarded for his Domestic Mutations investigation of collective live/work typologies in Los Angeles. Blough and Simone Giostra were together awarded a grant in 2019-21 from the IDC Foundation to conduct design studios exploring the relationship between building form and active solar potential to organize and power mid-rise housing in NYC. Previously, the two were were recipients of the 2013-2014 Pratt Innovation Fund, seed money to research building integrated solar thermal façade applications. Blough was also a recipient of a 2010-2011 New York State Council on the Arts Independent Projects Award, a grant to develop an innovative aerated concrete textile block wall and vault system. He has contributed book chapters to “Matter: Material Processes in Architectural Production” and most recently “Pedagogical Experiments in Architecture for a Changing Climate” and presented at multiple academic conferences in the US, Canada and the EU. Blough received a MSAAD from Columbia University and a BArch from Tulane University where he was awarded a commendation with special distinction for outstanding thesis.

MSAAD, Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, Columbia University

BArch, School of Architecture, Tulane University