| “I do not remember a time when I did not want to be an architect,” says Visiting Assistant Professor James Matthew Thomas, who grew up drawing cities and told his mother he wanted to be an architect before she thought he knew what the word meant. With wander-lust and architecture prompting many visits around the world, in September Thomas joined AUB’s Department of Architecture and Design.
After earning a BA in architecture from Kansas State University in 2001, Thomas went on to teach at Chongqing University in China for a year before working on numerous professional projects in New Mexico.
Balancing academic work and practice, Thomas obtained an MS in architecture and urban design at Columbia University in 2008. He then taught at Columbia University and Parsons New School of Design in New York and acted as a visiting critic at Parsons, the Universities of New Mexico and Toronto, and Columbia University.
While working on many projects around the world—Mexico, Zambia, Hungary, Turkey, and different parts of the United States—Thomas was awarded the William Kinne Fellowship in 2008 for his project, “Wading the Waters: Exploring Malawi's Fragile Infrastructure of Water and Health.”
Cofounder and partner for the Taos Design Group in New Mexico, Thomas held positions with the US Green Building Council and the World Hands Project, the latter published in American Institute of Architects Forward Emerging Professionals in the Global Community in 2006.
Teaching courses on sustainability and architecture design to undergraduates, Thomas finds AUB students “great to work with; they ask good questions about their environment.” In his own research on sustainability, he is looking at infrastructure and architectural systems.
Thomas enjoys listening to mainstream music, cooking, and reading about sustainability. He finds the best way to “get the most of a place is to live there for a while and engage with the people,” believing that “it really does not matter where you are; it’s the people you’re with that matter.” Through long hikes in nature, he has done a great deal of internal tourism covering many Lebanese sites. He has also explored Beirut on foot and visited neighboring Arab countries. |