Neil Denari

Neil Denari is an architect and principal of Neil M. Denari Architects (NMDA, Inc.), a globally recognized design office based in Los Angeles. NMDA works at all scales across a diverse array of countries and contexts. Focusing primarily on architecture and urban scale planning, the office also has worked in the realm of graphic design, branding, and product design. At present, his office is engaged with projects of various scales in the U.S. and Asia. NMDA’s most recent completed building is HL23, a 14-story condominium tower next to the High Line at 23rd Street in New York.

NMDA considers architecture as a medium with specific attributes that are different from other art and media forms, but not as a medium whose responsibility it is to resist the influences of the temporal or the graphic, those forces exerted by immaterial or two-dimensional media. In this sense, we work with media rather than against it, allowing architecture to be engaging rather than authoritative.

Denari studied at the University of Houston (BArch 1980) and Harvard University (MArch 1982), and is a Professor at UCLA. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard, Princeton, Columbia, and the University of California, Berkeley, among other schools. Denari has received numerous awards, including the Los Angeles AIA Gold Medal in 2011, induction into the Interior Design Hall of Fame in 2010, an artist’s Fellowship from the United States Artists organization in 2009 and in 2008, an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His most recent solo exhibition was “The Artless Drawing: Neil Denari 1982–1996,” a 2010 show of 60 of his analog drawings held at ACE Gallery Los Angeles, curated by Sylvia Lavin.

Denari is the author of two books, Interrupted Projections (1996, TOTO) and Gyroscopic Horizons (1999, Princeton Architectural Press). He is currently working on Facticity (AADCU), an 800-page multigraphic book on the work of NMDA to be released in 2013.