Margaret McCurry

Margaret McCurry received her Bachelor’s degree in Art History from Vassar College in 1964 and her Loeb Fellowship in Advanced Environmental Studies from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University in 1987. She is the recipient of eight National Honor Awards as well as numerous Distinguished Building and Interior Architecture Awards from the American Institute of Architects Chicago Chapter and the Association of Licensed Architects. She is also the recipient of numerous Interior Design Project Awards from the American Society of Interior Designers (ASID) and the International Interior Designer Association (IIDA). In 1989, she was awarded the Dean of Architecture Award and the following year she was inducted into the Interior Design Hall of Fame. In 2002, she was named “The Designer of Distinction” by ASID. Her work is widely published in architectural and interior magazines and exhibited at museums and galleries here and abroad. In 2000, a monograph of her work entitled Margaret McCurry: Constructing Twenty-Five Short Stories was published by The Monacelli Press.

Professionally, McCurry has served as vice president of AIA Chicago and chair of the National AIA Committee on Design. She has also served as vice president of the Illinois Chapter of ASID. A former board member of the Architecture and Design Society at the Art Institute of Chicago, she currently presides on the board of the Art Institute’s Textile Department. She has been president of the Alumni/ae Council of the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University and served a six-year term as a director of the Harvard Alumni/ae Association. She recently completed a two-year term as president of the Harvard Club of Chicago where she oversaw the publication of the book 150 Years of the Harvard Club of Chicago: 1857–2007, and continues to serve on the board as an ex officio member.

McCurry lectures at many architectural and design conferences as well as at schools of architecture and design at major universities and has taught design studios at The School of the Art Institute, Miami University at Oxford, and the University of Illinois. In addition to authoring articles for architectural journals and catalogues, she serves on numerous design award juries and panels for the AIA and ASID as well as for the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Collegiate Schools of Architecture. She is also appointed to the General Services Administration’s (GSA) Public Buildings Service National Register of Peer Professionals.

McCurry’s architectural credits as principal at Tigerman McCurry Architects include the design of several variations of sustainable housing using shipping containers for a Chicago developer, mixed-use facilities and a golf clubhouse for the St. Joe Company in Florida, the Chicago Bar Association and the award-winning Juvenile Protective Association Headquarters in Chicago. She has also completed custom residences for the nationally acclaimed Prairie Crossing conservation community in northern Illinois and designed and remodeled country and town clubs, showrooms, museum installations, offices, and countless private residences throughout the country. She collaborated with Hickory Business Furniture to produce an exclusive line of executive office furnishings and fabrics, which won the IIDA IFMA Gold Award at NeoCon 1998 for Best Furniture Design System. Shortly thereafter, LandscapeForms commissioned her to design a new line of park and town center outdoor furnishings, which earned Interior Design magazine’s Best of Year Merit Award in 2006. While at in Skidmore, Owings and Merrill’s Chicago office, she collaborated on such diverse projects as a 20-story headquarters office building for an insurance company, an atriumed hotel/restaurant/meeting room complex, a four-story bank, and the East Wing addition to The Art Institute of Chicago including the School of The Art Institute and The Rubloff Auditorium.

McCurry is an expert at analysis of client program needs, problem solving, and consensus building and achievement. She has become well known for her inventive synthesis of modernity and the vernacular. Years of designing and furnishing award-winning residences has honed her expertise in providing harmonious, well-proportioned, and well-designed environments that incorporate many sustainable features, both passive, such as solar orientation and natural ventilation, and active, such as geothermal wells, solar and photovoltaic panels, green roofs, radiant floors, and environmentally correct materials—all of which directly affect the quality of one’s life.