FOUNDER |

conrad-bercah is the leader of C-B A—conrad-bercah architects, a Milan-based architectural workroom founded in New York in 1999. The office’s extensively published work ranges from hotel facilities to residential, institutional, and commercial projects. It is known for perceiving architecture as a complex element of cultural production and as a serious vehicle for an active critique, through architecture, of the culture in which it is placed.

The approach is discussed in detail in conrad-berch’s West Workroom, Towards a New Sobriety in Architecture (Charta, 2008), a critical, formal, and cultural self-analysis of the work the office has produced since its foundation. The book was recently listed as one of the best of 2008 in ‘Il Giornale dell’Architettura’ and ‘Il Giornale dell’Arte’ and is now at the centre of a lively debate in Italy—where it has been reviewed and discussed at the Politecnico di Milano, NABA, Domus Academy, the American Academy in Rome, and FESTARCH 2, an international architecture festival held in Cagliari in June 2008—and in the USA where it has been introduced at the University of Toronto Daniels School of Architecture and the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

conrad-bercah is currently working on a personal atlas of west architecture titled Architecturah and from time to time writes a column of architectural criticism in the weekly magazine of ‘Il Sole 24’, in ‘Abitare’ and in ‘Compasses’. He also runs architectural workshops at the Domus Academy Master in Architectural Design in Milan.

conrad-bercah holds a degree in Architecture from the Politecnico di Torino and from the Harvard Design School where he serves as a design critic. He received the John D. Sawyer fellowship from the Longfellow Institute of the Harvard Department of English and American Literature in 1996 and the Arthur Wheelwright fellowship from the GSD in 1999. In 2002, he was awarded the first prize in the Rabin International Peace Forum Competition in Tel Aviv.