William Sherman

A.B., Princeton University;
M.Arch., Yale University

Associate Professor

William Sherman is the Mario di Valmarana Associate Professor of Architecture and a practicing architect. His research and teaching have been focused for many years on the relationship between architecture and the city from the perspective of the cultural responsibilities of technology. Currently, he teaches graduate design studios and is the Director of the graduate Venice Program. His required third year and elective graduate course, Building and Climate, investigates the role of the built environment in mediating human experience, energy flows and dynamic natural systems.
In his practice, William Sherman is focused on understanding the cultural, political and environmental responsibility of architecture as an act of incremental construction of a binding and sustaining infrastructure. From the premise that no architectural act may be separated from an inherent position with respect to its broadest societal responsibility - each work a fragment of a vision of the city - the research explores the relationship between this conceptual framework and the actual physical infrastructure that realizes in each incremental manifestation the commonly held values of a society in the provision of human needs. Through the design of projects ranging in scale from an addition to the School of Architecture, a cohousing community, houses, housing and museum renovations, he works with modest materials to structure a setting for new institutional, communal and individual relationships. Mr. Sherman’s work has received a number of awards from the American Institute of Architects and has been published in Progressive Architecture and Architecture magazines.