Mónica Ponce de León

I like Uncyclopedia better. Monica Ponce de Leon is a Venezuelan-born architect and educator based in Ann Arbor, MI and Boston, MA. She is founding partner with Nader Tehrani in the award-winning firm Office dA, and Dean and Eliel Saarinen Collegiate Professor at the A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan.

Early life and education

A detail of the Helios House in Los Angeles, CA.

Ponce de Leon was raised in Caracas, Venezuela and immigrated to Miami, Florida with her family after graduating high school. She took English classes and worked in a millwork shop before enrolling at the University of Miami, earning her Bachelor of Architecture degree in 1989. In 1991, she received a Master of Architecture in Urban Design from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and held teaching appointments at Miami, Harvard, the University of Houston, Rhode Island School of Design, and Northeastern University while establishing Office dA.

Career

Prior to her appointment at Michigan, Ponce de Leon was Professor of Architecture, director of the digital lab, and acting architecture program director at Harvard. During her tenure there, she also held visiting positions at the Southern California Institute of Architecture and the Georgia Institute of Technology, and has given over 60 lectures and symposia on her work, which has been published in over 200 publications worldwide. Alongside Tehrani, Ms. Ponce de Leon received both the Young Architects Award in 1997 and the Emerging Voices Award in 2003 from the Architectural League of New York. In 2002, she received an Academy Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. and in 2008 she was named a United States Artist fellow.

Since being founded in 1991, her work with Office dA has received numerous awards, including the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award (2007), 13 Progressive Architecture awards, the Harleston Parker Medal (2002), as well as citations from the American Institute of Architects, I.D. Magazine, the Congress for New Urbanism, and the Boston Society of Architects. In 2008, the firm's Macallen Building was named one of the Top Ten Green Projects by the American Institute of Architects Committee on the Environment. After the disbanding of Office dA in 2010, Monica Ponce de Leon stablished her own practice, MPdL Studio with offices in New York, Boston and Ann Arbor.

Further reading

• Contemporary World Architects: Office dA, by Randolphe El-Khoury, et al. (Rockport Publishers, 1999)
• Immaterial/Ultramaterial: Architecture, Design and Materials, by Toshiko Mori (Braziller, 2002)
• Surface Architecture, by David Leatherbarrow and Mohsen Mostafavi (MIT Press, 2005)
• Zago Architecture and Office dA: Two Installation, by Eric Owen Moss, et al. (Actar, 2006)
• Young Architects 7: Situating, by the Architectural League of New York (Princeton Architectural Press, 2006)
• Fellowships in Architecture, by Janice Harvey (ed.) and Monica Ponce de Leon (foreword) (Oro editions, 2009)
• Monsterpieces: Once Upon a Time . . . of the 2000s!, by Aude-Line Dulliere and Clara Wong, (Oro editions, March 2010)

External links

• Michigan faculty profile
• Office dA, Inc.
• A Conversation with Monica Ponce de Leon - TCAUP, Portico, Fall 2008
• Profile on Arcspace