SARAH WHITING

Since 2010, Sarah Whiting has been the dean and William Ward Watkin Professor at the Rice University School of Architecture, which acts as a think tank of research and production while preparing graduates to think, negotiate and collaborate. Whiting is also a partner of WW Architecture, a practice that she co-founded with her partner, Ron Witte, in 1999. WW recently completed the EL House in Houston, which received a Texas Society of Architects design award. Their competition entry for the Oujda soccer stadium also received a TSA award. They are currently completing design development of the Kaihui Exchange, an environmental, agricultural and business tourism center outside Changsha, China, which is expected to break ground in early 2017.

Whiting’s interests are interdisciplinary, with the built environment at their core. She possesses an indefatigable curiosity about how individuals constitute a public and through what forms that public manifests itself in both architecture and urbanism and is then, in turn, formed. In her teaching, writing and practice, Whiting focuses on architecture’s public audience and how architecture can engage that collective subject.

Whiting received her undergraduate degree from Yale University, organizing her studies as an independent major that combined architecture and urban studies with history and philosophy. She received her Master of Architecture degree from Princeton University and after two years practicing with Rem Koolhaas in the Netherlands, she returned to school to obtain her Ph.D. in Architectural History, Theory and Criticism from MIT.