New department chairs in AAP are active practitioners in their fields

Cornell's College of Architecture, Art and Planning has three new chairs: Nasrine Seraji-Bozorgzad, Department of Architecture; Franklin "Buzz" Spector, Department of Art; and Pierre Clavel, Department of City and Regional Planning. Seraji and Spector, established practitioners in their fields, are also new to Cornell.

Seraji was born in Tehran and trained at the Architectural Association in London. As the principal of Atelier Seraji in Paris, she won the competition for the Temporary American Center in Paris in 1991 and subsequently built the center, which now has been supplanted by a permanent one. Her structure, a melange of concrete and patterned brick in contrasting tones, incorporated 21 trees already on the site. She has since participated in numerous international architecture competitions and built houses, apartments and, most recently, a museum and observatory in the Aisne region of France.

For the past five years she has been a professor at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna and director of its Institute for Art and Architecture. She has held visiting professorships at Princeton, Columbia and Tulane universities, the École Spéciale d'Architecture in Paris and the University of Toronto.

Seraji has exhibited widely, including at the Galerie d'Architecture in Paris, the Royal Institute of British Architects in London and the Venice Biennale. Her work and writings have been featured in publications around the world, and she has lectured in the United States and Europe. She will fully enter her new position in January 2002.

Spector earned a B.A. in studio art at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and an M.F.A. from the Committee on Art and Design at the University of Chicago.

He comes to Cornell from the art department at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he was a faculty member.

Described as a theoretician's artist, Spector recently created a series of collages, using publicity photos of writers pieced together like mosaics, that are intended to be "read" as much as viewed.

He has taught and exhibited his work widely across the United States, including at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Northwestern University, University of California-Santa Barbara, Pilchuck School of Glass and the Anderson Ranch Arts Center. His work is in the permanent collections of such institutions as the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cranbrook Art Museum, the Museum of Modern Art/Franklin Furnace Archive Collection, Harvard University's Houghton Library, the Illinois State Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Luigi Pecci Centre for Contemporary Art in Prato, Italy, and the Sackner Archive of Concrete and Visual Poetry in Miami Beach. Recent exhibits (summer 2001) were in the Cristinerose Gallery in New York City, Zolla-Lieberman Gallery in Chicago and Marsha Mateyka Gallery in Washington, D.C.

Clavel holds a B.A. in economics from Haverford College, a master's degree in regional planning from the University of North Carolina and a doctorate in planning from Cornell. His areas of professional interest are planning theory, community and economic development planning, urban policy and public administration. He has taught in Cornell's Department of City and Regional Planning since 1967, during which time he has served multiple terms as director of graduate studies. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Puerto Rico and the University of Illinois at Chicago. His books include The Progressive City (1986), Harold Washington and the Neighborhoods: Progressive Government in Chicago 1983-87 (co-editor with Wim Wiewel, Rutgers University Press, 1991), and Reinventing Cities: Equity Planners (co-editor and coauthor with Norman Krumholz, Temple University Press, 1994).