Lead Designer

Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi are partners in New York-based Weiss/Manfredi, which is committed to the dynamic integration of architecture, art, infrastructure and landscape design. They received the 2004 Academy Award in Architecture, given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, acknowledging their unique vision. New York’s Architectural League named the firm one of North America’s “critical emerging practices.”

Weiss/Manfredi’s design for SAM’s Olympic Sculpture Park won an international competition, the Veronica Rudge Green Prize and a Progressive Architecture Award and has been included in the following exhibitions:

• Groundswell: Constructing the Contemporary Landscape, Museum of Modern Art, New York
• The Good Life Exhibition, Van Alen Institute, New York
• Cities: 10 Lines, Approaches to City and Open Territory Design, Harvard Graduate School of Design, Boston
  
  

The firm’s other noted built works include the Women's Memorial and Education Center at Arlington National Cemetery and the Olympia Fields Park and Cultural Center in Illinois. Both projects won state and national AIA honor awards and ID Magazine Environments awards. 

Other completed projects include the Museum of the Earth in Ithaca, exhibited in the Cooper-Hewitt Museum’s Design Triennial, the Robin Hood Foundation Media Library at New York’s PS 42 and the Smith College Campus Center. All were featured in international publications and won AIA honor awards. 

Their design for the NYC 2012 Olympics flatwater and whitewater rowing venues was featured in the São Paolo International Biennial. Completed urban design projects include the Columbus Circle redesign, development strategies for lower Manhattan areas affected by 9/11 and the design for elevated pedestrian crossings in lower Manhattan, winner of the international "Bridging the Gaps” competition. The team also won the invited competition for the Nexus, a mixed-use arts center planned for Barnard College, and completed a retreat and conference center for the U.N. 

Weiss/Manfredi’s work has been exhibited internationally, at the recent Groundswell show at MoMA and also at major universities and institutions including Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia, the Architectural League of New York, Storefront for Art and Architecture and Venice Architecture Biennale (as well as those mentioned above).

Publications featuring Weiss/Manfredi’s work include A+T, Architectural Record, Architectural Review, Architecture, C-3 Korea, Chicago Tribune, Costruire, Detail, Domus, GA Document, I.D. Magazine, L’Arca, Landscape Architecture, Landscape World, Metropolis, Praxis, Space, The New York Times, The Seattle Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Time and Topos. The monograph, Site Specific: the Work of Weiss/Manfredi Architects, features their cross-disciplinary projects in architecture, landscape architecture and urban design. The monograph Surface/Subsurface, published in January 2008, features cross-disciplanary projects in master planning, urban design, landscape and architecture.

Weiss and Manfredi have taught and lectured at Yale University, Cornell University, Princeton University and the University of Pennsylvania, and have also lectured at a variety of universities and institutions including Harvard, Rice, the Architectural League and the Smithsonian.

Weiss is the Graham Chair Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, where she has taught since 1991. Manfredi is a board member for the Van Alen Institute, where he was the founding Chair and is on the board for the Storefront for Art and Architecture.