Mark Mulligan

Mark Mulligan is an architect and educator with a deep knowledge of construction technology and a multi-faceted engagement with Japanese architecture and urbanism. In both practice and in academia, he espouses a holistic design approach, in which rigorous technical development emerges from a nuanced understanding of contemporary architecture’s social, urban, and environmental contexts.

In May 2019, Mulligan became Chair of Wentworth's Architecture Department, and since September 2020 he has served as Associate Dean of the School of Architecture and Design. Prior to coming to Wentworth, he directed the Harvard Graduate School of Design's Master in Architecture Degree Program (2011-14) and served as Interim Curator of the Loeb Fellowship (2014-15) and co-chair of the Dean's Diversity Initiative (2014-18). He was a member of the GSD faculty from 1996 to 2018.

As a teacher and scholar, Mulligan has led numerous design-build projects that bridge teaching, research, and practice. These include the experimental plastic structure KOMOREBI Pavilion (collaboration with Tokyo University structural engineer Jun Sato and Autodesk BUILD Space, 2016-17); the new-generation sustainable Horizon House (First Prize, LIXIL “Retreat in Nature” competition: constructed and occupied in Japan, 2013); and “The Thinking Hand” exhibition on Japanese carpentry tools and techniques (collaboration with Yukio Lippit, Takenaka Carpentry Tools Museum, Reischauer Institute, 2014). As part of his historical research on Japanese modernism, he has led groups of students to reconstruct detailed digital models of lost landmarks – Frank Lloyd Wright’s Imperial Hotel in Tokyo (2011); Kenzo Tange’s National Olympic Stadium in Tokyo (2012); and Junzo Sakakura’s Japan Pavilion for the 1937 Paris World Exposition (2014) – and to produce animated videos analyzing their construction and reproducing the experience of moving through their spaces.

His practice (Mark Mulligan Architect) focuses on well-crafted homes in a variety of geographic and urban contexts including New England, Hawaii, and Costa Rica. Prior to establishing his own Cambridge-based architectural practice in 1998, Mulligan worked as project architect for Fumihiko Maki’s Pritzker Prize-winning practice in Tokyo, Japan. In 2008, he edited and produced the definitive English-language anthology of Maki’s essays entitled Nurturing Dreams: Collected Essays on Architecture and the City.