Joe Day is an architect and theorist in Los Angeles, where he leads Deegan-Day Design & Architecture and serves on the design and critical studies faculty at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc).

After graduating from Yale College in 1990 with a double-major in Architecture and Economics & Political Science, Day completed a Master of Architecture at SCI-Arc in 1994. He worked in the studios of Frank Israel, Robert A. M. Stern, Dagmar Richter, and Marc Appleton, as well as at HNTB, before joining HEDGE Design Collective in 1995, a ground-breaking collaborative of architects as well as landscape, graphic, floral, fashion, and product designers. In 1996, Day founded Deegan-Day Design LLC for building and furniture design. An offshoot of that practice called “Dayware”—a line of utilitarian clothing for arts practitioners—was in production from 1998 to 2008. In 2021, Deegan-Day Design was re-incorporated as Deegan-Day Design and Architecture (DDD&A).

The work of DDD&A explores both the practical and utopian horizons of architecture, with an emphasis on how space and geometry orchestrate vision. Many designs register and reconfigure the ‘scopic’ environments defined by abstract and actual sightlines, viewing dynamics, and cinematic projection. A proposal for a Media Center at Columbia College Hollywood garnered a Progressive Architecture Citation in 2016, and the C-Glass House (Marin, CA) and 4/Way House (Topanga, CA) were both recognized with AIA Residential Design Awards in 2021. Day’s own home in Silverlake was featured on the covers of Dwell and the Arts section of the Los Angeles Times in 2005, and the 4/Way House was accorded that honor by GA Houses in 2023. Other completed works include a showroom and service center for Ferrari Maserati Beverly Hills, and residential projects throughout southern California. Currently, DDD&A is designing a cultural pavilion to expand the Wende Museum in Culver City, dedicated to the history and culture of the Cold War, while an artists’ compound, Baja/Bali, nears completion in Todos Santos, Mexico. The first ADCube, a standardized 20’x20’x20’ living unit, was realized in 2023, and three more are in development and construction.

In addition to his design work, Day authored Corrections & Collections: Architectures for Art and Crime (Routledge, 2012, with a grant from the Graham Foundation), a provocative study of the complementary formal evolutions and shifting urban roles played by prisons and museums since WWII. He also contributed a new foreword to the most recent edition of Reyner Banham’s seminal study, Los Angeles: Architecture of the Four Ecologies (University of California Press, 2009), and edited an AIA Award-winning monograph, Franklin D. Israel: Buildings and Projects (Rizzoli, 1992). His critical writing has been featured in Log, Places Design Journal, Architecture, Interior Design, LoudPaper, Deutsche Bauzeitung and Architecture and Urbanism in Latin America, as well as in surveys and anthologies, including Sessions (SCI-Arc, 2005) and Evil Paradises (New Press, 2007). A series of monographs, Arrays (SCI-Arc, 2016), Forays (ORO, 2021) and Essays (Inventory, 2026), consolidate Day’s diagrams, design work, and short-form writing, respectively.

Since 2000, Day has taught design and critical studies at SCI-Arc, as well as at the Yale School of Architecture, in 2012 as the Louis I. Kahn Visiting Assistant Professor and in 2022 and 2027 as the William Henry Bishop Visiting Professor. He has also taught studio courses at Otis College of Art and Design, UCLA, and in 2016 at the Singapore University for Technology and Design (SUTD). Day’s early design studios and seminars explored themes of exhibition, incarceration, urban studies and the nexus of contemporary art and architecture; since 2012, a series of six “PLEX” studios have focused more exclusively on film, architecture, and the typology of the cinema.

From 1995 to 2000, Day served on the Board of Directors of the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design, as its President in 2000. He has been active on the SCI-Arc Board of Trustees since 2001. Day joined the W.M. Keck Foundation in 1996 and became its Co-Chair and co-CEO in 2023. He was born in 1967 in Berlin, Germany.

Headshot by Ashlynn Trane