David Gissen (MArch ’96) Named Inaugural Architecture Class of 1972 Professor at Yale

The fund for the Architecture Class of 1972 Professor at the Yale School of Architecture was created in celebration of the class’s 50th reunion to support a faculty position in the history and theory of architecture. The inaugural Class of 1972 Professor, David Gissen (MArch ’96), is a historian of architecture and author of works of architectural theory and criticism. His research examines physiological and environmental concepts embedded within modern and late-modern architecture and design. In particular, Gissen studies the manner in which works of architecture shape experiences of health, stability, capacity, and normalcy within built space. He traces these processes within historical research and formulates alternative, critical responses to deepen the field for scholars and designers.

Since graduating from Yale with a Master of Architecture, Gissen has returned to teach as the Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor, in 2019–20, among other appointments. “The Yale School of Architecture is a thrilling place to study, teach, and practice architectural history,” he says. “When I was a student Paul Rudolph Hall unleashed my interest in the interrelationship between architecture, history, and disability. It’s exciting to be back in this new role under Dean Berke’s leadership with such fantastic colleagues.”

Gissen’s Fall 2019 advanced design studio explored how to reconstruct the character of pre-modern, less sunlit spaces in Vienna as a response to urban heat gain and its attendant health problems. His students explored historical concepts including Alois Riegl’s concept of Raumdunkel (constructed spatial darkness) and related readings in new materialism, architecture, and urban theory. In Spring 2020 Gissen taught “The Polychromatic Reconstruction of Architecture,” a seminar examining the tremendous loss of color in historic works of architecture due to aging, industrial pollution, and Modernist aesthetics of form and hygiene. Polychromatic reconstruction “typically describes the way architects, historians, and archaeologists reconstruct the lost colorfully painted surfaces of ancient classical sculptures and buildings.” Students in Gissen’s course revisited the practice relative to emerging theories of chromatic perception and contemporary architectural politics. The course developed a model for combining the pedagogy of an architectural history and theory seminar with technical components found in lab-format courses.

In addition to his master’s degree, Gissen holds a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the University of Virginia and a PhD from University College London. His dissertation is titled “Atmospheres of Late-Modernity: The Urban Production of Indoor Air in New York City, 1963–2003.” Prior to starting at Yale in January of this year, Gissen taught as professor of architecture and urban history at Parsons School of Design at the New School and, from 2007–2019, at California College of the Arts. He has taught as a visiting professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation; at the Institute for Art and Architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna; and in the PhD program in the History, Theory, and Criticism of Art and Architecture at MIT.

Gissen is the author of four books, including The Architecture of Disability: Buildings, Cities, and Landscapes beyond Access (University of Minnesota Press, 2023), a work of history, theory, and memoir that offers a disability-based critique of the discipline of architecture and architectural history; Subnature: Architecture’s Other Environments (Princeton Architectural Press, 2009), a critical reassessment of the material aesthetics of hygiene and health in modern and late-modern architecture; and Manhattan Atmospheres: Architecture, the Interior Environment, and Urban Crisis (University of Minnesota Press, 2014), a book that charts the postwar history of New York City’s architecture via the material attributes of the air within its buildings.

Gissen has also been tapped to lead Yale’s PhD program in architecture, hosted at YSoA. He advocates for the importance of an education in architectural history: “Architecture history has the potential to be an expansive and vanguard form of practice—one that rivals the work of architectural design. By revisiting the past and thinking about who gets to do this and how this is done, we also construct frameworks for alternative and more desirable futures.”

“It is wonderful to have David back here at Yale as the inaugural Architecture Class of 1972 Professor,” says Deborah Berke, Edward P. Bass Dean and J. M. Hoppin Professor of Architecture. “He brings critical perspectives on disability and architecture, as well as a truly vast wealth of knowledge in architectural history and theory that will challenge the ways our students design and think about buildings. I am tremendously grateful to the Class of ’72 for creating this new position for a full-time faculty member, greatly strengthening our ability to educate the future leaders in architecture and design.”