Karen Bausman + Associates

With her Progressive Architecture Award-winning (P/A Award) theater design for Warner Bros. that arises from the Los Angeles urban landscape like a flower from a seed and a residential tower project for New York with multiple facades that track the sun like a wall of morning glories, architect Karen Bausman is cultivating new ground on architecture's leading edge of thought and design.

Ms. Bausman leads the design teams at New York-based Karen Bausman + Associates and is known for establishing a creative connection with her clients in the entertainment and cultural sectors, for whom she has executed notable projects ranging from building designs and urban landscapes to interiors and site-specific installations. Focusing on works of structural and visual poetry, her design philosophy is based on a fundamental faith in the power of an authentic architecture for a modern humanity.

Recipient of the Rome Prize, Ms. Bausman first garnered international recognition with her Performance Theater for Los Angeles. This breakthrough commission and other works that push the boundaries of structural and visual poetry formed the basis of Karen Bausman: Supermodels, a solo exhibition of her building designs and working methods at Harvard University. Among her most notable private commissions are ultra-elegant headquarters for clients Warner Bros. Records (Office Interior of the Year) and Elektra Entertainment – award-winning environments that are designed to celebrate the iconoclastic artist and that serve as important incubators in New York’s highly competitive cultural arts scene.


An active member of the New York design community, Ms. Bausman has participated as a panelist and lecturer for the Architectural League of New York, the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum, a fellow of the American Academy in Rome and the AIA New York Chapter. She has also been a guest lecturer and design critic throughout the United States and Europe - including at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design and at the U. S. General Services Administration where she serves on the GSA National Register of Design Excellence Peer Professionals. She is a featured commentator on NYC-TV's Secrets in the Sky: The Towers of Gotham, the New York Emmy-winning program currently airing on PBS stations across the United States.

Recognized as a noted designer, Ms. Bausman has made substantial contributions to architectural education. She has been the Eliot Noyes Visiting Design Critic in Architecture at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design and the Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor at Yale University's School of Art and Architecture, the only American woman to hold both distinguished design chairs. She was a faculty member of Columbia University's School of Architecture's Advanced Architectural Design Studio from 1990 to 2004. Her applied research into biological and natural structures during this time underlies her dynamic building designs and is featured in INDEX Architecture, published by MIT Press.


Today, Ms. Bausman is considered a design leader in the field of contemporary building design with an international reputation for developing 21st century structures that are creative and authentic to their site and purpose. Her work has won acclaim by the world's most prominent media including The New York Times newspaper and magazine, Architectural Record, and A+U (Japan), which published a 60-page monograph of her work.


Karen Bausman received her professional degree in architecture from the Cooper Union for The Advancement of Science and Art. She received the President's Citation for Outstanding Contributions to the Field of Architecture from her alma mater in 1994. She was awarded a Rome Prize at a White House ceremony in the same year.