Kris Menos
Faculty, School of Architecture
I’m a human being, a designer, and a teacher. As Creative Director for Human Being Design, I’m responsible for shaping our practice’s continuously evolving conceptual grounding (see metamaterialism), and guiding the research, design, and implementation of our projects.
As a member of the faculty at the Academy of Art University’s School of Architecture, I’ve taught first-year design studios (both first and second semester) in the BArchprogram, as well as a design communication course that introduces digital modeling, rendering, and presentation skills, with emphasis on procedural thinking and fidelity of expression over realism. I’ve also taught a Pre-College summer program introducing students to architecture as a field of study through an art-focused approach, using the classic pedagogical sequence of painting analysis to model translation to cube project.
I was previously a Board Member and Director of Research and Design for the nonprofit, youth-oriented community gardening organization Trenton Grows. In the spring of 2018, we established a “Garden Club” for first- through fifth-grade students at an underperforming K-through-8 school in Trenton, New Jersey. We held twice-weekly meetings with about 25 to 30 student volunteers between the ages of six and 12, with the intended goal to facilitate educational experiences in gardening, nutrition, and fitness. With the help of the students, we collaboratively designed, built, and operated a small, temporary educational garden on the school’s grounds using mostly recycled materials and a budget of approximately $1,000. Through this hands-on process, we introduced the students to every phase of the organic gardening process, from seed to harvest.
In 2017, I received a post-professional Master of Science in Architecture Studies (SMArchS) degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Department of Architecture under a Graduate Fellowship, with a concentration in Architectural Design. My graduate thesis, entitled Post-Mordial: Esoteric Embodiment, embraced the emergent technological paradigm of personal genetic sequencing and leveraged parametric design and digital fabrication techniques, to produce unique proto-architectural design artifacts that blur the boundary between human and environ. View the project documentation in full here.
While at MIT, I received the Kaufman Teaching Certificate from the Teaching and Learning Laboratory.
For undergraduate study, I attended Syracuse University under the School of Architecture Scholarship, and attained a professional Bachelor of Architecture (BArch) degree with dual majors in Architecture and the History of Architecture, and a focus on mid-century visionary, utopian, and paper architecture. Upon graduation, I was a recipient of the 2013 James Britton Memorial Award for Outstanding Thesis for Isotopia: Architectural Visions from a Posthuman Future. This project was shown in the 2013 AIANY Architecture School Exhibition at the Center for Architecture. View the project documentation in full here.
My undergraduate and graduate theses form a fertile foundation for my current work. My research is focused on novel means of anthropomorphic form-making, fabrication, and materiality, using fundamentally human tools, methods, and sources to explore, subvert, or dissolve the Enlightenment-era bifurcation between human and environment. My particular areas of interest include: universalist transhumanism and posthumanism, speculative architecture and urbanism, agricultural and food-related architecture, working class housing, exhibition and installation design, concrete construction, parametric design, digital fabrication, and handcraft.
Beginning in 2004, I’ve had professional experience in the fields of urbanism, design, architecture, and construction. This includes a term as an Architectural Research Fellowwith the nonprofit urban think tank Terreform ONE, researching, designing, and fabricating exhibition models and materials for the NYC Post Carbon City State project. With Woolley Morris Architects, I worked directly with the firm’s Design Principal on numerous projects of varying types, including a golf resort master plan in Kunming, China, the NYS Office of Cultural Education’s Collections Processing and Storage Facility in Albany, and the St. John’s Hospital neighborhood rehabilitation effort in Syracuse. With the concrete contractor Pacific Structures, I worked as an intern on the construction of a thirty-acre, 1,750-unit mixed-use residential development in San Jose.
I’ve been involved professionally in a diverse range of projects, across a wide range design disciplines and scales, from less than one square inch (1 in2) to more than one million square feet (1,000,000 ft2): memorial artifacts, jewelry, everyday items, products, exhibitions and installations, gardens, housing (single-family, multi-family, and condominiums), senior living and assisted living facilities, dormitories, schools and state facilities, cultural spaces, cafés, auto dealerships, retail strips, master plans (residential, commercial, and academic), speculative urbanism, etc. I’ve participated in all phases of the architectural design process — from pre-concept through construction administration and closeout — on tens of millions of dollars of projects.
Courses Taught
