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MICHAEL J. OSTWALD

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Project Involvement

Professor Ostwald is currently working with Mark Burry, Peter Downton and Andrea Mina on the ARC Discovery funded project 'Spatial Knowledge and the Built Environment: The Design Implications of Making, Processing and Digitally Prototyping Architectural Models.'

Professor Michael J. Ostwald is Dean of Architecture and Head of the School of Architecture and Built Environment at the University of Newcastle, Australia. As well as being a Visiting Professor at SIAL, he is also a Professorial Research Fellow in the Faculty of Architecture and Design at Victoria University Wellington, New Zealand.

Appointed a Research Fellow at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney in 1995, Michael Ostwald conducted research on design and non-linear mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1997, was a Visiting Scholar to the Rome Academy and Research Visitor in Italy in 1998 and a Visiting Scholar at the University of California in Los Angeles in 2001. In 2000 and 2001 he was awarded the prestigious Byera Hadley scholarship to undertake Post Doctoral research into Baroque geometry at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, where he is a registered reader, and at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Michael Ostwald has been a Chief Investigator on teams awarded more than $1,500,000 (AUS) in competitive research funding from the ARC in Australia and from the Graham and Getty foundations in the USA.

His more than 170 publications include papers in the international journals Assemblage, Nexus, Communication and Cognition, The Philosophical Forum Transition, Interstices, The Mathematical Intelligencer, Architectural Theory Review, Exedra and Architecture and Geometry, as well as the professional journals Monument, The Interior, The Architects Journal, Inside (Interior Review) and Architectural Review Australia. His chapters have been published in prestigious books from various publishers including Elsevier in Holland, 2G in Barcelona, Edizioni Dell’Erba in Florence, Images in Melbourne, Sage in London, World Scientific in Singapore, Routledge in London, Archadia in Sydney, Global in Tokyo, the MIT Press and Harvard University Press in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Michael Ostwald is co-editor of Architectural Design Research (the AASA Journal), and on the editorial board of the international journals Nexus: Architecture and Mathematics and Architectural Theory Review. He has been a Contributing Editor to Architecture Australia and the Architecture Bulletin and is a Contributing Writer to Monument and the Architectural Review Australia. Since 1983 he has been awarded four international prizes or commendations for his research including the 1990 Transition prize for writing in architecture.

Between 1985 and 1991 Michael Ostwald worked for various architectural and urban design practices based in Australia and the United Kingdom during which time he was involved in the design and documentation of a number of commercial, public and private buildings. Since 1992 he has developed an extensive theoretical design practice. His design works have been refereed and published internationally in such journals as FlashArt International, Architecture Australia, Digital Art, Art and Text, Constructional Review, Information Age, Inside: The Interior Review and The Architecture Bulletin. His theoretical designs have been displayed in galleries and travelling exhibitions and published in books and journals. He has been awarded three national citations for design since 1995.

Michael Ostwald is a principal of the design team Ostwald-Tucker-Chapman whose works have been exhibited in state, national and international exhibitions since 2003. Several of their entries into national and international architectural competitions have been short-listed for prizes or highly commended and in 2004 two of their projects were short-listed for the national IDEA conceptual design award.