The Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis will welcome Cory Henry, Anna Bach, Eugeni Bach, and Karel Klein as visiting faculty in architecture for the spring 2024 semester. Henry will lead a graduate-level options studio, Anna Bach will lead a section of the degree project studio in the master of architecture program, Eugeni Bach will lead the graduate core 318A studio (also in the master of architecture program), and Klein will lead a junior/senior-level undergraduate options studio.

Cory Henry
Cory Henry joins the school as the Ruth & Norman Moore Visiting Professor. Henry is the principal of the award-winning, Los Angeles-based firm Atelier Cory Henry. His approach to design integrates research and socially conscious ideals to create poetic, contextually driven design solutions. His work ranges in scale and types, with projects spanning several continents. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, has been recognized by NCARB as an emerging force in the field.

Recently, Henry has taken an active interest in St. Louis’ Grand Center Arts District. He won the emerging national Black architect competition for “On Olive,” a development on Olive Street between Vandeventer and Spring Avenues. The development, put into motion by Emily Rauh Pulitzer, aims to build a series of new, architecturally significant homes in the neighborhood. Henry, along with Constance Vale — chair of undergraduate architecture and winner of the local architect competition for “On Olive” — have already created the first stages of designs.

Last spring, Henry led WashU’s annual Fitzgibbon Charrette, which challenged students to speculate alternative designs to Spring Church, the open-air space in the Grand Center operated by the Pulitzer Arts Foundation.

Henry serves as design critic at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and has been twice named KEA Distinguished Professor by the University of Maryland. He previously taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Syracuse University, Penn State University, and the University of Southern California. He earned a master of architecture from Cornell University and a bachelor of architecture from Drexel University.

Anna and Eugeni Bach
Anna and Eugeni Bach are returning for another semester following their role as Ruth & Norman Moore Visiting Professors in spring 2023. They are the founders of an award-winning architecture studio based in Barcelona that operates across a broad spectrum of design, from urban planning and architecture to interior and object design. Through innovation and research, the studio aims to find new solutions and alternatives for each project by optimizing both natural and economic resources, working as a team with the end user to ensure the best synthesis of concept, functionality and beauty.

Anna Bach holds an architecture degree from the Helsinki University of Technology and a master’s degree from the Barcelona School of Architecture at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC) and has taught at EINA University Center for Design and Art of Barcelona. Eugeni Bach teaches at the Barcelona School of Architecture at UPC, where he earned his architecture degree. They were director-curators of the 2021-22 Spanish Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism. Their projects have been published in various European magazines such as Domus, MARK, Interni, Arquitectura Viva, and A10, among others, and their work has been exhibited at the Lisbon Architecture Triennial and the Spanish Pavilion of the Lisbon Biennial.

Karel Klein
Karel Klein, co-director of Ruy Klein, returns as a visiting professor. Investigating craft, precision, and the evolution of design expertise in the digital age, Klein continues to foreground the persistence of the designer in contemporary culture. She earned her master of architecture degree from Columbia University and also holds a bachelor of science degree in civil engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Recently, Klein has been investigating possible applications of artificial intelligence technologies for architectural design. Klein teaches design studios at SCI-Arc, Pratt Institute, and University of Pennsylvania.

In her practice, Klein works with various artificial intelligence technologies. Her ongoing project is an investigation into crossbred image-objects produced using atypically trained GANs and their capacity for contemporary myth-making in architecture. In the same way that “imaginative vocabulary” and “metaphoric style” were primary, if literary, instruments for the invention of new mythologies for Surrealists, the strange and idiosyncratic qualities of images produced using artificial intelligence are similarly a kind of matter metaphored and made visible by the cyborg imagination. She is interested in a kind of re-enchantment of the architectural body — one that both foments and succumbs to sensual perceptions, and one that discovers new and unexpected relations to the world beyond the realm of the rational.

For more about the Sam Fox School at WashU, visit samfoxschool.wustl.edu.