Peter MacKeith has been appointed associate director of the Sam Fox Arts Center.
MacKeith, who also serves as associate dean in the School of Architecture, will be responsible for three areas of the center’s operations: public programming; organization of collaborative teaching and research; and organization of the Whitaker Foundation Learning Center, a new media lab to be located in one of two planned buildings by Pritzker Prize-winning Japanese architect Fumihiko Maki.
In addition, MacKeith will serve as academic liaison to the School of Art.
“Peter’s appointment to this new position is a result of his demonstrated talent for working with his colleagues to produce stimulating, collaborative activities,” said Mark S. Weil, Ph.D., the E. Desmond Lee Professor for Collaboration in the Arts and director of both the Sam Fox Arts Center and the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum. “I am confident he will provide effective leadership in the key area of academic program development.”
An award-winning author and designer, MacKeith came to the School of Architecture in 1999 as assistant dean. In addition to directing graduate admissions and teaching at both undergraduate and graduate levels, MacKeith oversees both the international Monday Night Lecture Series and school publications, including Approach and Architecture News.
He has initiated two ongoing semester-abroad programs — in Copenhagen, Denmark, and Helsinki, Finland — and last spring organized The Sustainable University: The Chancellor’s Sesquicentennial Colloquium, which examined environmental campus design initiatives across the nation.
MacKeith holds bachelor’s degrees in literature and international relations from the University of Virginia and a master of architecture degree from Yale University, where he edited the architectural review Perspecta.
Before joining Washington University, MacKeith directed the International Masters Program in architecture at the Helsinki Institute of Technology and taught at Yale, Virginia and the University of Llubljana, Slovenia.
An authority on contemporary Finnish architecture, MacKeith is author of The Finland Pavilions: Finland at the Universal Expositions 1900-1992 (1993) as well as numerous articles for Architecture, Architectural Record, The Architectural Review, Arkkitehti-Lehti (The Finnish Architect’s Review), World Architecture and other major periodicals.
In 1990, under a Fulbright research grant, he began examining the work of 20th-century Finnish master Alvar Aalto. MacKeith’s analytical drawings of Aalto’s buildings were included in the renowned architect’s 1998 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
MacKeith has worked as a designer in both Finland and the United States. Major projects include the House Siltavuori, the Finnish Exhibition at the 1991 Venice Biennale (with Juhani Pallasmaa Architects, Helsinki); and the Klockner Soccer Stadium, University of Virginia, Charlottesville (with VDMO Architects, Charlottesville), which won a Virginia American Institute of Architects Merit Award in 1993.
In 2003-04, MacKeith was a research fellow for the Finnish Center for Business and Policy Studies (known by its Finnish acronym, EVA), preparing both a lecture for EVA’s June 2004 conference on “Culture and Business” and a forthcoming book, The Dissolving Corporation: Contemporary Architecture and Corporate Identity.
MacKeith also recently edited Encounters, a forthcoming collection of essays by Pallasmaa, for Rakennustieto publishers in Helsinki.
MacKeith serves on the competition jury for the European Association of Architecture Education’s architectural essay awards program.