Michael Young

Jury 2026 /

cooper.edu/architecture/

Michael Young is an Associate Professor at the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union. Appointed Dean in December, he will formally assume the position in April 2026. He also serves as Coordinator of Graduate Studies. He has been a member of the Cooper Union faculty since 2005, teaching across the full undergraduate design sequence as well as in the graduate design studios. Awarded tenure in 2022, he has played a central role in shaping the school’s pedagogical culture, with electives and seminars that consistently reach capacity. In his current leadership role, he is responsible for advancing the strategic vision of the graduate program, with a focus on curriculum development, recruitment, and strengthening professional pathways through internships and career development.

Alongside his academic work, Young is a founding partner of the New York–based architectural practice Young & Ayata. The studio has received wide international recognition, including the Progressive Architecture Award, the Design Vanguard Award, the Young Architects Prize, and the Architecture Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In international competitions, Young & Ayata won first prize for the Bauhaus Museum in Dessau, Germany, and for the New Agricultural Management Institute in Gyeongsangbuk-do, South Korea. Their residential project DL1310 in Mexico City was a nominee for the Mies van der Rohe Crown Hall Americas Prize and received an AIANY Honor Award. The practice’s work has been exhibited at institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Istanbul Modern, the Graham Foundation, SCI-Arc, and Princeton University.

Michael Young is the author of The Estranged Object (Graham Foundation, 2015) and Reality Modelled After Images (Routledge, 2021), and has published numerous essays on architecture and representation. He was the 2019–20 Rome Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Rome. Young holds a Master of Architecture II from Princeton University and a Bachelor of Architecture from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and is a registered architect in the State of New York.