Winka Dubbeldam

Winka Dubbeldam is a Dutch-American architect and academic. After her education in architectural design at Columbia University, she established her own firm, Archi-Tectonics (with 15 employees), in 1994 in New York City. Her use of a combination of sustainable materials, innovative and inventive building methods with adoption of digital techniques has rewarded her with many accolades for her architectural projects. She has earned a reputation as a leading figure in modern architectural designs which has also made her "a real estate newsmaker". She is a Professor and Chair of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. She is also the RIBA External Examiner for the Bartlett UCL London [2018-2022], the Creative Director for the Venice Biennale Virtual Italian Pavillion [2021]. Her Ted talk "Crowdfunding Urban Planning" was in TED Global in Edinburgh Scotland 2013.

Her debut venture in building design was a residential house whose exhibits were displayed at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and Esquire magazine named her "Best and Brightest" in 2004. Her designs have also been exhibited in the Venice Biennale, MoMa, Storefront, and Aedes Berlin in 2019, among others

Dubbeldam was born in 1966 in the Netherlands. Her father headed a Dutch organization connected with police and fire services. After her initial schooling in the Netherlands, she studied architecture at the Institute of Higher Professional Architectural Education, Rotterdam, in 1990 and obtained a Master of Architecture degree. She then moved to New York in 1990 to study architecture at the Columbia University where the digital revolution in architecture was in a nascent state of evolution. She obtained her Master of Architecture in advanced architectural design from this university in 1992. From 1992 to 1994 she worked with Peter Eisenman on projects which she termed as "investigations". She then established her own firm in New York, Archi-Tectonics, in 1994 and since then has been engaged in designing commercial and residential projects.

Dubbeldam, 6 feet (1.8 m) tall, generally attired in black, resides in her house which has black walls (which she says is "a little experiment"), with interior furnishings in black and white with tinge of purple shade.

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2023