Pari Riahi

As associate dean of academic operations and infrastructure, Pari Riahi works with the dean on management of the College through oversight of operations, implementing innovative workflows and programs, and building relationships with staff and faculty members within the HFA community. Riahi evaluates the effectiveness of existing programs; develop and manage new ways to support faculty research; and bolster diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. 

Riahi works across different media and formats in architecture to research and practice, both individually and in collaboration with others. She is Associate Professor in Architecture (tenured in 2022) at University of Massachusetts Amherst. Before joining UMass in 2016, she taught at Rhode Island School of Design, in different capacities in the Architecture and the Interior Architecture and Adaptive Reuse Departments for 8 years. Riahi completed her PhD dissertation in the History and Theory of Architecture at McGill University in 2010. Her dissertation focused on understanding the development of architectural drawing as the main medium of expression during the Renaissance and became the basis for a book published by Routledge in their Academic Monograph Series, titled: Ars et Ingenium: Embodied Imagination in Francesco di Giorgio’s Drawings (Routledge, 2015).

She is presently working on two book projects. One, titled: Architectural Drawing in the Post digital Era: Disjointed Continuity (in contract with Routledge) which is a continuation of her dissertation questions and observations and considers the digital turn in drawing and representation in architecture. Two, provisionally titled: Architectures of Collectivity: a study of urban form and public Grounds in Affordable Housing, is a comparative analysis of affordable housing projects in the suburbs of Paris, in which she fuses historical research with visual analytical modes through photographs, drawings and collages, bringing together her interests in the themes of the contemporary city, affordable housing  and architectural representation in theoretical and creative ways. Riahi’s work has been published in the Journal of Architecture and Journal of Architectural Education among others. She has held solo and group exhibitions of her creative work and interdisciplinary collaborative research.

Preoccupied with contemporary architecture’s reckoning with its modes of thinking and operation, Riahi initiated and co-convened a trio of symposia, titled Exactitude (2020), Multiplicity (2022) and Quickness (projected for 2024). She is co-editor with Laure Katsaros and Michael T. Davis,  a series based on these symposia. First came Exactitude: of Precision and Play in Contemporary Architecture (UMass Press, 2022), which will be followed by Multiplicity: On Agency and Constraint in Contemporary Architecture (UMass Press, projected to publish in 2024) and ultimately Quickness will be the last in the series (projected to publish in 2026). Riahi teaches both theory classes and design studios. She was a Lily fellow in 2020-2021 and has received the College Outstanding Teaching Award in 2021.  She serves on the advisory committee to the Journal of Society of Architectural Historians and is an international editor of the Journal of Architecture.