Harriet Harriss
About
Dr. Harriet Harriss (RIBA, PFHEA, Ph.D., (Assoc.)AIA, MA(RCA), FRSA) is an award-winning educator, qualified architect, and the former Dean of the Pratt School of Architecture in Brooklyn, New York.
Her teaching, research, and writing focus upon pioneering pedagogic models for design education and exploring the intersectional edge of social justice and climate crisis theories and practices – themes that emerged from two of her highly-regarded texts, Radical Pedagogies: Architectural Education & the British Tradition (2015) and A Gendered Profession (2016).
After graduating from the Royal College of Art in 2003, Dr. Harriss established Design Heroine Architects – a participatory design practice that won start-up funding for its social innovation objectives from NESTA in 2004.
Throughout her academic career, Dr. Harriss has won various awards for teaching and research, including, a Daiwa Foundation Fellowship, two Santander Awards, a Brookes Teaching Fellowship, a Winston Churchill Fellowship, and a HEA Internationalisation Fellowship. Dr. Harriss was awarded a Clore Fellowship for cultural leadership in 2016, elected to the European Association of Architectural Education Council (EAAE) in summer 2017, and in 2018, awarded a Principal Fellowship of the UK's Higher Education Academy.
Her consultancy roles include the UK Department for Education construction industry T-Level panel, international program validations, external examining, and pedagogy design and development.
From 2018-2020, Dr. Harriet Harriss chaired the RIBA's prestigious Dissertation Medal judging panel and in 2016, secured a €500k Erasmus research grant to lead an international consortium investigating the trans-sector applications of an architecture degree.
Dr. Harriss has spoken across a wide range of media channels (from the BBC, Fox News, and Monocle Radio to TEDx) on the wider issues facing the built environment.
In 2019, Dr. Harriss’ advocacy for diversity equity and inclusion positioned her as one of the Top Ten Champions for Women in Architecture and Design.
Dr. Harriss’ more recent publication, Architects After Architecture won the Annual Bates Prize for Architectural Media and her thesis on the role that a (re)design of the interior could play in thwarting domestic violence – a topic she explores within her 2019 book, Interior Futures – is billed to feature in an exhibition on Housing being launched by a major gallery in 2023.
Historiographically, Dr. Harriss’ contentions with the exclusionary attributes of architecture’s canon are elucidated within Greta Magnusson Grossman – Modern Design from Sweden to California (Lund Humphries 2020), Working at the Intersection: The Architecture of the Post-Anthropocene (RIBA Publishing 2022), and Architectural Pedagogies of the Global South (Routledge Companion Series 2022).
Her forthcoming books include 100 Women Architects (RIBA Publishing, 2023), and Architecture’s Afterlife (Routledge, 2023).
In her own words, Dr. Harriss argues that there can be ‘no climate justice without social justice,’ and that, ‘the co-creation of a climate crisis curriculum is the most pressing imperative facing architectural education and practice.’