Mario Gooden

Mario Gooden is a cultural practice architect and director of Mario Gooden Studio: Architecture + Design. His practice engages the cultural landscape and the intersectionality of architecture, race, gender, sexuality, and technology. His work crosses the thresholds between the design of architecture and the built environment, writing, research, and performance.

Gooden’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including the International Exhibition of Architecture Biennale in Venice, Italy; Architekturmuseum der TU Mūnchen; Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam (formerly the Netherlands Architecture Institute); Storefront for Art and Architecture; the National Building Museum in Washington, DC; and the Municipal Arts Society in New York. His work has also been featured in journals and publications including ARTFORUM International, Architect Magazine, Architectural Record, Metropolis, Wallpaper, Architecture & Urbanism (A+U), PIN-UP Magazine, and The New York Times. Gooden’s multi-media installation work entitled The Refusal of Space was featured in the Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art. Mario Gooden Studio is currently designing The Woodson African American Museum of Florida in St. Petersburg, the Jeh Vincent Johnson ALANA Cultural Center at Vassar College and the Churchill House / Rites and Reason Theater at Brown University in Providence Rhode Island.

Gooden is also a Professor of Practice at the Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) of Columbia University where he is the Director of the Master of Architecture program and co- director of the Global Africa Lab (GAL). He is a 2012 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow, a MacDowell Fellow, and a 2019 National Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Architecture recipient. Gooden is the author of Dark Space: Architecture Representation Black Identity (Columbia University Press, 2016) as well as numerous essays and articles on architecture, art, and cultural production including the works of Torkwase Dyson, Jimmy Robert, Sondra Perry, Woody de Othello, Adam Pendleton and Gerard & Kelly. Gooden is a Research Associate at The Visual Identities in Art and Design Research Centre (VIAD) at the University of Johannesburg (South Africa) and a founding board member of the Black Reconstruction Collective (BRC). In 2022 Gooden was elected the 63rd President of the Architectural League of New York.