Michael Bell

Bell’s architectural design has been commissioned and exhibited by The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Venice Biennale; the Architectural League of New York; and the University Art Museum, Berkeley, and has been shown in museums and galleries in Europe, Mexico, and China. He was commissioned by MoMA for Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream (2012), leading a team of engineers, real-estate economists, and housing authorities in a proposal for the American suburb after the foreclosure crisis. His work is held in the permanent collection of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Gefter-Press / Binocular House is included in Kenneth Frampton’s American Masterworks: Houses of the Twentieth & Twenty-first Centuries. Bell has received four Progressive Architecture Awards and the Architectural League’s Emerging Voices Award.

Bell taught at the University of California, Berkeley (1987–93) and Rice University (1993–99), and has held visiting professorships at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design; Cornell University, School of Architecture; the University of Michigan, as Eliel Saarinen Visiting Professor; and Berkeley, as the Howard A. Friedman Professor of Practice. During 2016 he was Visiting Professor at the Stanford University School of Engineering, where he collaborated with the Center for Design Research in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. In 2026 he was in residence at Stanford’s NG Humanities House, working with Michael Shanks on 8 Minutes, 20 Seconds and on the framing of Everything Must Scale. Bell is a former Fellow of the Joint Center for Housing Studies, Harvard University (2011–13), and has served on external academic review committees for the University of Hong Kong, Bilkent University, and Hong Kong’s University Grants Committee Research Assessment Exercise.

At the university level he has served three terms as a Senator in the Columbia University Senate and sat on its Housing Policy Committee, as well as on Provost’s committees for university housing, faculty retirement, and faculty quality of life.

Michael Bell received a Master of Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley and a Bachelor of Science from the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. He established his practice in Berkeley in 1989 and led it in Houston and New York City before Eunjeong Seong joined him to re-launch and expand it as Bell-Seong Architecture, founded in New York in 2010. With Seong he founded Visible Weather in 2011, a research and design firm focused on energy, engineering, materials science, advanced manufacturing, and urban economics. Partners have included Transsolar, Arup, Buro Happold, Lafarge, and Oldcastle Glass, alongside advanced manufacturing companies in the Bay Area and Los Angeles and collaborations with Keenan Climate and Community Solutions.