Doug Garofalo, FAIA, began teaching at the UIC School of Architecture in 1987. Over his twenty-five years at the school, he moved through all faculty ranks, from part-time adjunct to tenured full professor, and served as Interim Director from 2001 to 2003. Representing the highest ideal of the academic practitioner, Garofalo was a tireless mentor and source of inspiration for the students, junior faculty, and architects who worked with him.
After receiving professional degrees from the University of Notre Dame and Yale University, Garofalo formed his practice, Garofalo Architects, in 1988. Garofalo was at the forefront of introducing advanced digital and conceptual models to architectural design and education. In collaboration with small offices in New York and Cincinnati, Garofalo Architects realized the earliest significant digitally informed project in the United States, the Korean Presbyterian Church of New York in Queens (1996–99), which augured not only a new style of contemporary design, but perhaps more radically a new way of practicing architecture.
In 2006, Garofalo was the subject of a one-person exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. His practice was frequently awarded; in 2007, the Hyde Park Art Center received both the Distinguished Building Award from AIA Chicago and the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation Award for Architectural Excellence in Community Design, and in 2008, Garofalo was named a United States Artist Fellow. He often collaborated with other architects and artists, including with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill on the design planning for the 2016 Chicago Olympic bid and as architect of record for UNStudio’s Burnham Pavilion, realized to commemorate Chicago’s bicentennial.
In supporting the work of the school’s faculty over the course of his career, Garofalo made an invaluable contribution in launching architectural careers in Chicago and elsewhere. The Garofalo Fellowship aims to allow an emerging architect to benefit, as he did, from the opportunity to teach and conduct research at the school at an early stage of practice.
Image: Doug Garofalo. Asylum for Subjective Realities, model, 1987