BIOGRAPHY

Robert Somol is a design critic and theorist. He was director of the University of Illinois Chicago School of Architecture from 2007 to 2022. He is the editor of Autonomy and Ideology (Monacelli Press, 1997) and has served on the editorial boards of Any and Log. His writings have appeared in publications ranging from Assemblage to Wired and will appear in a forthcoming collection of essays, Nothing to Declare. Somol is the co-designer of off-use, an award-winning studio and residence in Los Angeles that extends his interest in combining the speculative discipline of modernism with the material excesses of mass culture.