Mario Gooden

Mario Gooden ‘90 MArch is Professor of Professional Practice, Director of the MArch Program, Sequence Director for Advanced Architecture Studios, and Co-Director of the Global Africa Lab at Columbia GSAPP, an innovative research initiative that explores the spatial topologies of the African continent and its diaspora. Gooden is also the Director of Mario Gooden Studio: Architecture + Design, a transdisciplinary practice dedicated to the design and exploration of architecture and its relationships to culture and knowledge. His practice merges architectural design with landscape, urbanism, history, cultural production and performance. Gooden graduated magna cum laude from Clemson University in 1987 with a B.S. in Design and received a Masters of Architecture degree from Columbia University in 1990 and is a recipient of the McKim Prize.

Gooden is the recipient numerous design awards, citations, and recognitions and his work has been exhibited nationally and internationally including the International Exhibition of Architecture Biennale in Venice, Italy; Architekturmuseum der TU Mūnchen; the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAi); 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 Magazine, Architect Magazine, Architectural Record, Metropolis, Wallpaper, Architecture & Urbanism (A+U), and The New York Times. Gooden’s installation work entitled The Refusal of Space was featured in the Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. The Refusal of Space is an interdisciplinary multi-media protest machine incorporating sound, video, and projected photography that explores the spatial choreographies of liberation from the post-Reconstruction era to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and the Black Lives Matters Movement of today through enacting the spatial action of protests, marches, and sit-ins in downtown Nashville, Tennessee.