Martin Gold

Martin E. Gold is Adjunct Professor of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. He has been teaching courses at GSAPP on real estate development law and commercial leasing since 1989. Mr. Gold is also an Adjunct Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, teaching a full course in the fall on real estate development law. He was an associate at the law firm of Debevoise & Plimpton. He subsequently became the founder and the head of the Economic Development Division of the NYC Law Department and also served as Director of Corporate Law for New York City (1978 to 1985). As the City’s chief corporate and real estate attorney, he supervised City lawyers in agreements development projects running from South Street Seaport to the 42nd Street-Times Square Project. While in government, Mr. Gold was the recipient of grant awards from the Rockefeller Bros. Foundation and The Fund for the City of New York.

In 1985, he joined Sidley Austin LLP, one of the largest and most respected law firms in the world. He has served as a partner and as senior counsel. His practice has focused on real estate (with emphasis on development), infrastructure, and environmental and energy facilities, and his clients have included governments, developers, large corporations, not-for- profits, financial institutions and colleges, including Columbia University.

Mr. Gold is the author of approximately twenty articles, most of them in law or economic journals (including law reviews at Columbia, Harvard, Fordham, Virginia, and Stanford), and the book Law and Social Change: A Study of Land Reform in Sri Lanka (foreword by Gunnar Myrdal), which was written with Ford Foundation sponsorship. He is the recipient of five pens used by New York State governors in signing laws that he drafted, and he has lectured at numerous universities and in front of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, the National Conference of State Legislatures, and at programs of the U.S. Justice Department. He has been listed in The Legal 500, and for continuous consecutive years in Super Lawyers, Best Lawyers in America, Who’s Who in America and Who’s Who in the World. He is an elected Fellow of the American College of Real Estate Lawyers (ACREL) which is the sole national academy in this field, and in 2017, he was included in the first group ever honored by the Marquis Who’s Who Board for his “Lifetime Achievement”.

He has travelled to all 50 states, and in 2018, Ethiopia became the 108th country to which he has travelled. His undergraduate degree is from Cornell University (he was graduating class president and class marshal). He received his law degree from Harvard Law School and a master’s degree from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.