Stephen Mueller

Stephen Mueller is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia GSAPP and a registered architect and a founding partner of AGENCY, a design and research practice which leverages spatial design and spatial information to counteract nascent forms of global and urban inequality.

Mueller is the founding Director of Research at POST (Project for Operative Spatial Technologies), a territorial think-tank situated on the US-Mexico border. POST engages transformations in the borderland through projects intersecting urban geography, border studies, and digital humanities.

Mueller is a co-organizer of the Border Consortium for Actionable Spatial Research and Practice, a platform for shared, comparative, and impactful cross-border research, with participants from leading practices and universities in the US and Mexico.

Mueller is co-author of FRONTS: Security and the Developing World (AR+D, 2020), which uncovers a growing geography of codependence between the global security complex and the urban morphologies of the developing world which it increasingly incriminates.

Mueller is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2021 Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the 2018 Emerging Voices award from The Architectural League of New York, and the 2010-2011 Rome Prize in Architecture from the American Academy in Rome. Mueller was awarded a University Design Research Fellowship at Exhibit Columbus in 2020-21, Cameron Visiting Architect fellowship at Middlebury University in 2016, was named a DISCREET Fellow in Residence at the Berlin Biennale in 2016, awarded residency fellowships at The MacDowell Colony in 2009 and 2013, and was named a Fellow of the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2010. Mueller was recognized as one of Architect Magazine’s Emerging Talents in 2011 and received the Architect Magazine R+D Award in 2008.

Mueller’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Hong Kong/Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale, the Berlin Biennale, the Venice Biennale, and the Storefront for Art and Architecture.

Mueller has published extensively, including in Manifest, Bracket, e-flux, MONU, Scapegoat, Volume, and the Architect’s Newspaper.

Mueller received the Columbia University GSAPP Incubator Prize in 2019, for ongoing research to uncover, represent, and design for the unseen dangers of irradiated shade in the borderland.

Mueller holds a Bachelor of Architecture with Distinction from the University of Kansas, and a Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia GSAPP.