Phillip’s teaching and research focus centers on the overlapping domains of design methodologies, technological change, and the politics of urbanization. He completed his PhD in architectural history at Harvard University in May 2025. His dissertation, “Constructing Reason: Design & Disenchantment in Weimar Germany,” historicizes the scientific turn in German modern architecture during the interwar period of the 1920s. The project examines how industrial rationalization paradigms transformed the role of the architect from artist to organizer and provides a critical framework for understanding how architecture necessarily evolves in response to “polycrisis”—intersecting socio-economic processes, political developments, and technological paradigm shifts. He has taught courses on topics including adaptive reuse, social housing, adaptability, representation, construction, public space, and urbanism—working with students to tackle complex design challenges, from the coexistence of diverse worldviews in Tirana, Albania, to the adaptive reuse of obsolete office stock for new social housing in Paris.
He holds a Master’s degree in architectural history from Harvard, as well as a Master’s in Architecture from Princeton University, where he received the School of Architecture History and Theory Prize as well as the Certificate in Media + Modernity. He also holds a Bachelor’s degree in architecture from Carnegie Mellon University, where he received the Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation Prize, the Louis F Valentour Fellowship, and the Henry Adams AIA Medal. In 2019, he was awarded a Graham Foundation grant to support his work on Nicolas Schöffer’s urban manifesto, La ville cybernétique. Phillip regularly collaborates with architects to develop publications, exhibitions, and archives.
Phillip has taught courses in architectural design, history, and publishing at Pratt Institute, the Cooper Union, Harvard University, Princeton University, and Syracuse University in NYC. He has given lectures and hosted workshops at ETH Zürich, Catholic University of America, Virginia Tech, Dessau Bauhaus Foundation, Harvard University, Princeton University, and Columbia University, GSAPP. In 2020, Phillip co-founded a83 architecture gallery in Manhattan; and was an editor of New York Review of Architecture from 2019–23. Phillip joined the board of the Architecture Exchange in 2022.
