Fall Kill Creek

Chris joined MASS to co-found the Hudson Valley Design Lab in Poughkeepsie NY in 2017. As a committed architecture and urban design educator, he moved to the Hudson Valley to convert his teaching into practice as a revolutionary and immersive model of listening and engagement. The design lab has become a thinktank for pioneering community design practice in American "Fringe Cities.” He sees architecture and design as a daily practice of outreach, showcasing adaptive reuse and new buildings both as coalition building methods to boundary span across multiple interests and regenerate city fabric. In addition to directing design projects, he leads all Poughkeepsie based community outreach work, serves as a design consultant to the Poughkeepsie Planning Board, and volunteers on a number of community and regional coalitions.

Prior to working at MASS Design Group's Hudson Valley Office, Chris has a career in award-winning architectural design practice, spending a decade as an associate partner with Dean/Wolf Architects where he conducted a series of award-winning projects in all stages of design and construction. “Restless Response: Emergency Medical Station 50” at Queens Hospital garnered the American Architecture Prize Gold Medal in Institutional Architecture in 2016, and the station was featured in Architectural Record in March 2017. Additionally, “Ephemeral Edge House,” a rural retreat home south of Albany won a Progressive Architecture Award in 2012 and a New York City AIA Honor Award in 2019.

Chris holds his Master of Architecture degree from Columbia Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) where he received the Lucille Smyser Lowenfish Memorial Prize, and his Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the University of Virginia, where he received the Sean Steele-Nicholson Memorial Award. He teaches studios and seminars regularly at Columbia's Graduate School of Architecture, Preservation and Planning, as well as in the Pratt Institute’s Graduate Architecture and Urban Design programs, and has held lecture positions at institutions worldwide.

Michael Murphy, Int FRIBA, is the Founding Principal and Executive Director of MASS Design Group, an architecture and design collective that leverages buildings, as well as the design and construction process, to become catalysts for economic growth, social change, and justice. Since MASS's beginnings, their portfolio of work has expanded to over a dozen countries and span the areas of healthcare, education, housing, urban development. MASS’s work has been published in over 900 publications and awarded globally. Most recently, MASS has been recognized as the winners of the national Arts and Letters Award for 2017 and the 2017 Cooper Hewitt National Design Award. Michael’s 2016 TED talk has reached over a million views, and was awarded the Al Filipov Medal for Peace and Justice in 2017. MASS's project, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice was named the single greatest work of American architecture in the 21st century. Michael has taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, University of Michigan, and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation. Michael is from Poughkeepsie, NY, and holds a Master of Architecture from Harvard Graduate School of Design and a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Chicago.

"I believe that every project is an opportunity to create a movement. To inspire this momentum, we must be one with the community, and together, go beyond the bare minimum."

Sierra began work with MASS in 2008 focusing on landscape architecture and joined full time in 2009 to finalize design and oversee implementation of the Butaro Hospital, MASS’s first project. Currently Sierra directs the ongoing design and implementation of MASS’s planning and architectural projects and is currently overseeing The Kayanja Center, an academic facility supporting rural health care delivery and research in Uganda, a number of African Conservation Schools in DRC, Tanzania, Zambia, and Rwanda, and the Butaro Hospital Expansion Plan, among others. Those completed include Butaro Hospital, the Umubano Primary School, the Butaro Doctors’ Housing, and the Butaro Ambulatory Cancer Center.

Prior to joining MASS, Sierra worked for four years at James Corner Field Operations, primarily in design and oversight of implementation of Section 1 of the New York City High Line. Sierra has taught graduate level studios at various universities and from 2010-2012, Sierra served as Head of the Architecture Department at the Kigali Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) in Rwanda. At KIST, Sierra was instrumental in shaping the current curriculum. She is invited to speak regularly, including the keynote address at the Healthcare Design Conference, serving as a Sasaki Distinguished Visiting Critic at the Boston Architectural College, and lecturing at the Carter ‘Lectures In African Studies’ series, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, University of Toronto, and the American Institute of Architects, among others. Select features of Sierra’s work with MASS Design Group include A+U Magazine, Lotus, Mark Magazine, and Detail.

Sierra received her Bachelors of Arts in Art and Architectural History from Smith College and her Masters of Landscape Architecture and Masters of Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania.