Maple Street Housing

Justin is a co-founder and Principal at MASS focused on expanding architectural work in the U.S. He leads the Hudson Valley Office in Poughkeepsie, NY and is dedicated to the growth of MASS’s Social Justice and Adaptive Re-use portfolios. He was the Project Architect for the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice and founder of the Fringe Cities Design Lab, which researches vulnerable American cities and follows community-engaged design practices to unlock upstream capital to transform liabilities into assets.

Prior to MASS, Justin has led award winning projects at Gensler in Washington DC, Perez APC in New Orleans, and Toshiko Mori Architect in New York. He has guest lectured in seminars at Harvard Graduate School of Design, MIT School of Architecture and Planning, University of Toronto, and Dartmouth College. He holds a Master in Architecture from Harvard University and a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania.

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.