Ignacio San Martín
Professor of Architecture, Dayton Hudson Chair of Urban Design and Director of the Metropolitan Center
Ignacio San Martín joined the University of Minnesota in 2009 as Professor of Architecture, Dayton Hudson Chair of Urban Design and Director of the Metropolitan Center. Prior to his arrival to the University of Minnesota he was Professor of Architecture and Director of the Urban Design Laboratory at the University of Arizona School of Architecture. His research work on the Phoenix and Tucson metropolitan regions has been the subject of widespread seminars, public lectures and publications including Questioning the American Dream: The Phoenix Metropolitan Area vr. Growth Management Strategies; Garden Cities in the Sonoran Desert; On the Possibility of an Urban Design Applicable to the Sonoran Desert; The Difficult Path of Sustainability: Conflicting Ideologies on the Production of Space; and Re-thinking Urban Futures: Toward a Livability Agenda? His research and urban design work for the Tucson metropolitan region was recognized in 2004 with the distinguished Richard A. Harvill Award for the Advancement of Higher Education by the University of Arizona.
Prior to his academic career, Professor San Martin was in professional practice first, as a senior urban designer for Bechtel Corporation, international projects office and later as acting director of the urban planning studio at EDAW, Inc. in San Francisco. He holds Master degrees in Landscape Architecture, City and Regional Planning, and Urban Design from the University of California at Berkeley. He is the author of Luis Barragán: The Phoenix Papers Arizona State University Press (1996); co-author of the Spanish translation of Ian McHarg Design with Nature, Gustavo Gili (2002) and Thinking the Present: Urban Design in Arid Regions, Ardvak Global Publishing (2008).
Professor San Martín has lectured at Columbia University, the University of Valladolid, Spain; The Universidad Autónoma de Mexico (UNAM); Charles University Faculty of Sciences in Prague; the Center for Environmental Studies in Budapest, the University of Arturo Pratt and the Pontificia Universidad Católica in Santiago, Chile. He is an Affiliate Professor in the Doctoral Program in Urban Design at the School of Architecture of Valladolid, Spain and the University Iberoamericana of Puebla, Mexico. He serves as a resource member of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the Mayor's Institute on City Design and is past-president of the Arizona Chapter of Landscape Architects. In 2006 he was elected as Scientific Adviser of the Journal CIUDADES and as a member and Technical Adviser to the Research Grants Council in Urbanism and Landscape Architecture at the University of Hong Kong, China.