Roger Trancik

Roger T. Trancik is an internationally recognized educator and practitioner of urban design who has devoted his career to improving the quality of public space through design. His vision promotes community involvement, advances environmental resilience and is founded on historical precedents. Work over the years, figure/ground diagrams, spatial typology models and axonometric drawing techniques, developed in his urban design studios at Harvard and Cornell were an integral part of implementing this vision.

Trancik taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design from 1970–1981, where he was professor of urban design and landscape architecture, and at Cornell since 1982, where he is currently professor emeritus. He also held several visiting professorships at Chalmers University School of Architecture in Göteborg, Sweden (appointed Jubileum Professor), the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, and Wuhan University School of Urban Design in China. He has taught numerous semesters in Cornell’s Rome Program in Architecture, Art, and Planning (see Layers of Rome app) and directed the international urban design studies program for Cornell at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark from 1983 to 2000. He was honored with the Merrill Presidential Scholars Distinguished Teaching Award and has lectured widely at universities and conferences in the U.S. and abroad. He has also shown his work in gallery exhibitions, most notably his sketchbook drawings of Rome.

Trancik received research and publishing grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Cornell Institute for European Studies, the NYS Smart Growth Fund and the Clarence S. Stein Institute. He has published several books and CDs including: Finding Lost Space, Layers of Rome, Hamlets of the Adirondacks, Garden Cities of the Panama Canal and Restructuring Anti-Space. He served on committees and selection panels for the NEA and the New York State Council on the Arts, and U.S. Fulbright Screening Committees. In 1990, he was elected Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects and in 2004 the recipient of the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award to Panama.

As an urban designer, Trancik practiced in the offices of Ralph Erskine Architects in Stockholm Sweden, CBT Architects and Sasaki Associates of Boston and is the founding principal of his firm Urban Design Consultants. Trancik holds a B.S. with high honors in Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning from Michigan State University (1966) and the Master of Landscape Architecture in Urban Design from the Harvard Graduate School of Design (1968) where he was awarded Harvard GSD’s Jacob Weidenmann Prize for most distinguished design achievement.