Roger Trancik

Professor Roger T. Trancik, FASLA, is an internationally renowned educator and practitioner of urban design. He has written three national award-winning books and has authored 45 professional urban design and planning studies, journal articles, and scholarly papers. He has also lectured extensively at universities and international conferences and shown his work in gallery exhibitions. His areas of specialization are urban spatial design production, theory, aesthetics, and international practice in the U.S., Scandinavia, Italy, Panama, and China. His work advances a creative vision of a future city that is designed for environmental resiliency and emerges from historic urban form precedents. Trancik is the founding principal of the award-winning firm Urban Design Consultants Inc., Cambridge, MA, and Ithaca, NY, active since 1971.

Professor Trancik taught at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design from 1970–1981, where he held professorships in urban design and landscape architecture, and at Cornell University since 1982, where he is currently professor emeritus. He was honored with the President’s Merrill Scholars Distinguished Teaching Award from Cornell in 1988. He has served in several administrative capacities — as Deputy Director of the Urban Design Program at Harvard Graduate School of Design, 1974–1978 — and Director of Graduate Studies in Landscape Architecture at Cornell, 1994–1999. He has been a visiting professor and professor in residence at Chalmers University of Technology’s Department of Architecture in Göteborg, Sweden; the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture in Copenhagen, Denmark; Wuhan University School of Urban Design in China, and the University of Colorado in Rome. He has also taught several semesters in Cornell’s Rome Program in Architecture, Art, and Planning and directed the international urban design studies program for Cornell at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark from 1983–2000.

Over his extensive career, Professor Trancik was awarded numerous research and publishing grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the Cornell Institute for European Studies, and the Clarence S. Stein Institute for Urban and Landscape Studies. He served on design arts selection panels for the NEA and the New York State Council on the Arts, the American Society of Landscape Architects National Awards Committees, and the National Fulbright Screening Committees. Trancik received the Fulbright U.S. Scholar Award to Panama in 2003–2005. He was also an urban designer in the offices of Ralph Erskine Architects in Stockholm, Sweden, CBT Architects of Boston, and the Boston–based global firm Sasaki Associates. He earned a B.S. magna cum laude with high honors in landscape architecture and urban planning from Michigan State University and holds the Master of Landscape Architecture in Urban Design degree with distinction from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where he was awarded Harvard GSD’s Jacob Weidenmann Prize for the most distinguished design achievement.