Charles Garcia

Charles Garcia is Adjunct Faculty in the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture.

Charles’ design perspective draws from a wide range of both industry experience—media and product design up to urban masterplans—and personal interests—travel, photography, endurance races, puzzles, language—to employ architectural design and discourse as a system for revealing novel intersections. Wielding research methodology as an academic framework, he seeks to inspire collective knowledge-building in his students, resulting in a clarity of intent and critique.

An Architect with over 15 years of professional practice, Charles currently leads design and project delivery teams for the Scaife Hall Addition for the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Medicine (85k GSF) and the New Science Building for Wesleyan University (190k GSF), with Payette in Boston MA.

Key previous built work includes the Virchow 16 research building on the Novartis Campus in Basel, Switzerland (with Rahul Mehrotra), the residential mixed-use Girard at 600 Harrison Avenue in Boston’s South End (with Utile), Golkin Hall at the University of Pennsylvania, and Tozzer Library at Harvard University (both with Kennedy & Violich). Charles has also led research endeavors, including exhibits and publications, that explore aspects of practice in dense urban environments such as Mumbai, as well as topics concerning the interface of global forces against local craft and traditions. Work with KVA and the Portable Light Project has been featured at MoMA and the Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum.

From 2014–2018, he taught Architecture, Urbanism, and the City at Northeastern, a 4th-year design studio. Previously, he was a thesis adviser for Master’s students at the Boston Architectural College, where he also co-directed the Urban Design-Build studios 2008–2010.