Viola Ago

Viola Ago is an architectural designer, educator, and practitioner. She directs Miracles Architecture and is the current Wortham Fellow at the Rice University School of Architecture. More recently, Viola held the Yessios Visiting Professorship at the Knowlton School of Architecture at OSU and the William Muschenheim Design Fellowship position at the Taubman College of Architecture, University of Michigan. Viola has previously taught at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Rhode...See more

Viola Ago is an architectural designer, educator, and practitioner. She directs Miracles Architecture and is the current Wortham Fellow at the Rice University School of Architecture. More recently, Viola held the Yessios Visiting Professorship at the Knowlton School of Architecture at OSU and the William Muschenheim Design Fellowship position at the Taubman College of Architecture, University of Michigan. Viola has previously taught at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Rhode Island School of Design Architecture, and the Southern California Institute of Architecture. She earned her Master of Architecture degree from the Southern California Institute of Architecture in Los Angeles, and a Bachelor of Architectural Science from Ryerson University in Toronto. Prior to teaching, Viola was a lead designer in the Advanced Technology Team at Morphosis Architects in Los Angeles working on international built and competition projects. Viola's work has been exhibited in Los Angeles, Boston, Houston, Ghent NY, San Francisco, Miami, Columbus, Ann Arbor, and Cincinnati. Her written work has been published in Log, Wiley's AD Architectural Design Magazine, Routledge's Instabilities and Potentialities Book, Sci-Arc's Offramp, Acadia Conference Proceedings, TxA Emerging Design and Technology Journal, JAE Journal, Architect's Newspaper, Archinect, among others. Viola held a digital fabrication residency at the Autodesk Build Space in Boston, a University Design and Research Fellowship with Exhibit Columbus, and an artist residency at the MacDowell Colony. More recently, Viola's work has focused on architecture's role in a world populated with forms of duress. Her personal experiences with the affective conditions of remnants of war has fueled her ambitions towards a design research project that looks at the aesthetic and formal agency of destruction through methods of perceptual mechanisms outlined by political theory and the phenomenology of empathy; and digital technological advancements such as real-time physics engines and production methodologies. See less