Alexandros Washburn is an urban designer whose mission is to protect cities from climate change. He teaches at the Stevens Institute of Technology, as Industry Professor of Design and Director of the CRUXlab for Coastal Resilience and Urban eXcellence, a research and education program at Stevens dedicated to the proposition that coastal cities can increase their resilience to climate change while simultaneously improving their quality of life. He practices as Urban Strategies Director with NBBJ Architects.

Washburn rose to prominence as Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Chief Urban Designer at the New York City Department of City Planning, at the forefront of Bloomberg’s epic remaking of New York City and at the center of the city’s response to Hurricane Sandy. His book was a New York Times Book Review Short List book, and he is the winner of the 2013 New York Public Architect Award.

Washburn sees urban resilience as an imperative: professionally, publicly, and personally. His own house was flooded during Hurricane Sandy, and his center at Stevens combines the three disciplines necessary to protect coastal cities from climate change: hydrodynamics to understand the force of the water, urban design to understand the force of the city, and complex systems engineering to computationally model cities and measure results.

He is unique among architects to have worked at every level of government from city to federal. In his career he has been Chief Urban Designer for New York City, President of the Pennsylvania Station Redevelopment Corporation for New York State, and Environment and Public Works Advisor to United States Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. In private design practice, he has won top national awards in architecture, landscape architecture and urban design and currently practices with NBBJ, a global full service design firm whose clients include Google, Amazon, Boeing and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Washburn believes that every citizen has a responsibility to leave their city better than they found it. As one of the world’s best known urban designers he seeks to widen the circle of those who can change cities for the better, showing people through his writing, teaching and practice how to simultaneously meet the technical challenges facing their communities while improving their quality of civic life.