John May is founding partner, with Zeina Koreitem, of MILLIØNS, a Los Angeles-based design practice. He an Assistant Professor of Architecture and Director of the Master in Design Studies Program at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and founding co-director (with Zeynep Çelik Alexander) of The Instruments Project—an ongoing exploration of the philosophical and historical dimensions of contemporary design technologies.
Situated at the intersection of philosophy, technology, and the politics of environmentalism, May’s writings aim at a continual articulation of the conditions surrounding the contemporary design fields. His most recent book, Signal. Image. Architecture (Columbia, 2019) contemplates the psychosocial effects of transmissible electronic images, and their consequences for architecture and urbanism. Design Technics: Archaeologies of Architectural Practice (Minnesota, 2019; co-edited with Zeynep Çelik Alexander) explores the philosophical, historical, and political dimensions of contemporary design technologies. May’s essays and interviews have appeared in Log, Perspecta, Praxis, MIT Thresholds, Project, Quaderns, New Geographies, and Actar’s Verb: Crisis, among many others.
May previously taught at MIT, UCLA, SCI-Arc, and the University of Toronto. In 2012, he was named National Endowment for the Humanities Visiting Professor in Architecture at Rice University. May holds a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy and Visual Art from the College of William and Mary, a Master of Architecture (AP) with Distinction from Harvard GSD, and a doctorate in Geography and Environmental Studies from UCLA.
MILLIØNS’ recent work includes completed and ongoing projects in California, New York, Boston, Germany and Beirut. Recently selected as the winner of an international competition to reimagine the west wing of I.M. Pei’s Everson Museum, in Syracuse, NY. MILLIØNS’ experimental work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at Friedman Benda Gallery, the Storefront for Art and Architecture, The Architecture + Design Museum of Los Angeles, and Jai & Jai Los Angeles, among others. Their essays have appeared in Harvard Design Magazine, e-flux, Flaunt magazine, I.D., a+t, and in a catalog of their work on experimental collective living, New Massings for New Masses: Collectivity After Orthography (MIT, 2015).
