Jaffer Kolb is co-founder and principal of the award-winning studio New Affiliates alongside Ivi Diamantopoulou and on faculty at MIT’s Department of Architecture. His work explores how architecture is shaped by, and shapes, local economies and political systems through its practice and its form. Projects include a collective monument in Lisbon, a store of fabricated artifacts in Detroit, a new space-sharing app, and built projects ranging in scale from ground-up residences to commercial buildings and interventions in public space.
Through New Affiliates, he has worked on commercial, residential, and institutional projects internationally. The practice has been recognized with a Design Excellence Award from New York’s Public Design Commission, a Bessie Award for Outstanding Visual Design, the League Prize for Architects, and the AIA New Practices Award among others. The practice has worked with various branches of the New York City government to identify alternative forms of reuse through public infrastructures.
Their work has been featured in The New York Times, Wired Magazine, Fast Company, Metropolis, Dwell, Die Zeit, and Architect Magazine among many others. In 2018, Jaffer guest edited a special section of the journal Log called “Working Queer”: an exploration of how alternative methodologies to design and research might locate new forms of agency in discipline and practice. Prior to founding New Affiliates, he was the 2015 Muschenheim Fellow at the University of Michigan’s School of Architecture and before that worked as a designer in New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles.
Previously he worked on the 13th Venice Architecture Biennial under David Chipperfield, and before that served as the US Editor of the Architectural Review. He holds a Master of Architecture from Princeton University, a Master of Urban Planning from the London School of Economics, and his Bachelor of Arts in Film Studies from Wesleyan University.
