Randall Kober

Biography

Randall Kober is founding faculty at the McEwen School of Architecture. Appointed as a Master Lecturer in 2013 he has integrated his training as an architect, carpenter, and historian to develop and deliver several classes and programs. Design studios meld conceptual development with tectonics and making. Structures 1: Wood’s explores First Nations, colonial, and contemporary timber building typologies to experience structural theory through hands on making. Building Case Studies places the material history of exemplary buildings within their larger cultural, social, and political contexts. Fabrication 2 makes students’ thought physical in a complimentary course to their thesis work. He has worked with the coop coordinators to develop undergraduate and graduate coop programs. He has accompanied the Laurentian teams to the Bergen International Wood Festival in Norway and lead the spring semester European travel, design build program centered within the medieval heavy timber building fabric of Dinkelsbühl, Germany. 

Kober has lectured nationally and internationally on his academic and professional work. He serves as Architecture Academic Advisor to the Board of the Canadian Wood Council for whom he is providing research for a new national timber architecture text book and organized the International Wood Educators Conference held at MSoA in fall 2019.

Randall holds a Master of Architecture from University of Illinois at Chicago and a Bachelor of Arts, concentrating in history, from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He worked as a carpenter, design builder in the USA and Germany for five years in between undergraduate and graduate studies. After his studies he interned as an architect with Thomas Hammer in Munich, Ken Schroeder and Douglas Garofalo, his graduate school mentor, in Chicago. At Garofalo Architects they created extremely contemporary, internationally published, award winning works. He has taught in Chicago, Rome and Paris for UIC, IIT, and Archeworks. Kober’s professional design build practice is anarchitectures in Dinkelsbühl, where a project was recognized with a Middle Franconia Historic Preservation Award.