Bio
Palmyra Geraki is an interdisciplinary architect, educator, writer, and editor. She is the founding principal of PALMYRA, a design practice working across disciplines, scales, and typologies.
Palmyra is a licensed architect in the US and her native Greece. Before founding her own practice, she worked at Leddy Maytum Stacy Architects in San Francisco, Pei Cobb Freed & Partners Architects in New York City, and Interform in Thessaloniki.
Before joining the faculty at UWM, Palmyra taught at the University of Illinois Chicago and at California College of the Arts in San Francisco, and was a member of the organizing committee of the 2021 and 2022 Architecture Beyond Capitalism (A-B-C) Summer School. She has been an invited juror at universities across North America.
Palmyra has been a Skyline Editor for the New York Review of Architecture, and her writing has appeared in Log, Journal of Architectural Education, and New York Review of Architecture. With six of her A-B-C colleagues, she is cowriting a book titled The Organizer’s Guide to Architectural Education (forthcoming from Routledge).
She currently serves on the Board of Trustees of the AIA Chicago Foundation and was previously on the AIA Chicago Young Architect Forum (YAF) Advisory Committee. She has been an active member of The Architecture Lobby (T-A-L), an international labor advocacy organization for the AEC industry, since 2017, having served as the organization’s financial comptroller as well as a member and leader of the Academia Working Group and the Cooperative Network Group.
Palmyra received her B.A. in 'Architecture' and 'Ethics, Politics & Economics' from Yale University and her M.Arch. from the Yale School of Architecture. At Yale, she was the recipient of the George Nelson Traveling Fellowship, the President's Public Service Fellowship, and the Curtis Prize. She grew up in Thessaloniki, Greece, and has lived in New Haven, New York, the Bay Area, and Chicago.
Palmyra’s Greek upbringing made her aware of the complex and layered histories of place. She is interested in the tensions and opportunities present in the relationship between the individual and the collective as well as in transcalar and inter-, trans-, and multidisciplinary approaches to knowledge and pedagogy. Her recent scholarly and creative research focuses on collectivity and cooperativism, the role of analysis in architecture education and practice, the intersection of living and working, the design and politics of public spaces and public housing, and the use of color.
Education
YALE UNIVERSITY / School of Architecture
Master of Architecture I Degree
YALE UNIVERSITY / Yale College
Bachelor of Arts Degree in ‘Ethics, Politics & Economics’ and ‘Architecture’ (double major)
Research Focus
Architectural Design
Architectural Pedagogy
Analysis
Collectivity
Cooperativism
Housing
Public Space
Landscape Urbanism
Representation
Courses
ARCH 320: Architectural Design II (U)
ARCH 650/850: ‘Living & Working’ Elective Design Studio (U/G)