Anthony Averbeck

Anthony Averbeck is a designer, urbanist, educator, and researcher whose work explores the intersections of housing, infrastructure, society, and the territory. In an era defined by housing precarity, social fragmentation, and environmental urgency, his work investigates how the design of collective housing can reimagine domesticity, civic identity, and urban life.

At Northeastern, his graduate research studio Collective Living and the Architectural Imaginary: Typological Responses to the U.S. Housing Crisis frames housing as a critical arena for the design of the contemporary American city. The studio interrogates the entrenched binary between single-family zoning and speculative multifamily development, advancing collective housing typologies that reimagine how we live together. Framed as a design research lab, the studio’s work contributes to debates around affordability, climate risk, and the erosion of civic life while testing new modes of representation and design advocacy. This agenda also underpins his forthcoming book Collective Living and the Architectural Imaginary (2026), co-authored with Felipe Correa and Devin Dobrowolski.

In addition to graduate teaching, Averbeck coordinates the undergraduate housing studio and teaches courses in urban design, architectural representation, and architectonic systems. He has also developed interdisciplinary pre-college and pre-graduate programs in foundational design thinking. Prior to joining Northeastern, he held teaching appointments at the University of Virginia, Wentworth Institute of Technology, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He has been an invited critic and lecturer at Harvard, Yale, RISD, UVA, Cal Poly, James Madison University, NDSU, UMass Amherst, and Escola da Cidade in São Paulo.

Alongside his academic work, Averbeck has collaborated with internationally recognized design and research practices including Somatic Collaborative, Bjarke Ingels Group, Arctic Design Group, and Leers Weinzapfel Associates. His work has been supported by the Northeastern Design Research Fellowship, the Edelstein Family Foundation, the Stary Family Foundation, the Harvard Dean’s Merit Scholarship Fund, and the Center for Global Inquiry and Innovation. His writing and design research have appeared in Harvard Urban Review, Urban Design in Dialogue, LUNCH Journal, e-flux, and AZURE. He holds degrees from Harvard University, the University of Virginia, and the University of Minnesota.