Joshua Ramus

Joshua Ramus is the founding principal of REX, an internationally acclaimed architecture and design firm based in New York City. Believing architecture should actively empower its users and communities—not simply be a representational art—Joshua’s work advances building paradigms and promotes the agency of architecture. Over his 30-year career, he has led the design of projects celebrated worldwide, such as the Perelman Performing Arts Center at the World Trade Center in New York (“Lower Manhattan could have hardly asked for a more spectacular work of public architecture,” The New York Times), The Lindemann Performing Arts Center at Brown University (“Takes theater architecture into new territory, pushing the notion of flexibility to its limits; to the point where you wonder if the whole idea of a theater—or any building for that matter—might be changing with it,” The New York Times), the AT&T Performing Arts Center Dee & Charles Wyly Theatre in Dallas, the Seattle Central Library (“The most exciting new building it has been my honor to review in more than 30 years of writing about architecture,” The New York Times), and the Guggenheim-Hermitage Museum in Las Vegas. Joshua was the first American recipient of the $100,000 Marcus Prize, the biennial international architecture award. He has also been credited as one of “The 5 Greatest Architects Under 50” by HuffPost; “The World’s Most Influential Young Architects” by Wallpaper*; “The Twenty Most Influential Players in Design” by Fast Company; “The 20 Essential Young Architects” by ICON; and “The Best and Brightest” by Esquire. Testimony to his design excellence and innovation, Joshua’s projects consistently receive the profession’s top accolades, including two AIA National Honor Awards, a U.S. Institute for Theatre Technology National Honor Award, an American Library Association National Building Award, Time magazine’s Building of the Year, the International Design Awards Building of the Year, and a listing in Architectural Digest’s AD100. In 2024, Fast Company ranked REX No. 25 on its World’s 50 Most Innovative Companies list. Joshua is currently the John Portman Visiting Critic in Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, has been the Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor at Yale University, the Cullinan Visiting Professor at Rice University, and a visiting professor at Columbia University, The Cooper Union, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Syracuse University. An early member of the TED Brain Trust, Joshua has shared REX’s design methodologies at several TED conferences and lectures frequently at universities, cultural institutions, and symposiums around the world. Joshua is a member of the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects.

Architecture, Rowing