Aaron Tobey

Critic

Aaron Tobey is a PhD candidate at the Yale School of Architecture and a freelance designer living in Providence. His dissertation combines media theory, architectural history, and science and technology studies to analyze how early computer use, management thinking and international practice shaped one another within American architectural firms from the 1960s to the 1980s. His previous academic work has explored how information, communication and representation technologies inform collective social imaginations of space and political subject formation. Tobey’s research and writing has been included in Thresholds, the Journal of Architectural Education and Architecture and Culture, and in conferences of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand and the Architecture, Media, Politics, and Society research initiative, among other venues.

Tobey earned his MArch at RISD and was awarded a 2015 Graduate Studies Grant to conduct field research aboard the container ship ZIM San Francisco and the 2016 Alumni Travel Award to study the border between Israel and Palestine. He obtained his BArch at the University of Cincinnati and also attended the École Spéciale d’Architecture in Paris. He has worked professionally at a number of firms throughout the US including the rendering consultancy Studio AMD in Providence, Fougeron Architecture in San Francisco and Studio LUZ Architects in Boston.