Richard Garber

Richard Garber, AIA, is a co-founder of GRO Architects.  The work of the practice privileges the integration of emerging technologies to respond to client needs, project complexity, and collaboration between disciplines, and has received numerous awards and recognitions. In 2024, GRO’s Montgomery Mosque received both a Merit Award from AIA New Jersey and a Gold Medal from the Newark and Suburban Chapter of AIA-NJ. GRO received the 2022 Honor Award, Residential Category in the annual AIA New Jersey Design Awards Competition for Nest, a 122-unit micro-housing project in Jersey City. Increasingly contemplating large-scale planning proposals, GRO received the Bronze Medal for Excellence in Planning from the City of Wuhan, Hubei Province, China in 2015. GRO’s urban infill prototype PREttyFAB won an AIA Merit Award in 2009, and a PCI Design Award in 2010. In July 2009, Metropolis Magazine named GRO a “Next Gen Notable” for their Docking Stations proposal. The December 2010 issue of Dwell magazine named him as one of 32 new faces of design, and showcased GRO's precast concrete housing prototype PREttyFAB.

Richard has written numerous books and essays in which he advocates for technology as it relates to formal speculation, simulation, manufacturing, and building delivery to generate innovate design, assembly, and construction solutions. He is the author of BIM Design: Realizing the Creative Potential of Building Information Modeling (Wiley, 2014), and guest editor of AD Closing the Gap: Information Models in Contemporary Design Practice (Wiley, 2009). Both publications examine the continually expanding capacity of design computing and Building Information Modeling to augment design-side operations, as opposed to simply making them more efficient. This work led to his concept of the architectural workflow; and the publication of Workflows: Expanding the Territory of Architecture in the Design and Delivery of Buildings (Wiley, 2017). In 2023, Wiley published his new book Building Futures: Technology, Ecology, and Architectural Practice.

GRO Architects was selected to participate in the 2025 Venice Biennale through the European Cultural Centre in their exhibition TIME : SPACE : EXISTENCE. The exhibition allowed the practice to further articulate their work in housing and urban development through ideas about typology (micro-housing), construction (modular systems), and adaptive reuse. The 2025 exhibition “moves beyond merely questioning how to build more sustainably; it seeks to showcase tangible applications, seeing architecture as a force for environmental and social repair”. GRO’s contribution was titled (im)Possible Density.

Garber has lectured globally, including, in China, at the Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT) in February 2013 and the Beijing General Municipal Engineering and Design Research Institute in June 2018. He holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. He was previously a project manager at SHoP Architects and at Greg Lynn FORM. Garber is a licensed architect in New York, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, and New Jersey.