One Million Acres & No Zoning

Lars Lerup, designer and writer, is a Professor of Architecture at RSA. He was Dean at Rice School of Architecture and William Ward Watkin Professor from 1993 to 2009. Previously, he taught for many years at the University of California at Berkeley.

His work focuses on the intersection of nature and culture in the contemporary American metropolis, and on Houston in particular. He is currently finishing up work on a new book, entitled Toxic Ecology: At the Limit of the Entrepreneurial City, which examines the consequences the city's relentless growth and expansion has had on various natural systems, and further, how those consequences will effect the future of the city.

Other books of note include After the City (2000, MIT Press), Room (1999, Menil Collection), Planned Assaults (1987, MIT Press), and Building the Unfinished (1977, SAGE).

In 1995 he published the article Stim and Dross: Rethinking the Metropolis in Assemblage magazine, which delivered a radical way of thinking about the new American city.
He lectures and participates in numerous conferences and symposia, most recently as the keynote lecturer at the Megacities 2005 Conference in Amsterdam, as a panelist at the ArchiLab 2004 conference, as a participant in the New Urbanism and Beyond conference in Stockholm, and as the guest speaker at the Inaugural Conference of the Delft School of Design.

Also, he participated in one of the three sessions of the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture's Debates on Urbanism, in a session with Peter Calthorpe entitled New Urbanism, which has recently been published as part of a three volume set.

Lerup was named the Swedish-American Citizen of the Year in 2004 for his lifelong contributions to architectural education and practice.