Karla Rothstein

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Karla Maria Rothstein (born April 6, 1966) is an American architect and an adjunct Associate Professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. She founded DeathLAB, a project that explores how cities can memorialize the dead in ways that fit urban life, and she co-founded Latent Productions, an architecture, research, and development firm in New York City.

Education and early career
Rothstein earned a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Maryland in 1988 and a Master of Architecture from Columbia GSAPP in 1992. She also completed international exchange programs in Moscow (1989) and at ETH Zurich (1991). Before starting her own practice, she worked as an international coordinating architect for William McDonough and Ralph Appelbaum & Associates.

Notable works and achievements
Her first built project, Ballston Lake House near Saratoga Springs, New York, was designed with Joel Towers. It is known for its precast concrete structure and was featured in In DETAIL and Kenneth Frampton’s American Masterworks.

In 2014, a commercial space she designed that used blocks cast in flour sacks received recognition from Built by Women NYC and the American Institute of Architects New York Chapter. Latent Productions’ Constellation Park project won third place in an international competition to find new ways to memorialize the dead; a model was sold at Christie’s and is displayed at Sir John Soane’s Museum in London. The project was highlighted in New York Magazine’s Reasons to Love New York in 2016. Verboten, a 10,000-square-foot nightclub her team designed, is another notable work.

Current and ongoing projects
Her recent and ongoing work includes:
- 25 units of affordable housing in Brownsville, Brooklyn, developed with the New York City Department of Housing Preservation and Development
- Environmentally advanced civic infrastructure to rethink urban cemeteries
- An eco-friendly childcare facility in New York City
- A resilient small-scale building prototype for the Rockaways flood zone
- Greylock Works in the Berkshires, a 240,000-square-foot former mill being renovated into a mix of food production, residential, hotel, and restaurant spaces

Greylock Works has received a $1.72 million grant from Massachusetts state housing and economic development authorities. Rothstein has held fellowships including the Jacob Javits Fellow in Fine Arts (1988–1992), the William Kinne Traveling Fellowship (1992), and a NYFA fellowship (2000). Her work has been shown in venues such as Storefront for Art and Architecture, the Center for Architecture, and in major publications like The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, WIRED, and more.

DeathLAB exhibition
In 2018, DeathLAB: Democratizing Death opened at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan, running from July 2018 to March 2019. The show included videos of DeathLAB’s manifesto, design projects, and interviews gathered over the previous years.