Richard Plunz
Richard Plunz is an American architect, critic, and historian. He is professor emeritus at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and founded the Urban Design Lab, a research unit of Columbia's Earth Institute.
He earned a B.S. in engineering, a B.Arch, and an M.Arch from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he began studying urban history and development. He also pursued urban history research at Penn State. Plunz has taught at Columbia since 1973, served as chair of the Division of Architecture, and led the post-professional Urban Design Program from 1992 to 2015. He has been a visiting professor at KU Leuven and the Polytechnic University of Turin.
Plunz's research covers housing, urban history, anthropology, urban parametrics, and design. In the 1970s, he conducted anthropological fieldwork using digitized environmental modeling in Mantua (West Philadelphia), the Italian village of San Leucio, and the Adirondack High Peaks. He carried out a 40-year study of Turgutreis, Turkey, and contributed to Millennium Cities Initiative analyses of Accra's Ga Mashie and Nima neighborhoods.
His books include A History of Housing in New York City (1992; republished with new material in 2016), Two Adirondack Hamlets in History (1999), Turgutreis 1974 (2016), City Riffs. Urbanism, Ecology, Place (2017), and New York_Global: Critical Writings and Proposals 1970–2020 (2023). Urban planner Peter Marcuse praised his NYC housing history, and Plunz received the Andrew J. Thomas Award from the American Institute of Architects for his pioneering work in housing.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 06:13 (CET).