1944-2010

Architect and urban theorist, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor William J. Mitchell was born and raised in Australia, where he obtained his Bachelor of Architecture. He later pursued post-graduate studies at Yale and Cambridge. His professional career was linked from the beginning to the academic world, teaching at the University of California and at Harvard. In 1992 he joined the MIT School of Architecture and Planning, of which he would be Dean. Since 2003 he was director of the MIT’s Media Lab, where he led, among others, the Smart Cities research group. A prolific author, Mitchell’s publications were a significant contribution in the field of new technologies applied to architectural design, such as Computer-Aided Architectural Design and The Logic of Architecture. Another of his fields of research was the influence of information technologies in the way of understanding cities. The trilogy formed by the texts City of Bits: Space, Place and the Infobahn, E-topia and Me ++: The Cyborg Self and the Networked City, sharply illustrate his line of thought.