About
Vishaan Chakrabarti, is the Holliday Professor of Real Estate and the Director of CURE., the Center for Urban Real Estate, at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation. An experienced architect, planner, and developer, Chakrabarti has transformed the Masters of Science in Real Estate Development into a curriculum dedicated to smart growth policies locally, nationally, and globally, with an emphasis on training students to synthetically tackle the three pillars of urban real estate, namely, the financial, the physical, and the transactional.
Simultaneously, Chakrabarti is a Partner at SHoP Architects where he advances large-scale projects worldwide. One of seven partners committed to proving that intelligent, exciting, evocative design can be done in the context of real world constraints, he adds to SHoP’s already diverse internal knowledge base and highlights the curiosity and creative thinking essential to groundbreaking design and urban development.
Both Chakrabarti’s academic and professional endeavors seek to deploy dense, transit-rich, affordable urbanism in response to a growing planet increasingly characterized by the sprawl that has led to economic decline, environmental degradation, and rising inequity.
Prior to joining Columbia and SHoP, Chakrabarti was an Executive Vice President at the Related Companies where he ran the Moynihan Station project and oversaw planning and design for the firm's extensive development portfolio including Hudson Yards. In addition, Chakrabarti was the inaugural Jaquelin T. Robertson Visiting Professor in Architecture for the University of Virginia in 2009.
From 2002 to 2005, Chakrabarti served as the Director of the Manhattan Office for the New York Department of City Planning. While with the City, Chakrabarti successfully gained approvals for major rezonings that have begun to reshape the west side of Midtown Manhattan including the extension of the #7 subway line. In this role Chakrabarti also directed the City's design response to the reconstruction of Lower Manhattan in the wake of 9/11, the expansion of Columbia University into Manhattanville, the makeover of Lincoln Center, the transformation of the High Line, and several other major development proposals in Manhattan.
Prior to his work with the City, Chakrabarti was an Associate Partner and Director of Urban Design at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, as well as a transportation planner at the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
Chakrabarti holds a Master of Architecture from the University of California at Berkeley, a Master of City Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and dual Bachelors’ degrees in Art History and Engineering from Cornell University. He serves on the boards of the Architectural League of New York and Enterprise Community Partners, is a trustee of the Citizens Budget Commission, and is an emeritus board member of Friends of the High Line. He is also a member of the Young Leaders Forum of the National Council on US-China Relations. Metropolis Magazine named Chakrabarti one of the top 12 “Game Changers” for 2012. Chakrabarti is a David Rockefeller Fellow and was a Crain’s “40 under 40"" in 2000. Chakrabarti lives in TriBeCa with his wife, son and daughter.
Vishaan Chakrabarti, is the Holliday Professor of Real Estate and the Director of CURE., the Center for Urban Real Estate, at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation. An experienced architect, planner, and developer, Chakrabarti has transformed the Masters of Science in Real Estate Development into a curriculum dedicated to smart growth policies locally, nationally, and globally, with an emphasis on training students to synthetically tackle the three pillars of urban real estate, namely, the financial, the physical, and the transactional.
Simultaneously, Chakrabarti is a Partner at SHoP Architects where he advances large-scale projects worldwide. One of seven partners committed to proving that intelligent, exciting, evocative design can be done in the context of real world constraints, he adds to SHoP’s already diverse internal knowledge base and…
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