Sarah Whiting


Sarah M. Whiting is an American architect, critic, and educator. Whiting is currently Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, in addition to being a founding partner of WW Architecture, along with her husband, Ron Witte. She previously served as Dean and William Ward Watkin Professor of Architecture at Rice University School of Architecture.

Career

Whiting attended Evanston Township High School in Evanston, Illinois, where she was part of the French Club and graduated in 1982. She received a Bachelor of Arts degree in architectural, urban history, and theory from Yale University, where she was also an editor for the arts section of the Yale Daily News. Whiting subsequently obtained a Master of Architecture from Princeton University in 1990, and a Doctor of Philosophy in the History and Theory of Architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2001. Her dissertation, advised by Stanford Anderson, at MIT was entitled "The Jungle in the Clearing: Space, Form, and Democracy in America, 1940-1949."
Whiting has previously worked in the offices of Peter Eisenman, Michael Graves, and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, where she served as a designer on the Euralille master plan and assisted with the publication SMLXL. She has taught at institutions such as Harvard University, Princeton University, the Illinois Institute of Technology, the University of Kentucky, and the University of Florida, where she led undergraduate and graduate level courses on modern urbanism and contemporary architectural theory.
On July 1, 2019, Whiting was named Dean and Professor of Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. She became the first female dean in the school's history, and replaced Mohsen Mostafavi. Her endowed chair is named after Josep Lluís Sert.
Along with her husband, Ron Witte, Whiting also cofounded WW Architecture, an architecture firm that is now located in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Works

Whiting is married to Ron Witte, who is a co-founder of WW Architecture. Witte, who has served as a professor at the Rice University School of Architecture, is currently a Visiting Professor of Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Her twin brother, Alex Whiting, who currently serves as Head of Investigations for the Kosovo Specialist Chambers and Specialist Prosecutor's Office, was an assistant clinical professor at Harvard Law School from 2007 to 2010 and a professor of practice at Harvard Law School from 2013 to 2019.