Stephen Mueller is a registered architect and a founding partner of AGENCY.
Stephen has received numerous awards for his design work and scholarship, including the 2021 Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the 2018 Emerging Voices award from The Architectural League of New York, the Rome Prize in Architecture from the American Academy in Rome in 2010, and residency fellowships at the MacDowell Colony in 2009 and 2013. Stephen received the Columbia University GSAPP Incubator Prize in 2019, for ongoing research to uncover, represent, and design for the unseen dangers of irradiated shade in the borderland. Stephen was awarded a University Design Research Fellowship at Exhibit Columbus in 2020-21. Stephen was named a Fellow of the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2010, and was recognized as one of ARCHITECT Magazine’s Emerging Talents in 2011. Stephen was awarded a Cameron Visiting Architect fellowship at Middlebury University in 2016, and named a DISCREET Fellow in Residence at the Berlin Biennale in 2016.
Stephen is the founding Director of Research at POST (Project for Operative Spatial Technologies), a territorial think-tank situated on the US-Mexico border. POST engages transformations in the borderland through projects intersecting urban geography, border studies, and digital humanities. Stephen is a co-organizer of the Border Consortium for Actionable Spatial Research and Practice, a platform for shared, comparative, and impactful cross-border research, with participants from leading practices and universities in the US and Mexico. Stephen’s recent book, FRONTS: Security and the Developing World (AR+D, 2020), co-authored with Ersela Kripa, uncovers a growing geography of codependence between the global security complex and the urban morphologies of the developing world which it increasingly incriminates.
Stephen has taught a variety of subjects in graduate and undergraduate university programs across the United States and abroad, including Columbia University GSAPP and Washington University in St. Louis. Stephen is currently an Associate Professor at Texas Tech University Huckabee College of Architecture in El Paso.
Stephen holds a Bachelor of Architecture with Distinction from the University of Kansas, and a Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia University, where he was the recipient of the Kinne Travel Fellowship for sponsored research in architecture and urbanism, and he was awarded the Lucille Smyser Lowenfish Memorial Prize for design excellence.