On April 5th, 2019, Shohei Shigematsu gave the J. Robert F Swanson lecture at University of Michigan's Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning.
Shohei Shigematsu is a Partner at OMA and the Director of the New York office. He has been a driving force behind many of OMA’s projects, leading the firm’s diverse portfolio in the Americas for the past decade. With an emphasis on maximum specificity and process-oriented design, Sho provides design leadership and direction across the company for projects from their conceptual onset to completed construction.
Sho is responsible for cultural projects across North America, including Milstein Hall, an extension to the College of Architecture, Art and Planning at Cornell University; a new museum for the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec; and the Faena Forum, a multi-purpose venue in Miami Beach. Sho’s cultural projects currently in progress include a museum expansion for the New Museum in New York City; an extension to the Albright Knox Gallery in Buffalo, New York; and an event space for the Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles. Sho has also designed exhibitions for Prada, the Venice Architecture Biennale, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and Park Avenue Armory and is currently designing Dior’s first US retrospective at Denver Art Museum. He has collaborated with multiple artists - including Cai Guo- Qiang, Marina Abramović, Kanye West and Taryn Simon - and is currently redesigning Sotheby's New York headquarters.
Sho’s urban and public space designs around the world include the Willow Campus masterplan, an integrated mixed-use village for Facebook in Menlo Park, California; a mixed-use development in Santa Monica; a new civic center in Bogota, Colombia; a post-Hurricane Sandy urban water strategy for New Jersey; and in Toronto, the largest transit-oriented development currently underway in North America.
Sho has built a number of innovative workspaces including - the China Central Television Headquarters in Beijing (2012), and the Shenzhen Stock Exchange Headquarters (2013). He is currently designing a new business center in Fukuoka (2020) and OMA’s first tower in Tokyo for Mori Building Co, Ltd. (2022). Sho’s designs for three residential projects are under construction across the country - from New York to San Francisco and Miami.
A design critic at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Sho has lectured at TED and Wired Japan conference, and at universities throughout the world.