Thomas Leslie, FAIA

Bio

Thomas Leslie, FAIA, spent seven years with Norman Foster and Partners, London, where he worked on the extension to the Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, Nebraska, the Al Faisaliah tower complex in Riyadh, and the Center for Clinical Sciences Research at Stanford University.  Since 2000, he has taught building science, history, and design at Iowa State University, the University of Technology-Sydney, Australia, the Bauhaus-Universität in Weimar, Germany, the Università di Bologna Alma Mater Studorium, and the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University.

Leslie is the author of Louis I. Kahn: Building Art, Building Science (Braziller, 2005), Chicago Skyscrapers, 1871-1934 (University of Illinois, 2013), and Beauty’s Rigor:  Patterns of Production in the Work of Pier Luigi Nervi (University of Illinois, 2017).  His research into the historical relationship between engineering, design, and construction has been funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Graham Foundation, and the American Philosophical Society, and has appeared in the Journal of Architectural Education, the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Construction History, Design Issues, and Technology and Culture, among others.  He has appeared as an expert on building technology and history for outlets such as the BBC World Service, the New York Times, the Discovery channel program Impossible Engineering, and WBEZ-Chicago and he maintains an active online research notebook, ArchitectureFarm, that is regularly cited for its explanations of building failures in the news.

In 2013-2014, Leslie was the Booth Family Rome Prize Fellow in Historic Preservation at the American Academy in Rome, and in 2018 he was elevated to Fellowship in the American Institute of Architects for his contributions to architectural education and research.