Joshua Ramus
Founding Principal
REX

Joshua Ramus is founding principal of REX, an internationally acclaimed architecture and design firm based in New York City. Believing architecture should actively empower its users and communities—not simply be a representational art—REX challenges and advances building paradigms and promotes the agency of architecture. REX aspires to produce inventive designs so functionally specific that they offer inspiring aesthetic experiences.

The firm’s work under construction includes the Perelman Performing Arts Center at the World Trade Center in New York, New York; The Lindemann Performing Arts Center at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island; Elizabeth Quay Lots 5 & 6, a pair of mixed-use skyscrapers in Perth, Australia; 205 North Quay, an office tower in Brisbane, Australia; and the Necklace Residence on Long Island, New York. REX recently completed 2050 M Street, a premium office building in Washington, DC that hosts CBS’s Washington Bureau; and the re-cladding and interior renovation of Five Manhattan West, a Brutalist landmark straddling Penn Station’s rail yard in New York City.

Seminal projects include the AT&T Performing Arts Center Dee & Charles Wyly Theatre in Dallas, Texas; the Vakko Fashion Center & Power Media Headquarters in Istanbul, Turkey; and the Seattle Central Library in the State of Washington. Joshua led the Seattle Central Library—hailed by Herbert Muschamp in The New York Times as “the most exciting new building it has been my honor to review in more than 30 years of writing about architecture”—while a founding partner of OMA New York (the firm he later rebranded as REX).

Testimony to the firm’s design excellence, REX and Joshua’s projects have been recognized with top accolades, including two AIA National Honor Awards, a U.S. Institute for Theatre Technology National Honor Award, an American Library Association National Building Award, two American Council of Engineering Companies’ National Gold Awards, a CTBUH Award of Excellence, Time magazine’s Building of the Year, inclusion in the prestigious Aga Khan Award and Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize competitions, and numerous AIA New York, ArchDaily, Architect/Progressive Architecture, Architect’s Newspaper, Architectural Review/MIPIM, Architizer, and Wallpaper* design awards. The firm has twice been named one of the World’s Top 10 Innovative Companies in Architecture by Fast Company.

Joshua was the first American recipient of the Marcus Prize, the biennial, international architecture award conferred by the Marcus Corporation Foundation and the University of Wisconsin, and has been honored by the experimental performance company STREB with their Action Maverick Award. He has also been credited as one of the “5 greatest architects under 50” by HuffPost; the world’s most influential young architects by Wallpaper*; the twenty most influential players in design by Fast Company; “The 20 Essential Young Architects” by ICON magazine; and the “Best and Brightest” by Esquire.

Joshua has been Eero Saarinen Visiting Professor at Yale University, Cullinan Visiting Professor at Rice University, and a visiting professor at Columbia University, The Cooper Union, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Syracuse University. An early member of the TED Advisory Board, Joshua shared REX’s design methodologies at the TED2006 and TEDxSMU conferences, and lectures frequently at universities, cultural institutions, and symposiums around the world.

Joshua holds a Master of Architecture from Harvard University, where he earned the inaugural Araldo Cossutta Fellowship and the SOM Fellowship, and a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy, magna cum laude with distinction in the major, from Yale University. He is NCARB Certified and a registered architect in states throughout the U.S. and Australia, as well as in The Netherlands.