Director and Associate Professor
Architecture Program
Tyler School of Art

Sally Harrison is a registered architect and an urban designer with an expertise in housing and the sustainable redesign of neighborhoods in the postindustrial city. Professor Harrison teaches advanced studios in Urban Design, lectures in Site Investigation and Housing, and has directed a service-learning workshop with Habitat for Humanity. She has served as a guest critic at numerous schools of architecture, a juror on national design competitions, and has lectured frequently at conferences of the American Institute of Architects, the American Collegiate Schools of Architecture, the Environmental Design Research Association and the Architecture Research Centers Consortium.

Professor Harrison’s architectural and urban design work draws on the close reading of a neighborhood’s the built, natural and cultural fabric as a means of generating new form and unique patterns of place. In an on-going research project, “Dwelling In-Between: Making Sustainable Places in the Postindustrial City" she is studying the evolution and reemergence of 19th and early 20th century industrial sectors in cities in North America and Northern Europe.

Professor Harrison’s work has been published in Places, Architecture Magazine, the Journal of Urban Design, the Encyclopedia of American Studies, the Urban Ecologist, and in other academic journals and the popular press. She has received the Award for Architectural Research from Architecture Magazine and the AIA Committee on Research for the North Philadelphia Urban Initiatives, a multi-year urban design project undertaken at Temple University with support from the U.S. Department of Education.

With colleagues from Sculpture, Landscape Architecture and Geography and Urban Studies, Professor Harrison has founded the Urban Design Workshop at Temple, a university-based practice that seeks to address North Philadelphia design issues through multidisciplinary engagement. Among the UDW’s current projects is an arts-based commercial corridor revitalization for the Village of Arts and Humanities, a recent winner of the Rudy Brunner Award, and as well the design and development of a model sustainable urban neighborhood for the Norris Square Civic Association.

Prior to joining the Architecture Faculty at Temple University Ms. Harrison was with Mitchell/Giurgola Architects, and was the principal of her own small firm, both award-winning practices. Ms. Harrison is a member of the American Institute of Architects and a former board member of both the Philadelphia Chapter AIA and of AIA Pennsylvania. While she was on the Philadelphia AIA Board, she was chair of the Social Action Committee and organized the visit of a national Regional/Urban Design Assistance Team (R/UDAT) to North Philadelphia. She is a founding member of the Community Design Collaborative of Philadelphia.

Ms. Harrison earned her Master of Architecture degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she was awarded an AIA Scholarship. She received her Bachelor of Arts degree magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania, and was graduated with Distinction in the History of Art. She undertook a year of public service as a VISTA volunteer between undergraduate and graduate studies.