Tony Santos

February 26, 2001

Biographical sketch

Professor Antonio de Souza Santos (Tony Santos) was born in Mozambique and educated there and in Portugal. He studied architecture at the University of Cape Town, South Africa, and at the University of Pennsylvania, where he obtained graduate degrees in architecture and city planning.

On returning to Cape Town, his practice focused on housing and urban design, with projects for individual houses, grouped houses, apartment buildings, residential developments, a retirement community, an agricultural village, a "new town in town", renewal of an urban squatter settlement, and an award winning competition proposal for downtown Santiago, Chile. After coming to the United States in 1973, he continued working in Africa, designing housing and institutional projects in Swaziland and a university campus in Botswana. Many of these projects were published in Architecture Plus, Domus, Progressive Architecture and other journals.

His dominant professional interest in housing design, urban development and infrastructure planning is reflected in his work as consultant to the United Nations Development Programme, the World Bank, and various government and non-government agencies in several African countries; and in urban design, housing and institutional projects in the United States, Canada, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Tanzania, Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Angola.

In 1997 he won an invited housing design competition for Atlantic City, New Jersey; a related project for 24 units of various types is scheduled for construction. Most recently, he was a principal member of the winning team in the competition for the design of the new campus of the American University in Cairo.

He has always combined practice with teaching and research, offering architectural and urban design studios as well as history and theory courses at the University of Cape Town, Harvard University, Rice University, the University of Toronto (where he was department chairman), and, since 1993, at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) where he is Professor of Architecture and founding director of the interdisciplinary Master in Infrastructure Planning program. He has been visiting professor at Tulane University, the University of Texas (Austin), the University of Cape Town (South Africa), Eduardo Mondlane University (Mozambique), the University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg, South Africa), and the University of Pennsylvania, and has lectured widely in North America, Europe and Africa.

He lives in Princeton, New Jersey, where he has an architectural and urban design practice.