William J. Mitchell is Professor of Architecture and Media Arts and Sciences and Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He teaches courses and conducts research in design theory, computer applications in architecture and urban design, and imaging and image synthesis. He consults extensively in the field of computer-aided design and was the co-founder of a California software company.
Mitchell's most recent book, City of Bits: Space, Place and the Infobahn, examines architecture and urbanism in the context of the digital telecommunications revolution and the growing domination of software over materialized form. In The Reconfigured Eye: Visual Truth in the Post-Photographic Era (MIT Press, 1992), Mitchell examined the social and cultural impact of digitally altered photographs and synthesized photorealistic scenes.
In addition to numerous articles, Mitchell is also the author of Digital Design Media, with Malcolm McCullough (Van Nostrand Reinhold, second ed., 1995; orig. publ. 1991); The Logic of Architecture: Design, Computation, and Cognition (MIT Press, 1990); The Poetics of Gardens, with Charles Moore and William Turnbull (MIT Press, 1988); The Art of Computer Graphics Programming, with Robin S. Liggett and Thomas Kvan (Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1987); and Computer-Aided Architectural Design (Van Notrand Reinhold, 1977). With Patrick Purcell and Malcolm McCullough he edited, and contributed essays to, The Electronic Design Studio (MIT Press, 1990).
A Fellow of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects, Mitchell came to MIT in 1992 from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, where he was the G. Ware and Edythe M. Travelstead Professor of Architecture and director of the Master in Design Studies program. From 1970 to 1986 he was on the faculty of the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he headed the Architecture/Urban Design program and was Associate Dean. He has also taught at Yale, Carnegie-Mellon, and Cambridge Universities. Mitchell holds a BArch from Melbourne University, a Master of Environmental Design from Yale University, and an MA from Cambridge University. He was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters by the New Jersey Institute of Technology in 1992.
Mitchell is Chair of the Editorial Board of the MIT Press and also a member of the Press' Management Board. He serves regularly on the juries for the Chrysler Awards for Innovation in Design and the ComputerWorld Smithsonian Awards.