Jonathan Kline

Jonathan Kline is a Studio Professor at Carnegie Mellon Architecture. Through over a decade of teaching and research at CMU, Jonathan has explored the future of cities with a generation of students. Since 2002 Jonathan has taught upper-level undergraduate urban design studios, building on the public interest design legacy of David Lewis who initiated urban design education at Carnegie Mellon in the 1960s. Jonathan is a core faculty member in the Master of Urban Design program and helped launch it and shape its curriculum. In recent years Jonathan’s studio teaching has focused on growing global cities, and his graduate and undergraduate urban design studios have traveled to the Middle East, Africa and Europe. He has also taught second-year design studio, undergraduate thesis and seminars in urban design theory. Jonathan has also worked on research projects at the Remaking Cities Institute and the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry.

As practitioner Jonathan is principal and founder of Studio for Spatial Practice, an innovative award winning design firm with a multi-disciplinary approach to architecture, urban design, landscape architecture and art. He leads the urban design work of the practice. His professional projects range from guiding the creation of mixed-use developments integrated with transit, to working with citizens to creatively revitalize urban neighborhoods, to imagining how to transform urban mobility for the twenty-first century. The work of Studio for Spatial Practice has won numerous awards and has been featured in exhibits at the Venice Biennale Architettura and the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. Jonathan previously worked with Urban Design Associates on neighborhood master-planning projects in cities around the United States and in Europe.

In addition to teaching and practice Jonathan is also a trained artist, creating paintings and drawings that visualize the changing spatial and social networks of cities. Jonathan was born in Pittsburgh and received a Bachelor of Architecture (B.Arch) from Carnegie Mellon University and MFA Painting & Drawing from The Pennsylvania State University.

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