Bio:
David Turnbull is the President & CEO of The Cosanti Foundation, based in Paradise Valley, Arizona, responsible for Arcosanti, Cosanti and the extensive archives of Paolo Soleri (1919 - 2013).
He is also a Senior Advisor at GRoW Oyster Reefs LLC in Los Angeles, California, USA, working on aquatic ecosystem restoration, and ‘Blue-Carbon’, and a Senior Research Fellow of the Urban Futures Lab (UFL) in Las Vegas, at UNLV, working as a member of the 'Desert Cities Research Group'. He was an Advisory Board Member for the Italian Pavilion at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, 2021, working on the theme - 'resilient communities’, and has been a Visiting Expert at ARUP, worldwide, a mentor at Dark Matter Labs in London, UK, since 2018, a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Portsmouth, UK, and a Principal Investigator on a collaborative research project with the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland and the CSIR_IIR, Council for Scientific and Industrial Research in Accra, Ghana, working with community groups in the rain-forest, near Kumasi.
From 2003 - 2018, he was a Director of ATOPIA LLC, renamed ATOPIA Innovation in 2012, and Design Director of ATOPIA Research Inc / PITCHAfrica from 2004 - 2018, an award winning 501(c)3 tax exempt organization, with a specific focus on the development and construction of building types that address global ecological and social challenges. PITCHAfrica's first Waterbank School was named 'The Greenest School on Earth' by the USGBC in 2013. Waterbank Schools were selected by SUSTAINIA in Denmark as one of the top 100 sustainable solutions in the World and won the INTERFACE award in the 2013 Buckminster Fuller Challenge. PITCHAfrica's Waterbank Campus was selected for 'Designs of the Year 2015' by Design Museum, London.
His academic career started in 1989 at The Architectural Association in London while he was working in the office of James Stirling, Michael Wilford and Associates, leading major projects in Spain, Japan and Singapore. His academic appointments since 1990 include the Eero Saarinen Visiting Professorship in Architecture at Yale University, and Visiting Professorships at the University of Toronto, Canada, Columbia University’s GSAPP in New York and Cornell University. He was Professor of Architecture at the University of Bath in the UK from 2000-2005, and from 2012 -13, Visiting Professor of Design & Innovation at the AUST, in Abuja, Nigeria. He was a Professor of Architecture at the Cooper Union in New York from 2006 to 2017. He has been a Fellow of the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, RSA, since 2003.