Germane Barnes is a Chicago-born, Miami-based architect, designer, and founder of Studio Barnes, a research and design practice. He is an Associate Professor and the Director of The Community Housing & Identity Lab (CHIL) at the University of Miami School of Architecture, a platform for investigations of architecture’s social and political resiliency. Germane’s research and design practice investigates the connection between architecture and identity, examining the discipline’s social and political agency through historical research and design speculation.

Barnes work is in the permanent collections of international institutions, most notably, Museum of Modern Art, MAS Context, San Francisco MoMA, LACMA, The Art Institute of Chicago, and The National Museum of African American History and Culture where he was identified as one of the future designers on the rise. His work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art’s ground-breaking exhibition “Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America,” as well as the 2021 Chicago Architectural Biennale and Milan Design Week.

Germane has been featured in The New York Times and Architect Magazine. He was selected in the inaugural cohort of The Dorchester Industries Experimental Design Lab created by Theaster Gates and sponsored by Prada. Most recently, his project Griot was widely published, as a participant in Biennale Architettura 2023, Laboratory of the Future. In 2021, Germane was awarded the Wheelwright Prize from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and in 2022 the Rome Prize at the American Academy, and the Architectural League Prize.

Studio Barnes