Michael Rock is among the most acclaimed designers, educators and critics of his generation.
For the past seventeen years Michael Rock has been Professor of Design at the Yale School of Art and he is currently heading the Graphic Architecture Project at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. From 1993-2001 he was visiting artist at the Jan Van Eyck Academy in Maastricht, The Netherlands, and a contributing editor and design critic at I.D. Magazine in New York and the British journal Eye. From 1984–91 he was Associate Professor of Graphic Design at the Rhode Island School of Design. Rock’s writing on design continues to appear regularly in a variety of publications worldwide and his recent essay Mad Dutch Disease (2006) has been re-printed in Dutch, Korean, Japanese and Chinese. He holds a B.A. in Humanities from Union College and a M.F.A. in Graphic Design from the Rhode Island School of Design. He is the recipient of the 1999/2000 Rome Prize in Design Arts. In 2005 he was chosen to deliver the prestigious national lecture by the Premsela Foundation in Amsterdam. Rock currently serves on the board of the American Academy in Rome.
In 1994, Rock and Susan Sellers joined Georgie Stout to form 2×4, a collaboration of writers and designers. 2×4 has grown to international stature and operates from studios in New York and Beijing. 2×4 projects are diverse and range from work with Chinese Central Television, Nike, Harvard University and museums such as the Guggenheim, MoMA, the LA County Museum of Art and the Mori Art Museum Tokyo to collaborations with fashion designer Miuccia Prada, architects Rem Koolhaas/OMA, Renzo Piano and Frank Gehry and artists such as Terry Winters, Tom Sachs and John Baldessari.
In 2005, the work of 2×4 was the subject of a mid-career retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the following year they received the National Design Award from the Smithsonian Institution, the highest design honor in the United States. This year work was featured in a 12-month exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.