Philip Szostak, FAIA

Philip Szostak is one of the most honored architects in North Carolina. His first professional award came in 1978, a national Owens-Corning Fiberglass Design Award for Chapel Hill Transit, the same year he began teaching graduate studio at NC State's College of Design. Over the forty-five years since, his buildings have been recognized with more than forty state, regional, and national AIA awards for design excellence, including an AIA National Small Project Award.

He was elevated to Fellow of the American Institute of Architects in 2009, sponsored by Frank Harmon, FAIA. A year later, the AIA North Carolina chapter awarded him the Kamphoefner Prize, named for the founder of NC State's College of Design and Phil's own dean. In 2014, Szostak Design was named AIA NC Firm of the Year. In 2018, the chapter presented him the F. Carter Williams Gold Medal, its highest honor for any architect, awarded once, for a lifetime of work.

He chose to build his practice in North Carolina, the state that educated him. Studying at NC State under Buckminster Fuller, Matthew Nowicki, Harwell Hamilton Harris, and Dean Kamphoefner himself, he inherited a modernist lineage that he has spent five decades extending.

He also teaches. He has been on the NC State faculty in some form since 1976 and now holds the rank of full Professor. He teaches the DPAC case study at Harvard's Graduate School of Design Executive Education Program. He is still running the studio that received its most recent design awards this year.

The Signature Project

Durham Performing Arts Center

If you've been to a Broadway show in Durham, you've been inside Phil's most visible work. He co-developed and designed DPAC, securing the financing, the corporate sponsorship, and the operator's agreement. He even traveled to New York personally to commission Jaume Plensa's Light Bridge, the sculpture that became Durham's first major piece of public art.

“Conceptually, we talked about DPAC being a lantern in the dark. That idea of a lantern in downtown Durham was pretty strong.”

Phil Szostak, Chapel Hill Magazine, May/June 2014

At 2,800 seats and 103,000 square feet, it is the largest broadway-style theater in the carolinas and is consistently ranked among the top three most-attended theaters in the united states.

DPAC was the first project in the world to receive SEED Certification for social, economic, and environmental performance. Phil wrote binding benchmarks into every design, construction, and operations contract, tying monthly payment approvals to verified performance. That methodology is now taught at Harvard's Graduate School of Design.

Beyond Practice

Teaching, Curating, Civic Work

Running a studio is only part of it. Phil's career has played out in classrooms, exhibition halls, and development boardrooms as much as on the drafting table.

• 01Full Professor, NC State University College of Design. Teaching graduate studio since 1976, continuing a line of modernist education that traces back to the school's founder, Henry Kamphoefner, under whom Phil studied as an undergraduate.
• 02Founder, Triangle Architecture and Design Society, 1997. A peer-review forum for NC State architecture faculty and adjuncts. TADS members have won more than seventy percent of AIA NC and AIA Triangle design awards since its founding.
• 03Curator, “The North Carolina School: The Art of Architecture” at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, 2003. An exhibition of twenty-one North Carolina architects, which Phil personally underwrote. The first survey of its kind for NC modernism.
• 04Board Member, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, appointed 2004. Served four years past the museum's grand opening.
• 05Founder and inaugural Chair, AIA North Carolina Committee on the Environment (COTE), 2003.
• 06Adjunct Instructor, Harvard Graduate School of Design Executive Education Program. Teaches the DPAC SEED case study.
• 07Visiting Speaker, Public Interest Design Institute, 2017. Invited presentations in Washington DC and Philadelphia on DPAC as a reference public-interest design methodology.
• 08Co-developer of DPAC. Not merely the architect. Phil secured the financing, the corporate sponsorship, and the operator's agreement for one of Durham's most consequential civic projects. He also traveled to New York personally to secure Jaume Plensa's Light Bridge sculpture, Durham's first major piece of public art.
• 09Former NC Principal, NBBJ, 1990 to 2002. Led the North Carolina office of the nation's second-largest architecture practice for twelve years before re-establishing Szostak Design.
• 10Jury service across more than fifteen AIA state chapters between 2000 and 2008, including chair and co-chair roles in Iowa, Virginia, Kansas, Maryland, Georgia, Utah, Pennsylvania, and others.

The Builder

Szostak Build

The home was built by Szostak Build, the firm's own construction arm, led by Zachary Szostak. The builder-architect relationship in this case is not a contractor interpreting someone else’s drawings: it is the architect’s own family building the architect’s own design.

The result is a level of fidelity between vision and execution that is genuinely rare.