Ann Marie Borys

Professor and Undergraduate Program Coordinator
AXP Licensing Advisor

Ann Marie Borys, Ph.D., FAIA is an architect and scholar who studies conditions of practice and the built environment as material culture. Her research explores the relationship of construction, intention, and meaning. She examines the ideas and influences that contribute to design and their relationship to the physical and experiential qualities of architecture.

She has practiced architecture full time in Boston, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati. She began teaching beginning design at the University of Cincinnati in 1991. She joined the faculty of the University of Washington in 2010, where she has been teaching history and theory and professional practice as well as design.

She earned her doctoral degree from the University of Pennsylvania where she focused on Roman and Renaissance studies. She published Vincenzo Scamozzi and the Chorography of Early Modern Architecture, the first English-language book on this 16th century northern Italian architect, in 2014. The book highlights Scamozzi’s interest in geography as expressed in Book Two of his treatise, and uses that focus to interpret his major works. More recently, American Unitarian Churches: Architecture of a Democratic Religion (2021) explores the denominational context for significant contributions to 150 years of American architecture and how they embody the unique social and cultural profile of Unitarianism in American history.

She has served on the Conservation Board of the City of Cincinnati and the Board of the Unity Temple Restoration Foundation. She is currently serving on the board of Environmental Works, a non-profit community design center that has provided design services to under-served communities in Seattle for 50 years.