Adnan Zillur Morshed is an architect, architectural historian and critic, urban theorist, and tenured professor at the School of Architecture and Planning, Catholic University of America in Washington, DC. He received his Ph.D. and master’s in architecture from MIT and BArch from the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, where he taught before coming to the USA. He has served as the Founder-Director of the Centre for Inclusive Architecture and Urbanism (Ci+AU) at BRAC University (Dhaka, Bangladesh) and a Fulbright Specialist (2021-2025).
Adnan Morshed’s diverse research interests include spatial justice, urban poverty and politics of spatiality, global histories in architecture and urbanism, water historiography in architecture, urbanism in developing countries, and American urban culture in the 20th century. He is the author of multiple books, including Impossible Heights: Skyscrapers, Flight, and the Master Builder (University Minnesota Press, 2015), DAC: Dhaka in Twenty-Five Buildings (Altrim Publishers, 2017), and Dhaka Delirium (2023). His forthcoming edited volume, How Does Spatial Justice Manifests in the Built Environment? (Wiley, Spring 2026), examines what spatial justice means for different constituencies, and how it is experienced, theorized, and debated in a complex era marked by diverse social justice movements and wide-ranging political reactions to them.
Morshed was featured in the acclaimed documentary, Louis Kahn’s Tiger City (2019), and was a TEDx speaker at George Washington University, Wyeth Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC), and Verville Fellow at the Smithsonian Institution. He has served, among others, on the Board of Directors of the Society of Architectural Historians; MIT’s Global Architecture History Teaching Collaborative; the editorial board of the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians; and as chair of SAH book award committees and a juror for the National Endowment for the Humanities (USA) grants. He received research grants from, among others, the Graham Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, and MIT. His articles appeared in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Journal of Architectural Education, Journal of South Asian Studies, Thresholds (MIT), Constructs (Yale), New Geographies (Harvard), Architectural Design, Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review, and Water History.
A practicing architect, Adnan Morshed’s design includes, among others, eight BRAC field offices across Bangladesh and a farmhouse in North Carolina, USA. He curated an exhibition, Architecture as Freedom, based on the BRAC work at the AIA District Architecture Center in Washington, DC, in 2023.
A rich exploration of the influence of skyscrapers, airplanes, and aerial vision on interwar American visual culture
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