Joel Towers is a professor of architecture and sustainable design at the School of Constructed Environments at Parsons School of Design. He is also the director of the Tishman Environment and Design Center and a University Professor at The New School. In 2009, he was appointed executive dean of Parsons School of Design. He finished his second term in that role in 2019 and, after a decade of service, returned to the faculty. Under his leadership, Parsons made major curricular reforms, launched several new graduate and undergraduate programs, constructed an integrated 27,000-square-foot cross-disciplinary making facility, and raised millions of dollars in scholarship, research, and capital funds. Towers supported multiple industry-leading design and research labs and expanded the ranks of full-time faculty with the aim of expanding the school’s reach and research capabilities. Today Parsons is one of the most internationally diverse design schools in the United States, with nearly half of the undergraduate student body coming from other countries. It is consistently ranked the top school for art and design in the United States by QS World University Rankings.

Towers joined Parsons in January 2004 as a member of the full-time faculty and the first director of Sustainable Design and Urban Ecology. In 2006, he was named associate provost for Environmental Studies and founded the Tishman Environment and Design Center (TED C) at The New School. TED C fosters the integration of bold design, policy, and social justice approaches to environmental issues with the aim of advancing just and sustainable outcomes in collaboration with communities. From 2007 to 2009, Towers served as the founding dean of the School of Design Strategies and the associate dean of Parsons. In 2019, Towers was named to the leadership group of the New York City Panel on Climate Change (NPCC), which reports to the New York City Mayor’s Office of Resilience and is charged with providing authoritative, actionable information on future climate change and its potential impacts to support city decision making.

Towers received a BS in Architecture from the University of Michigan School of Architecture and a Master of Architecture from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation. After graduating, he worked with William McDonough Architects, where he directed projects including The Hannover Principles: Design for Sustainability, which codified that firm’s environmental thinking. In 1992, Towers co-founded Sislian Rothstein and Towers Architects. For 18 years, SR+T completed award-winning projects and served as a testing ground for the integration of research, scholarship, and creative practice.