Growing up in public housing on Roosevelt Island in the middle of New York City’s East River, Elie Gamburg went to sleep every night staring at the city’s remarkable skyline from his bedroom window. His father was an artist and his mother a mathematician, so, “I guess I sort of had to do architecture if nothing else.” 

Gamburg is a Design Principal at KPF, a global architecture firm known for designing some of the most innovative and high-profile buildings around the world. Working from New York and London, with a lot of travel around the world in between, Elie has been innovating for cities for over 20 years. His work is consistently sensitive to human scale, urban context, and sustainability. Some of the more famous projects he has worked on at KPF are the Seaport Square Master Plan and Channelside in Boston, Atlantis The Royal in Dubai and NYU Shanghai. 

As a kid, everything was about buildings. Drawing them, looking at them, reading about them. After high school, he spent a summer at Cornell University, to see if he was cut out for his life’s ambition. Unsurprisingly, he was. Much of his time is still spent at school; he’s taught studios at his alma maters, Cornell and Harvard. He was an adjunct professor at NYIT for eight years and has served as a guest critic at Yale to name a few. 

Listen in as Vince and Elie discuss how 100 years ago New York was the Dubai of the times, the concept of Central Social Districts, and why he has Ganesha, the god of wisdom, mischief and fun on his desk. 

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Designing local global architecture with Elie Gamburg