Gail Peter Borden FAIA is the Director of Graduate Programs and tenured Professor at the Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design at the University of Houston. As principal of Borden Partnership, his design work has won numerous recognitions including: the Architectural League Prize; the AIA Young Architect Award; BD+C’s “40 Under 40” award; and numerous AIA, ACSA, and RADA awards. Borden received artist-in-residence awards from the Chinati Foundation; the Atlantic Center for the Arts; the Borchard Fellowship; and MacDowell. He was named the youngest Fellow of the AIA in the history of California.
Borden attended Rice University, simultaneously receiving Bachelor of Arts degrees (all cum laude) in fine arts, art history, and architecture as well as his B.Arch., also cum laude. He went on to Harvard University’s GSD to complete a post-professional Master of Architecture with distinction. His books include: Material Precedent (Wiley, 2010), Matter (Routledge, 2011), Principia (Pearson, 2013), Process (Routledge, 2014), Lineament (Routledge, 2017), New Essentialism (AR+D, 2017), and Assembly (Routledge, 2025). As an architect, artist, theoretician, and practitioner, Professor Borden’s research and practice focus on materiality.
At MacDowell in 2011, Borden completed a series of drawings based on his recent installation, "Light Frames", at Materials and Application Gallery [2010-2011]. In 2026, he created 90 works on paper in 13 families looking at the architectural implications of drawing in projective versus perspectival open structures. Examining architectural archetypes, depicted through the weight and force of material translated to a representational object, the production resulted in a series of families of lo-fi architectural primitives. These works will be exhibited and published in 2026.
