Michelangelo Sabatino (Ph.D.) is Associate Professor and Director of the History, Theory, and Criticism Program at the Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture, University of Houston. He is a critic, designer, teacher and historian. His research and teaching explore the intellectual history and material cultures of modern and contemporary architecture, design, landscape, and urbanism. Sabatino serves on a number of editorial boards, has participated in juries, and lectures regularly at universities in the Americas and Europe.
His award-winning books include Pride in Modesty: Modernist Architecture and the Vernacular Tradition in Italy (2010) and, with Jean-François Lejeune, Modern Architecture and the Mediterranean: Vernacular Dialogues and Contested Identities (2010). Sabatino is currently working on a book, Arthur Erickson: Architecture into Landscape, forthcoming from Princeton Architectural Press and McGill-Queens University Press. This focuses on Erickson’s innovative contributions to Canadian and international architectural production during the 1960s and 1970s
Sabatino trained as an architect and historian at the Università IUAV di Venezia and the University of Toronto’s Department of Fine Art. He completed a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard University’s Department of the History of Art and Architecture and taught one year at Yale University’s School of Architecture before his appointment at the Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture. Sabatino is co-principal of Ambrose + Sabatino, an architecture, preservation and research firm with projects in Houston and Miami. His collaboratively-designed SUKKANOE pavilion is part of the permanent collection of the Canadian Canoe Museum in Peterborough.
Sabatino has received fellowships and grants from the Canada Council, Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in Fine Arts, Georgia O’Keeffe Research Museum, the Houston Architecture Center Foundation, the Japan Foundation, the Wolfsonian-FIU, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. In 2011 he was appointed Visiting Scholar at the Canadian Centre for Architecture to work on his manuscript on Arthur Erickson. Most recently Sabatino was appointed a Wilder Green Fellow in residence at the MacDowell Colony.
