William J. Mitchell

William John Mitchell (15 December 1944 – 11 June 2010) was an Australian-born author, educator, architect and urban designer, best known for leading the integration of architectural and related design arts practice with computing and other technologies.

Mitchell was born on 15 December 1944, in Horsham, Victoria, Australia. He earned an undergraduate degree in 1967 from the University of Melbourne with a major in architecture and was awarded master's degrees from both Yale University (a Master of Environmental Design in environmental design in 1969) and the University of Cambridge (in 1977 with a major in architecture).

Mitchell headed the architecture and urban design program at the Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles starting in 1970. He was named the G. Ware and Edythe M. Travelstead Professor of Architecture and director of the Master of Design Studies program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1986 and was named as Professor of Architecture and Media Arts and Sciences and Dean of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning in 1992. His 1977 book Computer-Aided Architectural Design and his 1990 work The Logic of Architecture: Design, Computation and Cognition were credited by The New York Times as having "profoundly changed the way architects approached building design".

At MIT, Mitchell served as an advisor to MIT President Charles Marstiller Vest in guiding a decade-long, five-building expansion project at the university that included designs by Charles Correa, Frank Gehry, Steven Holl, Fumihiko Maki and Kevin Roche, and added one million square feet of classroom, office and other spaces to the MIT campus. The building project became the subject of his 2007 book Imagining MIT: Designing a Campus for the 21st Century, which was written in a single weekend while he was at a Dublin hotel. At the dedication ceremonies for the Frank Gehry-designed Stata Center in 2004, Mitchell said that schools like MIT "carry a particular responsibility to conceive of architectural projects not just as the rational allocation of resources to achieve quantifiable management goals, but also as inventive, critical contributions to our evolving culture" and that anything less would be "a betrayal of their advertised principles".

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