David Rifkind
Dean
David Rifkind is Dean of the College of Architecture and Planning. He views higher education as an essential form of public service, and is committed to CU Denver’s twin missions of accessibility and excellence in teaching, research, and creative activity. His work as an architectural historian has been recognized with international awards for his scholarship on interwar Italy and modern Ethiopia. His work as a designer has been recognized for its innovative approaches to environmental and social sustainability. As an academic leader, his success at promoting greater inclusivity in the student body earned the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture 2025 Diversity Achievement Award.
Dr. Rifkind previously served as director of the School of Architecture at the University of Florida and Interim Chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture + Environmental and Urban Design at Florida International University, where he also served as Associate Dean in the College of Communication, Architecture + the Arts. His efforts as an academic leader include increasing enrollment at both universities (with particular success improving demographic diversity), growing external funding for faculty research, and expanding partnerships with non-profit and governmental bodies.
Dr. Rifkind holds a Bachelor of Architecture from the Boston Architectural College, a Master of Architecture from McGill University, and PhD in Architectural History and Theory from Columbia University. His doctoral dissertation, Quadrante and the Politicization of Architectural Discourse in Fascist Italy, won the 2011 James Ackerman Prize for Architectural History from the Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio in Vicenza, and was subsequently published as The Battle for Modernism in 2012 by the CISA Palladio and Marsilio Editori. He has also won best article awards for essays published in the two flagship journals in architectural education and history, the Journal of Architectural Education ("Misprision of Precedent: Design as Creative Misreading") and the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians ("Gondar. Architecture and Urbanism for Italy’s Fascist Empire").
Dr. Rifkind curated the 2012 exhibition, Metropole/Colony: Africa and Italy, in the Wolfsonian-FIU Teaching Gallery at the Frost Art Museum, and in 2016 developed an exhibition with Professor Dawit Benti (Ethiopian Institute of Architecture and Building Construction), Contemporary Architecture in Ethiopia, which opened in Addis Ababa, Miami, and Gainesville. In 2014, Ashgate published A Critical History of Contemporary Architecture, which Dr. Rifkind co-edited with Elie G. Haddad; the book was reissued in a second printing and in a Chinese translation. He is co-editor, with Itohan Osayimwese, of the forthcoming volume Architecture of the African Diaspora in/of the United States (University Press of Florida), which was funded by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.