Cathy Simon

Cathy Simon is an architect and a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects whose practice has spanned five decades, focusing on transformative design at all scales. Her award-winning work includes design for higher and secondary education, civic and commercial buildings, reinvention of historic structures, waterfront projects, and urban planning schemes for numerous post-industrial waterfront sites in and around San Francisco. She is the founder of SMWM, a celebrated women-owned...See more

Cathy Simon is an architect and a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects whose practice has spanned five decades, focusing on transformative design at all scales. Her award-winning work includes design for higher and secondary education, civic and commercial buildings, reinvention of historic structures, waterfront projects, and urban planning schemes for numerous post-industrial waterfront sites in and around San Francisco. She is the founder of SMWM, a celebrated women-owned architecture and urban design practice that opened offices in San Francisco and New York during the mid-1980s. In 1999, after fifteen years of practice, SMWM became the youngest firm to be honored with the AIACA Firm Award, which the American Institute of Architects awarded for the consistent production of distinguished architecture. Her firm later joined Perkins + Will, where she served as a senior consulting design principal before retiring in 2018. Having gained expertise in the revitalization and resiliency of the post-industrial waterfront, she is currently an urban design and architecture consultant to a multi-firm engineering team developing the Waterfront Resiliency Program for the Port of San Francisco. Educated at Wellesley College and the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD), she has served as the President of the GSD Alumni Council and spent several terms on the GSD Visiting Committee. She has taught architecture at both Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley, where, in 1996, she was the Howard Friedman Distinguished Professor of Architecture in Practice. See less