Following a global search and rigorous selection process of a year, premier city-based planning school CEPT University has appointed Anne Feenstra, a Dutch architect and recipient of the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture 2012, as the Dean of the Faculty of Architecture.

Having previously visited CEPT in 2009 to launch an exhibition about future mapping of cities, he has taken lectures twice at CEPT and will be joining the institute this week.

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CEPT University is very pleased to begin the new year by announcing that Mr. Anne Feenstra, Dutch architect and recipient of the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture 2012, has been appointed as the Dean of Faculty of Architecture for a term of three years starting 5 January 2015. The University would also like to thank Prof. Pratyush Shankar for the terrific job he has done in stewarding the Faculty of Architecture while the search for new Dean was ongoing. During the period that he served as Acting Dean, a number of transformational changes were undertaken at the Faculty. While some of these changes were necessitated by the overall restructuring underway at the University, many were initiated based on his vision for where the Faculty needed to go.

To initiate search for the new Dean of Faculty of Architecture, a Search and Selection Committee, comprising Bimal Patel, Krishna Shastri, Darshini Mahadevia, Christopher Benninger and Pankaj Vir Gupta was tasked with the selecting the most suited candidate for the position. The committee first met with faculty members of FA to hear their views on the role of the Dean and their suggestions on potential candidates. The committee also met with members of the Faculty of Architecture’s wider community. Following this a global call for applications was conducted with outreach to all alumni, national newspapers and in media of prominent institutions such as ACSA and RIBA. After a long and deliberative process, the committee has unanimously recommended the appointment of Mr. Anne Feenstra.

Anne (47) is a laureate of the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture 2012 (Paris) and is well known for his architectural work in Afghanistan, India and Nepal. In all three contexts, he has worked with local communities to redefine contemporary architecture to make it more inclusive and sustainable.  He also has ten years of working experience in Europe.  After completing his Masters of Architecture at Delft University in 1993 he worked for five years in The Netherlands and five years for Will Alsop (London).

Anne also has considerable teaching experience.  After a short teaching stint in 2003 at the Academy of Architecture in Groningen (Netherlands), he taught for four and a half years at the Architecture Department of Kabul University. Together with his Afghan colleagues, he re-wrote the curriculum as the existing one dated from the 1970s.  While in Kabul, Anne set up AFIR architects & planners. Through this, he and his colleagues worked with artists, bio-diversity specialists and foremen on projects all over Afghanistan.

In 2009 and 2010 Anne taught at the School of Planning and Architecture in Delhi. He established ‘arch i’, a research based platform for exploring design. With his Indian team, he designed award winning maps and books, comfortable high altitude buildings, responsible eco-tourism architecture and schoolchildren programs ‘Learning by Playing’. The work done by Arch i was selected for exhibition at the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam  ‘Making City’ in 2012.

While his Afghan colleagues continued AFIR under the name NEWAFIR, Anne moved to Nepal to set up Sustainable Mountain Architecture in Kathmandu in 2013. In May 2014, seven of Anne projects were exhibited at the Architecture Manifesto exhibition ‘Re-enchant the World’ in the Trocadero (Paris). They included the Learning Centre, built at an altitude of 4200 meters in Ladakh, the Maternity Waiting Homes project for UNICEF and the National Museum in Kabul. Also on show were two Afghan National Park projects that he and his team had worked on in Bamyan province and the Wakhan corridor, one of them being the well known ‘House with Dancing Windows’.

Anne has also lectured and exhibited his work in Canada, France, China, Turkey, Rwanda, Kenya, Germany, Brazil and The Netherlands. He first came to CEPT in 2009 and has twice lectured here.

As the new Dean of Faculty of Architecture, Anne Feenstra has been charged with first understanding CEPT as an institution - in a deeper, more personal manner - so that he can uphold and strengthen CEPT's core values and traditions. He has also been mandated to refocus, strengthen and expand teaching, learning and research at the Faculty.  To do this, he will work with full-time and visiting faculty members to develop a strategy for: improving the quality and rigor of teaching; improving student learning and work culture; expanding programs, and; invigorating and deepening research to make research at CEPT more practically relevant and theoretically rigorous.