Lonn Combs

Lonn Combs is a practicing architect and educator in New York City and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. He is the 2011-2012 Gorman P. Stevens Rome Prize in Architecture, American Academy in Rome where he is currently based while developing an architectural research project entitled New Vectors of Liquid Stone: Speculations on the Material Innovations of Pier Luigi Nervi and the Roman Tradition. Lonn Combs is the co-founder with Rona Easton of EASTON+COMBS, an award winning, internationally recognized architectural office that operates as a laboratory for innovative building strategies at the intersection of material practice, digital methodology and applied architectural research.

Lonn Combs studied architecture at the University of Kentucky in the United States, where he received his first professional degree in Architecture in 1992. In 2001 he received a post-professional degree at Columbia University in New York City. Lonn Combs co-founded EASTON+COMBS in 2004 with over ten years of professional experience in Germany, China, and the U.S. He received professional licensure in Germany in 1996 and in the U.S. in 2002. Lonn Combs and Rona Easton were invited to participate in the MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program in 2009-2010. Lonn Combs was awarded in 2008 the League Prize by the Architecture League in New York City and received in 2010-2011 Independent Projects Awards from the Architecture, Planning and Design Program of the New York State Council on the Arts. A full grant was awarded to support ongoing research and application into lightweight structural membranes for public space implementation.  

EASTON+COMBS received Design Merit awards in the AIANY Design Awards 2010, 2011 and the 2012 programs. Recently they were awarded in the biannual New Practices New York 2010 competition with the 'highest honor' within a field of seven new offices recognized as important emerging and innovative practices in New York City. In tandem with the founding of EASTON+COMBS, Lonn began teaching design studios and has taught at Pratt Institute, City College of New York, and Cornell University. He has served as the Assistant Chair and then the Acting Chair of Undergraduate Architecture at Pratt Institute from 2007 to 2010. Lonn Combs is currently Assistant Professor in Architecture at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY.