Personal Statement

Maurice Cox is an urban designer, architectural educator at the University of Virginia, School of Architecture and former mayor of Charlottesville, Virginia. He most recently served as Director of Design for the National Endowment for the Arts where he presided over the largest expansion of direct grants to the design fields, oversaw the Governors' Institute on Community Design, the Your Town Rural Institute, and the Mayors’ Institute on City Design. To strengthen urban design implementation by MICD alumni mayors Cox developed the MICD Technical Assistance Workshops and assisted in the creation of the NEA’s MICD’s 25th Anniversary Initiative celebrating the program’s 25-year history of transforming communities through design. Cox served as a Charlottesville City Councilor for six years before becoming the mayor of that city, from 2002-2004. His experience merging architecture, politics and design education led to his being named one of “20 Masters of Design” in 2004 by Fast Company Business Magazine. A founding partner of RBGC Architecture, Research and Urbanism from 1996-2006 the firm received national acclaim for its partnerships with communities traditionally underserved by architecture. Their design for a New Rural Village in Bayview, Virginia received numerous national design awards as well as being featured on CBS’s "60 Minutes" and in the documentary film "This Black Soil". A recipient of the 2009 Edmund Bacon Prize, the Harvard University Graduate School of Design 2004-05 Loeb Fellowship and the 2006 John Hejduk Award for Architecture, Cox received his architectural education from the Cooper Union School of Architecture.