Jonathan Kline
Jonathan Kline is Professor of Practice at Carnegie Mellon Architecture. Through over a decade of teaching and research at CMU, Jonathan has explored the future of cities with a generation of students. Since 2002 Jonathan has taught upper-level undergraduate urban design studios, building on the public interest design legacy of David Lewis who initiated urban design education at Carnegie Mellon in the 1960s. Jonathan is a core faculty member in the Master of Urban Design program and helped launch it and shape its curriculum. In recent years Jonathan’s studio teaching has focused on growing global cities, and his graduate and undergraduate urban design studios have traveled to the Middle East, Africa and Europe. He has also taught second-year design studio, undergraduate thesis and seminars in urban design theory. Jonathan has also worked on research projects at the Remaking Cities Institute and the Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry.
As practitioner Jonathan is principal and founder of Studio for Spatial Practice, an innovative award winning design firm with a multi-disciplinary approach to architecture, urban design, landscape architecture and art. He leads the urban design work of the practice. His professional projects range from guiding the creation of mixed-use developments integrated with transit, to working with citizens to creatively revitalize urban neighborhoods, to imagining how to transform urban mobility for the twenty-first century. The work of Studio for Spatial Practice has won numerous awards and has been featured in exhibits at the Venice Biennale Architettura and the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum. Jonathan previously worked with Urban Design Associates on neighborhood master-planning projects in cities around the United States and in Europe.
In addition to teaching and practice Jonathan is also a trained artist, creating paintings and drawings that visualize the changing spatial and social networks of cities. Jonathan was born in Pittsburgh and received a Bachelor of Architecture (B.Arch) from Carnegie Mellon University and MFA Painting & Drawing from The Pennsylvania State University.
PROFESSIONAL AFFILIATION
Fall 2025 Teaching
Praxis I unpacks architecture’s entanglements with extraction and capital to explore emergent models for transformative socio-ecological praxis using Just Transitions/Transition Design as a prompt and theoretical underpinning. It considers architecture as a broad framework for Worldmaking across political, social, and ecological contexts to locate “praxis” in the context of architectural agency and design ethics.
This course explores core urban design methods and theories organized into three themes intended to give students a foundational understanding of urban design, examine key critiques of urbanization, and explore emerging modes of design agency.
Spring 2025 Teaching
Commoning the City is a yearlong research-based-design thesis studio focused on social justice and community-led urban transformations, positioning design as an agent of change that can support citizens claiming their Right to the City.