Adam Dayem is an architect and educator based in Brooklyn, New York. He is the principal of actual / office, an architecture and design studio founded in 2004. a/o takes on a wide variety of work including residential, exhibit design, furniture design, and research projects. a/o has won awards for theoretical research and architectural projects including Second Place in the American Architects 2017 Building of the Year Competition and a Chicago Athenaeum Museum of Architecture and Design 2019 American Architecture Award. Dayem received a Bachelor of Arts in architecture from the University of California Berkeley and a Master of Architecture from Columbia University where he was awarded the McKim Prize honoring the year’s most outstanding graduate in Architecture. He subsequently worked at Bernard Tschumi Architects as a designer on competitions and projects around the world including the New Acropolis Museum in Athens, Greece, the Blue Condo Tower in New York City, and the Alesia Museum in Alesia, France. Dayem is currently Assistant Professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute where he teaches architectural design studios and visual studies classes while also serving as Director of Summer Career Discovery Program and Director of Publications for the school. His current research focuses on the nature of representation in contemporary architectural design and its evolving capacities to produce conceptual and formal novelty. He has previously taught architecture and design at Pratt Institute, University of Pennsylvania, The New School for Design, and Columbia University. He is a registered architect in New York State.