Walter Chatham, FAAR, LEED AP was born in Washington, D.C. in 1952. He studied painting at the New York Studio School and the Philadelphia College of Art before receiving a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Maryland in 1978. He did post-graduate work at the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, where he was assistant to Peter Eisenman, FAIA. Chatham received a mid-career Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome in 1989.
Chatham has been associated for the past thirty years with Duany Plater-Zyberk Company, who founded the New Urbanism movement in America with their groundbreaking town of Seaside, Florida. In this capacity he has participated in numerous new town design “charettes”, championing the dual causes of modern architecture and traditional urban planning. He has also been active in the rehabilitation of numerous buildings in the SoHo District of New York, Downtown Providence, Rhode Island and the Miami Design District, where the firm has renovated or built over one million square feet of retail space during the past ten years.
Walter Chatham Architect (WCA) was founded in 1986. WCA has received numerous awards; including two National American Institute of Architects Distinguished Architecture Awards - one for the Ruskin House in Seaside, Florida and one for the Delta and Pine Land Company Guesthouse in Scott, Mississippi. The firm has designed many hotel, office, apartment and condominium projects around the world.
WCA was an early participant in the environmental design movement and has completed a number of projects which utilize state-of-the-art energy management and conservation strategies. The firm aspires to design all of its projects to LEED standards.
Chatham was a long-time Co-Chairman of the National Academy of Design and is a Board Member of both the Architectural League of New York and the former head of the City of Hudson New York Planning Board.
In addition to his professional activities, Walter is writing two books - Villain's Villas, which explores the relationships between evil people and their domestic arrangements; and Love Nest, which traces the development of a culturally significant but largely ignored building type in the 19th and 20th centuries. He is also the co-creator of an up-coming BBC documentary series titled 95, which will chronicle the way that the Interstate Highway System has been used as a tool to enforce “soft-apartheid” in the United States.
