Gabriel Cira

Gabriel Cira is a licensed architect based between New York City and Massachusetts. He is an associate professor in the History of Art at MassArt, where he teaches architecture and art history seminars. Gabriel’s architectural work, teaching, and research focus on historic preservation, urban history, ecology, and infrastructure. He was educated at Princeton University (MArch ‘14) and MIT (BSA ‘08), and worked internationally before starting the architecture practice ARCH CIRA in 2017. Gabriel is a longtime member of activist architecture organization The Architecture Lobby (TAL); he was a founding member of TAL’s “Cooperative Network” initiative in 2020, and has contributed to many other TAL projects and publications.

ARCH CIRA is invested in construction, details, materials, techniques, and the interactivity of the built environment and the people of the city. Specializing in historic preservation and adaptive reuse, ARCH CIRA as a professional architectural practice is toward the public dimension of space in the city and against the rush toward privatization and gentrification. In every context, ARCH CIRA works with people that are making things more public—infrastructure, institutions, places—and uses architectural tools to help envision and enable the remaking of the built environment for open-access social and public life. This involves collaborating with many types of people, often community groups, non-profit organizations, scientists, advocates and activists, artists, students, and friends, in order to build collective power and knowledge toward these larger objectives.

Industry Experience

ARCH CIRA – Built work

• AUX BOX at Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, new media gallery in the Le Corbusier-designed 1963 Carpenter Center arts building on Harvard University campus, 2025.
• Black History In Action, historic preservation of St. Augustine’s, a 1886 Black church in Cambridge MA, adaptation for use as Black cultural arts and performance space, 2019-2025.
• SUN BLOCK, shade structure and precast seating in Lafayette Square, a public urban plaza in Cambridge, MA, 2024-2025.
• EZ Weave, shade structure in Day Square, a public urban plaza in East Boston, MA, 2024.
• Zero-E Greenhouse, new 1,500 sq ft geothermal and passive greenhouse as community-use classroom and gathering space for Eastie Farm, including landscape/exterior space design, East Boston MA (with Jena Tegeler), 2021-2022.
• Bizarro Beach, architectural installation commissioned by the ICA Boston, 2019.

Exhibitions and research

• Unpaid Labor with The Architecture Lobby — Curated participation and exhibition in the main arsenal hall of the 2025 Venice Biennale of Architecture, on international political organizing within architectural practice, 2025.
• Stull & Lee: Black Architecture Vision for an Infrastructural City with James Heard, Wandy Pascoal, Julian Philips — Research-based exhibition at YouthBuild’s Designery Gallery (Roxbury, MA), supported by The Graham Foundation and Elise Jaffe + Jeffrey Brown, 2024.
• The Architects Collaborative 1945–1995: Tracing a Diffuse Architectural Authorship with James Heard and Emma Pfeiffer — Exhibition at Pinkcomma Gallery (Boston, MA) and MIT Keller Gallery (Cambridge, MA) sponsored by The Graham Foundation and Elise Jaffe + Jeffrey Brown, 2020-2022.
• The Emerald Tutu — scientific research, prototyping, advocacy, and community work around nature-based infrastructure for coastal climate resilience, 2018 – ongoing.

Publications

• The Writing on the Wall, co-authored with Daham Marapane, VOLUME 69: Stress Management, 2026
• Stubborn Materialism: Stoppages, Piles, and Blocks, Art Papers, 46.04, 2023
• High Tech Nu-Goblin Modernism, Thresholds 51, 2023
• Guerrilla Maneuvers in Architectural Preservation (co-authored with Kris Manjapra), Journal of Architectural Education 77:1, 2023
• Face to Face (in dialog with Wendy Jacob and Jeffrey Mansfield), Boston Art Review #8, 2022
• Less than Heroic (interviewed by Dan Roche), New York Review of Architecture #25, 2022
• Architectural Camouflage and the Class Dynamics of Housing, Art Papers 44.03, 2021
• Template for a Cooperative Network of Small Architecture Practices, MAS Context, 2020
• Loitering, Legibility, Disability, Art Papers online, 2019
• Spaces of Labor, Architectural Labor #2, 2019
• Performing Arts Access, Art Papers, 42.04, 2019
• Signs and Architecture, Pre-Vinylite Society Journal #1, 2018
• Blueprint for Counter-Education , Big Red & Shiny online, 2018
• Semiotic Structure as Context: Inscriptions at Harvard GSD , Big Red & Shiny online, 2018
• Lobbying for Value with Peggy Deamer / The Architecture Lobby, ARQ #97, 2017
• Reverse History, Mixed Metaphors, The A and the E, Nova Organa #1, #2, #4, 2012-2014

Awards

• 2025 Preservation Award, Cambridge Historical Commission, Black History in Action / St. Augustine’s
• 2023 BSA Design Award for Built Design Excellence: Civic and Cultural Facilities, Zero-E Greenhouse
• 2019 American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) innovation award in Sustainable Engineering, The Emerald Tutu

Professional Affiliations

• Registered Architect (RA), 2018 – present
• The Architecture Lobby (TAL), 2017 – present

Connect

• arch-cira.com
• Instagram: @arch_cira

Professional experience

• 2017 – present – ARCH CIRA, Cambridge MA
• 2015 – 2017 – EJA, Cambridge MA
• 2014 – 2015 – Isozaki, Aoki & Associates, Tokyo
• 2009 – 2011 – R&Sie(n) Architects, Paris
• 2008 – 2009 – dECOi, Cambridge MA
• 2007 – 2008 – Höweler+Yoon, Boston MA