Michael Mehaffy is  President of Structura Naturalis Inc. (DBA Tectics), his project consulting firm.  He is also co-founder and Research Associate  of the Centre for Environmental Structure - Europe, a research centre founded by Dr. Christopher Alexander, Emeritus Professor at The University of California, Berkeley, and Visiting Scholar at the University of Cambridge, England.  Dr. Alexander has been responsible for a number of seminal texts in planning and architecture, including Notes on the Synthesis of Form, A City is Not A Tree, and A Pattern Language.  The centre's current focus is research into advanced forms of locally adaptive, "generative" codes, and their relation to traditional codes and building processes. 

Michael was also formerly Director of Education for The Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment in London, where he founded the Foundation’s highly-regarded graduate and professional education programme, described in the Architects’ Journal (UK) as “highly intelligent inquiries into key urban issues.” The programme offers conferences and intensive short courses in many of the hottest issues of the built environment today, including sustainable practice, planning reform, local involvement, heritage-led regeneration, urban coding, and more.  Its partners include the Royal Institute of British Architects, the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, and other leading UK and international universities, agencies and organisations.

Michael has lectured and written across Europe and the US on architecture and planning, and personally designed and built many projects.  He has served as project manager and co-designer of a number of innovative new mixed-use communities in the US, including the transit-oriented community of Orenco Station in Portland, Oregon, described in the New York Times as “perhaps the most interesting experiment in New Urbanist planning anywhere in the country.” He studied 20th Century art and music at the California Institute of the Arts before doing graduate work in philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin, and architecture at the University of California at Berkeley.   

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