SAH Fellows

2025 SAH Fellow

Stephen Tobriner

Stephen Tobriner (pictured) is an architectural historian, educator, and archivist with a significant record of scholarly achievement, mentorship, and public engagement.

Tobriner received his Ph.D. from Harvard University (1972) specializing in the history of architecture and cities in Spain, Italy, and Latin America 1600-1750 and Mesoamerican architecture. His graduate paper, "The Fertile Mountain: An investigation of Cerro Gordo's importance to the town plan and iconography of Teotihuacan," Mesa Redonda (Sociedad Mexicana de Antropología, Mexico), 1972, pp. 103-115, provided an important and hitherto unnoticed iconographic key to understanding the ancient city of Teotihuacan in Mexico.

He taught the history of architecture and urbanism in the Architecture Department of the College of Environmental Design, University of California, Berkeley, from 1971 until 2006.  Along with Spiro Kostof, Norma Evenson, Dell Upton, and Kathleen James-Chakraborty, he pioneered a revolutionary survey course in the late 1970s which included the architecture, urbanism and landscape history of the world.  For his teaching of this course and his direction of its graduate teaching assistants he was awarded the University of California, Berkeley, Outstanding Faculty GSI Mentoring Award in 2004. Tobriner also taught courses in Mesoamerican architecture, Baroque architecture, cities in disaster, the city of San Francisco, the history of structures, and socially responsible architecture.  In the Engineering Department he team-taught a course entitled Renaissance Engineers alongside a structural engineer, a mechanical engineer, and an historian of science. He also taught Baroque architecture as a visiting professor in the Architecture Department of the University of Palermo, Sicily, and was a member of the Italian Department of the University of California, Berkeley. 

From 1973 to 1997 Tobriner was the curator of the College of Environmental Design Documents Collection, later to become the CED Archives. He directed, catalogued, supervised patrons, collected new materials, preserved accessions, and publicized one of the most extensive architectural and landscape archives in the western United States.

Tobriner holds a long fascination with the politics, sociology, and technology of earthquake-resistant engineering. He has published numerous articles and two books on the history of earthquake-resistant construction.

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Past Fellows of the Society of Architectural Historians