Galen Cranz

Galen Cranz is a designer, a consultant, and a Professor of the Graduate School in Architecture at the University of California at Berkeley, where she taught social and cultural approaches to architecture and urban design, and established the field of Body Conscious Design, which she taught for 30 years.

She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Chicago and was certified as a teacher of the Alexander Technique mid-career in New York. Cranz has lectured widely on her perspective on Body Conscious Design and taught her unique approach at craft schools in the US and abroad. Her research on the chair has attracted print and media attention nationally and internationally. The Chair: Rethinking Culture, Body, and Design (Norton 1998) received a 2004 Achievement Award from the Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA).

As a designer she has been part of significant park design competition teams for Spectacle Island, Boston Inner Harbor; Olympia Fields, Chicago; Tschumi’s Parc de LaVillette in Paris, and lead designer for and winner of the St. Paul Cityscape competition. She holds two US patents for body-conscious bathtub and chair designs. In 2005-2007 she designed and built a residence for the elderly following universal design principles.