Biography

Bruce Mau studied at the Ontario College of Art & Design in Toronto, but left prior to graduation in order to join the Fifty Fingers design group in 1980. He stayed there for two years, before crossing the ocean for a brief sojourn at Pentagram in the UK. Returning to Toronto a year later, he became part of the founding triumvirate of Public Good Design and Communications. Soon after, the opportunity to design Zone 1|2 presented itself and he left to establish his own studio, Bruce Mau Design, Inc. Bruce remained the design director of Zone Books until 2004 since that first publication, to which he has added duties as co-editor of Swerve Editions, a Zone imprint. From 1991 to 1993, he also served as Creative Director of I.D. magazine.

In 1995, Bruce Mau received considerable attention for the award-winning and critically acclaimed S,M,L,XL. Designed and conceived by Bruce Mau and Rem Koolhaas, the 1300-page compendium of projects and texts was generated by Pritzker Prize-winning Rem Koolhaas' Office for Metropolitan Architecture.

From 1996 to 1999 Bruce Mau was the Associate Cullinan Professor at Rice University School of Architecture in Houston. He has also been a thesis advisor at the University of Toronto's Faculty of Architecture, Landscape & Design; artist in residence at California Institute of the Arts; and a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. He has lectured widely across North America and Europe, and currently serves on the International Advisory Committee of the Wexner Center in Columbus, Ohio.

In addition, Bruce is an Honorary Fellow of the Ontario College of Art and Design and a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Art. He was awarded the Chrysler Award for Design Innovation in 1998, and the Toronto Arts Award for Architecture and Design in 1999. In 2001 he received an Honorary Doctor of Letters from the Emily Carr Institute of Art + Design.

Building on the practice of learning by doing, Bruce Mau founded the Institute without Boundaries in 2003, a studio-based postgraduate program in partnership with George Brown - Toronto

City College. The IwB, formed out of the conviction that the future demands a new breed of designer, became the engine to produce Massive Change, an ambitious, multi-venue exhibition on the possibilities of design culture. Massive Change is also a book, an online forum, an education model as well as a Visionaries Symposium. The Massive Change exhibition opened to critical acclaim at the Vancouver Art Gallery in 2003, and has since toured to the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.

The objective of Massive Change is to start a global movement of people committed to supporting a new vision of sustainable life on the planet. Envisioned as a collective project, Massive Change has become the optimistic design engine for the Bruce Mau Design practice. Well respected for broadening the idea of design, Bruce has worked with countries, such as Guatemala and Denmark to envision the future of their country.