Nazia Tarannum
Adjunct Faculty
Nazia Tarannum is Adjunct Faculty with the School of Architecture and a Principal Planner at the City of Pittsburgh Planning Department.
A design professional and educator, Nazia engages critical design thinking and community engagement through architectural practice. She draws her inspiration from critical urban, social and climate justice issues of our time.
As a registered architect in Bangladesh, she practiced with Form.3 Architects and taught at the University of Asia Pacific. Since coming to the U.S., she has worked with Kohn Pedersen Fox in New York and UAM in Ohio. She has also volunteered her time for neighborhood revitalization and other urban restoration projects with Toledo Design Center in Ohio. Her master’s research focused on the search for public spaces and the revitalization of unused liminal urban voids in Dhaka. This and other graduate-level works won her the AIA Ohio Foundation Award for Academic Excellence and other design awards.
Nazia is a firm believer in the Fourth Ecology and looks for opportunities for collaboration with various professionals. From 2020-21, she co-created a video podcast series in Bangla highlighting Bangladeshi female professionals. She also designed an open platform, Boithok, for students in design disciplines in Bangladesh. Most recently, she has been working with Form.3 Architects as a Co-Curator on the Historic Preservation and Landscape Design of Old Dhaka Central Jail and Redevelopment of Surrounding Area project. She also serves as the Principal Planner for Community Planning with the DCP (Pittsburgh). Through public outreach and collaborations with other divisions and departments, she works to design and make neighborhoods accessible and sustainable.
Nazia holds an MArch from the College of Creative Arts at Miami University in Ohio and a BArch from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology in Dhaka.