Apply to the School of Architecture

Danniely Staback

Assistant Professor Adjunct

Danniely Staback Rodríguez is a Puerto Rican designer and academic. Her research centers on the critical embrace of fabrication and design technologies as vehicles for both cultural awareness and creative expansion of the modern and the vernacular. Her teaching seeks to problematize the consequences of the built object, and its transcendence in our social interactions as it folds in production chains,  exchanges of value, and the promise of our collective fulfillment. 

She obtained her bachelor's degree in Environmental Design from the University of Puerto Rico School of Architecture (‘13), where she graduated Summa Cum Laude. She was admitted to MIT SA+P for a master’s in architecture as a Graduate Fellow, and served as fab-lab and teaching assistant. After graduating (‘18), she became a Teaching Fellow for graduate and undergraduate studios and workshops in the Department of Architecture. She has been involved in various design-build projects, including a post-hurricane reconstruction effort in Puerto Rico that she continues to develop. She received the Pierce / Emerson Fellowship, the Schlossman Research Travel Award for her thesis, the Alpha Rho Chi medal for leadership and merit, and also obtained a Kaufman Teaching Certificate.

She has accrued a broad range of experience through her work at Muuaaa Design Studio, Díaz Paunetto Arquitectos, Block Research Group, Snøhetta, MIT, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, and Kennedy & Violich Architecture, where she worked on the MIT Hayden Library renovation and courtyard. She is currently an adjunct lecturer at RISD Architecture and a designer at Studio Enée. She is also part of ResilientSEE-PR, the Voluntariado de Ingenieros y Profesionales de Puerto Rico, and sits on the advisory board of PRoTECHOS.

Staback's CV is available here. 

  • Founded by inventor, industrialist and philanthropist Peter Cooper in 1859, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art offers education in art, architecture and engineering, as well as courses in the humanities and social sciences.

  • “My feelings, my desires, my hopes, embrace humanity throughout the world,” Peter Cooper proclaimed in a speech in 1853. He looked forward to a time when, “knowledge shall cover the earth as waters cover the great deep.”

  • From its beginnings, Cooper Union was a unique institution, dedicated to founder Peter Cooper's proposition that education is the key not only to personal prosperity but to civic virtue and harmony.

  • Peter Cooper wanted his graduates to acquire the technical mastery and entrepreneurial skills, enrich their intellects and spark their creativity, and develop a sense of social justice that would translate into action.