Earl G. Jackson IV, AIA

Earl Jackson is the founder of IF6, an accomplished multi-disciplinary team of architects and urban designers and a new kind of design practice. Prior to starting IF6, Earl spent eight years designing for Skidmore Owings & Merrill, three years working under Michael Graves, and four years in high end small office New York City architecture firms. In his time as Associate Director at SOM, Earl led the office’s practice of Urban Design in New York where he designed and coordinated the work for more than 30 projects around the world including: New cities in China, New Townships and Slum Redevelopment projects in India, Post-industrial Waterfronts in New York, Malaysia, Singapore, and Korea, New Waterfront Districts in the Middle East, Transit Oriented Development and Smart Growth projects in both American and International ‘Edge Cities’, and Strategic Planning and restorative landscape design at the Air Force Academy, Columbia University, and the University of Puerto Rico.



His extensive travel and work in some of the world’s most exciting and rapidly changing cities earned him the privilege of speaking at the APA National Convention in 2009 entitled “Influence of Culture, Climate, and Geography on Urban Identity: Master Planning approaches for the Eastern Europe, Middle East, India, and China” He is a frequent speaker at New York’s Center for Architecture and has lectured around the world on architecture and some of the most challenging issues facing our evolving cities and ecologies. Earl is an active Adjunct Associate Professor of Architecture at Columbia University’s GSAPP, where he teaches Urban Design Studio to international students in the MSAUD program. He has taught second year architectural design studio at the New Jersey Institute of Technology’s School of Architecture, and has made contributions as guest critic at Harvard, Yale, CUNY, and Parsons.



In recent years, Earl has sharpened special skill set negotiating on behalf of compact development and sustainable urban growth around the world. He is often cast as the mediator between government initiatives for cities and private property holdings’ aspirations for development. Earl sat on the ad hoc committee for the Downtown Alliance’s the Redevelopment of Water Street in Manhattan and has assisted government officials in Russia with plans to maintain compact transit-oriented development in the face of Post-Soviet and post-industrial tendencies toward sprawl. He was recently named to the Clinton Foundation’s Climate Positive Cities Initiative after years of designing one of their pilot projects in Ahmedabad, India. Earl was honored in 2009 as a recipient of NJIT’s Alumni Achievement Award for his work in Architecture and Urban Design and is now very excited to start a new relationship with the Huffington Post.