James F. Kerestes, RA, LEED

James F. Kerestes is a registered Architect and Assistant Professor of Architecture at Thomas Jefferson University’s College of Architecture, Design & Engineering. He holds a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Syracuse University and a Post-Professional Master of Architecture degree from Pratt Institute. Prior to his current position, he has taught digital media and emergent technologies at Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Ball State University. 

His current research focuses on identifying and exploring the latent potential within tools and building typologies to instigate novel architectural design inquiries. This emphasis explores methods for engaging tools as mediums where authorial exchanges lead to new opportunities in design communication, architectural storytelling, user interaction, digital fabrication, and construction.

In 2023, James Kerestes co-edited the book Architecture, Film, and the In-Between: Spatio-Cinematic Betwixt with Vahid Vahdat. The book looks at the cinematic representation of architectural in-betweenness, as well as the in-between spaces within the architectural structure of films. The following year in 2024, James co-edited A Purple Architecture: Design in the Age of the Physical-Virtual Continuum with fellow editors and collaborators Ebrahim Poustinchi and Vahid Vahdat. A Purple Architecture is an edited collection of essays and projects investigating Purpleness, as a quality independent from the virtual and physical, the material and immaterial, and mundane and exotic. The book aims to advance the discourse around new technological spatial mediums to blend different modes of reality through various scales and with degrees of physicality and virtuality.