Urbana Studio

Founded by Rob Ley in 2002, Urbana Studio operates at various scales within the built environment. The studio's projects and continuing explorations engage innovative material and formal approaches to develop environments that respond to human experience.

The studio’s history of experimental work includes installations at the Storefront for Art and Architecture (New York), the Taubman Museum of Art (Roanoke, VA), Materials & Applications (Los Angeles), Florida State University (Tallahassee, FL), and metropolitan arts commissions including the City of Los Angeles, the City of Seattle and Kansas City.

Urbana has been awarded several notable grants including a Graham Foundation grant, multiple AIA research grants, and an IDEC Special Projects grant. In 2010, Urbana was presented with the Best Storefront Design award by the Municipal Art Society of New York for Reef at the Storefront for Art and Architecture. Other recipients that year included Morphosis and Diller Scofidio + Renfro.


Rob Ley currently teaches graduate and undergraduate design studios and seminars at the University of Southern California (USC) and at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc). Ley has lectured and exhibited extensively on the topics of architecture, technology and innovation for the public sphere at institutions including the Cooper Union (New York), Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design (Los Angeles), Virginia Tech School of Architecture (Blacksburg, VA), American Institute Vienna (Vienna, Austria), and the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design (Milwaukee, WI). Prior to founding Urbana, Ley worked as Project Manager for Randall Stout Architects, Senior Designer for Cliff Garten Studio, and Designer for Dmac Architecture. He holds a Master of Architecture from University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) and a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.