Rate My Professor Ermal Shpuza

Ermal Shpuza serves as Professor of Architecture at Kennesaw State University’s College of Architecture and Construction Management. Born in Shkodër, Albania, in 1969, he obtained his Diploma in Architecture from the Polytechnic University of Tirana, an MSc in Advanced Architectural Studies from the Bartlett, University College London, and a PhD in Architecture from the Georgia Institute of Technology, with a major in Spatial Morphology and a minor in Design Computing. Shpuza joined Kennesaw State University in 2005 and was promoted to full Professor of Architecture in March 2021. He concurrently serves as Visiting Professor in the Department of Art History at Emory University and was a Research Assistant at the Georgia Institute of Technology from 1998 to 2006. His honors include Sustainability Fellow, Global Fellow for the Year of Greece at KSU, and Visiting Faculty Fellow at Emory University.

Shpuza teaches courses including Urban Design and Planning Theory, Space Lab, Environmental Technology 2, Environmental Technology 3, and Architecture Studio 8: Urban Lab. His research interests encompass spatial morphology, history of urban form, complex systems in cities, environmental design, and workplace design, focusing on the evolution of street networks, urban block shapes, floorplate geometry, and configurational descriptions of urban form using space syntax and biological allometric methods. Key publications include “The shape and size of urban blocks” (2022, Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science), “Transformation of urban form in Shkodër during the Ottoman period” (2021, Journal of Design for Resilience in Architecture and Planning), “Allometry in the syntax of street networks: Evolution of Adriatic and Ionian coastal cities 1800–2010” (2014, Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design), “A coupled configurational description of boundary shape based on distance and directionality” (2011, AIEDAM: Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing), “The effect of floorplate shape upon office layout integration” (2008, Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design), and multiple papers in proceedings of International Space Syntax Symposia from 2001 to 2024. His work examines the interplay between shape, circulation, and urban growth patterns.