John Capen Brough (b. 1982: Louisville, KY, USA) grew up in Memphis, TN. In 2000, he matriculated to Princeton University, where he was a member of Butler College. During his time at Princeton, he also studied at Denmark’s International Study Program in Copenhagen and completed independent study work in Egypt and Morocco. Graduating Summa Cum Laude with a BA in Architecture in 2004, he was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa and received the Joseph Sanford Shanley ’17 Memorial Prize in Architecture as well as the William Feay Shellman Travel Grant. His thesis, The Dark Forest and the Art of Inversion in the Work of Alvar Aalto, written with the guidance of Guy Nordenson, won the Frederick Bernard White Senior Thesis Prize in Architecture from the Department of Art and Archaeology.
After graduation, he worked for Rafael Vinoly Architects and 1100: Architect in New York City over a period of two years. In 2006, he returned to school at the Yale School of Architecture to pursue his Masters in Architecture. Since attending Yale, he has served as Assistant Editor of Retrospecta 2006-2007 and worked for the Yale University Art Gallery. He has also received the George Nelson Fellowship for his proposal to study the INA-Casa program of postwar Italy.
He is the editor of Perspecta 43: Taboo - to be published in the Fall of 2010 - and he currently works for Herzog & de Meuron in New York City.