Born in La Jolla, California in 1970, Tom Wiscombe is a licensed architect living in Los Angeles. He is founder and principal of Tom Wiscombe Design (formerly EMERGENT), an internationally recognized design office operating at the forefront of contemporary design. His work stands out in terms of its synthesis of form, pattern, color, and technology into singular, irreducible contructions.
Wiscombe has developed an international reputation through winning competition entries, exhibitions of work at major cultural institutions, and publications worldwide. His work is part of the permanent collection of the FRAC Centre Paris, the Art Institute of Chicago, MoMA San Francisco, and MoMA New York. ICON Magazine, in its May 2009 issue, named Wiscombe one of the “top 20 architects in the world who are making the future and transforming the way we work”. In 2011, Wiscombe was interviewed By Tom Dyckhoff for the UK television show "The Secrets of buildings" along with Rem Koolhaas and Frank Gehry.
Wiscombe is a senior faculty member at the Southern California Institute of Architecture. He teaches design in the M.Arch. II and EST programs and is Applied Studies Coordinator, in charge of curriculum building and faculty recruitment. In the Fall of 2012, Wiscombe will hold the Louis I. Kahn Visiting Assistant Professorship at Yale University.
Previously, Wiscombe worked for Coop Himmelb(l)au, where he was the right hand of Principal Wolf Prix for over 10 years. Notably, he was Chief Designer for BMW Welt, Munich, known as one of the most important works of architecture of the 21st century.
Tom began his career as an intern at NASA's Goddard Spaceflight Center, where his father is Chief Scientist.
