Principal
MASS Design Group
Justin Brown believes in design’s potential to address seemingly impossible challenges. As a Co-founder and Principal at MASS Design Group, Justin co-leads the Fringe Cities Design Lab that seeks to harness the unique assets—physical infrastructure, cultural heritage, and local leadership—of smaller cities to propel their revitalization. Since 2018 he has operated a storefront design center on Main Street in Poughkeepsie that works to foster collaborative partnerships between young people, civic organizations, and public leaders, and to build spaces that promote economic development, youth empowerment, and environmental resilience.
Justin leads research on disinvested mid-size American cities and uses community-engaged design practices to unlock capital that will transform existing liabilities into future assets. This type of work includes projects like The Northside Hub with Scenic Hudson, who is credited with launching the modern grassroots environmental movement, to transform the Historic Standard Gage Factory into a new community hub through brownfield remediation, historic preservation, and carbon-positive transformation.
Justin has led a large number of MASS’s projects including as project architect for the Equal Justice Initiative’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice– the United States’ first memorial dedicated to the legacies of racial terror. The Dallas Morning News declared this, “The greatest work of architecture of the 21st Century”.
Before joining MASS, Justin led award-winning projects at Gensler in Washington DC, Perez APC in New Orleans, and Toshiko Mori Architect in New York. He has served as a guest lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, MIT’s School of Architecture and Planning, the University of Toronto, and Dartmouth College.
Justin holds a Master of Architecture from Harvard University and a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania, where he graduated summa cum laude.
