Betsy West
Betsy West became Professor Emeritus in the School of Architecture in 2025.
Betsy West served as Associate Professor in the David R. Ravin School of Architecture. She received her Master of Architecture degree from Yale University and practiced professionally with several firms, including The Freelon Group before joining the faculty at UNC Charlotte in 1998. She is a licensed architect in North Carolina.
Her scholarship and teaching focus on the relationship of architecture to its context, issues of diversity in the profession, and humanitarian design processes and projects. Her work in these realms explores the physical, cultural, historic, political, pragmatic and poetic aspects of design as they combine to create varied conditions of wastelands, borderlands and Homelands.
West has taught graduate and undergraduate studios across the curriculum and has developed several seminars, including Humanitarian Design: Small-Scale Mediation in a Big-Scale World; Wastelands Borderlands Homelands; and Everything Reverberates: Ernest Hemingway, Edward Hopper, Louis Kahn. She has also taught numerous courses focused on writing in the discipline.
Currently she is working on a book about diversity, equity, inclusion and justice in architecture, forthcoming from Princeton Architectural Press, Spring 2024.