Jeff Balmer is an associate professor at the David R Ravin School of Architecture at UNC Charlotte. His scholarship engages the history of modernist and contemporary architecture in Italy, foundations design pedagogy, and the history and practice of the architectural diagram. He is nearing completion of the Third Edition of Diagramming the Big Idea: Methods for Architectural Composition (co-authored with Michael T. Swisher, Routledge, 2025), and is working towards completion of Luigi Moretti: Modern Roman (Routledge, 2026).
Balmer’s teaching focuses on the architecture and urban history of the city of Rome, design studio, and postwar cultural history. He has led international study programs for almost 30 years, including the University of Waterloo and Iowa State University programs in Rome. In 2018, he inaugurated UNC Charlotte’s only faculty-led semester abroad program. Since 2022, he has directed the Rome + Istanbul semester program, providing RSoA students with a capstone academic experience in their final undergraduate semester.
Balmer leads the annual SoA Rome + Istanbul program for 4th-year architecture students.
Balmer has received the 2021 Outstanding Peer-Reviewed Research Award for “Best Paper” from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture for his research, “Marble & Lead: Aldo Moro, Luigi Moretti, and the Bunker Courtroom of the Foro Mussolini.”
In Diagramming the Big Idea, Jeffrey Balmer and Michael T. Swisher introduce the fundamentals of design thinking by illustrating how architects use diagrams to clarify their understanding of both specific architectural projects and principles of form and order.
