Rachel Paupeck is an architect, researcher, educator, and founder of Montgomery Studios, an interdisciplinary design practice based in New York City. Founded in 2014, Montgomery works across architecture, interiors, installation, experiential design, research, writing, and public scholarship. Paupeck’s work examines how architecture and spatial experience shape memory, identity, ritual, belonging, care, and embodied life. Moving between practice, research, and cultural production, she approaches architecture as both a material discipline and a cultural practice: a way of making visible the emotional, social, ecological, and historical forces embedded in the built environment.

Paupeck is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at Colgate University, where she has helped establish a new undergraduate Architecture program. She has also held academic appointments at Pratt Institute, The New School, and Colorado College, and has lectured or served as a critic at Columbia University, Cooper Union, the University of Pennsylvania, RISD, Brown University, Pratt Institute, and The New School.

Through Montgomery Studios, Paupeck has led architectural, interior, installation, and experiential projects for clients and cultural institutions including Art Basel, Dior, Nike, the Whitney Museum, Friends of the High Line, Mercedes-Benz, Rolls-Royce, Tommy Hilfiger, Emporio Armani, L’Amico, The Vine, The Luggage Room, and Jungle Bird. Her work has been featured in Architectural Digest, Vogue, CNBC, and RISD Alumni Magazine.

Her current research focuses on architecture’s relationship to mourning, remembrance, ritual, ecological care, and cultural memory. Her long-term project, The Architecture of Death, brings together architectural history, material research, environmental thinking, public art, participatory practice, and ritual studies to investigate new forms of burial, memorialization, and collective remembrance. Through permanent and temporary installations, objects, workshops, walking practices, and public programs, the project asks how design can support grief, continuity, ecological reciprocity, and shared cultural meaning.

Paupeck is also the creator and host of Between Four Columns, a podcast and public research platform exploring how space shapes feeling, meaning, and belonging. Through conversations with artists, architects, scholars, designers, and cultural producers, the project extends architectural discourse beyond institutional settings and considers listening, reflection, and conversation as forms of spatial and cultural inquiry.

Paupeck holds a Master of Architecture from the Rhode Island School of Design and a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from Smith College, and completed the Sheridan Center Teaching Program at Brown University.