Rachel Paupeck is an architect, researcher, 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, writing, and public scholarship. Paupeck’s work examines how architecture and spatial experience shape memory, identity, ritual, belonging, care, and embodied life. Moving between design 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, 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 held academic appointments at Pratt Institute, The New School, Colorado College, and Colgate University, and has served as a critic or lecturer at Columbia University, Cooper Union, University of Pennsylvania, RISD, Brown University, Pratt Institute, and The New School, among others.

Through Montgomery Studios, Paupeck has led architectural, interior, installation, and experiential design projects for 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 investigates architecture’s role in mourning, remembrance, ecological care, and cultural memory. Her long-term project, The Architecture of Death, examines burial, memorial practice, ritual space, and alternative forms of commemoration, asking how design can support grief, repair, continuity, and collective meaning-making. Bringing together architectural history, material research, environmental thinking, speculative design, and ritual studies, the project considers how spaces of death might become spaces of cultural health, ecological reciprocity, and intergenerational memory.

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 her commitment to public scholarship and design discourse beyond institutional walls. The podcast treats listening, reflection, and conversation as spatial practices, asking how built environments inform our internal registrations of self, place, and collective life.

Her work has been supported by the Mrachek Fellowship Research Grant, the McShea Foundation Grant, the Faculty Collaboration Grant from Colorado College’s Creativity + Innovation Initiative, and the Exemplary Achievement in Community-Engaged Research Award from Colorado College’s Center for Community Engagement. She was also a Design Fellow at the Form Tomorrow Center for Sustainable Growth.

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