Robert E. Somol Jr. is an architectural theorist and the director of the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Somol is also an author and a contributor to several publications. His writings, which have appeared in publications ranging from Assemblage to Wired, focus on modernism and its modes of repetition, the emergence of the diagram in postwar architecture, landscape and interior urbanism, and the criticism of contemporary architectural practices and pedagogy. Somol was formerly a principal at the Los Angeles architecture firm Pollari X Somol (PXS). He is the co-designer of "off-use," an award-winning studio and residence in Los Angeles (2002) that, according to his obtuse cryptology, "combines the speculative discipline of modernism with the material excesses of mass culture."