Thomas Luebke, FAIA

Thomas Luebke, FAIA, has served since 2005 as Secretary of the U. S. Commission of Fine Arts, the federal design review agency for the nation’s capital, where he manages the review of some 700 cases per year. He is an architect with more than thirty years’ experience in design, planning, and historic preservation in both public and private sectors. A frequent speaker and commentator on topics of design in Washington, D.C., he produced the 2013 book, Civic Art: A Centennial History of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, as well as Palace of State: The Eisenhower Executive Office Building, published in 2018. In cooperation with the National Building Museum, he has initiated and participated in numerous symposiums and exhibits, including Monuments and Memory (2001), Framing A Capital City (2007), and Power, Architecture, and Politics: The U.S. Commission of Fine Arts and the Design of Washington (2010). He has been a visiting studio critic at Catholic University and Harvard University, and he was a visiting scholar at the American Academy in Rome in 2009-10. Luebke is a Phi Beta Kappa and honors graduate of Washington University in St. Louis, and he graduated with a master in architecture degree from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where he was a teaching fellow in architectural history. He served as president of the board of the Washington Architectural Foundation; he was named a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects in 2011, and was honored with the Institute's Thomas Jefferson Award for Public Architecture in 2015.