Deborah Moelis AIA CPHD

Principal

Deborah Moelis AIA CPHD is a Principal and a founding member of Handel Architects. She is a licensed Architect in NY and California and a Certified Passive House Designer.   Ms. Moelis has lectured extensively on the principles of Passive House design, including recent presentations at AIANY, Greenbuild DC, nZeb in Wexford, Ireland and the International Passivhaus Institute conference in Vienna, Austria.  

Ms. Moelis has managed all of the firm’s Passive House projects, including serving as Project Manager for Cornell Tech’s new residential tower on the Roosevelt Island campus in New York City. Called The House at Cornell Tech, the tower is the largest and tallest building in the world built to Passive House standards.   

Current work includes serving as Project Manager for Sendero Verde, a new 650-unit residential building in New York City, which, when complete, will be the largest fully affordable Passive House building in the world.

Previously Ms. Moelis managed the design and construction of Aire, a 42-story 315-unit residential tower on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, as well as Millennium Place, a 256-unit residential building in downtown Boston. She has also led numerous teams through successful entitlement processes in NY City as well as Jersey City and Boston, MA.  Additionally Ms. Moelis has run several winning competition teams in her tenure.  Her projects have been extensively published and received numerous awards, including honors from AIANY, the BSA, and the Boston Preservation Alliance.

Prior to joining Handel Architects, Ms. Moelis worked in the New York and London offices of Kohn Pedersen Fox Associates.