Alex Pincus is an award-winning architect, James Beard nominated restaurateur, and dedicated preservationist.
Along with his brother Miles, Alex has created multiple celebrated restaurants in New York and New Orleans including Grand Banks, Seaworthy, Holywater, Pilot, High Tide , Island Oyster, and Drift In. He is CEO of their family-owned hospitality and maritime operations group, Crew, and he also serves on the board of directors for the 501(c)(3) not-for-profit Billion Oyster Project. In addition to their hospitality projects, Crew operates Tribeca's Pier 25 Marina, Brooklyn’s Pier 6 Wharf, and the historic vessel restoration facility Heritage Marine Works.
Alex is currently directing the restoration of Coronet, the preeminent sailing yacht of the Gilded Age, and is working to find a permanent home for New York's last surviving oyster barge.
Prior to co-founding Crew, Alex led Bureau V, a New York City–based architecture firm that he co-founded in 2007, and Atlantic Yachting, a sailing school and charter company he co-founded in 2006.
At Bureau V, Alex designed National Sawdust, a classical and experimental music concert hall in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Upon it's opening, The Architectural Review named National Sawdust one of the "World's Best Cultural Projects of 2015," honoring it with an AR Culture Commended Award; The New York Times called it “a soaring, distinctive surprise"; Architectural Record named National Sawdust one of the "Ten Best Arts Centers of 2015"; and The Village Voice said it "will change the way modern music is made." His other significant projects at Bureau V include Eye to Eye, a sound installation at the Guggenheim Museum; and Abacus, a theatrical performance space commissioned by the Whitney Museum (unrealized).
Prior to Bureau V, Alex was a senior designer and project lead at Asymptote Architecture, where he designed the competition-winning Budapest Bank Towers in Hungary, the Strata Tower in Abu Dhabi, and the Volkswagen Knowledge Gate in Wolfsberg, Germany. He also led Asymptote’s collaboration with Rem Koolhaas and the Office for Metropolitan Architecture for the competition-winning design for the Shenzhen Stock Exchange in Shenzhen, China. Before arriving at Asymptote, he worked at Eisenman Architects, Archi-Tectonics, and LOT-EK.
Alex won the Honor Award for Excellence in Design at Columbia University, where he received his master’s degree in architecture. Before Columbia, he studied architecture at the University of Virginia and anthropology at New York University and the University of California at Santa Cruz. Alex has taught architecture at Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Kentucky, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He has been a lecturer and juror at leading architecture schools worldwide, and his design work has been recognized by The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Wallpaper, among many others.
In his younger years Alex was an avid whitewater kayaker, was a member of the U.S. Junior Canoe and Kayak Team and U.S. Olympic Training Team, and made several first descents of unchartered rivers throughout the world. These days he is an easy-going sailor and beginning surfer. He is also a Kentucky colonel.
