Marilyn Jordan was born on March 31, 1949 in Montezuma, Iowa and moved with her family to Washington, D.C. when she was ten years old. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1969 and went on to attend the MIT Graduate School of Architecture. Jordan finished her master's degree in Architecture at UC Berkeley in 1974 and joined Skidmore, Owings & Merrill's Washington, DC Office. Around a decade later, she became a partner and relocated to the New York City office of SOM. Taylor is known for her use of design in urban places working with infrastructure and public spaces. Some of the projects she has led include the master plan for Columbia University's Manhattanville expansion, the East River Waterfront project, the reclamation of the Con Edison East River station for the East River Greenway, the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center's Mortimer B. Zuckerman Research Center, the "New Building" of John Jay College, among others. In addition, she founded and then directed the Airports and Transportation Practice at SOM. She designed Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv, an expansion at Dulles International Airport in Washington, JFK terminal 4, the terminal for Continental Airlines at Newark Liberty International Airport, Singapore Changi Airport's Terminal 3, and the SkyCity at the Hong Kong International Airport. In 2001, Taylor became the chair of SOM, the first woman to head the company. Then in 2005, she was elected as chair of the Urban Land Institute and two years later, in 2007, Crain's New York Business titled her as one of the "Most Powerful Women in New York" because of her urban planning projects. Taylor took over as dean of the University of Pennsylvania's School of Design in 2008 and in 2014, agreed to extend her appointment until 2016. Taylor has served on the advisory board for Amtrak's Northeast Corridor expansion project, the Delaware River Waterfront Planning and Development Board, the Partnership for New York City and as the President of the New York City Chapter of the American Institute of Architects. She was awarded with an honorary doctorate of Humane Letters from the Georgetown University School of Continuing Studies in 2014 for her interdisciplinary approach to urban planning and contributions to responsible development. In 2015, the Architectural Record granted her the Women in Architecture Award for mentoring other women and advancing the roles of women in the profession.
