SAM
“Over the next decade, the Sam Fox School and our partners will affirm the power of design, architecture, and art to ask difficult questions, demonstrate relevance, sow passion and action, iterate innovative solutions, and reap stronger outcomes for local and global communities.”
Carmon Colangelo
Ralph J. Nagel Dean, E. Desmond Lee Professor for Collaboration in the Arts
The Sam Fox School’s roots are deep in the core disciplinary areas of art, architecture, design, and museum; these legacies inform the excellence and depth of our academic programs. Building on our rich history and core strengths, we have also grown our interstitial practices— the in-between places where we come together across disciplines in the context of a top-ranked research university—to contribute to contemporary society in meaningful and impactful ways. This commitment to working collaboratively defines our unique character and structure as a school and will allow us to realize our most ambitious goals.
Building on our successes of the last 15 years, we are looking ahead to a new era of disciplinary exchange: delving deeper into critical discourses and working toward solutions as we connect across the university, join forces with community stakeholders, and engage our national and global networks. New partnerships will blur boundaries between the academy and professional world.
The Sam Fox School’s 2022-2032 strategic plan details three key areas where we will have the most impact and achieve distinction: Digital Transformation in Art, Architecture, and Design; Leadership in Sustainable Practices; and Strengthening Local, National, and Global Communities. These areas are specific yet intentionally broad, providing alignment with the university’s priorities, space for ideas big and small
to flourish, and flexibility to respond to changing conditions over time.
Our plan also outlines targeted investments in people, programs, and relationships that will build academic and research excellence, educate leaders, support access and equity, and drive opportunities for achievement across the school’s academic units and the Kemper Art Museum. I hope every member of our community sees themselves in this plan, and that it serves as an invitation for our students, faculty, staff, and alumni to participate, to build and evolve their individual and collaborative practices, and to foster the evolution of our fields.
Over the next decade, the Sam Fox School and our partners will affirm the power of design, architecture, and art to ask difficult questions, demonstrate relevance, sow passion and action, iterate innovative solutions, and reap stronger outcomes for local and global communities. Please join us as we commit to Shaping the Future. Carmon Colangelo
Ralph J. Nagel Dean E. Desmond Lee Professor for Collaboration in the Arts
The Sam Fox School was founded in 2006, bringing together three historic institutions: the School of Art (1879), the School of Architecture (1910), and the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum (1881). A thriving community of makers and scholars emerged, with a deep desire to leverage the unique opportunities facilitated by work within and across creative disciplines. As a singular unit, the school committed to addressing crucial social and environmental challenges.
The school launched its first strategic plan, Design for Excellence, in 2008. Ambitious outcomes evolved from the plan, including Missouri’s first graduate degrees in landscape architecture and illustration and visual culture, dedicated offices for socially engaged practice and research, an art on campus program, and expanded international engagement. Importantly, the plan outlined new facilities that would bring all students together on the Danforth campus to fully realize the vision of a united Sam Fox School. We worked diligently to achieve these goals, and in partnership with university and volunteer leaders, raised transformational funding through the Leading Together campaign to make new facilities and programs a reality.
Sixteen years after its founding, the Sam Fox School has built the intellectual foundation and the physical facilities needed to take our people and programs to the next level. We are now committed to working across the university, building strategic partnerships, leveraging key alignments, and Shaping the Future.
The Sam Fox School will educate and shape new generations of leaders in art, architecture, and design to create a more just, sustainable, humane, and beautiful world.
The Sam Fox School is a leader in architecture, art, and design education. We are advancing our fields through innovative research and creative practice, excellence in teaching, engagement with a world-class university art museum, and a deep commitment to addressing the social, economic, and environmental challenges of our time.
The Sam Fox School initiated an inclusive strategic planning process in 2020, incorporating faculty, students, staff, National Council, alumni, and campus partners. A comprehensive idea-gathering phase yielded a broad range of proposals that were evaluated and prioritized by the strategic planning committee.
Ten smaller committees were commissioned in late 2020 to draft white papers providing deeper context and more specific initiatives around areas of top priority. As the pillars of the Sam Fox School’s strategic plan emerged into sharper focus, we benefited from a simultaneous university-wide planning process. Key overlaps provide enormous potential for distinction and achievement.
Shaping the Future is a roadmap, with clearly identified guideposts, but room for evolution and flexibility as we encounter the realities of the next decade. Working closely with academic, staff, and volunteer leaders in the school, our attention is now on launching and implementing our plan, ensuring that we track progress as we work toward and reach our goals.
The Sam Fox School’s 2022-2032
strategic plan details three key areas where we will have the most impact and achieve distinction. These areas are specific yet intentionally broad, providing alignment with the university’s priorities, space for big ideas to flourish, opportunities for meaningful collaboration, and flexibility to respond to changing conditions over time.
We will harness the power of transformative digital tools in architecture, art, design, and museum to advance and critically assess emerging technologies that shape our world; to access and widely disseminate impactful research, creative activity, and scholarship; and to practice and teach at the cutting edges of our fields.
The pace and extent of technological advancements has fundamentally altered creative disciplines and fostered new areas for research, teaching, and social and environmental impact. Digital innovations are shaping a wide range of art, design, and museum practices—through tools, products, environments, and systems—at an accelerating rate that challenges both professionals and societies. Understanding how digital tools control the physical world and shape human interaction is key to developing and deploying new technological solutions that strengthen individuals and communities, build capacity, grow knowledge, confront bias, and adapt to changing environments. Digital innovations will also change the way artists, architects, designers, and curators work, and we must ensure that our students, faculty, and staff have access to the latest tools and technologies in our shops, labs, studios, and galleries.
Ai Weiwei: Bare Life exhibition at the Kemper Art Museum, 2019.→ Develop a graduate degree in Design Futures focused on Human Computing Interaction (HCI) and synthesizing research in technology and social innovation in partnership with McKelvey,* the Brown School, the humanities, and others.
→ Iterate curricula for all undergraduate and graduate programs to reflect emergent practices and collaborative disciplinary opportunities.
Equip our facilities with emerging technologies to provide students and faculty with essential skills for contemporary practice.
→ Develop a master plan for a Design Futures studio, a full build-out of the media studio, expanded fabrication spaces, and spaces for student and faculty research.
The Sam Fox School is connecting with partners across the university, the region, and the world to bring these initiatives to life. Interdisciplinary collaborations are marked with an underline.
Invest in digital platforms that build capacity, facilitate a community of ideas, and strengthen reputation.
→ Develop and launch a new museum website and collections management system that provides scholarly access and appropriate stewardship of the museum’s exceptional collection.
→ Establish robust digital platforms to host interactive digital archives and exhibitions, including student projects, independent faculty works, collaborative research projects, and interdisciplinary explorations developed over time that link multiple prior works.
“Architects, artists, and designers play a crucial role in projecting the future and thinking about how challenges will unfold over time. Our creative disciplines have the tools to evaluate digital technologies—an increasingly pervasive part of our lived experience—to control their forces and to design their position in the world.”
Constance Vale Assistant Professor and Chair, Undergraduate Architecture3D printed garment from assistant professor Kelley Van Dyck Murphy’s Expanding Skin studio
Landscape architecture students experience the geography of the Mississippi River first-hand on a guided canoe trip.
The Sam Fox School will make critical, design-centric contributions toward collaborative research that addresses our global climate crisis. We will shape the future of the built environment through resilient design solutions, a commitment to environmental justice locally and globally, dissemination of creative work that promotes awareness and action around climate and environment, and the education of sustainable design leaders.
In the next decade, our cities and systems must transition away from fossil fuels to curb damage to the Earth’s air, water, and ecosystems. Design will be at the forefront of solutions that counter the impacts of climate crisis, such as rising sea levels, temperature change, destructive land use, and weather-related disasters—all of which contribute to increased social inequity, global migrations, and the precarious future of our planet. The school’s diverse work across many areas—including creative practice, exhibition, architecture, ecology, energy and material use, building assembly, technology, infrastructure, and visual culture—intersects to form an important body of sustainable practices.
Build a Sustainable Practices cohort to address the global climate crisis and environmental equity across the university, the school, and the museum.
→ Execute a plan for focused hires in Sustainable Practices over the next three years to ensure cutting-edge curricular development and research across both colleges.
→ Establish corporate and practice partnerships to strengthen our research, teaching, and professional development around Sustainable Practices.
→ Identify faculty leaders and staffing capacity to champion and advance the work of the cohort.
Make Sustainable Practices a top priority in our teaching, research, creative practice, and scholarship.
→ Take a leadership role in the university’s goal to identify local and global environmental solutions by developing sustainable built environments, urban systems, and cities that are adaptable to environmental challenges.
→ Revise curricula across the school to prioritize global climate resiliency, healthy environments, and sustainability as foundational elements.
→ Provide support and facilitation for the fabrication, exhibition, study, discussion, and dissemination of creative work and research that calls attention to environmental issues.
Renderings of SMOOTH House, a sustainable occupational health facility designed through the US Dept. of Energy’s Solar Decathlon competition to serve St. Louis residents on Delmar Blvd.
Students study the impact of development along the river in Chiang Mai, Thailand.
Model Sustainable Practices across all aspects of our school.
→ Build a robust program of visiting faculty, scholars, curators, artists-in-residence, and fellows to ensure the school is exposed to the most current global environmental strategies and ideas.
→ Create a blueprint for sustainable Sam Fox School operations, in line with best practices in our professions and in partnership with the university’s Office of Sustainability.
“Historically, we’ve been part of the problem. We’ve altered most of the environment. Now we have an ethical responsibility to be part of the solution. And we have the design skillsets to be leaders, and to help our students become leaders, as we create a healthier planet.”
Derek Hoeferlin Associate Professor and Chair, Landscape Architecture & Urban Design
The Global Urbanism Studio travels abroad to study cities such as Kampala, Uganda, that are managing the contemporary challenges of population growth, climate change, economic development, and cultural hybridity.
We will work for social justice, healthy environments, and stronger communities— including a focus on projects with and for St. Louis—through academic and museum programs; collaborative research initiatives; and mutually beneficial industry, practice, and cultural partnerships in architecture, art, and design.
St. Louis’ history and present-day context informs much of our education, research, museum programming, and creative practice at the Sam Fox School. We have to ask how art, architecture, and design can confront historic divisions and disparities to create a more equitable environment and future for our own community as well as societies around the world. The Sam Fox School has laid a foundation of being in, with, and for communities—addressing the increasing urgency of social, economic, and environmental justice that surround us. We are particularly interested in how the learnings and outcomes of this work in our own region might contribute to the body of knowledge in communities nationally and globally.
Build academic and research excellence through mutually beneficial St. Louis partnerships.
→ Advance health-adjacent research and curricula across art, architecture, design, and the museum that support replicable positive public health outcomes in the St. Louis region.
→ Build a financially self-sustaining consortium of regional industry partners through partnership agreements, philanthropic donations, and sponsored research contracts.
→ Launch a Master of Arts in Arts Administration drawing on the interdisciplinary assets of the Sam Fox School, the vibrant St. Louis cultural community, and curricular strengths of the Olin Business School.
→ Incubate design startups in St. Louis and build professional opportunities for students and alumni in partnership with the Skandalaris Center, the Career Center, and our regional alumni network.
→ Build a robust set of internships and externships with St. Louis organizations.
Implement curricular and co-curricular programs to achieve measurable community impact.
→ Evolve the current Office for Socially Engaged Practice to ensure capacity for ambitious community-based projects and greater financial, project management, and dissemination support for faculty and students.
→ Develop new community-facing Kemper Art Museum education programs that create stronger ties to the St. Louis region and advance equity in arts education.
→ Advance our Art on Campus program to enrich the cultural life of the campus and region.
Chakaia Booker’s Shaved Portions (2021), on view from summer 2022 to summer 2023 as part of the Art on Campus program.
Create global opportunities that build a network for dialogue and exchange.
→ Offer meaningful study abroad opportunities— both semester-long and shorter immersion workshops—that respond to evolving global conditions and relevant issues in our fields.
→ Provide support for faculty and student travel to advance national and international creative practice and research opportunities.
→ Recruit talented international students from around the globe.
“When we consider ways for this institution to exist in community, art can be a powerful force. It can move us out of the WashU bubble. Through its intimacy, art forces us to go beyond that one-mile radius and brings us closer to people’s lived experiences.”
Penina Acayo Laker Assistant Professor, Communication Design
Our plan outlines targeted investments in people, programs, and collaborative relationships that will build academic and research excellence, educate leaders, support access and equity, and drive opportunities for achievement across the school’s academic units and the Kemper Art Museum.
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School” philosophy to facilitate academic and research excellence
Expand professional development opportunities for students, faculty, and staff
The Sam Fox School will make unified investments in expertise, access, diversity and inclusion, and infrastructure to achieve our strategic goals. We will streamline our internal governance and strengthen our collective identity to ensure greater focus on academic excellence, innovative research, scholarship and practice, professional success, and significant contributions to culture and society.
The core investments we make as a school over the next decade will have a ripple effect across our fields through the work of our students, alumni, faculty, and staff.
Ensuring the excellence and distinction of our academic programs is paramount and will rest on our ability to support the needs of talented faculty, students, and staff. Diversity, equity, and inclusion need to underpin our decision-making around hiring, budgeting, scholarships, pipeline programs, facilities, and technology. Likewise, professional and leadership development will ensure students build and fortify a strong alumni network and successfully pursue chosen career paths while faculty and staff thrive professionally. Finally, as the school endeavors to fulfill its mission to be more than the sum of its parts, we will look for opportunities to embrace a “One School” approach—building reputation by strengthening our collective
identity and, through greater efficiency, allowing faculty and staff to focus on academic distinction, student success, and research innovation.
Increase diversity and capacity with exceptional people.
→ Increase the diversity of our community, nurture an inclusive learning and work environment, and promote a polyvocal culture and ethos that highly values diversity, inclusion, and equitable success.
→ Provide student scholarships that rival the most generous funding at peer programs across the country, significantly reduce student debt, and provide students with needed support beyond tuition for materials, travel, research, and professional development experiences.
→ Build faculty and curatorial expertise through a holistic plan for faculty hiring, new endowments for professorships and key museum positions, and a robust program of visiting faculty, scholars, fellows, and artists-in-residence.
→ Create new pipeline programs, expand existing ones, and aggressively seek scholarship support for participants to widen access to the fields of art, architecture, design, museum studies, and arts administration.
→ Invest in the well-being, development, and success of our staff.
“The most exciting thing about this plan is that it’s shaping the minds of future leaders, not just for our industry, but for the world. The possibilities are literally limitless here.”
Mike Konzen, MArch86 Principal and Chair, PGAV Destinations Strategic Plan Steering Committee Chair Member, Sam Fox School National Council
Grow infrastructure for collaborative research and creative practice.
→ Grow the Sam Fox School Office for Research and Innovation under the leadership of a newly appointed director to increase the annual amount of funded research and increase faculty engagement in collaborative research projects across campus.
→ Strengthen internal research funding for individual and collaborative seed grants and build resources for research and creative practice dissemination.
→ Develop and manage industry partnerships that support academic programs in key areas such as human-computer interaction, fashion, sustainable design, and at the intersection of health and design.
→ Support junior faculty working towards tenure with start-up funds, mid-tenure-track sabbaticals, grant awards, and course releases.
Adopt a “One School” philosophy to facilitate academic and research excellence while streamlining administrative functions.
→ Strengthen the operations of the school through stronger alignments across the colleges and museum, streamlined faculty service, and investments in staff.
→ Build a digital, peer-reviewed journal to promote and disseminate innovative scholarship in the history, theory, and culture of art, design, architecture, and the humanities.
→ Invest in a comprehensive external communications strategy, including state-ofthe-art websites for the school and museum that will build reputation and drive recruitment of student, faculty, and industry partners.
→ Explore stand-alone coursework, certificate programs, and/or degree programs that emphasize the intellectual and historical dimensions of architecture, art, and exhibition studies, and bring critical perspectives to bear on the built environment and the humanities.
Expand professional development opportunities for students, faculty and staff that offer a range of professional directions and provide career-long connections to the Sam Fox School.
→ Build on our partnership with the university’s Career Center and industry partners to ensure that students leave the Sam Fox School with highly competitive employment opportunities across a broad range of fields and the tools and resources to achieve lifelong career growth and success.
→ Grow our partnership with the Skandalaris Center to cultivate the confidence of our entrepreneurial-minded students and alumni.
→ Build a Leadership Development program to prepare our students for strong leadership in their fields and add to the school’s distinctive positioning vis-à-vis competitive peer programs.
→ Invest in and fully utilize the school’s powerful alumni network; ensure that we are regularly showcasing, communicating with, and connecting alumni.
→ Provide faculty and staff with time, resources, and opportunities to engage in professional growth; strengthen internal systems for onboarding, mentoring, coaching, evaluation, and ongoing feedback to support professional achievement.
→ Eliminating bias and dismantling systemic injustice
→ Building cultures and systems for physical and mental health
→ Creating pathways for professional achievement
→ Ensuring access and resources for student, faculty, and staff success
→ Doing more together than we can alone
→ Achieving excellence across our fields
→ Iterating new approaches grounded in creative process
→ Fostering an inclusive and welcoming community
→ Making positive, meaningful change in the world
The Sam Fox School will harness transformative digital tools in architecture, art, design, and museum; advance and critically assess emerging technologies that shape our world; and leverage digital platforms to widely disseminate impactful research, creative activity, and scholarship.
We have a responsibility to lead with innovation contribute to society’s most pressing imperatives: change, social and environmental justice, transformation. Shaping the Future interconnected thinking and cutting-edge research to define our
WE WILL STRENGTHEN OUR FOUNDATION TO ENSURE EXCELLENCE AND SUCCESS.
The Sam Fox School will make unified investments in expertise, access, diversity and inclusion, and infrastructure to achieve our strategic goals. We will streamline our internal governance and strengthen our collective identity to ensure greater focus on academic excellence, innovative research, scholarship and practice, professional success, and significant contributions to culture and society.
Developa masterplanfora Design Futures Studio thatservesasa physicaland intellectualhubfor emerging technology. Launcha newgraduate degreein design focusedon Human Computing Interaction (HCI)and synthesizing researchin technologyand social innovation. Implementanew museum website and collections management system that will strengthen publicand scholarly engagement. Builda Sustainable Practices faculty cohort thatprovides leadership acrossthe school andcampusfor design-centric research addressing climate change. Designand implement school-wide, innovative curriculum updates tomeet best practicesin sustainability, technology,and engaged practice. Createa formal programof visiting faculty, scholars, curators,and artists-in-residenceto buildknowledgeand expertise across fields. Developanew Masterof Arts Administration degree thatleverages expertiseand resources inthe SamFox School,Olin Business andSt. Louisarts community. Advancecurriculahealth-adjacent critical
innovation and creatively imperatives: climate justice, and technological Future requires visionary, cutting-edge creative collective pathways.
community.BusinessresourcesSchool,health-adjacent researchand curricula tocenterartand designas critical factorsin public health outcomes. Evolve theOfficefor Socially Engaged Practice intoa national leaderin community-engaged design. Growa consortiumof industry partnersto advance goals acrossall strategic objectives. Facilitate studentand alumni professional success througha robustsetof internships/ externships andpartnershipswiththe Career Center and Skandalaris Center.
The Sam Fox School will innovate design-centric contributions toward collaborative research addressing our global climate crisis; make a commitment to environmental justice locally and globally; disseminate creative work that promotes awareness and action around climate and environment; and educate the next generation of sustainable design leaders.
WE WILL WORK FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE, HEALTHY ENVIRONMENTS, AND STRONGER COMMUNITIES.
The Sam Fox School will strengthen the St. Louis region and communities nationally and globally through academic and museum programs, collaborative research initiatives, and mutually beneficial industry, practice, and cultural partnerships.
Expand graduateand undergraduate scholarships tomakea Sam Fox School education accessibleto the most talented students. Addendowed professorships toattract andretain exceptional faculty. Buildprogramsto support student, faculty,andstaff equityand growth . Enhance infrastructureto support faculty researchand creative practice . FOUNDATIONAL INVESTMENTS
Mike Konzen
Committee Chair and Member, Sam Fox School
National Council
Vicki Match Suna
Chair, Sam Fox School National Council
Carmon Colangelo
Ralph J. Nagel Dean
Amy Hauft
Director, College and Graduate School of Art
Heather Woofter
Director, College of Architecture & Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design
Sabine Eckmann
Director, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum
Nicole Allen
Associate Dean, Planning Lead
Jack Risley
Professor of Art, Planning Lead
Will Bates, Alumni Representative
James Cohan, National Council Representative
Corinna Cotsen, National Council Representative
Adrienne Davis, University Representative
Jared Della Valle, Alumni Representative
D.B. Dowd, Faculty Representative
Damaris Dunham, Student Representative
Emily Greenspan, National Council and Kemper Art Museum Art Collection Committee Representative
Pam Henson, University Representative
Derek Hoeferlin, Faculty Representative
Odette Joos James, Student Representative
Liz Kramer, Staff Representative
Penina Acayo Laker, Faculty Representative
Meredith Malone, Kemper Representative
Eric Mumford, Faculty Representative
Lavar Munroe, Alumni Representative
Jane Neidhardt, Kemper Representative
Tim Portlock, Faculty Representative
Tirzah Reed, Student Representative
Kia Saint Louis, Student Representative
Audrey Treece, Staff Representative
Constance Vale, Faculty Representative
Enrique Von Rohr, Staff Representative
Hank Webber, University Representative
Engaging St. Louis
Chairs: Penina Acayo Laker and Liz Kramer
Marla Guggenheimer, Heidi Kolk, Meredith Lehman, Arny Nadler, Rodrigo Reis, Mónica Rivera, Linda Samuels, Stefani Weeden-Smith Interdisciplinary Initiatives
Chairs: Tim Portlock and Constance Vale
Eric Ellingsen, Petra Kempf, Sung Ho Kim, Patricia Olynyk, Jack Risley
Design for Climate Change, Sustainability, and Resiliency
Chairs: Patty Heyda and Derek Hoeferlin
Chandler Ahrens, David Fike, John Hoal, Melissa Meinzer, Hongxi Yin
Interaction Design
Chairs: Jonathan Hanahan and Aggie Toppins
Will Bates, Mike Buzzard, Lucas Drummond, Caitlin Kellher, Molly Needleman, Alvitta Ottley, Mary Ruppert-Stroescu, Enrique Von Rohr
One School
Chairs: Igor Marjanoviç and Jack Risley
Matthew Branham, John Hendrix, Kelley Van Dyck Murphy, Mark Ryan, Audrey Treece, Cheryl Wassenaar History, Theory, Culture
Chairs: Sabine Eckmann and Eric Mumford
Shantel Blakely, D.B. Dowd, Meredith Malone, Robert McCarter, Monika Weiss Diversity, Equity, Inclusion
Chair: Bruce Lindsey
Nicole Allen, Petra Kempf, Liz Kramer, Shreyas R Krishnan, Meredith Lehman, Arny Nadler, Tim Portlock, Mónica Rivera, Dryden Wells
Entrepreneurship and Practice
Chair: Nicole Allen
Wyly Brown, Jared Della Valle, Carrie Johnson, Mike Konzen, Jen Logan Meyer, II Luscri, Mary Ruppert-Stroescu, Karin Soukup, Enrique Von Rohr, Hank Webber, Hongxi Yin
New Modes of Academic Delivery
Chairs: Nicole Allen and Jack Risley
Rob Morgan, Audrey Treece, Ian Trivers, Constance Vale, Enrique Von Rohr
