Building Tomorrow

Dean Jonathan Massey looks to the future for Taubman College and for the architecture and planning professions

By Amy Spooner

THERE WAS THE MOMENT ON DAY 39 of his deanship, when he stood in the midst of a crowd of excited students, faculty, and alumni to dedicate the new, $28.5 million A. Alfred Taubman Wing. And the April morning he sat not at, but on midfield at college football’s biggest venue, as one of the platform dignitaries celebrating the University of Michigan’s newest alumni on their graduation day.

But mostly, says Dean Jonathan Massey, the theme of his first year at the helm of Taubman College has not been grandiosity. Rather, “it’s been a continual, ever-deeper understanding that I am part of a big enterprise that a lot of talented people are passionately committed to.”

Foremost among them are alumni, Massey says. From the moment he was announced as Taubman College’s next dean in May 2017, friends and colleagues from near and far offered congratulatory messages with common themes: the University of Michigan is amazing, my years at Michigan were the best of my life, you are going to love Ann Arbor.

“The level of school spirit among University of Michigan alumni is like nothing I’ve experienced before,” Massey says.

Dean Jonathan Massey addresses a standing-room-only crowd of students and faculty at the September 8, 2017, Dean’s Inaugural Lecture.

Developing and sharing his vision with the global Taubman College community has been important in Massey’s first year; he knows some elements present a paradigm shift. Conversations with faculty, staff, and students have informed, refined, and clarified his agenda, Building Tomorrow, and in his first year he also met with alumni around the country to share his ideas.

“ The society that relies on architects to translate its needs and desires into built form deserves better. The underrepresented population turned away by the cost and other challenges of architectural education deserves better. Those of us in the field deserve better.”

— Dean Jonathan Massey

With Building Tomorrow, Massey envisions Taubman College becoming even more of a research powerhouse, especially in the areas of post-digital design, emerging urbanisms, and building sector innovation — all of which play to its inherent strengths as part of one of the country’s preeminent research universities. As Massey has learned in his first year on campus, “Michigan is a place that likes to think big.”

Another key element of Building Tomorrow is a human-centered redesign of the education that Taubman College offers, aimed at improving student learning and success while expanding access.

Massey is a product of the current model of architectural education and, like graduates of rigorous programs worldwide, is proud of the effort he put in, especially as a student and early-career practitioner, in order to be successful. He also is proud of his profession and the influence it can wield. But he’s troubled by the marked gaps in participation and advancement by gender and ethnicity within education, leading into a profession where these disparities are even more pronounced.

“I am passionate about design and about architecture’s intellectual and creative capacities. I wouldn’t have come to Taubman College if it didn’t have a kick-ass, lively, and intense experimental design culture,” he says. “But the society that relies on architects to translate its needs and desires into built form deserves better. The underrepresented population turned away by the cost and other challenges of architectural education deserves better. Those of us in the field deserve better.”

The demands of the traditional educational environment — the intense time-to-credit-hour ratio, the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses competitiveness of the studio, escalating student debt coupled with the near impossibility of holding down part-time work as a student, and the long road to licensure — “powerfully equip those who are willing and able to pursue it,” Massey says, “but weed a lot of people out in the process. And we lose a huge diversity of talent as a result.”

He has written and spoken extensively about the notion of “building the profession we deserve,” including an

op-ed in The Architect’s Newspaper in September, and notes that “we” refers to those inside and outside the architecture profession. “It’s mostly about what society deserves in its built environment — people who are knowledgeable and empathetic about building a world that supports a diversity of people equitably. But at the same time, we in the field deserve a better professional world. I get energized by a diverse workforce with leadership from many types of people; I know others do, too.”

Changing the profession must start in the schools, Massey argues. A cornerstone of his Building Tomorrow agenda is what he calls equity innovation — academic innovation that promotes equitable access to learning

Town Hall (opposite page) in the Taubman College Commons, A. Alfred Taubman Wing. Dean Massey’s first year on campus (above) included lectures, symposia, and alumni events around the country. He sees campus partnerships like MCity (middle right) helping to make Taubman College even more of a research powerhouse during his tenure.

and professional opportunity — in both the architecture and urban and regional planning programs. “Architecture and planning education at Taubman College remain little changed by the technological and business disruptions underway in some higher education sectors,” Massey says. “This inertia is a strength, preserving high levels of student-faculty engagement, deep learning, and high levels of capacity development. It also is a liability, making demands on student time and finances that undermine success in other dimensions of life, isolate our students from other people and opportunities, and exacerbate disparities in access.”

This spring, Massey launched an Equity Innovation initiative aimed at the human-centered redesign of Taubman College’s educational offerings. He convened a task force to explore ways to reduce the time, cost, and geographic hurdles of attending the college, as well as focus on student success. “One of my learnings from being in the midst of the tech sector and in the Bay Area, where interaction design was driving a lot of innovation,

was to realize that educational processes and practices often are built out from a faculty-centered perspective,” he says, referencing his previous deanship at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Instead, Massey wants to focus on the end user — prospective students, current students, and other stakeholders like alumni and employers who engage with the college. “We already do a great job in the format in which we offer our education. But I think we can diversify the ways that we help people develop their capabilities so that we engage a broader range of people and do so with greater success.

“We are revamping our educational model not because it’s bad, but because we are passionately committed to it and think it could be better.”

The Equity Innovation initiative includes a multiyear competitive incentive funding program to elicit, develop, pilot, and deploy new approaches conceived by faculty and staff at Taubman College. It called for proposals to develop or pilot new modes and formats of teaching and learning, curricular reformulation, and process innovations that promise to make a Taubman College education more inclusive, accessible, affordable, and satisfying by giving students the options they need to find the most viable path to and through school. The five winning proposals, which in total are receiving more than $52,000 in funding, include establishing a peer mentorship program; incorporating emerging technologies like massive open online courses (MOOCs); and enhancing the global and cultural competence of planning students, as well as

the profile of the field and the college, by strengthening and expanding teaching materials grounded in perspectives from the Global South.

“One of our winning proposals came from an earlycareer member of our marketing communications team; another came from a group of tenure-track faculty,” Massey says. “It speaks to the breadth of talent at the college and our shared enthusiasm for moving the needle in transforming education.”

Massey says one of the things that drew him to Taubman College was the chance to explore these ideas of education reform — which he began developing earlier in his career — on a larger stage. How broad that stage is, though, has been the biggest surprise of his inaugural year in Ann Arbor. “I knew Taubman College is a place that has bigger capacity and can make a bigger impact than where I’ve previously taught. But I have been blown away by the level of preeminence in research, teaching, and learning across so many fields of knowledge and study at the University of Michigan. It’s a formidable place, and Taubman College plays into that — and in so doing, transcends what traditional architecture and planning programs, by themselves, can do.”

Dean Massey says that initiatives like Equity Innovation and Prototyping Tomorrow will help to position Taubman College as a leader in creating an innovative, inclusive environment that trains a diverse array of highly skilled practitioners.

“ We are revamping our educational model not because it’s bad, but because we are passionately committed to it and think it could be better.”

— Dean Jonathan Massey

In his second year, Massey looks forward to continuing to leverage that formidability — through further partnerships with the College of Engineering around building sector innovation; with the Ross School of Business, the School for Environment and Sustainability, and other units around emerging urbanisms; and with MCity and multiple facets of the University that are working on smart city technology.

outside of conventionalized epistemologies of urban development. It features Associate Professor of Architecture McLain Clutter, Lecturer Cyrus Peñarroyo, and Muschenheim Fellow Laida Aguirre working with colleagues from U-M’s School for Environment and Sustainability and the Cleveland-based nonprofit LAND studio.

Prototyping Tomorrow and other initiatives to support interdisciplinary research, Massey says, will build upon Taubman College’s core strength in training future architects and planners for the ever-evolving world of practice, while simultaneously leveraging U-M’s vast, divergent collateral capacities to make the impact of those core strengths even greater. At the same time, he also sees opportunities for Taubman College to “shape winning geographies” by increasing opportunities for students and faculty to engage with partner institutions and research collaborators around the world, in Detroit, and even across the street through initiatives like the current effort to reimagine North Campus.

To aid such efforts, in March he announced a faculty research seed program, Prototyping Tomorrow, which builds on the college’s legacy of supporting research that generates knowledge in targeted focus areas by offering a new multiyear cycle of competitive funding for projects that use physical, virtual, historical, or social prototyping to test hypotheses about architecture, planning, and urban design. Prototyping Tomorrow especially encourages proposals that activate collaboration between fields within the college, with another U-M unit, or with an external partner. “Whether at the scale of a component, situation, simulation, building, or city, prototyping moves concepts from ideas into some form of provisional reality that allows them to be studied, tested, and refined iteratively,” Massey says. “By foregrounding the interplay between concept and outcome, prototyping develops ideas and moves them toward potential deployment.”

The seven recipients of the inaugural Prototyping Tomorrow grants cover a broad array of interests at Taubman College and beyond. For example, “Post Post Rock” is co-led by Meredith Miller and Thomas Moran, both assistant professors of architecture, in partnership with U-M’s Center for Entrepreneurship. The project is enhancing the college’s work in building sector innovation by working to define a specific building application for a new stone-like material that Miller and Moran have developed by combining waste plastics and construction debris. Another project, “Collective Reality: Image without Ownership,” is developing an augmented reality application that will allow residents of marginalized urban communities to image alternative spatial and social scenarios

It’s work that Massey says will require the buy-in and passion of Taubman College stakeholders worldwide — which is yet another reason why he sees the alumni community as a tremendous asset. “Our greatest growth potential lies in aiming our professional capacities outward in strategic partnership in order to have the most impact on the future of the built environment. And alumni are key partners in that because they are the ones out in the world of practice, seeing emerging patterns and potentials, often at the leading edge. “I see alumni as true thought partners in how we can build what we already know onto a set of emerging capacities that will meaningfully put Taubman College at the forefront of the architecture and planning fields.”