Portico Spring 2020 by Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning

SPRING 2020

Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning University of Michigan

SUSTAINABILITY BY PLAN AND DESIGN In Ann Arbor and around the world, Taubman College faculty and alumni are shaping a more sustainable future

BLACK LIVES MATTER B

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THE TAUBMAN COLLEGE COMMUNITY SHARES a collective sadness, anger, and sense of responsibility with regard to the police killings that we have witnessed recently, as well as those that preceded them and the centuries of structural racism that underlie anti-black violence. Promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion is a core ethos of our college, and we are now entering the fourth year of our DEI action plan. As proud as we are of the progress we have made, we understand that these steps â&#x20AC;&#x201D; and, indeed, the plan itself â&#x20AC;&#x201D; are not enough. In a town hall on June 4, we heard passionate, raw, and heartbreaking testimony from students, faculty, and staff. We talked about the ways that not only our society but also the university and college have failed African Americans both within and beyond our community. We have work to do. Look for a deeper examination of our past and present, along with a commitment to future action, in the next issue of this magazine. In meantime, please join the conversation by contacting our chief diversity, equity, and inclusion officer, Joana Dos Santos, at joanads@umich.edu. 1

A MESAGE FR OM T HE DE A N: SEEK ING SPAT I A L JUS T ICE WIDESPREAD PROTESTS and the global campaign against police brutality have again in recent weeks called attention to longstanding problems of structural racism and state violence, especially against African Americans. Robert Sellers, Vice Provost for Equity, Inclusion and Chief Diversity Officer at University of Michigan, shared his perspective in an essay titled “I Am So Tired.” I know that many in the Taubman College community — and especially students, staff, and faculty of color — are tired, too. Tired of seeing black folks killed in the streets. Tired of seeing police and other perpetrators go unpunished. Fed up with having to monitor their actions to avoid becoming the target of another such attack. Fed up with pervasive silence and complacency. I write on behalf of Taubman College leadership to recognize the pain, anger, and anguish of this time, and to salute those who resist the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, David McAtee, and innumerable other victims of state violence. I write to salute also those experiencing the painful impacts of police violence, racism, and oppression. We are here for you, we see you, we support you. Taubman College has no place for racism, bigotry, or hatred. This is a time of compounded pain stemming from multiple traumas: not only police killings and repression of public protest, but also the disparate impact of COVID on communities of color in and beyond Michigan. Behind all of these is a legacy of structural racism with roots centuries deep. Taubman College students, staff, faculty, and alumni are among those generating knowledge about structural racism and creating tools for promoting spatial justice, so personal pain and outrage is often linked to our intellectual and professional work. The University of Michigan, one of the world’s great public research universities, is dedicated to “developing lead2

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ers and citizens who will challenge the present and enrich the future.” How do we fulfil this mission in this time of crisis? The Michigan state seal proclaims tuebor, usually translated as “I will defend.” How do we defend people against racialized violence? Michigan is a distinctive place from which to address these universal issues. From the mass-produced automobile and industrial architecture to modern design and Motown, our state was a crucible of modernity. As one of the major Great Migration destinations, the Detroit metropolitan area also helped to forge racialized patterns of urban development, segregation, and spatial violence, including the urban abandonment precipitated by racial capitalism. Just three years ago, a spate of articles, books, and films marked the fiftieth anniversary of Detroit’s 1967 rebellion against racialized state violence — a precursor to the uprisings happening now. Detroit has been hit hard by the COVID pandemic, with some of the nation’s highest death rates and stark racially disparate outcomes. Meanwhile, the image of armed protestors occupying the state capitol in Lansing to challenge public health measures has epitomized white privileges to bear arms and claim public space for which black and brown people sometimes pay with their lives. I am thankful to all who are putting their bodies on the line to reassert civil rights in our streets. I know that Taubman College students and alumni are among them. Our community has another role to play, too, by advancing knowledge and practices that promote spatial justice. We must ally with scholars, planners, architects, designers, and advocates in and beyond the Black Lives Matter movement to learn from and support their work. We must center questions of justice in our curriculum and our research programs. We must support students, faculty, staff, and alumni in making changes that serve justice. One of my introductions to Taubman College came

five years ago, when I published essays by Professor Joy Knoblauch and doctoral student Michael Abrahamson in a collection addressing the intersections of the Black Lives Matter movement with architecture and urbanism. Professors June Manning Thomas, Margi Dewar, Robert Fishman, and Lan Deng have shown us new ways to understand the urban abandonment shaping Detroit and other cities, as Harley Etienne, Andrew Herscher, Marc Norman, and others are working with activists, community groups, government, and the private sector to redress it. Craig Wilkins is one of the foremost theorists of race and architecture, and our faculty and students are among the leaders of cross-campus initiatives such as the The Detroit School of Urban Studies, The Carceral State Project, Settler Colonial City Project and the Egalitarian Metropolis Project. Through our diversity, equity, and inclusion initiative, our chief diversity officer Joana Dos Santos and many others are pursuing our own institutional transformation.

Martin Luther King Day symposium; this past February, they also mounted a Black History Month exhibit. One of our most recent graduates, Asya Shine, M.Arch ’20, completed an Architecture Student Research Grant project, “Afrotutions”, which included the installation of a hair salon station to prompt reflection on the role of hair braiding in African and African diaspora identity, aesthetics, and design. At Taubman College, our first priority is to support our community through the intersectional impacts of the compounded assault of police oppression and pandemic overlaid onto a legacy of structural racism. The next is to generate knowledge and practices for long-term transformation. We are architects and planners learning to design for justice, community-builders pursuing sustainable change. We are centered in Michigan but engaged with the world. We fulfil our mission most fully when we put architecture and planning at the service of spatial justice.

Our students advance the causes of racial equity and spatial justice through their coursework, co-curricular initiatives, and student organizations, as our alumni do in their careers and advocacy. Every year, students organize a

“Afrotutions” by Aysa Shine, M.Arch ‘20, part of the 2019 Architecture Student Research Grant exhibition.

Jonathan Massey, Dean Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning University of Michigan 3

CON T EN TS

34 AR OUND T HE COL L E GE / 06

FA C U LTY & S TU DEN TS / 3 0

06 News from the Art & Architecture Building and Beyond

30 What Are You Thinking About? Cyrus Peñarroyo María Arquero de Alarcón

12 Best of Class: Student Awards 16 Architecture Student Research Grant Pushes Boundaries

C OVER ST O RY / 20 20 Sustainability by Plan and Design In Ann Arbor and around the world, Taubman College faculty and alumni are shaping a more sustainable future 4

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32 Gravitational Slingshot 34 Light Play Associate Professor Catie Newell explores light and darkness in her practice and in the classroom 38 Engaging Detroit Workshop transcends disciplines to focus on real-life community engagement

A L U MN I / 4 0 40 A Career Shaped by Love and Love of Country From a girl to his “beloved” Ann Arbor to a religious homage to a democratic Nicaragua, José Terán, B.S. ’56, M.Arch ’58, has followed his passions 44 Forging a Future in Chicago Aja Bonner, M.U.P. ’14, is helping to lay the groundwork for better, smarter affordable housing in the Windy City

46 Resilience Beyond Climate Change Kevin Bush, M.U.P. ’10, is thinking about cyber risk, population growth, affordable housing, and, yes, climate change in the District of Columbia

48 Every Town Deserves Great Architecture In Flint and beyond, Shannon Easter White, B.S. ’00, M.Arch ’03, brings critical thinking, design flair, and FUN 54 Designing CULTURE At Carrier Johnson + CULTURE, Gordon Carrier, B.S. ’79, M.Arch ’81, says understanding the heart of a client lies at the heart of good design

C L A S S N OTES & GI V I N G / 5 9 61 Jamie Simchik, M.U.P./M.B.A. ’15 Helping Students Connect the Dots

I N MEMORI A M / 6 5

C L OS I N G / 6 6

ON THE COVER:

Sustainability initiatives led by Taubman College faculty and alumni include the Avenue 26 Community Food Hub in Los Angeles, an accessible place for residents to work, learn, socialize, and affordably shop for fresh, healthy, local produce.

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Scenario Planning for Cities and Regions MANAGING AND ENVISIONING UNCERTAIN FUTURES

R OBE RT GOODS PE E D

Scenario planning is helping cities and regions prepare for uncertainty. Robert Goodspeed’s new book, Scenario Planning for Cities and Regions: Managing and Envisioning Uncertain Futures (Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, 2020), explores this practice and offers the first in-depth examination of how urban planners and the communities they serve can make better decisions about the future. Goodspeed is an assistant professor of urban and regional planning. A procedural tool originally developed for military and corporate strategic planning, scenario planning enables communities to create and analyze multiple plausible versions of the future. Unlike traditional approaches that begin with forecasting, scenario planning starts with a consideration of multiple plausible futures based on the different ways that major uncertainties could evolve. In his book, Goodspeed examines how this tool can be adapted to a range of urban and regional planning contexts — and how it can empower practitioners and citizens alike to better address the unprecedented challenges that lie ahead for cities and regions. The book features practical guidance on scenario planning methods, modeling and simulation tools, and detailed case studies.

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Emerging Urbanisms In February, Taubman College hosted a symposium, “Emerging Urbanisms in De-industrializing Urban Regions.” Lester Spence (Johns Hopkins University) and Matthew Gandy (University of Cambridge) delivered keynotes. The symposium framed discourses emerging from a relational study of four transatlantic urban regions that display acute asymmetries of concurrent growth and socio-economic decline in the midst of larger economic restructuring: the Detroit metropolitan region, the Ruhr Valley, Germany’s innovation region “Rheinisches Revier” (Aachen-Cologne), and the deindustrializing hinterland of the southeastern Atlantic coast in the United States. Organized around four thematic sessions, participants challenged the notion that all sites of abandonment suffer an identical fate. Examining these four regions as grounds for speculation and a platform for broader reflection engaging other global geographies, participants engaged in discussions regarding the intricate relationship between the simultaneous, incremental erasure of the built environment vis-à-vis ongoing urban projects that instigate, appropriate, produce, and reproduce these weak urbanities while projecting more sustainable futures. The symposium, co-sponsored by the Seminar Series program at the Urban Studies Foundation, was part of an interinstitutional initiative between U-M, the University of Virginia, and RWTH Aachen University.

Architecture and Media Culture When COVID-19 forced classes to move online in March, students in Cyrus Peñarroyo’s thesis studio were one step ahead. For the studio, which examined the intersection of architecture and media culture, Peñarroyo and his students explored a variety of approaches for handling design critiques and reviews remotely, including distance learning and shared work sessions. During the desk crit session screenshot seen below, Peñarroyo met remotely with his students to provide feedback on ongoing design work. Half were working in-studio (in-person courses were still taking place at U-M at that time), while the others worked from other locations.

Haar to Lead ACSA

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Pieces of personal protection equipment have been delivered to Michigan Medicine from the FABLab as of April 24. Taubman College faculty, staff, students, and alumni joined the effort to provide the gear for hospital workers treating COVID-19 patients.

Professor Sharon Haar, FAIA, has been elected to a four-year term on the board of directors of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA), which will include one year serving as its president. As a nonprofit association of more than 200 architecture schools, ACSA acts as a forum for pressing issues and innovative ideas in the field of architecture and sponsors a variety of events and activities as well as awards, competitions, and financial support for research and policy. “The ACSA has been a constant throughout my career. It is where I presented some of my earliest research and scholarship, and it has provided me with a vital network of colleagues nationally and internationally,” says Haar. “I believe we are at a critical moment when the academy can truly demonstrate that we provide important assets in research, knowledge of inclusionary practices, and innovations in disciplinary thinking — and I am honored to help do so through my leadership of the ACSA.”

ARCC Honors for Ng Assistant Professor Tsz Yan Ng received the 2020 New Researcher Award from the Architectural Research Centers Consortium (ARCC). The award acknowledges and rewards emerging figures in architectural and environmental design research who demonstrate innovation in thinking, dedication in scholarship, contributions to the academy, and leadership within architectural and environmental design research. Ng’s material-based research and design primarily focus on textile manipulation and experimental concrete forming, incorporating contemporary technologies to develop novel designs and innovative ways for building and manufacturing. 7

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“ We are at this inflection point where the human brain and the building brain can be in conversation with each other. … That’s an entire paradigm shift because that changes how we look at architecture and makes us stop looking at architecture as a static object or as an object at all, but rather a living, breathing organism that interacts actively with the people that it’s for.” — Upali Nanda, associate professor of practice, in a January story in The Architect’s Newspaper. Her research explores how data and neuro science influence architecture.

Shaking Up Small Business Lauren Week, a dual-degree student in urban and regional planning and law, has won the Economic Development Division Holzheimer Scholarship from the American Planning Association (APA). This national award is in recognition of her paper, “Shaking Up Small Business: The Impact of Seismic Retrofitting on Small Businesses in San Francisco.” The paper stemmed from work that Week did with the City and County of San Francisco during an internship in December and January, where she studied how retrofitting commercial buildings to improve earthquake resilience affects existing tenants. Working with San Francisco’s Office of Small Business, she developed a database to compile and organize GIS parcel and zoning, construction permit, business registration, and census data. She then analyzed that data to estimate and compare small business turnover, ownership change, and commercial vacancy rates across three supervisor districts. “Working with the Office of Small Business allowed me to connect the theories and principles we learn in the classroom at Taubman to the real world; it allowed me to explore and understand how planning policies and regulations directly impact communities and can have unintended consequences,” Week says. “I am hopeful my research can support the Office of Small Business as they devise programs to safeguard small businesses unintentionally impacted by necessary resiliency measurements.” In addition to the scholarship, Week’s paper will be published in the EDD News and Views newsletter. 8

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4 Teams of students nationwide advanced to the finals of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s 2020 Innovation in Affordable Housing Student Design and Planning Competition, including a team from Taubman College. The Taubman College team consisted of Josh Childs (M.U.R.P./M.P.P.), Bryan Hicks (M.Arch), Sam Kollar (M.U.R.P.), Amelia Linde M.Arch/M.U.D.), and Jess Yelk (M.Arch/M.U.R.P.).

6 Taubman College students are 2020 Dow Sustainability Fellows: Madeeha Ayub (M.U.D.), Clare Kucera (M.U.R.P./School for Environment and Sustainability), Jamie Lee (M.Arch), Rosanna Ren (M.U.R.P./School for Environment and Sustainability), Nicole Rusk (M.Arch), and architecture Ph.D. candidate Deok-Oh Woo. The Dow Sustainability Fellows Program supports U-M graduate students and scholars in their efforts to create sustainable solutions to pressing issues through interdisciplinary, actionable, and meaningful work on a local, national, and global scale.

Faculty Win ACSA Awards Two teams of Taubman College faculty won 2019–2020 Faculty Design Awards from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA). The Faculty Design Award recognizes work that advances the reflective nature of practice and teaching by encouraging outstanding work in architecture and related environmental design fields as a critical endeavor. McLain Clutter and Cyrus Peñarroyo, who are design partners in the firm EXTENTS, were honored for “Shaped Places of Carroll County New Hampshire,” which speculates on the complex reciprocity between who we are and the shape of where we live; between identities and the environments that support them. The project culminates in the design of three linear cities in Carroll County, New Hampshire. A notorious swing state, New Hampshire remained purple on the presidential election map until late into the night on November 8, 2016. Much like the gerrymandering practices that produced those results, “Shaped Places” seeks to geometrically organize population at a geographic scale to carefully prescribed ends. Forced to co-exist, this melange informs strategies for co-existence by urbanizing the rural while ruralizing the urban. Shape and content forge a complex reciprocity. Clutter is an associate professor and chair of the architecture program. Peñarroyo is an assistant professor. 

Kathy Velikov and Jonathan Rule were honored for the New Domesticities New Collectivities studio. How we live, work, and play is continually changing, which questions our assumptions for what constitutes a home, how the private and the shared are partitioned, and what new kinds of spatial uses are necessary. In response to these new domesticities, the studio focused on the development of alternative forms of housing for emergent forms of living and working in Detroit’s Eastern Market area. It explored how traditional spatial labels can be reframed and recombined at the unit and building scales to develop scenarios and spatial typologies that experiment with

collective forms and combinatory strategies for domestic arrangements and their architectures. Velikov is an associate professor, and Rule is an assistant professor. 

In addition, Velikov, Associate Professors Lars Junghans and Geoffrey Thün, and Daniel Tish, M.Arch ’15, and Dustin Brugmann, M.Arch ’15, won the inaugural TAD Research Contribution Award for their paper, “Experiments Toward Hyper-Local Reverse Heat Flow Assemblies.” The Technology | Architecture + Design Journal (TAD) is published by the ACSA. The paper discusses Latitudo Borealis, a cold-climate wall assembly that combines new passive opaque building envelope technologies to absorb, store, and transfer solar energy into a building during winter, with exterior shading to mitigate overheating during summer. The research encompasses physical testing and optimization of high- performance envelope assemblies; the use of computational evolutionary algorithms to design highly tuned, climate-informed shading configurations; and new tools and processes for precise robotic heat bending of wood. It demonstrated that the assemblies are capable of successfully absorbing and redirecting heat into the building interior in winter to improve building performance. The application of the experimental envelope assembly is further explored through the design of an unbuilt test case pavilion. 

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In November, Mayor Mike Duggan joined Lars Gräbner, assistant professor of practice; Christina Hansen, lecturer; and other officials at the groundbreaking for Midtown West, a $100 million, five-story development in Detroit. Designed by Gräbner and Hansen’s VolumeOne Design Studio, the first development in this phase, Fourth & Selden, will consist of 26 for-sale condos, 4,200 square feet of retail, and other amenities like a gym and yoga room.

Levine, Grengs Book Rethinks Transportation In their new book, From Mobility to Accessibility (Cornell University Press, 2019), Jonathan Levine, Joe Grengs, and their co-author, Louis Merlin, argue for an “accessibility shift” whereby transportation planning and the transportation dimensions of land-use planning would be based on people’s ability to reach destinations, rather than on their ability to travel fast. Existing models for planning and evaluating transportation, which have taken vehicle speeds as the most important measure, would make sense if movement were the purpose of transportation. But it is the ability to reach destinations, not movement per se, that people seek from their transportation systems, the authors argue. While the concept of accessibility has been around for the better part of a century, the book shows that the accessibility shift is compelled by the fundamental purpose of transportation and argues that the shift would be transformative to the practice of both transportation and land-use planning — but is impeded by many conceptual obstacles regarding the nature of accessibility and its potential for guiding development of the built environment. Levine is a professor of urban and regional planning. Grengs is an associate professor of urban and regional planning and chair of the program. Merlin is an assistant professor at Florida Atlantic University.

“The lakes go down just long enough for people to forget that they go up again.” — Professor Richard Norton, in a February 19, 2020, Financial Times story about record-high Great Lakes water levels. While Norton does not dispute that climate change is happening, he argues that the lakes’ levels historically have risen and lowered in cycles.

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Kelbaugh and Thomas Retire Two celebrated Taubman College faculty members retired at the end of the 2019–2020 academic year. June Manning Thomas, FAICP, Ph.D. ’77, is the Centennial Professor of Urban and Regional Planning and the Mary Frances Berry Distinguished University Professor of Urban Planning. She joined Taubman College in 2007 from Michigan State University, where she developed statewide initiatives to link urban planning services on campus with community development needs in Michigan cities. She served as the president of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP) from 2013 to 2015 and was immediate past president from 2015 to 2016. She also co-founded and co-chaired the Planners of Color Interest Group, which advances the interests and concerns of people and communities of color within planning academia and the profession.

for excellence in research, scholarship, teaching, and community service, including receiving the ACSP’s annual Paul Davidoff Award, given to the best book published that year in social justice and urban planning, for Redevelopment and Race: Planning a Finer City in Postwar Detroit (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997; second edition, Wayne State University Press, 2013). Her more recent books include the co-edited The City After Abandonment (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013) and the coedited Mapping Detroit: Evolving Land Use Patterns and Connections (Wayne State University Press, 2015). She also received the Laurence Gerckens Prize for Sustained Excellence in the Teaching of Planning History from the Society for American City and Regional Planning History. “I have enjoyed teaching at Taubman for so many reasons: students eager to learn and always keeping me on my toes; colleagues devoted to the principles of consultation rather than conflict; and the college’s continual support of scholars and students dedicated to the improvement of special central cities such as Detroit,” Thomas says.

Thomas’s contributions to the urban and regional planning profession and academia encompass the diver sification of the planning profession, planning history, social equity in neighborhoods, and urban revital ization. Her recent research has explored the relationship between the concept of social equity and the civil rights movement, and examined the land-use reactions of community organizations to vacant land in Detroit. She has been recognized

Doug Kelbaugh, FAIA, former dean and a professor of architecture and urban and regional planning, has moved with his wife to Seattle. He joined Taubman College in 1998 with a global reputation as a pioneer in passive-solar design. His 1975 passive solar house in Princeton was the first to utilize a Trombe Wall. He later served as architecture chair at the University of Washington. In 2016, Kelbaugh received the Topaz Medallion for Excellence in Architec-

tural Education from the American Institute of Architects and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, recognizing his career for bridging architecture, sustainability, and the city.

Kelbaugh authored Common Place: Toward Neighborhood and Regional Design (University of Washington Press, 1997) and Repairing the American Metropolis (University of Washington Press, 2002). In addition to writing more than a dozen book chapters, he was the editor of The Michigan Debates on Urbanism: Everyday, New, and Post (University of Michigan Press, 2005) and the co-editor of Writing Urbanism (Routledge, 2008). His most recent book is The Urban Fix: Resilient Cities in the War Against Climate Change, Writing Urbanism, Heat Islands, and Overpopulation (Routledge, 2019), which he wrote on sabbatical as a visiting fellow at Cambridge University’s Clare Hall. He currently is working on Urban Cool, Heat, Health, and Habitat in the Anthropocene. “What an honor to be associated with such a preeminent institution, located in a culturally bountiful, burgeoning city,” said Kelbaugh when announcing his retirement. “It’s been a world-class campus and rich milieu to have spent so many meaningful years in — never to be forgotten.”

BES T OF CL A SS: S T UDEN T AWA RDS As part of closing out the 2019–2020 academic year, Taubman College rewarded excellence in the annual Student Show and in work by graduating students. While a sampling of the award-winning work is seen here, the complete gallery is on Taubman College’s Flickr page at taubmancollege.umich.edu/flickr/albums.

BURTON L. KAMPNER MEMORIAL AWARD – FIRST PLACE (THESIS / M.ARCH) Marco Nieto: “Autopsia in

Abstentia.” Faculty: El Hadi Jazairy. The nuclear disaster stylized Chernobyl’s landscape, and multiple realities are fighting and struggling for their voice to be heard by the world. This project’s interventions form a temporally and spatially open system that focuses on reworking and appropriating a set of conditions that affect the local, environmental, and bio-political. These apparatuses will vary in scale and scope in order to better comprehend the magnitude and severity of nuclear collapse by fragmenting the site into understandable bits, composing the framework of an evo‑ lutionary landscape that keeps the sophistication of heavy industry in an effort to understand it, while also providing a sympathetic second life that is often caught between realities.

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WALLENBERG STUDIOS AWARD – FIRST PLACE TIE (B.S.)

Cayman Langton and Natsume Ono: “Alternating Duality.” Faculty: Matiss Groskaufmanis. The 2020 Wallenberg Studios’ theme was From the Margins. “Alternating Duality” identifies a petroleum coking refinery located in Texas City, Texas, where the continued production of petcoke, a refining byproduct, is contributing to both local and international damage. To shed light on the problem, the project proposes a public intervention that replaces half of the existing, functioning elements with a ghost-like shadow of its past, while maintaining production capability of the other half to showcase the destructive occupancy of the present. This mode of decommissioning invites people to observe alternating dualities of detrimental productivity and benign unproductivity. The Wallenberg Awards are made possible through the generosity of the Benard L. Maas Foundation.

STUDENT SHOW – FIRST PLACE (M.ARCH) Laura Lisbona: “Theater

as Iranian Tomb Tower.” Faculty: Eduardo Mediero. “Theater as Iranian Tomb Tower” examines the typological extents of the theater and proposes a new space that allows for an alternative, contemporized, and dramatic experience. It is based on the idea that in order to fit into the typology, a theater can be identified as a “place to experience the extreme.” The project is a critical response to the over-stimulation of life in post-digital megacities and the need for a theater that allows for an extremely individual experience. The interior is arranged as a series of “Progressive Theaters,” a new genre in which the lines between viewer and performer become blurred. In “Theater as Iranian Tomb Tower,” the occupant can decide how to experience each progressive space.

STUDENT SHOW – FIRST PLACE TIE (M.ARCH) Anhong Li, Baekgi Min,

Lucas Rigney: “In Praise of Shadows.” Faculty: Craig Borum, Claudia Wigger. This project aims to evoke the traditional intimacy and sensitivity of Japanese culture within a contemporary dwelling concept. The new mixed-use architecture combines a neighborhood center with residences to introduce a new type of urban fabric, horizontally and vertically interweaving different relationships between public and private space. Twelve wells of shadow are generated under the logic of the structural grid and the scale of the dwelling. As spatial voids, these wells establish various scales of intimacy and character among the mixing neighborhood.

STUDENT SHOW – FIRST PLACE TIE (B.S.) Phillip Allore, Clare Coburn,

Mitchell Lawrence: “Terran Enclave.” Faculty: Daniel Jacobs. As climate discourse shifts from “change” to “crisis,” an optimistic outcome requires interventions that renew human-non-human relationships. Contemporary institutions perpetuate status quo forms of knowledge production, which is directly channeled to profitable industries in order to further the exploitation of Earth’s resources. “Terran Enclave” proposes a transdisciplinary institution that works against this by creating diverse forms of knowledge production. It seeks to enable a new way of life that promotes closer working relationships across disciplines and species. The compound mixes communal, domestic, work, and growing spaces so that Terrans can envision a livable future together.

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WILLEKE PORTFOLIO COMPETITION – FIRST PLACE TIE (B.S.)

Gian Anovert Operation | \-p-r-shn: Any of various mathematical or logical processes (such as addition) of deriving one entity from others according to a rule. “As I progressed throughout my college career the exuberance of design has escaped me. Lending my designs to be informed by operations, not intuition. By defining these operations, I now enter a phase where my exuberance must return and entangle with new logics and operations,” says Anovert.

WILLEKE PORTFOLIO COMPETITION – FIRST PLACE TIE (B.S.)

Vikitha Reddy Bezawada “Throughout my architecture education, I have had moments when I’ve questioned the importance of architecture. Now, graduating with an architecture degree, I have learnt the importance and relevance of spatial design. Given our current politically and climatically tumultuous state, architects can use their agency as creatives to challenge our politically driven world and provide solutions to this anthropogenic era. I am a designer and a critical thinker at heart, and I cannot be more excited to start implementing my skills and thinking into the real world. Architects don’t just make drawings; architects shape the world,” says Bezawada.

Architecture Student Research Grant Pushes Boundaries THE 2019 ARCHITECTURE STUDENT RESEARCH GRANT (ASRG) exhibition in the Taubman College Gallery featured images of Grenfell Tower and Notre-Dame Cathedral on fire, a series of raised steel domes with a sign encouraging people to step on them, and a row of floor-to-ceiling hair braids. It’s fitting, given that the ASRG calls for projects that push the boundaries and possibilities of the discipline of architecture, including new forms and methods of working, making, and representing.

’11, M.S. ’14, and Adam Smith, M.Arch ’11 (Synecdoche Design Studio, Ann Arbor), provides a unique opportunity for students to support outstanding research by their peers. The benefits for the recipients are many. “On a personal level, receiving an ASRG was the confidence boost I needed as I am beginning to understand and define my interests within architecture,” says Asya Shine, M.Arch ’20, who received a grant for “Afrotutions.” “Culturally, receiving an ASRG was an opportunity to showcase an underrepresented community within architecture and hopefully create a familiar experience for other students of color at Taubman College.”

“Taubman College is committed to the idea that architecture is a cultural product that always negotiates a complex plurality of voices and ideas, as well as myriad social, political, and aesthetic concerns,” says McLain Clutter, program chair. “The Architecture Student Research Grant is an excellent example of our experimental mindset in action.”

For Sauvé and Smith, providing funding for the ASRG allows them to give students the kind of experience that they found so valuable as they launched their own careers. “Opportunities for small projects with funding were the kickstart to our portfolio. Learning independently and through the act of making simultaneous to designing had a huge impact on our creative process and how we developed an alternative practice path,” they say. “Being able to provide similar opportunities gives students the room to experiment and possibly launch their own practice, product prototype, inaugural publication, or something else. We like to think of it as no-strings-attached seed funding towards creative entrepreneurship.”

The Architecture Student Research Grant, which was seeded with gifts from the Class of 2013 and continues to be funded through the generosity of Lisa Sauvé, M.Arch

The Architecture Student Research Grant winners exhibited their work in the Taubman College Gallery in fall 2019.

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“ We developed this idea in our Sartorial Architecture seminar with Tsz Yan Ng, where we were making textiles out of unconventional sheet materials. For the course, we worked with PETG and melted it over a mannequin to study the way it can form to the curves of a body. This made us think about how we could apply it at an architectural scale, which is when steel came into play.” — Mackenzie Bruce, M.Arch ’20, and Maggie Cochrane, M.Arch ’20

“Sinuous Steel: Auxetic Possibilities” Mackenzie Bruce, M.Arch ’20, and Maggie Cochrane, M.Arch ’20 This project explores the opportunities and limitations of auxetic patterning on steel sheets to create controlled, doubly curved surfaces. Auxetic patterns are created through nested geometries that create “hinge points.” When cut into planar sheet material, the surface is allowed to expand in multiple directions when stretched, rather than stretching parallel to the applied force. The resultant elasticity allows the material to be formed into unique forms beyond the typical capabilities of flat surfaces. The project interrogated the potential of this technique by combining fabrication technologies of the CNC Waterjet and 7-axis Kuka robot, which allow for formal, spatial, and experiential explorations with greater material efficiency in the panel and form-making process. The research involved an iterative process of experimentation of thin gauge steel sheets with various auxetic pattern geometries, sizing, and robotic toolheads that allow for the flexibility and control of the form. 17

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“Afrotutions” / Asya Shine, M.Arch ’20 “Afrotutions” aims to inspire a strategy for design thinking rooted in African tradition that reimagines design aesthetics and communication. It celebrates the identity of Afro-people around the world through a historical and cultural framework. The project investigates the broad range of practices and techniques used to maintain Afrohair and showcases the implications of a traumatic yet inspiring past rooted in generations of tradition. Hair braiding interweaves a wide range of social and physical relationships: heritage, expression of individuality, community building, and means of survival. Black women and men have always communicated through the beauty of hair. Globally, hair braiding has transcended the diaspora of African people, and its formation as an institution within Afro-communities is important in our understanding of the world today.

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“Four Fires” / Daham Marapane, M.Arch ’20, and Michael Ferguson, M.Arch ’20 Fire and architecture are intimately intertwined: from prehistoric homes built around the hearth to the massive urban reconstructions following modern-era recent blazes in Oakland (the Ghost Ship warehouse), London (Grenfell Tower), Rio de Janiero (National Museum of Brazil), and Paris (Notre-Dame Cathedral). How did these fires start? What was consumed in their flames? What factors — technical, social, political — allowed them to burn the way they did? How will they be remembered? What agency and responsibility does architecture have in the prevention, mitigation, and cultural memory of catastrophic fire?

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SUSTA INABIL I T Y BY PL A N A ND DESIGN In Ann Arbor and around the world, Taubman College faculty and alumni are shaping the conversation on what a more sustainable future looks like By Amy Crawford

BY 2030, MORE THAN HALF the global population is expected to live in cities, which researchers have predicted will cover 3 percent of Earth’s land surface — triple the area devoted to urbanized areas just 20 years ago. Meanwhile, we’re already using half the habitable land for agriculture. And with climate change making an ever-more-rapid impact, it’s imperative that the growth and development of what might be termed our “human habitat” — buildings, transportation networks, food systems — be sustainable, with minimal damage to ecosystems and to the planet as a whole. As U-M President Mark Schlissel said last year in a message announcing the creation of the President’s Commission on Carbon Neutrality, “Climate change is the defining scientific, social, and environmental problem of our age.” It’s a complicated problem, with many interdependent facets. On the front lines are architects and urban planners, among them Taubman College faculty, students, and alumni. They are studying ways to make buildings more sustainable, reimagining transportation and food systems, and ensuring that environmental justice also is social justice. And through the President’s Commission, they are working to help the university meet its carbon neutrality goal, an effort that could also serve as a roadmap to a sustainable future for humans everywhere.

Leigh Christy, FAIA, B.S. ’96, is developing the L.A. River Urban Agriculture Green Infrastructure Plan at Perkins & Will.

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COMMISSION In 2011, U-M set a series of goals for sustainability by 2025: reduce energy-related greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent, cut on-campus transportation carbon emissions by 30 percent, and reduce landfill waste by 40 percent. Nearly a decade later, the university is making progress on these goals, but as the full impact of the climate crisis grew impossible to ignore, it became clear that U-M needed to do more. So last year, President Schlissel announced a goal of complete carbon neutrality. It’s a tall order for a 200-year-old institution made up of more than 500 buildings, 50,000 faculty and staff, and 50,000 students. The first step was bringing people together from across campus — including representatives from Taubman College — to form the President’s Commission on Carbon Neutrality and discuss how the sprawling university can meet this ambitious goal. “A lot of people don't understand what carbon neutrality means, exactly,” says Larissa Larsen, an associate professor of urban and regional planning and a member of the commission. “Unlike sustainability, it’s focused on energy production and fossil fuel use, so that’s a much narrower discussion.” To determine a baseline for carbon emissions, 22

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the commission created three scopes of greenhouse gas inventories based on source: emissions from U-M’s own energy production, those from the additional energy the university purchases, and those from all other sources. That third scope “is where difficult decisions must get made,” Larsen says. “One of our biggest challenges is determining what should be included in scope 3." Scope 3 covers emissions from such things as the daily commute to campus to work or study and travel by students and faculty to share research findings or conduct fieldwork. But other, less-obvious elements carry a carbon footprint, too. “We are thinking about anything related to food on all three campuses,” says Lesli Hoey, an associate professor of urban and regional planning and co-leader of the commission’s internal analysis team for food. U-M’s food service outlets are highly fragmented, with dining halls, Athletics, Michigan Medicine, and retail outlets operating independently. Fostering stronger connections could improve efficiency and reduce waste. Meanwhile, consumers must make changes that campus food purveyors are well-posi-

The President’s Commission on Carbon Neutrality is examining how to make a campus composed of more than 500 buildings, 50,000 faculty and staff, and 50,000 students carbon neutral.

COVER S TORY

tioned to encourage, including nudging students toward choosing plant-based meals, composting their table scraps, and reducing waste. “A lot of research surrounds trying to change people’s behavior,” Hoey notes. Changing behavior may also be key for the commission’s internal analysis team for commuting, led by Jonathan Levine, a professor of urban and regional planning who says that getting U-M students and workers to choose more sustainable modes of travel will require “a combination of sticks and carrots.” Among the sticks may be a revision of parking permit policies. Rather than a large annual fee, the university might prompt drivers to think twice by implementing smaller daily fees. A potential carrot would be fast, higherfrequency bus routes that connect different campuses, as well as the university and community. But regardless of his team’s final recommendations, Levine argues that considering commuting at all is progress. “It would be easy to say, ‘We're not responsible for the commute itself, that’s an individual's decision,” Levine says. “So it’s big and important to consider that commuting is part of the university’s carbon footprint.”

The bulk of U-M’s impact remains its buildings. In fact, notes Jen Maigret — an associate professor of architecture and co-leader of the commission’s internal analysis team for buildings, with Associate Professor Lars Junghans — the International Energy Agency has found that 40 percent of global energy consumption is related to building construction and use. “Reducing energy use, including heating and cooling, is one of the things that we're working on,” she says, “but we’re also considering the contribution of concrete and other materials, or what’s come to be called ‘embodied energy.’ And a lot of the greatest gains that you can get on a project come out of a very strong collaborative design team that, right from day one, establishes goals and expectations, and looks for simple or elegant approaches to achieving them.” By the end of this year, commissioners will present Schlissel with a final report outlining goals, expectations, recommendations, and ideas that will set the course for the University of Michigan over decades to come. It may also chart a path that other institutions, businesses, and municipalities might follow, with the ultimate hope, in Schlissel’s words, that the effort will “marshal the intellectual resources and commitment of the U-M community to contribute to a more sustainable and just world.”

Research by Taubman College faculty — including Mania Aghaei Meibodi (top) and Tsz Yan Ng and Wes McGee (bottom) — is informing how to make concrete more sustainable.

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BUILDINGS Since 10,000 B.C.E., humans have used concrete to construct everything from homes to monuments. In the 19th century, it allowed buildings to rise to new heights, and in the 20th century it let architects experiment with radical new ideas. Today, this mixture of lime-based cement, water, sand, and aggregates — little changed since ancient times — is the most common building material in the world. But it’s also the most polluting. Primarily due to the energy-intensive process of baking limestone to produce cement, concrete is responsible for as much as 8 percent of global carbon dioxide emissions. But a new generation of architects is exploring ways to make this important building material much less destructive — without giving up its miraculous capabilities. “Green building has traditionally been all about reducing operational energy needs, and we’ve made huge strides,” says Jim Nicolow, FAIA, B.S. ’91, M.Arch ’95, a principal at Lord Aeck Sargent and the firm’s first director of sustainability. “New buildings are much more efficient now than even 10 years ago. But the big shift has been a recognition of the impact of all of the materials that go into a building, known as embodied carbon, and how we can improve that environmental footprint — especially with concrete.” Part of the solution, Nicolow says, may lie with new materials, particularly so-called mass-timber, an engineered wood product that allows for taller structures than traditional timber. “Timber sequesters carbon,” says Arash Adel, whose research as a postdoctoral fellow at Taubman College involves designing and building more efficient timber structures by employing computational design methods and robotic manufacturing techniques. “If you manage the life cycle, it has a positive impact on the carbon footprint of a building. And mass-timber allows for taller buildings. This is opening up new opportunities for timber construction, not only for houses and small buildings, but also for mid-rise buildings and for building types that may require large spans.” Still, it is likely humans will always rely on concrete for our largest, tallest buildings. And some countries need a lot of it. That was made clear to architecture students who participated in a recent studio led by Assistant Professor Tsz Yan Ng and Associate Professor Wes McGee. The studio, sponsored by the global architectural, planning, and engineering firm SOM, took students to China

for a whirlwind tour of the economic behemoth’s construction industry. “China uses a lot of concrete,” McGee says. “Probably more than anyone else in the world. And their construction industry operates at a timescale that’s unfathomable.” Back in Ann Arbor, the students studied the problems with concrete and considered solutions, including ways to apply 21st-century technology to this ancient material. “We’re using digital fabrication and computational technique to rethink how we design and produce forms for casting,” explains Ng, who with McGee organized a 2019 symposium about innovations in concrete. “Part of this is looking at it from beginning to end, everything from the forms to the material itself to the scaffolds that hold the molds together.” The most promising options are 3D printing concrete formwork or the concrete itself, says Mania Aghaei Meibodi, an assistant professor of architecture, who explains that both fabrication methods enable production of lightweight concrete structures or elements in any shape while reducing the material waste related to the traditional ways of fabrication. “3D printing will transform the concrete industry, the concrete element itself, and the way we design concrete structures in the future,” she says. An example is the Smart Slab project that she led at ETH Zurich, where her team created a concrete slab that is just 20 millimeters thick at its thinnest point and allows for the integration of infrastructures like sprinklers and electrical conduct.

In collaboration with ERNE AG Holzbau, Arash Adel organized a Robotic Timber Assembly Workshop for Taubman College’s Master of Science in Digital and Material Technologies cohort. They traveled to Switzerland in February.

TRANSPORTATION Throughout most of the 20th century, transportation planning began with an assumption that economic growth would necessarily lead to more and more automobiles traveling through cities, as well as suburban and rural areas. A planner’s goal, then, was to ensure that all this traffic moved as swiftly and efficiently as possible.

“The amount of concrete we use is ridiculous,” Meibodi says. “It’s not even good for the structure. It makes it heavier. But new technology allows us to produce lighter, more complex forms. We not only have to change the way we produce concrete, so that there’s less pollution, but we have to change the way that architects design with concrete, so that the material is placed only where it’s needed and resources are utilized efficiently.” These ideas for greener buildings can’t come fast enough, says Doug Farr, FAIA, B.S. ’80, a fellow of the Congress for the New Urbanism and president of Farr Associates, a sustainable arschitecture and urban design firm based in Chicago. In the late 1990s, his firm was among the first to attain a LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) Platinum certification, one of the first and most widely adopted programs to make architecture more sustainable. Today, Farr notes, it’s become an expectation that high-profile projects will meet some level of LEED certification. “LEED made a world of difference,” he says. “It changed the conversation. LEED is now a mainstream credential and skill set — for almost any architecture firm, it’s expected you’ll know how to design to LEED standards. But if we’re going to address the climate emergency, we need to go beyond the stand-alone building and ultimately beyond LEED. To progress, our firm helped to create LEED Neighborhood Development, a tool to certify entire places and building projects to the rigorous Living Building Challenge. So I think architects have a lot of power, but they need to have more awareness of it, and of how their work can accelerate the speed of change.”

Taubman College alumni are spearheading sustainable initiatives that include a Living Building Challenge-certified building in Georgia and bike lanes in Washington, D.C.

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“The transportation planning profession originated in an era when the car was king, and there was a lot of popular sentiment for public policies that would support auto mobility,” says Jonathan Levine, a professor of urban and regional planning. “So it was pretty easy to get going in that way. And once you’re doing that, it becomes a little hard to change. Engineering manuals, guidelines from the federal government — they all specify a certain way of doing things.” Despite the inertia, Levine argues that the field of transportation planning needs to shift from a “mobility logic” to what he calls “an accessibility logic.” Under that framework, the goal of transportation planning would not be speed or freedom from congestion, but “an increase in the value of the destination for a given investment of time and money. Under this notion, the purpose of travel is not moving, but the ability to reach destinations.” He lays out this case in his latest book, co-written with Joe Grengs, chair and associate professor of urban and regional planning at Taubman, and Louis A. Merlin, of Florida Atlantic University. In From Mobility to Accessibility, Levine and his co-authors argue for a redefinition of success in transportation and land-use planning, which not only makes more sense to the person trying to get

from point A to point B, but also offers a path toward a more sustainable future. Sustainability also goes hand-in-hand with safety, notes Linda Bailey, M.U.P. ’01. Formerly executive director of the National Association of City Transportation Officials, she joined Washington, D.C.’s Department of Transportation last year. As Vision Zero director for the District of Columbia, she is tasked with eliminating traffic fatalities and serious injuries by 2024. “I think that traditional traffic safety doesn’t see the connection necessarily,” she says. “Vision Zero is a much more holistic approach.” A movement that began in Sweden in the 1990s, Vision Zero rejects the idea that a certain risk of injury and death is an acceptable trade-off for mobility. And crucial to realizing the goal of zero deaths is a rethinking of the automobile’s role in urban transportation. “In transportation and urban planning, we’re still such servants to the automobile,” Bailey says. “But with the changes in technology and the changes in the way we build things, we can get to a point where the vehicle is the servant of the human, and not the other way around.” That could include reengineering roadways or reducing the size and speed of cars so they pose less danger to the people around them. It could also include placing a greater emphasis on transit; active modes like walking and biking; and newer forms of micro-mobility, like scooters. All of these efforts have the effect of reducing the amount of energy used to move people to wherever they are going, which can make transportation not only safer, but much less carbon-intensive.

SOCIAL JUSTICE As climate change upends weather patterns and increases sea levels and temperatures, it has become clear that the most marginalized members of society will bear the brunt of the impacts. As we work together to find solutions, how can we ensure that our efforts on behalf of the environment leave no humans behind? “On a global scale, the poorest people in the world create almost no emissions — and yet they will be the first and worst affected by climate change,” says Larissa Larsen, an associate professor of urban and regional planning. Her research looks at how rising temperatures, diminishing water quality, and flooding affect cities’ poorest residents, particularly in the Global South. “Through research, we’ve learned that certain people — usually people of color or lower-income people — will disproportionately suffer the health impacts of pollution and extreme heat.” Larsen’s research has focused on urban heat islands, where surface and air temperatures are elevated due to the higher heat-absorbing capacity of impervious surfaces. The phenomenon is exacerbated by climate change, which is now causing more extreme and longer heat waves. And it’s worse for poorer communities, who are less likely to

Larissa Larsen’s field work with Taubman College students in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, shows them the challenges of making environmental improvements in a low-resource city.

have air conditioning and whose neighborhoods often lack so-called “green infrastructure,” like street trees and parks. It demonstrates how environmental justice is linked to social justice, Larsen notes. “But meanwhile, social justice can conflict with sustainability,” she says, noting a recent call by Ann Arbor’s City Council members that new affordable housing should be carbon-neutral, which would place an additional burden on developers of much-needed housing for low-income residents. “By trying to do the environmentally right thing, you impede our ability to help people get housing.” But social justice and sustainability need not always be in conflict. “Environmental justice issues have always been intertwined with racial justice, and even with reproductive justice, gender issues, and other concerns,” says Gabriel Jones, M.U.P./M.S. ’17, a senior associate at the philanthropy consulting group Arabella Advisors, which works with foundations, companies, families, and individuals to maximize the impact of their giving. Jones says that some of the funders he works with have begun to think “more holistically” about how their gifts can have an impact on both the environment and on social issues. That’s also important for the urban planning profession, he says, noting that planning once played a role in destroying communities of color, particularly during the era of so-called urban renewal. “It’s important to recognize the reality that planning has participated in unjust systems,” he says. “When you’re able to approach it from that lens, you’re even more attuned to 28

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each community’s vision for its neighborhood. And you can hopefully be a better advocate for social justice in different spaces that you’re in.” That’s been a life’s mission for Kristin Baja, M.U.P./M.S. ’11, climate resilience officer at the Urban Sustainability Directors Network, a network of 238 local officials working on environmental, economic, and social justice issues. Recognized in 2016 by the Obama administration as a Champion of Change for her work on climate and equity, she now focuses on creating “resilience hubs:” facilities providing space and resources for a marginalized community to work toward economic development and equity goals, as well as toward reducing carbon emissions and improving its ability to adapt to a changing climate. “Race is the greatest disparity in the United States,” Baja says. “I center all conversations around climate change in the reality of racism and prejudice to encourage a proactive, equity-centered approach. We are wasting our time if we’re not considering climate change and social systems together. We need to ensure we’re not progressing forward on one thing without considering who is impacted the most, how they are impacted, and how we can shift the power dynamics. We can’t take a top-down approach — our work toward sustainability must first be grounded in community well-being.”

(This page) Part of the Baltimore Mural Program, “What is and What Could Be” encourages proactive thinking to dismantle racism in policies and practices, says Kristin Baja, M.U.P./ M.S. ’11. (Opposite) Leigh Christy, FAIA, B.S. ’96, wants to remake a 660-acre area in L.A. into a hub for urban agriculture.

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FOOD The Los Angeles River runs more than 50 miles, from the mountains northwest of the city, through the San Fernando Valley and downtown L.A., and finally south to the Pacific Ocean. Once bordered by thick reed forests, its waters full of steelhead trout, the L.A. River today functions more like a giant storm drain. Lined with concrete by the Army Corps of Engineers after a disastrous 1938 flood, the river has long been seen as effectively dead. In recent years, however, it has been declared a navigable river, and some human residents have begun to think of the river and its banks as an ecological asset that could even help feed this sprawling city. “If you look at how park-poor Los Angeles is, particularly in some of the communities along the L.A. River, well, we’ve realized the river can’t just be a flood channel anymore,” says Leigh Christy, FAIA, B.S. ’96, a principal in the Los Angeles office of Perkins & Will who leads the office’s pro bono work. She has spent more than a decade developing a series of visions that could transform at least one segment of the river for future generations. Her Urban Agriculture Green Infrastructure Plan, a partnership with the nonprofit River LA and incorporating substantive input from the City of Los Angeles, would remake a 660acre area along the heart of the river into a hub for urban agriculture, with space for gardens, beekeeping, and even aquaculture, as well as a marketplace and facilities for processing so-called “value added” food products. Providing local jobs, affordable food, and testing new food-related innovation were goals, too. Christy says it’s all about resilience in the food system — providing options that leverage actions the local community is taking already. “If you’re going to make something happen in this area, you need to define urban agriculture broadly,” Christy

explains. “We’re talking about the full food cycle, because that’s what it will take to make something like this work in this community in a way that’s also truly sustainable.” Urban agriculture has become a buzzy concept, notes Lesli Hoey, an associate professor of urban and regional planning whose research focuses on righting inequities in food systems. She describes how “large-scale, high-tech urban agriculture initiatives are growing around the country, but too often, they overshadow the long history of urban gardening and farming, particularly in communities of color.” Still, like Christy, she sees value behind the hype. “From an environmental perspective,” Hoey says. “I think it has a huge role to play, if only in educating more people and bringing them closer to their food systems.” Hoey’s research has taken her to Vietnam and Kenya, and she currently is looking at the nation of Bolivia and the state of Michigan as what she calls “prototypical cases,” or model food systems from which other cities, states, regions, or countries could learn. “Both Bolivia and Michigan are ahead of the game in trying to shift toward either more health-promoting or more equitable or more sustainable food systems,” Hoey says. “In Bolivia, for example, the national government was one of the first to develop a massive effort to prevent malnutrition in children. In Michigan, it’s more of a bottom-up approach, in which cities and the state have responded to a lot of grassroots efforts to revive our local food economies and address equitable food access.” Local food economies are increasingly important as climate change threatens global food systems, Hoey says, but the idea is also a bit of a throwback. As American cities grew in the 19th century, “food systems were integral to how they developed and were planned — ensuring people had access to food and connecting farmers with markets was a public function for a long time,” she explains. “It used to be something urban planners thought of as one of their basic functions, just like ensuring clean water.” That changed as grocery stores replaced public markets and industrial agriculture replaced small farms, but as planners like Hoey and architects like Christy help cities develop more resilient food systems, the future might wind up looking more like the past. That’s certainly true for the L.A. River, which — when Christy’s vision is realized — may begin to look and operate a little more like the vibrant, nourishing place it was before 20th century engineers encased it in concrete. 29

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A. Internet inequity.

Q: What Are You Thinking About?

Why Is This Interesting to You? The internet — much like other media throughout history — gives form to our cities and connects us with the world, and cities in turn give form to the internet. As more of our lives are conducted online, and as entrepreneurs and municipalities continue to promote fully integrated digital infrastructure in our homes and on our streets, cyberspace and urban space are becoming one and the same. Broadly speaking, my work critically engages the role that networked technologies play in the design of the built environment. More recently, I have been studying how uneven broadband service provision influences urban development in Detroit’s underserved neighborhoods and trying to understand the challenges and opportunities that emerge from this digital divide. Through this research, my hope is that designers could learn from alternative models of ownership, collectivity, and resilience to more effectively support communities in need.

Cyrus Peñarroyo

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What Are the Implications? After we were advised to shelter in place because of the global health crisis, we became even more dependent on high-speed internet for education, employment, information, social interaction, supplies, and entertainment. While inadequate access to the internet has consistently been a challenge for margin alized communities, suddenly everyone had to confront this issue. As we cautiously and collectively adjusted to living online for the foreseeable future, we must remember that these digital environments rely on infrastructure that is intensely spatial and material: server-filled data centers, underground fiberoptic cables, proximities between devices, and signal-propagating wall sections. Due to physical distancing and limited face-to-face interaction, “urban life” became mostly online, and our personal connections and internet connections became inextricably linked. This is the new context within which designers must intervene. Cyrus Peñarroyo is a FilipinoAmerican designer and educator whose work examines architecture’s entanglement with contemporary media and digital culture. He is an assistant professor of architecture and previously was the 2015–2016 William Muschenheim Fellow. Peñarroyo received the 2019 Architectural League Prize and an ACSA Faculty Design Award Honorable Mention. His work has been exhibited at Materials & Applications in Los Angeles, Pinkcomma Gallery in Boston, The New School in New York, Princeton University School of Architecture, Harvard Graduate School of Design, and the 2014 Venice Biennale. He is a partner in the Ann Arbor-based design practice EXTENTS.

A. Confinement, education, and urban life.

Q: What Are You Thinking About?

Why Is This Interesting to You? While this is not the piece I originally intended for Portico, the global pandemic has caused us to navigate a distant present and wonder about an uncertain future. This winter and spring, we became intensely aware of our own socio-environmental footprints while launched forward into “the digital” as the only available social space. Following the calls for confinement, we have all embodied the widespread effects of this crisis. Yet the impacts are asymmetrical, and the highly segregated and unequal society that we have created has turned to us its most dreadful face. Many are calling for this distinct moment to mark a paradigm shift, to challenge the status quo in a quest for critical investment in building systemic resilience. For us, educators, architects, and urbanists, this is a call to address the crisis of imagination that keeps preventing us from taking decisive action and leading a radical shift of priorities. What Are the Implications? At Taubman College, we work with communities across the globe, and we are following the impact of the pandemic with utmost concern and attention. In the winter 2020 semester, our projects brought us to learn from Detroit, São Paulo, Madrid, Ahmedabad, Mexico City, and New York. The pandemic has deeply impacted each of these cities, challenging our pedagogies and compelling us to question the nature of our work. Our agency as educators, students, professionals, and global

María Arquero de Alarcón citizens is at stake, and yet we can seize this moment as an opportunity to markedly reshape our institutions of higher education. Can we relearn to teach, research, and practice in a way that accounts for uncertainty and far-reaching change and protects the most vulnerable? Can we reimagine paths to the co-production of knowledge with the very communities who cannot afford our fees and services? What are the mechanisms to ensure our doors and windows remain open for more widespread access to our academic resources? How can we relearn to plan, design, write, and imagine alternative, better worlds that transcend our vision of possibility today? While higher education offers us the privilege to reflect and cultivate a critical gaze of the world around us, it should first and foremost lead the way to collective transformation in times of crisis and uncertainty. This is the defiant and fascinating journey ahead of us. María Arquero de Alarcón is an associate professor of architecture and urbanism and director of the Master of Urban Design program. She also is principal of the researchbased, collaborative design practice MAde-Studio.

GR AV I TAT ION A L SL INGSHOT Coronavirus challenge presents an opportunity to make education more accessible, inclusive, and effective for the long haul By Dean Jonathan Massey “Don’t go back to normal.” Among coronavirus slogans and memes, this one describes the ethos motivating me as we chart a new path for teaching and learning at Taubman College. Since mid-March — in Michigan, earlier or later for some of you — our lives have been far from normal. Here is what I’m thinking as we adapt to the pandemic and look ahead to an as-yet-undetermined future. Residential education based on face-to-face teaching is glorious, but it has limitations and drawbacks. Embodied, personalized, and sociable, it is also demanding, prescriptive, and costly. What works well for some students disadvantages others, filtering out a diversity of talent based on factors such as ability and socioeconomic status. These attributes are especially pronounced in professional programs. The cost, credit hour requirements, inflexible curriculum, and contact hour expectations of architectural education, in particular, can be disproportionate to the benefits, particularly for learners from traditionally underrepresented groups. The pedagogy and culture of the design studio represent the best and the worst of faceto-face education: intimate, intense, communal, synthetic, creative … and excessive, wasteful, exhausting, and at times exploitive. It’s a trope of space thrillers that when your damaged spaceship is drifting toward the black hole, you use the last ounces of fuel to set a gravity-assist course that will propel you forward onto a new trajectory. In adapting to the challenges of our traumatic present and unknown future, I’m looking to these gravitational slingshots for inspiration. I aim to address challenges of the pandemic by accelerating equity innovation: academic innovation that supports diversity, equity, and inclusion by making education accessible to a broader range of learners. Online instruction disadvantages some students; the digital divide is real. But 32

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so does on-campus residential instruction, which all too often forces learners with diverse needs and preferences into a single pathway through a one-size-fits-all education geared toward the most privileged. Let’s prioritize adaptations that can improve residential education after the plague has passed. This is the work of building the discipline we deserve, rather than perpetuating the one we’ve inherited from forebears with circumstances, demographics, and values different from ours. This is how we will mobilize a diversity of talent to address complex problems such as climate change, the focus of our cover story. At Taubman College, faculty, students, and staff have stepped up under extraordinary pressure, making the transition from face-to-face instruction in a closely knit residential community to teaching and learning at a distance using file sharing, email, and, yes, Zoom. They have adeptly migrated annual events such as Career Fair, admitted student preview days, and student exhibitions into virtual platforms. Thanks to their dedication and skill, the abrupt adjustment to emergency remote teaching is working — for now. But it’s a far cry from true online instruction, which is intentional, supported, and planned along distinctive pathways. Looking ahead to a year or more of adaptively triggered social distancing, we expect in-person instruction to be limited in size, density, duration, and frequency. We plan to complement whatever face-to-face work public health measures allow with methods from online instruction. We are not going back to normal. Beyond the next year or two is an as-yet-undetermined new normal, in learning and in life, to be planned and designed. Our goal is to move from emergency remote instruction to resilient teaching. Resilient teaching combines the greatest strengths of face-to-face education, like access to specialized facilities and a lively academic community, with those of online instruction, such as the flexibility to teach or learn where and when you are best able, balanced with your caregiving responsibilities, your part-time job, your sleep or sports schedule, and the accommodations for your disability. It sustains the imaginative discovery and peer-to-peer exchanges that enrich the design studio, but discards the all-nighters, all-consuming schedule, and unsustainable costs. Resilient teaching methods equip us for the stresses of a pandemic, a natural disaster, or any disruptive event, even as they improve the instructional baseline in good times. If we handle the coronavirus challenge right, we will combine residential and online methods to make education more accessible, inclusive, and effective for the long haul. That’s the slingshot whereby this black swan, or black hole, can accelerate us onto a better course.

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The virtual world explored in studios (bottom right) became a reality in March when COVID-19 forced online adaptations of all Taubman College activities, including classes, reviews, admitted student preview weekends, and Career Fair.

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L IGH T PL AY Associate Professor Catie Newell explores light and darkness in her practice and in the classroom By Julie Halpert

CATIE NEWELL DIDN’T BECOME interested in architecture because she had a love for buildings. Instead, she was inspired by a long-held fascination with flying. “I had an interest in being up in the sky, and having different vantage points, and seeing different light and different landscapes,” says Newell, the director of the Master of Science in Digital and Material Technologies program and an associate professor of architecture. She has incorporated that perspective in her current projects, which have received notoriety for the way she repurposes spaces through innovative material processes and use of light and darkness. Newell has won numerous architectural prizes, including the 2011 Architectural League Prize for Young Architects and Designers. Dressed casually in steel-toed boots, jeans, and a long-sleeved shirt, her demeanor is down-to-earth and her voice brims with enthusiasm as she describes the work that has become the focal point of her life. Her passion for flight led her to start out in aerospace engineering, but she quickly grew bored and craved an

“Secret Sky” harnesses light patterns in a barn in Michigan’s Thumb.

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area of study that allowed her to create. After exploring a few other majors, she switched to architecture, which proved to be the perfect fit. Her design work ranges from studying glass and materials to creatively repurposing spaces in urban, rural, and remote settings. “I have a tendency to make work that is very much embedded in the site that it’s located in,” Newell says. She explains that the singular thread in her designs is the “chase of the interesting reactions that happen with dark and light.” In 2003, after completing graduate school, she began working for the architectural firm, office dA, where Nader Tehrani became her mentor and remains so to this day. But she ultimately grew weary of the 80-hour workweeks and became curious about what she could do if she were given the chance to create her own work. She applied for the Oberdick Fellowship in 2009 at the University of Michigan, which allowed her to both teach and receive funding for her own projects. She’s been at Taubman College ever since. Many of Newell’s early creations have been immersed in sites that were difficult emotionally, like abandoned buildings in Detroit and a historic home that the city was trying to demolish in Flint. “I started to do projects where I could physically rework spaces that had been left alone and didn’t need to serve their original function,” she says. Ultimately, she grew concerned that her practice would be defined by working with these bleak sites. Eager for a break, she won the Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon Polsky Rome Prize to study at the American Academy in Rome 36

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in 2013. In a project called “Involving Darkness,” she studied how darkness and the night alter spaces. In 2010, she launched her own architecture firm, Alibi Studio, in Detroit, the city where she lives. She’s currently renovating a building that will be her studio. “I’m trying to figure out how the work I’ve done before scales up to a building,” she says, adding that she is committed to staying true to her vision while dealing with such details as plumbing and building codes. The first full, building-size project for Alibi Studio is the reconfiguration of a barn in Hume, Michigan. It is part of an initiative by a group that commissioned Detroit-based designers and artists to transform 10 barns in that area. Newell saw the project as a prime opportunity to harness patterns of light and darkness. She cut a slice through the barn to let the sky come through yet ensured that slice was not just a simple cutout but a meaningful space. “When you walk through, it’s like the walls have actually been turned into the barn, and the barn face and sides and roof are all cut for that optical vantage point,” she says. “At night you can turn the lights on and it glows in the opposite direction, so there’s a day and a nighttime effect.” The project, completed in September 2019, was all consuming. “I’m still recovering from it,” Newell says. Nearly every Friday, she would drive 2.5 hours to the site, then

(Above) Salvaged Landscape” in Detroit, Michigan. (Opposite, from top) “Secret Sky” in Hume, Michigan. “Overnight” at the University of Michigan Museum of Art.

work the entire weekend. “I basically just disappeared for a couple of years. I was literally either in the classroom or at the barn.” Still, she welcomed the change in venue. “I’m an outdoorsy person and love the color of the sky and being outside, so it did have its treasures,” she says. “Sunrise and sunset last for so long, and my work has always been so interested in the shift to nighttime.” Newell says her greatest sense of fulfillment comes from the surprise results as a project starts to reveal how it’s going to work with the light at the site. She recalls an exhibition at the University of Michigan Museum of Art called “Overnight,” built in a studio in Detroit. It was installed on the ground level with floor to ceiling windows. There was no opportunity to test it in advance. One night, she asked the head museum security guard to turn off the exterior building lights. He agreed. “We all went outside and turned on my lights and turned off all the building lights, and it all just worked,” she says. “It was a very sweet moment where I felt like everyone who was around me got the project.” Newell brings the concepts of her work at Alibi — where she’s focused on incorporating heart and intensity at a site while also challenging new ways of building with new fabrication technologies — into the classroom. In her teaching, she focuses on trying to figure out new ways of making that are paired with an increased use of technology, and she is particularly fascinated by how new tools allow materials to be deployed in a different way. She also appreciates the chance to take her students into realworld settings. Students in her advanced prototyping class and master’s studio recently headed to U-M’s Biological Station in northern Michigan, a place with almost no artificial light, to focus on wood and use it in ways that the discipline and industry have not yet envisioned.

Some students experimented with mixing wood in clay to try and figure out a new water filtration system; others cut wood in an interesting way so it bends where it wouldn’t normally be expected to. “I roll up my sleeves with the students,” she says. She enjoys witnessing the different ways their approaches can bring new discoveries. “It’s very much like a working lab, where I learn from them.” Newell also says she is grateful for the opportunities that the University of Michigan provides for her own research and experimentation: “Michigan’s been very good that way. I don’t think I would be able to do the things that I do here anywhere else.” Newell is particularly energized traveling to places with strange light effects — preferring those in cold places “because the higher latitude lines have greater shifts between day and night throughout the year.” In January 2019, she headed to Svalbard, Norway, the last inhabited town before the North Pole, for a conference on darkness. “I was finding my people,” she says with a smile. She has journeyed to Iceland numerous times, a place she describes as having “light and color that can be seen nowhere else.” She purchased a glass kiln there so she can continue her work while in that country, and she hopes to build a small cabin there, as well. A self-described creative introvert, Newell often prefers solitary concentration undertaken in small spaces. She lives in a 900-square-foot loft that once was a photography studio. Her dream is to create several solitary research studios in unusual, unspoiled landscapes “that are dedicated to the location, true light, and pure night.” In winter 2019, she co-taught a seminar with Sir David Adjaye — whom she met when they were traveling together as jurors for Seattle’s AIA Awards in 2014 — in which students were asked to create silence. Newell’s hope is that her creations, which she says are best experienced in solitude, offer a respite from the fast-paced world. “I think the world doesn’t get enough silence. I want the world to slow down in my work.” 37

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Engaging Detroit Workshop transcends disciplines to focus on real-life community engagement ONE OF THE THINGS THAT Detroit planning and evaluation consultant Jane Fran Morgan enjoys most about her work is the variety. “You’re working with different organizations in different contexts and with different challenges,” says Morgan. “And you’re always thinking about new approaches, which requires a certain amount of creativity.” As the 2019–2020 Sojourner Truth Fellow at Taubman College, Morgan wanted to bring creativity to the community engagement workshop she taught during the winter semester. Eric Dueweke, lecturer in urban and regional planning, was the co-facilitator. The Sojourner Truth Fellowship engages scholars and practitioners who can bring rigorous attention to issues of race and ethnicity as they relate to the theory and practice of urban and regional planning. Beyond that, Morgan’s objective was “to create something that was fun, engaging, and useful for students” — urban planning and architecture students alike. The four-part weekend workshop series — Engaging Detroit: Maximizing Solutions for Impact — connected students with organizations in Detroit that are experiencing community engagement challenges and gave them an opportunity to work in teams to develop solutions to those problems. Morgan and Dueweke deliberately paired students from different programs in teams to foster an interdisciplinary approach to problem solving. Morgan, a Detroit native, says it was important that she bring students into the community and provide them with valuable real-world experience: “A number of them hadn’t been to Detroit, and they certainly hadn’t been working directly with a community-based organization. I wanted to give them that experience, so that they had a better understanding of what it means to do community engagement work and to put their toe in the water.” That’s exactly what drew Serena Brewer, M.Arch ’21, to the workshop in the first place. She wanted to step beyond her traditional architecture curriculum to explore her 38

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interest in community engagement. “Many architecture schools don’t offer this kind of experience,” says Brewer, who is considering pursuing a graduate certificate in community action and research through U-M. “So I thought this was a good opportunity to get engaged and learn firsthand the kind of work I would be doing.” During the first session, students visited the three participating organizations: HOPE Village Revitalization, Grandmont Rosedale Development Corporation, and the Center for Community-Based Enterprise (C2BE). They met with executive directors to learn about each organization’s mission, its impact on Detroit neighborhoods, and its particular community engagement issue. In the second session, students heard from a panel of Detroitarea community engagement leaders who introduced them to community engagement approaches, and later

During the four-part Sojourner Truth Workshop in winter 2020, interdisciplinary teams of students presented ideas to representatives from three partnering agencies in Detroit.

they participated in a small-group community engagement planning exercise. The 18 students then were divided into interdisciplinary teams of two and assigned a participating organization to represent. At the third session, Morgan shared insights about her own community engagement efforts as a planner and facilitator, which includes working with nonprofits, foundations, and the public sector in the areas of planning, evaluation, strategy, development, and applied research. She also provided one-on-one coaching for each team that included best practices for presentations — gleaned from her years as principal of JFM Consulting Group. The final workshop culminated in a competition where the students presented their community engagement strategies to the participating organizations.

“We worked with a real stakeholder on a real project. The workshop was something I could really invest myself in, and it fostered collaborative and interdisciplinary problem solving.” — Megan Rigney, M.U.R.P./ M.P.H. ’20 Morgan says she and the executive directors were impressed with the quality of the students’ work: “There was a lot of great information, and the students really stepped up to the plate. The executive directors were excited by the presentations and wanted access to all of them. They were genuinely appreciative of the experience.” Also appreciative was Megan Rigney, M.U.R.P./ M.P.H. ’20, who enjoyed the workshop’s real-world engagement and interdisciplinary nature. “We worked with a real stakeholder on a real project,” says Rigney, who presented to Grandmont Rosedale. “The workshop was something I could really invest myself in, and it fostered collaborative and interdisciplinary problem solving.”

and the thing that made it more interdisciplinary was that a lot of urban planning students are pursuing dual degrees, including public health, public policy, social work, and law. It brought different perspectives to the table, and you could tell people were taking inspiration from their other degrees.”

Brewer, who presented to HOPE Village and is continuing to work with the organization on two other projects, echoed that sentiment: “There was a fair amount of architecture and urban planning students in the workshop,

Morgan says she is pleased with how the workshop came together, which proved to be a learning opportunity for her as well. “It was a terrific experience, and I hope the students got as much out of it as I did.” — Lori Atherton 39

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A Career Shaped by Love and Love of Country From a girl to his “beloved” Ann Arbor to a religious homage to a democratic Nicaragua, José Terán, B.S. ’56, M.Arch ’58, has followed his passions BEFORE BECOMING NICARAGUA’S most famous architect; before building a multimillion-dollar empire, losing it all in his country’s civil war, and starting over in the United States; before a call from the White House, José Terán stepped off the train in Ann Arbor with no idea where he would lay his head that night. Like other moments when Terán faced uncertainty in his life, he found a path forward. After walking up the hill, past downtown, and to campus, he found a place to stay — and an experience that would change his life. “I was immediately overwhelmed, in the most positive way, by Ann Arbor,” says Terán, B.S. ’56, M.Arch ’58, whose diverse interests were satiated by the campus’s endless cultural and intellectual pursuits. “I was always discovering.”

As a boy in Nicaragua, Terán excelled in an array of subjects. As he poured over volumes in his school’s library, he discovered, through the ancient Greeks and Romans, his career path. “I was drawn to architecture because it is oriented toward solving social problems,” he says. Because Nicaragua had no architecture schools, Terán came to the United States. In Washington, D.C., where his brothers lived, he took prerequisite courses before arriving in Ann Arbor to enroll in the architecture program. Beyond the plethora of activities that enthralled him, Terán found a way to embrace his lifelong interest in publishing at U-M. With a group of classmates, he launched an annual publication of architecture students’ work. Now known as Dimensions, the group originally gave it a singular title: “We were dogmatic,” he says. “We believed there is only one dimension.” Terán’s academic experience was shaped by some of the architecture program’s legends. He calls Professor William Muschenheim a second father. Professor Walter B. Sanders hired him for summer work on the Unistrut framing system that he was developing. Gunnar Birkerts, the chief designer for Minoru Yamasaki, helped Terán join Yamasaki’s firm after Terán earned his master’s degree. While working for Yamasaki (who later designed the twin towers of the World Trade Center), Terán set off on another trip that changed the trajectory of his life. Stepping back from the grueling work for the up-and-coming Yamasaki, Terán drove from his suburban Detroit home to Managua, Nicaragua — a nearly 3,500-mile trip — to take a break. At a New Year’s Eve party, in a scene straight out of a movie, he spotted a pretty girl across the crowded room. The rest was history. “I told Yamasaki, ‘I’m sorry, but I believe that I’m not coming back,’” Terán says. “And he said that if it was for love, then he supposed it was all right.”

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(Clockwise from top left) RubĂŠn DarĂo National Theater. JFT Architecture Firm, Nicaragua,1964. Enaluf Building. INCAE business school campus in Managu. Bello Horizonte housing.

Nicaragua in the early 1960s was a place of economic opportunity. Terán connected with three childhood friends who also had attended American universities. Together, the foursome formed what would become Nicaragua’s largest conglomerate in the fields of architecture, engineering, and construction. Their companies also included real estate brokerages, banks, and wood and concrete manufacturers. While the company grew, Terán’s status as an architect soared after another fateful encounter with a woman at a social gathering — this time a conversation about the arts with the future first lady of Nicaragua. A lifelong lover of the arts, Terán designed a cultural center for Ann Arbor for his M.Arch thesis project. Now back in Nicaragua, he was upset by the lack of cultural institutions, especially since his country had produced one of the world’s greatest modernist poets, Rubén Darío. The country was preparing to celebrate the centennial of Darío’s birth, but “there was no dignified cultural space in the entire country where 250 people could gather,” says Terán. At a gathering following the death of his aunt, Terán struck up a conversation with Hope Somoza, the wife of Anastasio Somoza, the head of Nicaragua’s National Guard and a member of the family who had ruled the country for decades. In Hope Somoza, Terán found a fellow U.S.-educated arts lover; as they continued to talk, he told her about a group he had formed to discuss building a national theater. He invited her to their next meeting at a local school. That night, “I was surprised to see a limousine pull up, and Mrs. Somoza got out and sat at the school desks with us,” Terán says. “She said she was very interested in our project and would do all she could to help us.” That help included arranging a meeting with Nicaraguan President René Schick, who pledged his support. At a 42

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ceremony marking the Darío anniversary, Terán stood in the crowd as Schick announced the new theater. He was shocked to hear the president then say that Terán would be its architect. “It was unbelievable. I was just part of the organizing group. I had assumed he would bring in a theater expert from overseas to lead the design.” Terán flew to New York in search of consultants to help him and cold-called Philip Johnson from his hotel room. “I said I was a 30-year-old architect from Nicaragua who had just been appointed to build a national theater, and he replied that I had a big load on my shoulders.” As it turned out, Johnson was on his way to observe acoustical testing at the new Lincoln Center, which he had helped to design, and he invited Terán to join him. As consultants came by to say hello to Johnson, Johnson introduced them to Terán; by the end of the day, Terán had his theater team assembled. “A great deal of my theater’s success comes from Philip and the people I met through him,” Terán says. Vaulted to prominence by the success of the theater, Terán’s next big break came when Harvard University asked him to design its new INCAE business school campus in Managua. “They told me their only design requirement was that it be Central American architecture,” Terán says. “I thought to myself, ‘What the hell is Central American architecture?’ So I invented it.” Terán’s design stemmed in abstract ways from traditional Spanish influences and mimicked the layout of a convent, with a long arcade connecting the rooms. While the Rubén Darío National Theater and INCAE were celebrated for their beautiful design when they were dedicated, they were revered in another way when a mas-

Metropolitan Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception of Mary.

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sive earthquake leveled Managua in 1972: the INCAE building survived unscathed. In the center of the city, which was almost entirely reduced to rubble, the theater suffered very minor damage. “I became somewhat famous after that,” Terán says modestly. Less than a decade later, Nicaragua would experience a different kind of destruction. After Anastasio Somoza, the husband of Terán’s theater champion, came to power, the Soviet-backed Sandinista revolution plunged the country into years of political turmoil. As violence escalated in 1978, Terán, his wife, and their daughters fled first to Guatemala and ultimately to the United States. He credits then U-M Architecture Dean Robert Metcalf ’s letter of recommendation with helping to expedite their relocation. “When the U.S. immigration officer saw that I had done research at the University of Michigan, he told me, ‘Don’t worry. You’ve got your visa,’” Terán says. Terán’s connections helped him reestablish his career in Houston. He went on to become founder and CEO of Natex Corp., an architectural, engineering, and facilities management firm, and spent 20 years enjoying success born from being an integral part of Houston’s rapid growth. During that time, Terán also established CFI, a holding company in Nicaragua with 20 different entities. With funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development, CFI oversaw eight residential projects in Nicaragua with more than 15,000 single-family detached homes. “I became an expert on low-cost housing in Central America and am proud of the impact I was able to make on ordinary Nicaraguans as a result,” he says. In 2003, living in Key Biscayne, Florida, and thinking he was retired, Terán received a call from President George W. Bush’s staff. Bush, whom Terán knew from Bush’s days campaigning to be Texas’s governor, wanted Terán to serve on the board of directors of the National Institute of Building Sciences. During his six-year term, Terán helped to establish the International Alliance for Interoperability, now called the buildingSMART alliance, which streamlined the exchange of information between software applications used in the construction industry. But for all of his success in the U.S., another cultural project in Nicaragua defines the latter part of his career. While at Michigan, Terán befriended a fellow architecture student named Tom Monaghan. When Monaghan dropped out of school to run his Ypsilanti restaurant, DomiNick’s, Terán regularly ate there because they served up big plates of spaghetti for under a dollar. By the early 1990s, Monaghan had turned his restaurant into a global empire known as Domino’s Pizza — and the devout Cath-

olic was financing the construction of a new cathedral to replace the one that was destroyed in Managua’s 1972 earthquake. He had commissioned Mexican architect Ricardo Legorreta to design it, but when Terán contacted Monaghan to congratulate him on the project, Monaghan asked Terán if they could meet. During a day of discussions at Domino’s headquarters in Ann Arbor, sitting in buildings designed by Gunnar Birkerts, Monaghan said there was friction between Legorreta and Nicaragua’s cardinal and asked Terán to step in as construction manager. Terán wasn’t sure he wanted to get involved. Then Birkerts, who maintained an office in the complex, walked in, got up to speed on the discussions,

“They told me their only design requirement was that it be Central American architecture. I thought to myself, ‘What the hell is Central American architecture?’ So I invented it.” — José Terán, B.S. ’56, M.Arch ’58 and took his protégé aside. Birkerts, a Latvian, said he had hesitated when asked to design the new national library in the capital, Riga. Ultimately, he realized it would be a way to help his country as it transitioned from decades of communist rule. With Nicaragua having just held its first democratic elections in 1990, Birkerts told Terán that he now faced a similar opportunity. “I went downstairs and told Tom yes,” Terán says. Terán’s involvement with the Metropolitan Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception of Mary was “a top-to- bottom reorganization” to bring the design into compliance with the parameters of the Second Vatican Council. The cathedral was controversial in many ways, including the American bankrolling and the design — which some said resembled a mosque and others said resembled breasts. But it received an AIA Design Award in 1994 and ultimately was embraced by Nicaraguans. Terán calls the cathedral the most important building in Nicaragua and says that of all the projects he has been involved with, the cathedral is “absolutely, totally special.” Like the architect whose storied career began by hauling his worldly possessions through Ann Arbor, looking for a place to stay. — Amy Spooner 43

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Forging a Future in Chicago Aja Bonner, M.U.P. ’14, is helping to lay the groundwork for better, smarter affordable housing in the Windy City AJA BONNER, M.U.P. ’14, was required to do an internship when she was an undergraduate student studying human development and social policy at Northwestern University. That’s what led Bonner to her first visit to the notorious Cabrini-Green public housing development in nearby Chicago’s Gold Coast community. She didn’t realize it at the time, but the experience laid the groundwork for her current career. It was 2003, and demolition had begun at Cabrini-Green. Bonner interned in a health clinic that hosted a youth drop-in program in a red brick building that had no lighting just a stone’s throw from the iconic John Hancock skyscraper. She was terrified to use the elevator. “It was eye-opening. I’d never experienced something like that,” says Bonner. “Seeing the extreme contrast between the concentrated wealth in the surrounding Gold Coast with the abject poverty at Cabrini was jarring and informed my ideas about how important urban planning is.”

Today, following a decidedly indirect path, Bonner has found her way back to Chicago. As a financial planning analyst for the Chicago Department of Housing, she is charged with ensuring that quality affordable housing is available in “choice neighborhoods of opportunity” and is a catalyst for investment in underserved communities. She evaluates proposals for low-income housing tax credits and is responsible for monitoring the financial health of multifamily housing subsidized by the department, including properties replacing Cabrini-Green. “As an undergrad, I had no concept of the policies governing public housing and how it was shifting to affordable housing, or that there was even such a distinction,” Bonner says. “The proposals that are being put forth now are worlds apart” from the Cabrini-Green she knew in 2003, and likely will include housing for a range of incomes. “One of the trickier parts of my job is identifying and understanding all of the federal and local regulatory requirements and conditions attached to a given development. But the cool thing is that my job touches on many disciplines: finance, policy, law, construction, design, and of course, politics,” she adds. Following graduation from Northwestern, Bonner worked for several years in security and emergency preparedness, starting with three years at the City of Chicago’s Office of Emergency Management and another four at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She knew, however, that her long-term career interests lay elsewhere. In 2012, she began as a student in the Master of Urban Planning program at Taubman College. Her real estate development and economic development courses in particular “were important cornerstones that helped launch me as an urban planner,” Bonner says. In 2014, she won a U-M MLK Spirit Leadership Award for organizing a symposium and student recruitment campaign aimed at increasing people of color in urban

(Opposite) The economics of Chicago’s growth, as well as the city’s complicated history with issues of race and disinvestment, have created a landscape in which some neighborhoods have thrived while others have struggled.

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planning. Her capstone study of workforce and industrial development in Detroit, called “Forging a Future,” was named the Michigan Planning Association’s Student Project of the Year in 2015. Upon graduating, Bonner worked as a program officer at the Hudson-Webber Foundation, a private foundation that commits millions in annual giving to spark economic development and quality-of-life improvements in Detroit. During her two years at the foundation, she developed and implemented an evaluation research study for a $40 million, seven-year investment strategy in the city. The challenges Detroit is facing provided Bonner with a basis for better understanding Chicago, where she moved in 2017. “It’s important to take heed to the lessons of Detroit, and what happens when you lose population and lose employers,” she says. “Chicago has done a good job of maintaining a diverse economy, but it’s always important to consider what to do when a city is not in growth mode.” The economics of Chicago’s growth, as well as the city’s complicated history with issues of race and disinvestment, have created a landscape in which some neighborhoods have thrived while others have struggled. “Chicago, like many other big cities, is facing an affordable housing crisis,” she says. “Wages are just not keeping pace with the

“We have a real opportunity to challenge the status quo for how we’ve been housing people, and maybe come up with ways to build community in the process.” — Aja Bonner, M.U.P. ’14 increases in rent, and the number of units of affordable housing we’re able to finance are far exceeded by demand. Many people are going unhoused as a result. Federal support is shrinking, so we are increasingly relying on corporate funds to help finance development deals.” Bonner sees her position on a four-person team in the Department of Housing, which she began in June 2019, as an opportunity to level some of the historic disparities. “We have a real opportunity to challenge the status quo for how we’ve been housing people, and maybe come up with ways to build community in the process,” she says. “I hope, first and foremost, that our work leads to more people being housed in quality housing. I work with some really bright people who are experts in this work, and it’s exciting to think about what we can do together.” — Katie Vloet

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Resilience Beyond Climate Change Kevin Bush, M.U.P. ’10, is thinking about cyber risk, population growth, affordable housing, and, yes, climate change in the District of Columbia RESILIENCE IS A BUZZWORD for many, from financial planners to athletes to parents with young children. Kevin Bush, M.U.P. ’10, thinks about resilience, too — in the context of cities. Bush recently became chief of resilience and emergency preparedness for the District of Columbia’s Homeland Security and Emergency Management Agency. Previously, he spent more than two years as D.C.’s inaugural chief resilience officer. Bush plans for things that no one wants to imagine — the next 9/11, the next super storm, cyberattacks — and most discussions of resilience involve climate change. But Bush also is thinking about chronic stressors like population growth, increased housing costs, aging infrastructure, and inequality. The common thread: preparing residents to thrive in the face of change. “A secret power of the term ‘resilience’ is that its different definitions present an opportunity to bring ordinarily divergent stakeholders together,” Bush says.

In 2016, Washington, D.C., was selected as one of 100 Resilient Cities, a worldwide initiative led by the Rockefeller Foundation to help cities address 21st-century challenges. Stepping into the new chief resilience officer position to spearhead the district’s implementation of the grant was a logical next step for Bush, who had been thinking about resilience for years. He says his foray into the seminal issue of our time “was a classic case of being in the right place at the right time.” Suburban sprawl, not climate change, was on Bush’s mind when he came to Taubman College. He studied climate adaptation when he worked with Professor Larissa Larsen on a project for the U.S. Green Building Council. But it wasn’t until a few years down the road that climate adaptation began to anchor Bush’s career. In 2011, Bush was working for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development on President Obama’s Strong Cities, Strong Communities initiative in Rustbelt cities when he was tapped to serve as a Presidential Management Fellow, working with the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality as part of its climate adaptation team. He says his previous work with Larsen put him on the council’s radar. A year into the fellowship, Hurricane Sandy pummeled New York City, and suddenly “our tiny team, which had been working on the federal government’s first climate adaptation plans, was writing memos for the president’s chief of staff and drafting executive orders,” Bush says. “The president identified climate change as one of the top priorities for his second term, and suddenly our work was front and center.” Ultimately, Bush left the White House to join the Hurricane Sandy Rebuilding Task Force. In the thick of the fray he didn’t have time for career introspection, but he realized later that it was when his career plan gelled. “After a disaster, a lot of money flows into communities, and the old model was to rebuild everything exactly the way it was,” Bush says. “The new model sees disasters as opportunities to rebuild in more resilient ways. Hurricane Sandy showed me that you can work in disaster management and at the same time stand for sustainable development and smarter cities.” Through the task force, Bush co-created Rebuild by Design (RBD), a competition that CNN called a top idea

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of 2013. Funded projects included the $335 million BIG U proposal to protect Lower Manhattan from floodwater, storms, and other impacts of a changing climate by building a protective system around the island’s tip. “RBD was revolutionary because it solicited great ideas to address disaster resilience in a way that delivered longstanding community benefit,” Bush says. “A strictly engineering approach to Lower Manhattan’s problem would be to build a seawall. But by bringing diverse minds together, BIG U designed a series of interventions that deliver the protection while making the community better.” RBD became a model for efforts nationwide, including the National Disaster Resilience Competition, which Bush launched when he returned to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Between 2014 and 2016, the competition awarded almost $1 billion in funding for disaster recovery and long-term community resilience to states and cities with recently declared major disasters. Bush also worked to expand an existing Department of Energy program, the Better Buildings Challenge, a voluntary partnership for building owners to reduce greenhouse gases and improve energy efficiency. Under HUD’s purview, Bush expanded the program to the multifamily housing sector, challenging owners to commit to 20 percent energy reduction in a decade. During his time with the Sandy task force, Bush also was instrumental in establishing the Federal Flood Risk

After Hurricane Sandy, “… suddenly our work was front and center,” says Kevin Bush, M.U.P. ’10, who was then part of the White House’s Council on Environmental Quality climate adaptation team.

Reduction Standard, born from a drive for more government efficiency and coordination along with an understanding that the climate crisis meant Americans needed to plan for the future. Bush describes passing the standard as “bureaucratic ninja training” that prepared him for his work as D.C.’s chief resilience officer. Before it had a chief resilience officer, the district had been thinking about problems like climate adaptation and cyberattacks, but in the siloes of more than 60 agencies. Bush began by reviewing every plan and strategy that was district-wide in scope and amalgamating them into one spreadsheet of 960 strategies regarding various aspects of preparedness. He then organized five multisector working groups to ponder big questions about D.C.’s future and develop ideas to present to the other working groups; held public forums; and combined the resulting ideas with the pre-existing agency-level ones. “We developed a meta-level strategy of strategies based on the shocks and stresses we were experiencing and could forecast that we would experience in the future,” Bush says. “Good ideas were already out there. It was largely a matter of empowering people, helping them make connections, and prioritizing the best ideas.” Now, Bush continues the work that began through 100 Resilient Cities and says cities’ continued commitment to resiliency planning is heartening. He also notes that credit rating agencies now expect cities to present climate adaptation plans as part of their review process. “I feel like I was on the ground floor of a movement,” he says. “And I do see that movement growing.” — Amy Spooner 47

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Every Town Deserves Great Architecture In Flint and beyond, Shannon Easter White, B.S. ’00, M.Arch ’03, brings critical thinking, design flair, and FUN TO BE CLEAR, A BUILDING’S aesthetic matters a great deal to Shannon Easter White, B.S. ’00, M.Arch ’03. Her firm’s name is FUNchitecture (pronounced funkitecture). Its tagline is work that makes you smile, and that work is award-winning. But really, White sees herself as a problem solver. “Architecture is about getting butts in seats at a concert hall; it’s about effectively and efficiently treating patients to drive down healthcare costs, and making somebody feel included and mindful in a place of worship. Beyond what a building looks like, architecture is about complex problem solving,” she says. In her hometown of Flint, Michigan, and beyond, White has developed a reputation for doing just that. Beyond the water crisis that put Flint in the international spotlight, Flint has seen tough times recently. One result is a dwindling tax base that makes funding scarce for renovations and new construction. So White has become savvy at leveraging tax credits and structuring finance deals to launch projects and move them forward. “I get calls where the client says, ‘I’m contacting you because I know you know how to do this,’” she says. One example is Northern Market, in the northwest Michigan town of Grayling. While the area is rich with farmers, they have few options for selling goods locally. Shipping them three hours south to Detroit’s Eastern Market is inefficient and creates a “dead leg” when empty trucks return. White worked with community leaders, farmers, and distributors to design the market, which will hopefully open in 2021 and is expected to become a local hub and a tourist destination. Besides its proximity to I-75, 48

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which brings tourists “up north,” the design boasts a variety of attractions beyond the farmers’ market vendors — including a play area; restaurants; and the opportunity to see USDA-certified production facilities for eggs, maple syrup, apple cider, and honey in action. In addition, Northern Market houses training facilities for food preparation and safety, farm and garden education, and other agricultural trades. Detroit-based Leonardo’s Produce will truck food to northern Michigan and return to Detroit, bringing northwest-Michigan products to sell at Eastern Market and returning with southern-Michigan-grown products not available in Grayling. “It took getting many minds together to think through problems like transportation, logistics, access to healthy food, and more that originated because people recognized Grayling needed a farmers’ market,” White says. White’s leadership with a farmers’ market closer to home had put her on the radar for the folks in Grayling. She had a longstanding relationship with the Flint Farmers’ Market, so as the market outgrew its old space, they asked her to help them figure out what was next. Since the Flint Farmers’ Market building was nearly 100 years old, expansion would require extensive renovation to bring it up to code. White, the market’s leadership, and the developers financing the deal saw the potential in relocating to a nearby warehouse that had been vacated by the defunct Flint Journal newspaper. Although the move would be less than a mile, it met public resistance. First, there was a great deal of nostalgia for the old space, and the move was seen as further evidence that Flint was losing its grip on its proud history. Second, one of the leaders of Uptown Investment Corporation, which had assumed oversight of the market from

The Flint Farmers’ Market, designed by Shannon Easter White, B.S. ’00, M.Arch ’03, was voted one of the top five best public spaces as part of the American Association of Planners’ Great Places in America list.

Flint’s historic Capitol Theatre houses White’s firm and retail boutique.

the city, was White’s husband. Although the project was put out for bid and the market chose White (over her husband’s objections, White points out with a laugh), the alliance was controversial. “We were lambasted at public meetings to the point where we had to take the microphone away sometimes,” White says. Ultimately, the market moved, and when it opened in 2014, “the naysayers quit upon arrival,” White says. “They saw it was 200 percent better than the previous space. And vendors were happy because sales skyrocketed.” Six years later, the year-round market is home to more than 50 vendors. A rooftop terrace allows people to enjoy the foods they just purchased. The market has hosted events ranging from weddings to chili cook-offs to the county-wide kindergarten roundup, where attendees munched on apples from a local orchard that is a market vendor. In 2015, the American Association of Planners voted it one of the top five best public spaces as part of its Great Places in America list. “It was a great example of adaptive reuse,” White says of the market. “And it supports entrepreneurship because it offered space for new vendors. I’m proud that it has become a regional destination and a model for others nationwide.” 50

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But White is not resting on her laurels. Her firm of two architects brings in about 40 million dollars’ worth of work annually. In 2017, on the heels of the highly touted renovation of downtown Flint’s historic Capitol Theatre to include office and retail space, White designed FUNchitecture’s new headquarters and a retail boutique called SHIFT that she launched with a friend. Other upcoming FUN projects include a new credit union headquarters in nearby Grand Blanc, an oral surgery office in neighboring Midland, and the adaptive reuse of a tire store into a restaurant in Okemos. She coyly admits to having a few other things up her sleeve, as well. “I run at zero percent or 100 percent; there’s no speed in between,” White says. That’s been her M.O. for a while. White began her undergraduate career at Western Michigan University in the honors college and playing collegiate soccer; she transferred to Michigan when she decided to switch from premed to architecture. When she returned to U-M as an M.Arch, White commuted daily between classes in Ann Arbor and a job in Flint at Tomblinson Harburn Associates (now THA Architects Engineers) — founded by James Tomblinson, B.Arch ’51, and Gerald Harburn, B.Arch ’54, M.Arch ’57. Years later, she launched FUNchitecture shortly after becoming a mother; her infant daughter sat alongside White during her final NCARB exam.

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“The world needs little ol’ architects in every rural town and community because we have a responsibility to protect the health, safety, and welfare of the public.” — Shannon Easter White, B.S. ’00, M.Arch ’03 The close timing of the births of her daughter and her firm is not a coincidence. While on maternity leave from Tomblinson Harburn in 2009, White wrestled with whether or not to return; when several clients called her at home, saying they only wanted to work with her, she realized she could hang her own shingle. She credits the firm with giving her the experience and mentorship to do so. “Gerry was an amazing designer, and Jim was an amazing business man,” she says of Harburn and Tomblinson. “I learned both sides of running a firm from them.” From 2005 to 2010, she was director of business development, which taught her how to write a proposal, develop a fee structure, and “talk the lingo of an architect in a way that a client could understand.” As one of the youngest stockholders in the firm, it also taught her how to run a firm while having hard conversations during a global economic downturn.

The experience that White gained through a professional exchange program early in her career also has influenced her. During five weeks in Italy, she shadowed the architect restoring San Marco Basilica in Venice and an architect in a tiny town near the Slovenian border, which showed the importance of architects regardless of scale. Back at home in Flint, that lesson drives her approach. “The world needs little ol’ architects in every rural town and community because we have a responsibility to protect the health, safety, and welfare of the public,” she says. In addition to her work with adaptive reuse, White is focused on energy efficiency. She is especially proud of the LEED Platinum certification she earned for the Urban Alternative House, a collaboration between the University of Michigan-Flint and the Genesee County Land Bank; she also notes that even during Michigan’s 2019 Polar Vortex, the heating bill for one of her clients, a surgery office, was less than $40 per month. She also has been heavily involved in the water crisis, as clients with new and previous projects grapple with lingering distrust of the water. “It has brought architects and the whole community together,” she says. “We’re intent on changing the narrative and showing people that seeing is believing with regard to Flint’s recovery.” It all feeds into White’s “no-growth plan” for her career. The next hot building in a big metropolis is not her goal. “Flint is the birthplace of General Motors, where innovation met great design through great partnerships,” she says. “Flint deserves the best, so I strive for that every day.” — Amy Spooner

White’s focus on energy efficiency led to low heating bills for one client, an oral surgery office, even during Michigan’s 2019 Polar Vortex.

HEL P US BU IL D TOMORR OW Salvador Lindquist, M.U.D. ’19, worked at SmithGroup in Ann Arbor before attending Taubman College. Making the leap from earning a paycheck to paying tuition was nerve wracking, but a scholarship eased his anxiety. “The scholarship helped relieve the overwhelming pressure of student loans, allowing me to focus my mental capacity on my studies and studio work and giving me the confidence to further my studies in urban design,” he says. As a Taubman College student, Lindquist traveled the world through his externship, studios, electives, and core courses. “Being exposed to other cultures through the study of their urban contexts has been formative in the way that I situate my work,” he says. Now he is bringing that global perspective back to his undergraduate alma mater, the University of Nebraska, where he is an assistant professor who teaches an undergraduate design studio and a course about site systems in landscape architecture; he also is developing a landscape representation course. In addition, he is a founding partner of Context Research Collaborative with two fellow Taubman College students, which was born from an independent study project. “Taubman College is unique because of the diversity in faculty engaging in the practice of urban design, which benefits from a plurality of voices and approaches as opposed to prescriptive dogma. This allowed me to pursue my interests in various capacities and strengthen my own voice,” says Lindquist.

A gift to Taubman College supports the next generation of leaders in architecture and planning. Visit taubmancollege.umich.edu/give.

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Designing CULTURE At Carrier Johnson + CULTURE, Gordon Carrier, B.S. ’79, M.Arch ’81, says understanding the heart of a client lies at the heart of good design

AS A CHILD GROWING UP in Mt. Morris, just north of Flint, Michigan, Gordon Carrier regularly passed a one-of-a-kind yellow house while biking to town center. As it turns out, that house belonged to a local architect. “I remember I admired this house, as it was unlike any other in the neighborhood,” says Carrier, B.S. ’79, M.Arch ’81. “However simplistic, it was my first exposure to the power architecture can have on an individual.” Today, as design principal of Carrier Johnson + CULTURE (headquartered in San Diego), Carrier is drawn to the search for unique architectural outcomes through research-based client engagement — not to elicit a design “wow” factor but to reveal the genuine spirit of a specific client’s need. “If we successfully discover that which is unique about our client, i.e., their CULTURE, how could the resultant building solution resemble any other?” he says. Carrier believes an organization’s CULTURE defines its unique offering and spends concentrated time revealing

his clients’ project desires, while continually assessing and tuning the CULTURE inside the firm. It’s also why Carrier and his partner, Michael Johnson, added “+ CULTURE” to their firm’s name in 2007: the word represents their passion to pursue that which represents the unique in a given commission. “We don’t believe powerful design solutions derive from collateral design elements like style, material, furniture systems, or an interesting form viewed in isolated fashion,” Carrier says. “Rather, we believe strong design reveals itself through identifying and leveraging an organization’s CULTURE, no matter the client. This is what sets every client, firm, and organization apart. We have to find it.” That approach has been highly successful in San Diego and elsewhere. Carrier Johnson + CULTURE has long been recognized as a leading architectural firm in San Diego and has additional footprints in New York, Los Angeles, and Seattle. Aside from its west coast influences, Carrier Johnson + CULTURE’s design team has planned and designed developments in the United Arab Emirates, China, Costa Rica, Korea, Vietnam, and Africa, including hotels, corporate headquarters, exhibition facilities, and urban mixed-use developments. Carrier Johnson + CULTURE’s work has been featured in numerous publications, including Architectural Record, and it is a perennial part of Building Design + Construction Magazine’s Giants 300 Report, Architect Magazine’s Architect Top 50 list, and ENR’s Top Design Firms. The firm and its design principals have received more than 210 awards for design excellence in architecture, interior design, and sustainable design. Most recently, two projects have garnered significant praise: the Point Loma Nazarene University Science

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“We believe strong design reveals itself through identifying and leveraging an organization’s CULTURE, no matter the client. This is what sets every client, firm, and organization apart. We have to find it.” — Gordon Carrier, B.S. ’79, M.Arch ’81

The Point Loma Nazarene University Science Complex has earned national and international acclaim.

“There’s a natural tendency to spend more energy making a building meaningful when you know who the end user is and what they represent and, as a result, can create a solution befitting their CULTURE.” — Gordon Carrier, B.S. ’79, M.Arch ’81

Complex in San Diego and the Robert Redford Conservancy for Southern California Sustainability at Pitzer College in Claremont, California. The Point Loma project was named Building of the Year for the West Region in Architect’s Newspaper Best of Design Awards Program; it also won the American Architect Award from the Chicago Athenaeum’s Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies, and it received an honorable mention in the educational building award category from the Architecture Master Prize. The Robert Redford Conservancy for Southern California Sustainability is the first higher education building in California to receive zero net energy certification. It earned a Citation Award from the AIA Los Angeles and also won Project of the Year from the U.S. Green Building Council at its annual Sustainable Innovation Awards (SIA), as well as an honor award in the SIA’s energy and atmosphere category. The firm’s rise is more impressive when weighed against its financial condition when Carrier first became a principal in 1986. Carrier was working in Colorado Springs, Colorado, in the first branch office of what was then Buss

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(Opposite) Ballpark Village. (This page from left) 7th & Market. Robert Redford Conservancy for Southern California Sustainability.

Silvers Hughes & Associates, when his branch office’s success convinced the San Diego-based founding principals that the firm would be best served by relocating him to their headquarters. Soon after Carrier arrived in San Diego, he was surprised to discover that despite their strong design reputation, the firm’s seven-year history of poor management practices would soon lead to its financial implosion. As the firm neared bankruptcy, Carrier was asked to take the helm and was thrown into immediate, on-the-job training in how to run a business. Rule one? “Michael [Johnson] and I made a pact that we will always run a profitable firm, because if we don’t understand the economics of day-to-day practice, we’re putting our staff and client base in jeopardy,” Carrier says. “If we wanted longevity, we had to reframe the firm as a real business. Making beautiful buildings wasn’t enough.” The new partners also realized that part of the firm’s vulnerability stemmed from its reliance on a narrow client base, both in terms of location and project scope. “So we started interviewing for things the firm hadn’t interviewed for before,” says Carrier. As a result, today Carrier Johnson + CULTURE’s portfolio is intentionally diverse: the firm works on interior design and urban design, in addition to a variety of archi-

tecture projects. This includes residential towers, offices, mixed-use developments, laboratories, hotels, libraries, civic centers, and correctional facilities. One of the firm’s current high-profile projects is development of a new 167acre west campus for San Diego State University on land surrounding and including the stadium that was vacated when the NFL’s San Diego Chargers left town in 2017. Another is 7th & Market, a vertical city representing 10 different building types and including San Diego’s tallest building, covering an entire city block. In addition, Carrier Johnson + CULTURE recently completed downtown San Diego’s largest development, the 3.2-million-squarefoot, mixed-use Ballpark Village. The San Diego Union Tribune dubbed it “downtown’s next big thing” when it broke ground in 2015. In contrast, Carrier also designed an award-winning, 550-square-foot prayer chapel for Point Loma Nazarene University on its oceanfront campus in San Diego. While smaller in scale than many of his other projects, he says it may have been one of the toughest projects he has ever done: “This small but important commission was about seeking an architectural clarity and simplification,” he explains. That notion of consistently drilling down to the meaning of a design challenge was inspired by Gunnar Birkerts, 57

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Carrier says the scale made the 550-square-foot prayer chapel for Point Loma Nazarene University one of the toughest projects he has ever done.

the internationally recognized, Eero Saarinen-mentored architect who taught Carrier at Michigan. The two went on to collaborate on numerous projects after Carrier graduated. “Frankly, he changed my life,” Carrier says. “He forced me to seek clarity of concept before anything else.” When Carrier and Johnson took over the firm more than 30 years ago, another early strategy was to deemphasize the prior firm’s focus on the developer enterprise and pursue projects for whom the end users are already known; hence the plethora of education and civic-based projects that anchor their portfolio. It’s another nod to the intentionality that Carrier learned from his mentor, Birkerts. “Speculative office buildings are largely about efficiency and sculpture, largely projects one observes, as opposed to structures that engage the user,” says Carrier. “There’s a natural tendency to spend more energy making a building meaningful when you know who the end user is and what they represent and, as a result, can create a solution befitting their CULTURE.” Carrier’s core belief that understanding people and their culture lies at the heart of strong design thinking extends to those who create that design. In addition to design awards for its projects, Carrier Johnson + CULTURE has received numerous awards for offering professionals a great place to work, including being named San Diego’s most admired business/corporation. 58

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When it comes to design thinking and its staff, the firm tries hard to avoid silos. Carrier Johnson + CULTURE talents might be working on a high-rise one month and a library the next. Beyond running a good business by protecting the bottom line, the firm believes that “cross- pollinating” its people on a variety of project types makes them better able to serve all of their clients. “We are here to solve a client’s unique problem. Having done 15 of the same building type doesn’t always result in creative problem solving. In fact, it could be just the opposite, with tendency to lean on the last project as informant for the next. So we prefer the freshness of each opportunity,” Carrier says. The firm also doesn’t believe in a top-down org chart; a junior associate or Carrier himself are seen as equally capable of contribution regarding best ideas. “Hierarchy is the enemy of collaboration,” Carrier says. “We don’t have a triangle of power, but rather a circle of design influence with everyone’s names inside of it, including mine.” He sees that circle as his biggest legacy. “I’m most proud of the quality of the talent and the dialogue we have every day. Ours is an environment where people enjoy the art and process of design. There’s just no substitute for being in a place where all people are trying to make a project better.” — Amy Spooner

Class Notes Share your news with your fellow alumni in a future issue of Portico. Send your class note (along with a high-resolution photo, if you would like) to taubmancollegeportico@umich.edu or complete the online form at taubmancollege.umich.edu/alumni.

1960s Thomas Zung, FAIA, B.S. ’60, president of Buckminster Fuller, Sadao and Zung Architects, was elevated to the AIA College of Fellows in February. He established Thomas T.K. Zung Architects Inc. in Cleveland in 1967; the following year, he designed the first elongated geodesic dome in association with Buckminster Fuller Synergetics organization. Thomas T.K. Zung Architects and R. Buckminster Fuller merged to form Buckminster Fuller, Sadao and Zung Architects where they designed numerous geodesic domes, tensegrity structures, vector equilibriums, museum exhibitions, publications, and Fuller’s last invention, Hang It All. Terry Slonaker, B.S. ’63, is retired and living in eastern Pennsylvania. He has maintained his state architecture license and continues to provide limited consulting services. He spent the bulk of his career in private practice at Slonaker McCall Architects, which was based in York, Pennsylvania.

1970s Peter Kuttner, FAIA, B.S. ’72, M.Arch ’74, was inaugurated as the 58th chancellor of the AIA College of Fellows in December 2019. He previously served as New England regional representative to the College of Fellows, as well as bursar and vice chancellor. He is a principal at CambridgeSeven, an architectural

and exhibit design firm located in suburban Boston, where his work includes serving as the principalin-charge for the new Mote Sea Education Aquarium in Sarasota, Florida; the Port Wonder Children’s Museum in Lake Charles, Louisiana; the kidSTREAM Children’s Museum in Camarillo, California; and the Naples Nature Center expansion in Naples, Florida.

Michael Tobin, B.S. ’74, M.Arch ’75, joined Rush Street Gaming LLC in December 2019 as senior vice president for development. He is based in Chicago. Previously, he was with CBRE as managing director in charge of the development management services group in the Midwest market. Rush Street is comprised of several full-service casinos, internet gaming, restaurants, hotels, television production, and more. It is one of the fastest-growing gaming companies in North America, launching four casinos in four years within the past decade.  Elisabeth Knibbe, FAIA, B.S.

 Brian Craig, FAIA, B.S. ’73, M.Arch ’75, was elevated to the AIA College of Fellows in February for his work in architectural education and practice. He recently retired from his position as founding director of the Master of Architecture Program at Kendall College of Art and Design (KCAD) in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Building on a career that spans from the Peace Corps in Afghanistan to senior vice president at Progressive AE, he designed, implemented, and led the accreditation of the KCAD M.Arch and taught in the program. He now returns to architectural research and consulting.

’76, M.Arch/M.U.P. ’78, a principal with Quinn Evans, is retiring after a 40-year career in architecture. She is widely recognized as a pioneer in the practice of historic preservation, noted in particular for her work in the repurposing of aging, underutilized buildings in order to promote economic development and community resilience. She will continue to

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serve as principal emeritus consulting on several of Quinn Evans’ major projects, including the restoration of Michigan Central Station in Detroit. She joined Quinn Evans in 2004; prior to that, she was principal and owner of Elisabeth Knibbe Architects. AIA Detroit honored her career accomplishments with a 2019 Gold Medal. Michael LeFevre, FAIA Emeritus, B.S. ’76, M. Arch ’77, has joined DesignIntelligence Strategic Advisors as principal, consulting with firms on strategy, technology, and leadership. In addition, he serves as managing editor of DI Media Group, publisher of DesignIntelligence Quarterly, DI Research, and Foresight. After a 30-year career as a practicing architect, he spent 22 years in a new role as design liaison within Holder Construction Company, a national CM firm. Last year, his debut book, Managing Design (Wiley, 2019) was Amazon’s No. 1 new release in its category. He continues to write and speak nationally on collaboration — and the power of others — and looks forward to seeing fellow classmates and alumni.

1980s William (Bill) Hartmann, FAIA, B.S. ’80, M.Arch. ’82, was promoted to regional managing principal at Gensler, covering the North Central Region and overseeing four offices, their teams, and their clients. Since joining the firm in 1996, he has served in a variety of leadership roles, including office director in Detroit, chair of the Design Leadership Taskforce, a rotating member of the Management Committee, and, most recently, firmwide client relationships leader. George Kacan, M.Arch ’86, has joined the leadership team at Wightman. He will focus on business development centered around 60

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historic Walton Gardens with Dior’s modern, French identity. John Ronan, B.S. ’85, and his firm, John Ronan Architects, received the 2020 AIA National Honor Award for the Ed Kaplan Family Institute for Innovation and Tech Entrepreneurship at the Illinois Institute of Technology. One juror commented, “The Kaplan Institute at IIT is an academic building that combines functionality and sustainability into an elegant design solution, all while working within rigorous financial constraints in a setting with tremendous architectural standards.” architectural and planning services for the education sector. Additionally, he is serving as the regional director for a new Royal Oak, Michigan, office that the firm is in the process of opening. Previously, he was with Sidock Group Inc., where he was responsible for the company’s design studio in Novi, Michigan. His completed projects have a collective construction value of more than $1 billion and include numerous school buildings throughout Michigan. He also led work on the Detroit Public Schools’ successful $500 million bond proposal in 2009 and subsequent program management.  John Myefski, B.S. ’84, M.Arch ’86, principal and president of Myefski Architects, won a 2019 AN Best of Design Award (Honorable Mention in the Retail + Mixed Use category) for the Christian Dior store in Chicago. The project also received the Design Award of Honor from the Society of American Registered Architects in November 2019. Transforming the 1950’s-era Walton Gardens building designed by Bertrand Goldberg into Maison Dior’s modern concept involved creating an incandescent facade that features a patterned frit/ceramic glazing. Show windows and lightboxes further balance the prominence of the

1990s Stanford Harvey III, FAICP, B.S. ’91, has been elected to the American Institute of Certified Planners’ College of Fellows. He is a principal in the urban design and planning practice at Lord Aeck Sargent and is director of the firm’s Lexington, Kentucky, office. His specialties are conceptualizing planning processes, facilitating community participation, directing facilities/infrastructure programs, and developing implementation strategies. In 1997, following three years of heavy involvement with pre-Olympic urban redevelopment for the Corporation for Olympic Development in Atlanta (CODA), Harvey co-founded Urban Collage, which in 2013 became a practice area of Lord Aeck Sargent. Pankaj Duggal, M.U.P./M.Arch ’95, recently joined Jensen Hughes as president and chief operating officer. He joins Jensen Hughes after a 21-year career at Jacobs, a global architecture, engineering, and consulting firm, where he most recently held a senior leadership role managing the company’s federal and environmental businesses worldwide. Jensen Hughes, headquartered in the Washington, D.C., metro area, (continued on pg. 62)

GIVING: JAMIE SIMCHIK, M.U.P./M.B.A. ’15

Helping Students Connect the Dots TAUBMAN COLLEGE HAS MADE a similar impact on Jamie Simchik, M.U.P./M.B.A. ’15, and Roland Gainer, an urban and regional planning student: it cemented their passion for real estate development and showed the field in a larger context. “Taubman College connects the dots by putting students from many backgrounds in the same room with faculty who are experts in many areas,” Simchik says. Adds Gainer: “Beyond all that I’m learning, I’m excited by the opportunities to get my hands dirty.” Their paths to Taubman College were different, however. Simchik first learned about real estate development from his father, a developer. After earning his bachelor’s degree, Simchik worked for an urban planning consulting firm in Australia and then for a municipality near Boston. “I liked the public engagement side of development and decided to study urban planning,” he says. “But I was attracted to the business school and the real estate certificate program. My dual degree made me a student of the entire university.” In grad school, Simchik founded his own firm; he still is principal of Boston-based Simchik Planning & Development. “I saw an opportunity in the real estate industry. In 2012, planning firms had down-

sized or were on hiring freezes, but the work still needed to be completed on time and on budget,” he says. His firm has undertaken projects for both public and private sector clients in New England, Southeast Michigan, and Australia spanning transportation, urban planning, public engagement, and more. Gainer became interested in real estate by walking the streets of his native New York City, wondering who owns the buildings, who owns the land, and how decisions are made about both. “Putting resources into communities is great, but we have to keep the integrity of the neighborhoods. I want to be developer, but I came to Taubman College to gain the mindset of a planner,” he says. As a first-generation college student, Gainer has faced many challenges: One brother was murdered. Gainer has experienced homelessness. His mother has battled cancer. Gainer came to Michigan as an undergraduate on the advice of a mentor. Sight unseen, Gainer took the bus to Ann Arbor with $200 in his pocket. “I came here with a purpose and am doing my best to fulfill it,” he says. Scholarships have made it possible for Gainer to pursue his education, and he is the inaugural recipient of the scholarship fund that Simchik established. When Simchik was a student, his neighbor, who worked in philanthropy, talked about the importance of private support for universities like Michigan. Simchik thought of the Urban Land Institute (ULI), with which he was active as an undergrad and graduate student, including several Hines competitions. As a Taubman College student, he gave money to host a ULI webinar, and after graduation, he wanted to pay expenses for students to attend ULI conferences. Professor Margi Dewar encouraged him to think broader. “She said the bigger need is tuition assistance for students who tack on an extra semester to complete the real estate certificate,” Simchik says. When Simchik created a scholarship fund based on Dewar’s advice, he didn’t realize what a kindred spirit the first recipient would be. “I hoped to give a leg up to a student who is interested in real estate and was thrilled when that was the case. Then I got a letter from Roland and was blown away by his story,” Simchik says.

Jamie Simchik, M.U.P./M.B.A. ’15, with his daughter, Stella.

He encourages alumni to stay connected to and support Taubman College. “It’s in the interest of every alum to help strengthen the college and bring in the best students because building the college’s reputation enhances the prestige of our own degrees. And it feels good to be engaged. I’m a firm believer that to keep something great or make it even better, you have to be involved.” 61

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is a global leader in safety, security, and risk-based engineering and consulting services. Kelly Powell, B.S. ’95, has started her own practice, 222 East Society, which is based in New York City. She previously worked at Perkins & Will and at Davis Brody Bond, where she held key corporate positions directly for the owner, Hudson’s Bay Co./CBRE. In 2001, she was awarded the prestigious Rome Prize in Architecture from the American Academy in Rome and currently is a member of its board of trustees. She also serves as the president of its alumni group, the Society of Fellows. Kristen (Burton) Conry, B.S. ’99, M.Arch ’01, has been named a principal at Gensler. Since joining Gensler in 2018, she also has served as managing director of the firm’s Chicago office. Previously, she spent nearly 12 years with Hyatt Hotels Corp., based in Chicago. During that time, she served in multiple roles, most recently as vice president for global product and brand development/design services Select Hotels group. Randy Howder, B.S. ’99, principal and managing director of Gensler’s San Francisco office, and his team won a 2020 AIA Interior Design award for the new Dandelion Chocolate store in San Francisco. Housed in a previously vacant, century-old industrial warehouse, the new store gives the growing Dandelion Chocolate the space it needs to both engage the community and showcase the skill of small-batch artisan chocolate.

2000s Alex Wu, M.Arch ’00, was featured in Dezeen in June 2019 for a tiny home that he built on one of Atlanta’s smallest plots. The lot, which is only six meters wide, was developed 62

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by his firm, Alex Wu Architects, which he founded in 2016. He previously specialized in client development, programming, project management, and project architecture in the higher education market sector at Perkins & Will in Atlanta. 

retail design. In September 2019, Architectural Digest featured his most recent project, Do;ReDo, a 6,000-square-foot retail experiential space in a luxury-industrial-chic style in Nashik, India. “I want people to come here, use the space, interact with the community of shoppers, feel good and energetic, and tell a story about their experience,” he says.  Jaron Lubin, B.S. ’02, M.Arch

David Parent, M.U.P. ’01, has been named managing partner of the Michigan office of Deloitte, a global consulting and accounting firm. He has been with Deloitte for 22 years, focusing on workforce strategy and transformation, HR operations, organizational transformation, leadership development, and technology implementation. Over the past decade, he has primarily served state, local, and higher education clients. As managing partner, he will focus on expanding the firm’s mobility practice and continue to hone its commitment to diversity and inclusion.

 Gautam Desai, M.Arch ’04,

moved to Mumbai in 2010 to start his boutique design firm after working on historic preservation, interior design, and architecture projects in New York City. Since opening his own firm, he has won two awards (national and international) for best

’04, a design principal at Safdie Architects, based in suburban Boston, was featured in a February Fast Company story about what the workplaces of 2040 will look like. He envisions a more fluid interplay between spaces for working, living, and playing that includes multistory open-air parks on tall buildings that are connected by bridges to create a network of streets in the sky.

Alberto Sanchez, B.S. ’03, has been promoted to senior associate at Davis Design, a full-service architecture firm with offices in Lincoln, Nebraska, and Vermillion, South Dakota. He joined the firm in 2005 as an architectural designer, and his portfolio includes medical facilities and corporate headquarters. Doug Schuette, M.Arch ’08, has been promoted to senior associate and co-director of Gensler Atlanta’s lifestyle studio. In his new role, he leads a team of 45 designers and architects and will spearhead business development for the practice. He has been with Gensler Atlanta since 2016, during which time he has focused on mixed-use projects and recently worked on the new Signia Hilton Atlanta.

CONNEC T W I T H US Taubman College hosts alumni events around the country, annual Homecoming and milestone reunion celebrations in Ann Arbor, and â&#x20AC;&#x201D; amid the COVID-19 pandemic â&#x20AC;&#x201D; virtual events by U.S. region. Learn more at taubmancollege. umich.edu/alumni or call 734.764.4720. You also can view events online at taubmancollege.umich.edu/alumni and see photos from past events on our Flickr page.

(Clockwise from top left) Five moments from Shaping Future Cities (NYC). Chicago Externships Reception. Dean Jonathan Massey with alumni in India. 63

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Conrad Kickert, Ph.D. ’14, recently published Dream City: Creation, Destruction and Reinvention in Downtown Detroit (The MIT Press, 2019), an expansion of the research and writing that he began with his dissertation. He is an assistant professor of urban design at the University of Cincinnati whose research focuses on the shape and shaping of cities and the effect on the current workings of the city. He also focuses on the changing relationship between urban form and the ground-floor economy as a key element of our urban experience.

2010s Vadim Avshalumov, M.U.P. ’12, was named to The Well and The Jewish News’s 36 Under 36 list for 2020. He is program manager for cultural and civic vitality at the William Davidson Foundation, which he joined in 2016, and is responsible for grantmaking and strategic planning to encourage cultural and civic engagement in Southeast Michigan. He also is active in Jewish lay leadership, serving as the president of the Isaac Agree Downtown Synagogue and on the boards of the Frankel Jewish Academy and the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Detroit. Andrew Heathfield, M.Arch ’12, was featured in MyNorth.com for a Northern Michigan home he

designed for his parents while practicing with William Kaven Architecture in Portland, Oregon. Called Camp MINOH (an acronym for Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio, all states the Heathfields have lived in), the name is a recognition of the family’s Midwest roots; the home is a celebration of the region’s legacy of great design. He has since founded MINOH, a full-service architecture firm based in Columbus, Ohio.  Robern Yuen, M.S. ’12, CEO and founder of Monograph in San Francisco, was featured in an Architect Magazine story in January in which nine design leaders identify significant developments from the past decade and what they anticipate most in the next. He predicts the emergence of more tech companies led by architects in the 2020s.

 Niloufar Emami, M.S. ’15, Ph.D.

’18, an assistant professor of architecture at Louisiana State University, received a Research Incentive Award from the Architectural Research Centers Consortium. She was principal investigator of “Flexi-Form: Design and Fabrication of Additive Flexible Formwork for the Design of Concrete Interlocking Modules,” a project that will study 3D-printed concrete fabrication methods that can accommodate the creation of complex and cost-effective form work geometries at scale.

Robert Marans, B.Arch ’57, professor emeritus of architecture and urban and regional planning, met with his former students during a trip to Thailand in January. All are faculty at universities in Bangkok. Pictured from left are Piyarat Nanta, M.S. ’03, Ph.D. ’09; Thana Chirapiwat, M.U.P. ’98, Ph.D. ’05; Pantuda Boonlualohr, D.Arch ’89; Soontorn Boonyatikarn, D.Arch ’82 and a former U-M architecture faculty member; and Rujirol Anambutr, M.U.P. ’88, Ph.D. ’89. Nanta, who is head of architecture at King Mongkut Institute of Technology Ladkrabang (KMITL), arranged Marans’s visit in order to explain U-M’s Sustainability Cultural Indicators Program (SCIP) and how it can be replicated at KMITL and possibly elsewhere in Thailand. 64

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Ujijji Davis, M.U.P. ’17, was a guest on the Transforming Cities podcast in November, where she spoke with host Chris Arnold about promoting change through landscape architecture, urban design, and an awareness of African American history across landscapes. She is a landscape architect and urban planner at SmithGroup.

In Memoriam

Karen Otzen, M.U.P. ’18, recently served as the City of Detroit Affordable Housing Policy Fellow, a role that stems from a partnership between U-M’s Poverty Solutions initiative and the city to facilitate the implementation of action-oriented research. She worked within the City of Detroit’s Housing and Revitalization Department on the Policy and Implementation Team, developing plans and strategies for lasting housing affordability and single-family housing stabilization.

Jay H. Volkers, B.Arch ’50 January 2, 2020

Richard E. Fry, B.Arch ’65 February 23, 2020

Robert H. Ritterbush, B.Arch ’51 December 17, 2019

Robert N. Wassenaar, B.Arch ’69 September 29, 2019

Portia P. Anderson, B.Arch ’52 September 24, 2019

Buford M. Lovett, B.S. ’71 September 15, 2019

George C. Rusu, B.Arch ’53, M.Arch ’54 February 20, 2020

Robert J. Fajardo, M.Arch ’03 December 17, 2019

H. Jack Begrow, B.Arch ’54, M.Arch ’55 November 1, 2019

Brady A. Tysinger, B.G.S. ’18 August 25, 2019

Alfred J. Gittleman, B.Arch ’54 August 9, 2019 James P. Wong, B.Arch ’54 September 17, 2019 Willis W. Andrews, B.Arch ’57 October 11, 2019 Indulis Liepins, B.Arch ’57 January 30, 2020

 Karis Tzeng, M.U.R.P. ’19,

was featured in FreshWater in December 2019 for her work as AsiaTown project manager for MidTown Cleveland. She is the first staff member to be fully dedicated to serving the AsiaTown community and bringing improvements to the neighborhood. The story highlighted her work to secure the honorary renaming of a section of East 30th Street as Stanley Eng Way in recognition of a prominent community leader. Her other initiatives include a pop-up park to celebrate the MidAutumn Festival, a traditional Asian holiday; and new artwork installations along Payne Avenue: four utility boxes covered in wraps designed by local artists.

Francis S. Cheng, B.Arch ’58 October 4, 2019 James M. Hackenberger, B.Arch ’61 September 7, 2019 David M. Probst, B.Arch ’62 November 1, 2019 Charles A. Quist, B.Arch ’62 February 8, 2020 Michael F. Pogliano, B.Arch ’64 August 31, 2019 Douglas H. Foulke, B.Arch ’65 February 6, 2020

Leave a Lasting Legacy Including Taubman College in your estate or financial plans is one of the easiest ways to make a lasting impact. You can even generate income for yourself and your family while benefiting the college and generations of students. Types of planned gifts include gifts from a will or trust, beneficiary designations, and property. Making a planned gift is a rewarding way to support the causes you care most about while providing for yourself and your family. Contact the Taubman College Advancement Team at 734.764.4720 or taubmancollegeadvancement@umich.edu to learn more about leaving a planned gift for Taubman College or to let us know if you already have included the college in your will or estate plans.

“You are graduating into the toughest of times. But the arc of your career will be long. So look for the fit of your ideas and talents to the needs and opportunities of reconstruction. Don’t rebuild the same society we knew, but work toward a better one — more beautiful and sustainable, healthy and just. Through it all, you can count for support on the Taubman College community — faculty and staff, the thousands of alumni you are now joining, and the students who come after you. We will mentor and encourage, assist and advise you, as you become the teachers from whom we learn what’s possible.” — Dean Jonathan Massey, in a video message delivered to the Class of 2020. While the COVID-19 pandemic canceled the annual Hill Auditorium celebration, students celebrated with a virtual toast on May 2.

SPRING 2020 TAUBMAN COLLEGE

P ORT ICO VOL . 20, NO. 1 SPR ING 2020 University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning 2000 Bonisteel Blvd. Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2069 USA taubmancollege.umich.edu

Jonathan Massey Dean Cynthia Enzer Radecki, A.B./B.S. ’87, M.Arch ’88 Assistant Dean, Advancement Kent Love-Ramirez Director, Marketing and Communications Amy Spooner Editor Liz Momblanco Senior Graphic Designer

Contributing Writers: Lori Atherton, Amy Crawford, Julie Halpert, Amy Spooner, and Katie Vloet Photo credits: Jacob Cofer and Ricardo Iglesias (pp. 3 + 14-17), Dave Cooper (p. 28), Mark Gjukich (bottom, p. 24), Jonathan Hillyer Photography/Lord Aeck Sargent, a Katerra Company in collaboration with The Miller Hull Partnership (top, p. 26), A. Jipa/copyright Digital Building Technologies, ETH Zurich (top, p. 24), Michigan Photography/Scott C. Soderberg (p. 22), Justin Mohling (p. 52), Catie Newell (pp. 4 + 34-37), Daniel Nikles/ERNE AG Holzbau (p. 25), Office of Campus Sustainability (p. 23), Ulrico Richters (p. 41), Leisa Thompson/Leisa Thompson Photography (pp. 5 + 38-39)

We welcome alumni news, letters, and comments at taubmancollegeportico@umich.edu. You also can submit class notes online at: taubmancollege.umich.edu/alumni/portico Has your address or email address changed? Submit your new contact information online at taubmancollege.umich.edu/alumni/alumni-contactupdate-form or call 734.764.4720.

© 2020 Regents of the University of Michigan The Regents of the University of Michigan Jordan B. Acker, Huntington Woods Michael J. Behm, Grand Blanc Mark J. Bernstein, Ann Arbor Paul W. Brown, Ann Arbor Shauna Ryder Diggs, Grosse Pointe Denise Ilitch, Bingham Farms Ron Weiser, Ann Arbor Katherine E. White, Ann Arbor Mark S. Schlissel (ex officio)

Nondiscrimination Policy Statement The University of Michigan, as an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer, complies with all applicable federal and state laws regarding nondiscrimination and affirmative action. The University of Michigan is committed to a policy of equal opportunity for all persons and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, age, marital status, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, disability, religion, height, weight, or veteran status in employment, educational programs and activities, and admissions. Inquiries or complaints may be addressed to the Senior Director for Institutional Equity, and Title IX/ Section 504/ADA Coordinator, Office for Institutional Equity, 2072 Administrative Services Building, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-1432, 734.763.0235, TTY 734-647-1388, institutionalequity@umich.edu. For other University of Michigan information call 734.764.1817.

Portico is a semiannual publication for alumni and friends of Taubman College, produced by the Office of Advancement.

University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning 2000 Bonisteel Boulevard, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2069

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Portico Spring 2020

Articles inside

Designing CULTURE

Every Town Deserves Great Architecture

Resilience Beyond Climate Change

Light Play

A Career Shaped by Love and Love of Country

Forging a Future in Chicago

Gravitational Slingshot

Sustainability by Plan and Design

Engaging Detroit

Best of Class: Student Awards

Architecture Student Research Grant Pushes Boundaries