Portico Fall 2021

FALL 2021

Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning University of Michigan

CHANGEMAKERS SOLVING URBAN CHALLENGES The Taubman community, including our new urban technology students, is designing the digital systems of tomorrow

BACHELOR OF SCIENCE IN URBAN TECHNOLOGY CLASS OF 2025

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Students

33% Higher Than Projected

Asian - 55%

2 or More - 5% Black - 5% White - 25%

Hispanic - 10%

Eight States

Female - 50%

Male - 50%

Six Countries

3.83

Avg. High School GPA

40%

International Students

A MESSAGE FR OM T HE DE A N The University of Michigan’s mission is “to serve...through preeminence in creating, communicating, preserving, and applying knowledge, art, and academic values, and in developing leaders and citizens who will challenge the present and enrich the future.” A big conversation across our campus is how we can best fulfill that mission in a continually changing world. How do we sustain that which has made our university great over two hundred plus years — and evolve to shape our collective future?

At Taubman College, this interplay is especially lively in the domain of urban technology, the area of practice and research where data and technology intersect with buildings and cities. From transportation and food systems to hospitality and workspace to e-commerce and municipal services, digital tools and platforms are changing our cities, buildings, and ways of living. Faculty, students, and alumni have been joining and shaping this work over the past couple of decades, and one of my first priorities upon joining the college four years ago was to convene conversations about how to engage the urban tech sector. In 2018, faculty organized Shaping Future Cities, a symposium connecting internal and external experts, to take stock. We began consulting alumni and colleagues in the private and public sectors to understand their work and projected future needs. (You’ll read about one of them, Josh Sirefman, in our cover story.) In parallel, we developed a curriculum and began to recruit faculty with expertise in both scholarship and practice, including Bryan Boyer, Anthony Vanky, and Jose Sanchez, featured in this issue.

This year we launch our Bachelor of Science in Urban Technology, a first-of-its-kind degree that focuses on the intersection of urbanism and technology with design.

The program centers on the distinctive insight into cities that only urban planners, urban designers, and architects hold. It draws on experts in data science, engineering, the humanities, business, and other fields across our comprehensively awesome university. It centers on purpose, challenging students to identify a mission that matters to constituents and motivates their work. And it activates our deep expertise in design to empower students to

shape the future by designing new strategies, services, products, processes, places, and pathways where the built environment intersects the growing digital infrastructure of our lives. Starting a new degree in an emerging field is an exciting project, a test of our ability to assemble established and new strengths into forward-looking courses and research projects that will challenge the present and enrich our collective future.

As we build out the undergraduate degree, we aim to expand our urban technology work. Launch a graduate degree? Create a multidisciplinary center connecting teaching and learning with research and external partnerships with cities, companies, and communities?

There’s a lot of room for growth. As Boyer recently put it, “we aim to steward equitable and sustainable digitization of the urban realm by replacing hype and buzzwords with confident statements of what’s working in urban technology, why, and how. The best way to achieve this goal is through hands-on collaboration with cities and companies, convening around the most pressing urban needs and learning by doing.”

A full suite of undergraduate and graduate degrees combined with a framework for catalyzing discovery through social engagement would allow us to fulfill some of the core purposes of a public research university: understanding what’s going on in our society, testing new approaches, and incubating student and faculty projects with the potential to make positive change.

To achieve these goals, we count on our alumni and friends to share your knowledge, connect us to allies, and accelerate our capacity building. Look for updates and invitations to participate in this vibrant venture.

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

CON T EN TS

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AR OUND T HE COL L E GE / 04

FA C U LTY & S TU DEN TS / 1 8

04 News from the Art & Architecture Building and Beyond

18 What Are You Thinking About?

McLain Clutter Larissa Larsen

C OVER ST O RY / 10

20 It’s a Critical Moment for a Broken Food System

Through partnerships across campus and across borders, Associate Professor Lesli Hoey is creating solutions for global hunger and poverty

10 Changemakers Solving Urban Challenges

The Taubman community, including our new urban technology students, is designing the digital systems of tomorrow

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22 Imagining What Cities Can Be Is Fair Game for All

Through video games, Associate Professor Jose Sanchez is allowing citizens to provide more input into the creation of their cities

A L U MN I / 2 6 26 Lauren Leighty, M.U.D. ’11: My Degree Transformed My Career 27 Leave a Lasting Legacy

Including Taubman College in your estate or financial plans is one of the easiest ways to make an enduring impact

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28 Leon Allain, B.Arch ’49: His Path Wasn’t Easy, So He’s Making Others’ Easier

30 How the Business of Building Is Building a Better Workspace

Robin Chhabra, B.S. ’08, M.Arch ’13, has merged design thinking and business thinking to make Dextrus a hub of Mumbai’s co-working scene 34 Balancing Act: Design + Numbers + Career + Wellness

Leekyung Han, B.S. ’94, says it’s time for a revolution in Korea’s hotel industry 38 There Are High Standards Behind Affordable Luxury

Hannah Dean, M.Arch ’14, M.U.R.P. ’15, is part owner-rep and part bad cop for citizenM in Europe 40 As Ghana Grows, So Does Its Need for Great Architects

Urban revitalization is essential, and Nana Bonsu Adja-Sai, M.Arch/M.U.D. ’11, knows that architects like him can find solutions

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C L A S S N OTES / 4 3 I N MEMORI A M / 4 7 47 Henry “Hank” Kowalewski, B.Arch ’60 Professor emeritus of architecture

ON THE COVER:

Taubman College’s new Bachelor of Science in Urban Technology will prepare students to be leaders in this emerging field at the intersection of technology, urbanism, and design.

C L OS I N G / 4 8

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Master of Urban and Regional Planning Trifecta In June, three urban and regional planning capstone studio teams tied for the 2021 Outstanding Graduate Student Project Award from the Michigan Association of Planning. Taubman College student teams have now won the award 12 of the past 14 years.

The 2021 award-winning projects are: Accelerating Climate Action in Colombia & India focuses on the importance of territorial planning instruments and multi-level governance to promote low-emissions urban development and ensure that vulnerable communities adapt to climate change and flourish. Through the application of the Law and Climate Change Toolkit, students identified opportunities for strengthening the connections between urban planning and climate change law at the national, sub-national, and regional and local levels — in partnership with the United Nations. M.U.R.P. students also collaborated with architecture and urban design students on the India component, developing alternate redevelopment schemes for Jyoti Nagar in Jaipur together with district and state-level policy assessments.

Envisioning a Decentralized Compost System for Detroit builds upon efforts led by the nonprofit FoodPLUS|Detroit to explore the context for establishing a citywide, community-scaled, decentralized compost network through discussions with stakeholders and site observations, a review of best practices, interviews with national and local composting leaders, and analyses of spatial and economic scenarios. Short- and long-term recommendations suggest ways that community engagement, local and state policy change, and partnership building can shift the narrative of waste management to resource recovery while establishing greener neighborhoods, building healthier soils, reducing stormwater runoff, creating local jobs, and empowering communities.

Tapping Economic Potential: The Impact of Microbreweries in Michigan explores whether Michigan’s microbreweries have a positive economic impact in the neighborhoods and local areas in which they are located by studying the communities of Kalamazoo, Grand Rapids, and Bellaire. The team’s data analysis of economic growth focused on business change, employment change, and sales volume change of Michigan microbreweries at various intervals after a brewery opens and at varied radii around the brewery.

The team recommended several regulatory, policy, and cultural approaches to ensure a seamless experience for consumers (both residents and tourists) that builds off of the existing landscape and culture of public and private spaces and the businesses within (including microbreweries).

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$1M Amount of funding from the U.S. Department of Agriculture for the new Transformative Food Systems Fellowship, open to applicants who identify as underrepresented, first generation, or low income and are enrolled in the Master of Urban and Regional Planning program, U-M School of Public Health’s Department of Nutritional Sciences, or the School for Environment and Sustainability.

Dolores Perales, who was featured in the spring 2021 issue of Portico, is the inaugural winner of the Young Climate Leader Award, given by the Michigan Climate Action Network. She is pursuing a dual master’s degree in urban and regional planning and environment and sustainability.

Perales grew up in southwest Detroit surrounded by vacant land, blighted property, illegal dumping, and noise and air pollution. In high school, she began volunteering with Cadillac Urban Gardens, part of the Southwest Detroit Environmental Vision Project. She continued working there throughout college and now is their environmental sustainability specialist — a full-time job on top of her graduate studies.

“You have this unusual combination of someone who was interested in the built environment but also the wilderness and the natural world.

He thought of them together.”

— Philip D’Anieri, a lecturer in urban and regional planning, speaking about Benton MacKaye, one of the architects of the Appalachian Trail, a 2,192mile-long stretch of wilderness that snakes from Georgia to Maine. In conjunction with the trail’s 100th birthday, D’Anieri published The Appalachian Trail: A Biography (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) in June.

$2M Amount of a National Science Foundation grant awarded in August to a team that includes Wes McGee and Arash Adel. In collaboration with U-M’s College of Engineering, the project, “Collaborative Research: Partnering Workers with Interactive Robot Assistants to Usher Transformation in Future Construction Work,” envisions that human-robot teams have the potential to increase productivity and streamline processes, resulting in new career opportunities and significant benefits to the industry.

Strickland, Founding M.U.D. Program Director, Retires Roy Strickland, a professor of architecture who founded the Master of Urban Design program at Taubman College, retired in September. He joined Taubman College as an associate professor in 2001. In 2015, he joined South China University of Technology as an international visiting professor of urban design. Since 2016, he also has been an adjunct professor of architecture at the Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture. The Chinese government has named him an Overseas Expert in urban design.

Prior to his time at Taubman College, Strickland held appointments at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation. He served as Columbia’s assistant dean for program development and as the director of the urban design program from 1990 to 1991.

On the practice side, Strickland co-founded the design firm Strickland and Carson Associates in 1982, was a principal at the Hudson Studio in 1991, and launched the eponymous design firm Strickland Urban Design in 1992.

He is an internationally recognizedß and award-winning urban designer whose career is marked by theoretical and site-based initiatives to redesign and rethink the urban school and communities. He is the founder and director of the New American School Design Project at U-M and MIT, which developed the City of Learning (COL) design and planning strategy. The COL makes school design and programming holistic by integrating the planning of schools with that of communities. It has shaped the planning and delivery of more than $1 billion in school and community development projects across the United States.

“Roy has had a lasting impact on Taubman College through his research and teaching, but we are especially grateful to him for establishing our internationally recognized urban design program,” said Dean Jonathan Massey.

“We wish him the very best as he enters this new chapter of his life.”

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Faculty Exhibit at La Biennale Architettura 2021 Sean Ahlquist and El Hadi Jazairy, both associate professors of architecture, are currently exhibiting at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, curated by Hashim Sarkis. The Biennale Architettura 2021, titled How will we live together?, opened in May and runs until November 21, 2021.

Ahlquist — a computational design and material systems expert and one of the few architects in the world who creates structures out of large-scale CNC knitted textiles — is part of How will we play together?, a section of the Biennale dedicated to children’s play. His installation, “Social Equilibria – OrchidsPlayscape,” is part of his extensive research in creating playscapes for children, especially for those with autism spectrum disorder like his daughter, Ara, to explore the connection between sensorial experience and social engagement.

 Jazairy contributed “The Planet After Geoengineering” as part of DESIGN EARTH — the Ann Arbor and Cambridge–based practice that he co-founded with Rania Ghosn. “The Planet After Geoengineering” is part of the As One Planet section of the exhibition and portrays Earth following the deployment of five technologies in a series of speculative fictions — Petrified Carbon, Arctic Albedo, Sky River, Sulfur Storm, and Dust Cloud — situated within a genealogy of climate-controlled projects ranging from 19th-century rainmaking machines and volcanic eruptions to Cold War military plans. “The Planet After Geoengineering” builds the worlds and tells the stories of geoengineering in three narrative media: drawing, animation, and book.

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65% The decline in the number of eviction cases filed between April and December 2020 from the number of cases filed during those months in 2019, according to a report by the Michigan Eviction Project.

The project, which is led by urban and regional planning faculty Robert Goodspeed and Margaret Dewar along with housing attorneys, is supported by Poverty Solutions at U-M.

55 Estimated number of capstone courses that Eric Dueweke, a lecturer in urban and regional planning and Taubman College’s outreach coordinator, led during his nearly 20-year tenure.

Dueweke, who retired at the end of the winter 2021 semester, taught the Integrative Field Experience capstone course to second-year urban and regional planning students — a planning studio course that works on a real-world project with a nonprofit or local government partner. In addition to negotiating projects with capstone clients, he served as a liaison to practicing planners, especially from the nonprofit sector, in Detroit and statewide. Prior to joining Taubman College in 2002, Dueweke worked for more than 20 years with Detroit nonprofits in the fields of arts, special events, and community development.

College Launches Racial and Spatial Justice Fellowship Program Understanding that architecture is a cultural product that always negotiates a complex multitude of voices and ideas and myriad social, political, and aesthetic concerns, Taubman College launched the Spatial and Racial Justice Fellowship program in summer 2021 to attract designers, practitioners, spatial activists, and researchers focusing on concerns at the intersection of race, ethnicity, gender, and the built environment.

Kevin Bernard Moultrie Daye will serve as the inaugural Spatial and Racial Justice Fellow, beginning in the winter 2022 term.

Daye makes music, designs, curates, fabricates, and is a founding member of SPACE INDUSTRIES. He also is an architectural designer for EHDD. His work focuses on how issues of climate, identity, material, and culture intersect in spatial theory. As one of the 2021 emerging curators at the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibition, he will stage PARABLE 003, an exhibition that draws on the long and storied history of Black communities and settlements as tools of resistance. As a member of SPACE INDUSTRIES, he was a participating artist/curator in the Gray Area Foundation (San Francisco) 2020 Experiential Space Research Lab, developing the immersive exhibition This Will Be The End Of You, which explored notions of selfhood and identity in ecological thought and specifically focused on issues of environmental justice and radioactivity in the Black community at Hunters Point/Bayview.

In 2019, he co-curated the SOMArts (San Francisco) exhibition, Forever, A Moment: Black Meditations on Time and Space, a multidisciplinary community art exhibition that explores Black identity and the way it experiences, interprets, distorts, and ultimately transforms time and space. He earned a Master of Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley.

“Designing with compassion is my biggest motivator for being a good architect. I’m hoping to expand the scope of inclusive design through practical architectural work and representational design in our daily life.”

— Kei Wing Wong, one of five Taubman College students who attended the 2021 Design Futures Forum, which was hosted virtually by Taubman College in June. Launched in 2013, the Design Futures Forum is an interdisciplinary leadership development conference centered on principles of racial justice and social equity. The 2021 Forum brought together more than 70 student leaders and more than 25 faculty from across the United States.

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(First row, from left) Melina Duggal, M.U.P. ’95; Olaia Chivite Amigo, M.Arch ’18; Ian Donaldson, B.S.Arch ’14; Laura Peterson.

(Second row, from left) Adam Miller; Leah Wulfman; Vyta Pivo; Torri Smith, M.Arch ’21.

Taubman College Welcomes New Faculty, Fellows Taubman College welcomes four new faculty members this fall, as well as four fellows. In addition, the college will welcome the inaugural Racial and Spatial Justice Fellow in January. (Read more on page 7.)

“With our 94 faculty across virtually every subject area in architecture, planning, and urban design, Taubman College gives students an unmatched breadth of opportunity to promote positive change in our built environment,” said Dean Jonathan Massey. “We thrive on the ideas and energies that new faculty bring to those already here, and we take pride in mentoring these incoming colleagues. To deepen these processes, we have extended our fellowships from one year to two, giving students, faculty, and fellows alike more time to teach and learn from one another.”

The new faculty members are as follows: Melina Duggal, M.U.P. ’95, visiting assistant professor of practice in urban and regional planning. Since 2016 she has been the president of Duggal Real Estate Advisors LLC, a woman-owned firm that provides clients with feasibility studies, competitive market analysis, economic 8

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development strategies, financial analysis, corridor studies, and redevelopment strategies throughout the United States.

Olaia Chivite Amigo, M.Arch ’18, lecturer in architecture. She is an architect at INFORM Studio and a recurring research collaborator for MAde Studio, a researchbased, collaborative design practice that offers integrated expertise in architecture, landscape, and urbanism. At MAde, her work focuses on developing visualization and representation strategies that depict the social, spatial, and ecological dynamics of contested urban spaces.

Ian Donaldson, B.S.Arch ’14, lecturer in architecture.

His work focuses on shifting scales between the ephemeral, programmatic, and relational complexities that govern the built environment — finding slack and contradiction as opportunities for transformation and experimentation. Previously, Donaldson worked on publications, installations, retail, housing, urban design, and cultural institutions while practicing in New York, Los Angeles, and Detroit. He holds a Master of Architecture from Yale University.

Laura Peterson, lecturer in architecture. She led the product development of the WeLive co-housing units, the concept design for the Henry Ford Center for Sustainability, and a ground-up housing and zoning proposal that received an honorable mention from the City of Los Angeles. Peterson is co-founder of 1+1+ Architects and co-curator of the 2021 Detroit Month of Design exhibition, How to Build* Our Own Living Structures. She holds a Master of Architecture from Columbia University.

Adam Miller, Muschenheim Fellow. He is director of Pneu-Stars, a collaborative design group that produces stage designs and installations. Miller’s interests lie in renegotiating the legacies of modern architecture and its taste culture by using queer theory, feminist theory, biopolitics, and aesthetics to develop design that takes marginalized perspectives into account. Miller earned his Master of Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley.

“Many dimensions of our profession seem to be optimized for privileged people.”

—Dean Jonathan Massey in a July conversation in Architect Magazine on the importance of creating a more inclusive and accessible design community — and his ideas on how to do so.

Leah Wulfman, Walter B. Sanders Fellow. They have been assembling hybrid, virtual, and physical spaces to prototype new relationships to technology and nature and to challenge normative ideologies so often reinforced by technology and architecture. In addition to mixed-reality installations that play with and emphasize the physical, material basis of everything digital, they are working on a research series focusing on gamified environments, interactions, and materials. They hold a Master of Science in Fiction and Entertainment from SCI-Arc. Vyta Pivo, Michigan Society of Fellows fellow in architecture. She specializes in architectural and urban history, environmental studies, and the U.S. in global context. Her current project, The Gospel of Concrete: American Infrastructure and Global Power, documents the global ambitions of the U.S. cement and concrete industries along with the environmental and social consequences of their unfettered expansion. She holds a Ph.D. in American Studies from the George Washington University.

In addition, Torri Smith, M.Arch ’21, will serve as a non-faculty Michigan–Mellon Design Fellow in Egalitarianism and the Metropolis. Funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Michigan–Mellon Project on the Egalitarian Metropolis explores contemporary issues on urbanism and egalitarianism. Smith’s research, building on her interests at the intersections of environmental justice, urban activism, and design, will explore ways ecological regeneration can address systemic racial inequity.

Mireille Roddier and Keith Mitnick, associate professors of architecture and founders of the collaborative design practice Mitnick Roddier, are the recipients of the 2021–2022 Arnold W. Brunner/Frances Barker Tracy/Katherine Edwards Gordon Rome Prize in Architecture. Awarded annually by the American Academy in Rome, the Rome Prize is a highly competitive award that supports advanced independent work and research in the arts and humanities. Rome Prize winners are selected by independent juries of distinguished artists and scholars. Described by the American Academy as “the gift of time and space to think and work,” the prize includes a stipend, workspace, and room and board at the Academy’s 11-acre campus in Rome, starting in September 2021. Roddier and Mitnick’s project, “Six Architectures in Search of an Author,” will stage six buildings into a composite and multilayered architectural reconstruction of Rome that takes artistic license in the creative representation of existing buildings in order to present new and contemporary views of the city.

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CH A NGEMAKERS SOLV ING URBAN CHALLENGES The Taubman community, including our new urban technology students, is designing the digital systems of tomorrow

By Amy Crawford

IN MANY WAYS, THE CITY OF THE FUTURE is already here. But while advanced technology has become a ubiquitous feature of urban life, it’s far less flashy than the pneumatic tubes, flying cars, or holographic billboards that have long populated science fiction. In fact, when it’s working well, urban technology is more likely to be invisible.

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tools — data creation and management, sensing, predictive analytics, modeling. If you think about it, planning has always been about imagining a future based on a community’s civic goals, and these new technologies are helping us chart a course to get there.”

Transit agencies use artificial intelligence to predict demand, making the bus more convenient and reducing carbon emissions. Streetlights connected to the Internet allow cities to keep up with maintenance and ensure that the lights stay on. Even modern 311 systems, which let citizens report problems to City Hall from an app, represent a quiet technological revolution.

All that means the time is right for a new undergraduate degree that places urban technology at its center, says Bryan Boyer, assistant professor of practice in architecture and founding director of Taubman College’s new Bachelor of Science in Urban Technology, which will launch this winter with its inaugural cohort of students. The program will be the first undergraduate degree in urban technology offered anywhere, positioning Taubman College as an early leader in education for this emerging field.

“There are things happening today that are not necessarily the sort of shiny objects that you can look at but that are still very important in terms of making cities better places to live,” says David Leopold, M.U.P. ’05, director of city solutions at the Chicago–based City Tech Collaborative, which brings together municipal agencies, nonprofits, commercial companies, and universities to find technological solutions for urban issues. “And planners are starting to explore how to apply these new skills and

“New technology deployed in a city can create as much of a shift as building a new neighborhood,” Boyer says.

That means the stakes are high for everyone when it comes to training the next generation of urban technologists — and Boyer believes Taubman is well positioned to lead the way. “When digital products and services rewire our everyday lives, we need the people designing those systems to understand not just the technical side but also urban implications and urban values,” he says.

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Using Chicago as a case study, City Tech Collaborative and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill gathered mobility and technology experts to explore concepts of future street typologies that reflect emerging mobility trends, technologies, and behaviors.

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“There’s so much opportunity to understand how technology can contribute to addressing urban issues — it’s the future of the field.”

— Josh Sirefman, M.U.P. ’03 THE FUTURE OF THE FIELD As the college began developing the new urban technology curriculum, the first alum that Dean Jonathan Massey turned to for help was Josh Sirefman, M.U.P. ’03. A member of Taubman College’s new Urban Technology Advisory Board, Sirefman is senior adviser and co-founder of Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, that is best known for working to develop a new mixed-used neighborhood in Toronto. Although Sidewalk Labs pulled out of the Canadian metropolis in 2020, citing economic uncertainty in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, Sirefman is applying lessons learned from that project to other efforts, including advising Taubman College on its new program.

“The reason why a program like this is so exciting is because it’s really difficult to effect meaningful change and innovation in the urban context,” Sirefman says. “You have to not just understand what technology can do and create a technology-driven product or strategy but you have to know how to work within communities, how to work with policy, how to understand the complex interplay between lots of different variables that make urban life what it is.”

The Taubman program, Sirefman says, will give students an opportunity to develop that skillset, and, in turn, he hopes its graduates will help ensure that urban technology is used as a force to make cities better for everyone. That could include not only using technology for standard urban applications, such as improving transit systems, but also big-picture challenges like climate change. Virtual power plants, for example, are a form of distributed electricity generation that, in conjunction with Internetconnected smart meters in buildings, can respond immediately to changes in demand, which reduces waste and keeps greenhouse emissions down. Urban technology also could help mitigate the affordable housing shortage that has become a crisis in many U.S. cities if, for example, artificial intelligence could help architects and builders optimize the use of materials to reduce construction costs.

“There’s so much opportunity to understand how technology can contribute to addressing urban issues — it’s the

future of the field,” Sirefman says. “And it can be applied across so many different categories of careers — whether urban planning or development or social issues, technology is going to be at the core of it. There will be massive opportunities for graduates with this skillset. It’s going to be increasingly in demand.”

DATA-INFORMED PUBLIC HEALTH, PUBLIC POLICY, PUBLIC ART While the new program doesn’t welcome its first cohort until January, Taubman students and faculty are already deep into exploring the potential for urban technology.

Anthony Vanky, an assistant professor of urban and regional planning, researches the use of digital sensors and data in urban contexts. As co-founder of Social Studies, a consulting and research and analytics firm, he has worked with clients including the City of New York Planning Department to look at how people use spaces by studying their “data exhaust,” which are the byproducts of cell phone data or mobile apps that trail them as they travel around. Vanky also mentored a wastewater epidemiology startup that calculates drug overdose rates at the neighborhood level via the microbes present in city sewers, as well as a startup that uses artificial intelligence to enhance agricultural production and one that creates 3D models of homes using residents’ smartphone cameras.

Robert Goodspeed, an associate professor of urban and regional planning, uses GIS, or geographic information systems, along with so-called “big data” to study social issues like eviction, aiming to help cities work better for communities of color, the poor, and other marginalized groups whose voices aren’t always heard in conversations about planning. His work also has explored the idea of “civic crowdfunding,” which uses a digital platform to help community-based organizations recruit volunteers and raise money from individuals for community projects.

“It could be public art,” Goodspeed says, “or it could range all the way up to building brick-and-mortar projects like 13

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community centers. There’s no venture capital. It’s about using technology like social media and an online platform to build community and improve urban quality of life.

So I think there are urban tech career pathways not only through the private sector but also through the public sector and through social entrepreneurship — where students may lead various initiatives through existing nonprofits or by founding their own social enterprise.”

These endeavors, Goodspeed notes, require a new combination of skills: “You need to know something about technology but also about how to work with communities.

I think the new degree will be right at that sweet spot.”

THE COMPLICATED GIVE-AND-TAKE OF URBAN LIFE Urban and community values will be crucial for students pursuing careers in the public or nonprofit sector — but they’ll be just as important if, like so many brilliant programmers before them, Taubman College’s urban technology graduates are drawn to Silicon Valley instead.

“There are already tons and tons of companies that are doing things that affect your everyday, brick-and-mortar life,” Boyer says, offering as examples the now-ubiquitous ride-hailing apps and the popular Internet-connected

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“You need to know something about technology but also about how to work with communities. I think the new degree will be right at that sweet spot.”

— Associate Professor Robert Goodspeed doorbell camera Ring. “There are so many ways tech is changing our utilization of and relationship with existing city fabric. Think about the next person who starts a company like Uber or Ring, or the person who figures out how to design and supply affordable housing at scale. Should that person only understand computer science and entrepreneurship, or should they also have a civic ethos and appreciate the complicated give-and-take of urban life?”

Wenting Yin Thomas, M.U.P. ’16, a user experience researcher at Uber in San Francisco, strongly believes in the latter option. Her current role involves interviewing and surveying the millions of people who use the platform to earn money driving rideshares or delivering food, then analyzing the data in order to help the company understand its earners’ needs. She studied the gig economy, in which companies like Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, and more rely heavily on urban technology, at Taubman — and now,

from the perspective of an industry insider, she’s been impressed by earners’ creativity.

“I met a driver who was also working in real estate, using the opportunity to reach out to a wider customer base,” Thomas says. “You can see that this gig economy tool is really opening up more opportunities to different types of people. And then during this past recession and lockdown period, when there were so many people losing their jobs, they could pick up on the gig economy to make a living right away.”

The gig economy, which has altered much about city life in recent years, also has been the target of criticism because the people who drive or deliver food — earning money for the company as well as themselves — don’t receive the benefits or protections typically afforded to employees.

Meanwhile, flexibility is a top reason for the popularity of the gig economy — people can earn with multiple apps, drive whenever and for as long as they want. Studies have also shown that in some cities, home-share platforms like Airbnb have an adverse impact on long-term rentals,

(Opposite) “Aging in the Alleys” by Karun Chughasrani, M.Arch ’20, for the Civic Futures thesis studio. (Above) Through his practice, Dash Marshall, Bryan Boyer created an app that harnesses census data to make architectural renderings representative.

while ride-sharing has cut into the revenue of transit agencies. “There are complex problems with sharing economy,” Thomas says, “but that’s why I love my work, providing solutions in a complex system to help people.

While the flashier aspects of urban technology — those autonomous cars Uber has been working on, perhaps — might suggest a futuristic city becoming less human, technology also can be humanizing, especially when it’s used to help people better navigate their city. Ruoshui “Rosie” Liu, M.U.R.P. ’19, is a research analyst at the nonprofit Data Driven Detroit, where she works on so-called “data portals” that help residents access information about their city.

“We get people the information they need to help with their decision making,” Liu says, describing the interactive maps and data visualizations Data Driven Detroit, or D3, creates for researchers, advocates, activists, and regular people who are simply seeking services. That could mean information about housing, daycare providers, public health, land use, and just about anything per­ tinent to the work of urban planners and the lives of urban residents.

Detroit residents seem to have a thirst for data, but while more and more of it is being made available online — census and election records, figures from municipal agencies, health surveys, business directories, and university 15

official technology strategy. She also interned with the software company Esri, where she modeled tools for urban planning. But she “caught the entrepreneurial bug” at Taubman College and now is the founder and principal of MEDDY Interaction Art Studio.

MEDDY is a New York–based startup that hosts interactive digital experiences, including “For Better or Better,” a Valentine–themed networking event for people also interested in self-improvement, and “Community Table,” a safe, anonymous place for people to discuss difficult topics like racism over audio-only chats with strangers.

MEDDY’s projects are about storytelling and community building, using digital technology at an intimate, human scale — something that’s also key when technology is applied to city life.

“With urban tech, self-driving cars are always the example that you go back to because that’s very shiny,” Jaffe says.

“But that sort of thing takes attention away from questions like, ‘How can we make the city better for the food delivery bicycle guy or the woman who cleans houses and has to cart her equipment on the bus?’ Technology can be cool and flashy and fun, but a city is about relationships and networks and people.”

READY FOR STUDENTS WHO WANT TO MAKE THINGS HAPPEN research — processing and interpreting what can feel like a firehose of information is tough. “Data’s always there,” Liu says, “but the challenge is to make data useful.”

What’s useful depends on who’s asking — and a service called “AskD3,” which allows Detroit residents to send their own requests for data, sometimes turns up surprises. “We get some real interesting requests,” Liu says.

“I remember there was a story writer who wanted to know where all the haunted houses are, to be part of his inspiration for his new novel.”

That writer is not the only one using technology to inspire creativity. While at U-M, Rachel Jaffe, ’17, who studied urban and regional planning and information science, worked with the transportation department in Montgomery County, Maryland, to create its first-ever

(Above) Data Driven Detroit is mapping residents’ participation in curbside recycling programs. (Below) MEDDY’s Community Table brings people together anonymously for conversation around difficult topics.

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At Taubman College, faculty are looking forward to winter term, when they’ll welcome the first cohort of 20 urban technology students. Their applications revealed a diverse group, ranging from hardcore programmers with experience on the high school robotics team to students with a design bent who want to explore new tools to urban policy wonks looking for efficient ways to make change. Some were taking on their own urban technology projects already, such as reducing vehicle congestion in front of their school by better managing traffic flow or improving the bus network in their hometowns.

“I’m thinking of this as almost a liberal arts program for students want to make things happen in today’s cities,” Boyer says. Still, noting the daunting issues the next generation faces — serious challenges like climate change and affordable housing — Boyer says, “It’s great to come to an understanding about what’s not working in the world around you, but then what do you do about it?

I tell prospective students, ‘Don’t come to urban technology if you’re looking for something that’s easy, because it’s not going to be easy.’ We’re talking about designing the future of cities.”

Urban technology students will leverage Taubman College’s culture of making and experimentation, including incorporating virtual reality into the classroom.

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FA C UL TY & S TU D E N T S

A.

Q: What Are You Thinking About?

Beginnings in architectural education.

Why Is This Interesting to You? For the past several years, we have been evolving our undergraduate curriculum at Taubman, and this summer I co-taught our introductory architectural theory course to incoming three-year Master of Architecture students, with Associate Professor Adam Fure.

Both of these initiatives have provided opportunities to rethink the received “fundamentals” in architecture. I’m interested in an anti-fundamentalist architectural education in which we replace the notion of fundamentals with a plurality of foundations from which to build design literacy and architectural knowledge.

Too often, an education in the fundamentals serves to create a rarified disciplinary interior for architecture that few are so privileged to enter.

McLain Clutter

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An anti-fundamentalist education would find architectural knowledge latent throughout the everyday built environment, empowering students to recognize and wield their unique perspectives and life experiences.

What Are the Implications?

I think this kind of education can better meet the social, cultural, and technological urgencies of the moment and better prepare our students for the dynamic contexts of their future careers. It might also help to erode the myth of auteurist genius in architecture, celebrate the myriad roles that architects play in professional contexts, and, hopefully, cultivate a culture of inclusion for those who have been excluded from architectural education in the past.

McLain Clutter is the chair of the architecture program and an associate professor of architecture. He is a partner in the Ann Arbor–based design practice EXTENTS, with Assistant Professor Cyrus Peñarroyo.

As an architect, Clutter’s work focuses on the role of architecture within the multidisciplinary milieu of contemporary urbanism, and the interrelations between architecture and media culture.

A.

Q: What Are You Thinking About?

A new energy landscape in the decade ahead.

Why Is This Interesting to You? Meeting the climate challenge means making significant changes to our daily lives. One important component of that change is our energy landscape.

Shifting from coal, gas, and natural gas toward cleaner renewables will require building new infrastructure.

Currently, three electricity grids supply most of the U.S. Upgrading our infrastructure will involve adding microgrids. These smaller systems can be disconnected from the larger grids when necessary and should improve reliability. For people in the Midwest, home heating will shift from primarily natural gas toward electricity. More and more, geothermal systems for heating and cooling are likely for our region. Planners will be thinking about how geothermal districts can serve downtowns and neighborhoods. Local utilities will need to rethink their business model and accept decentralized energy production. In 10 years, more vehicles will need to plug in versus gas up. While electric vehicles are a cleaner alternative, planners, architects, and urban designers will need to keep transit and multifamily dwellings at the center of development discussions.

Larissa Larsen and regulations still make sense.

For example, some cities are rethinking single-family zoning.

I hope we will be restarting discussions about high-speed rail because creating a line between Toronto, Detroit, and Chicago would bring many benefits. Planners will help shape this new energy landscape, which brings the opportunity for creative problem solving and a responsibility to serve and engage with all members our communities.

Larissa Larsen is the chair of the urban and regional planning program and an associate professor of urban and regional planning. Her research focuses on the urban environmental problems of extreme heat/ urban heat islands, water pollution and infrastructure, and stormwater flooding. In her research, she documents the magnitude of these environmental problems and tests the effectiveness of different design and policy interventions.

What Are the Implications?

Planners often see their role as serving the public good by enforcing regulations. However, the rapid changes needed in the next decade will require examining what rules

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It’s a Critical Moment for a Broken Food System Through partnerships across campus and across borders, Associate Professor Lesli Hoey is creating solutions for global hunger and poverty

By Julie Halpert

MUCH OF LESLI HOEY’S research was inspired by growing up in a remote part of Bolivia where her father ran a cooperative farm. “They were practicing fairly forward-thinking sustainable agriculture strategies in the tropics,” she says.

Hoey, an associate professor of urban and regional planning, has dedicated her academic career to studying the adverse consequences of unequal access to healthy food and ways to address the problem. She experienced the challenges firsthand as a young child, when her family moved to the U.S. and lived in her grandparents’ trailer in western Pennsylvania. Being poor, she experienced the consequences of food inequality and the role of government food aid that she says provided mostly unhealthy options: “There were huge chunks of cheese, dehydrated milk, canned goods and boxed food,” she says.

This was in stark contrast to Bolivia, where her family lived on fresh, healthy, unprocessed food.

A turning point was in 2003, when Hoey spent nine months at a working ranch in Arkansas that was part of a small nongovernmental organization called Heifer International. She taught students about global hunger and poverty and strategies for changing the food system.

“It solidified that this is what I want to do — be a part of creating solutions for global hunger and poverty.”

Transforming food systems, she says, not only addresses issues of economics and equity but also has “incredible impacts on environmental resilience and people’s health and nutrition.”

She’ll now have the opportunity to further this work as a Fulbright Fellow, examining how Bolivia’s Promotion of Health Food Law affects urban food systems planning.

In 2022, she’ll spend three months in Bolivia looking at how street food vendors impact the nutritional value of food offered in urban schools. In low- and middle-income countries, street vendors often are vilified or violently attacked by local governments that have a vision of modernizing and cleaning up the streets. “Cities have a myopic view. They think supermarkets will solve food security and increase the prestige of their city,” Hoey says. Yet the result often undermines food security and worsens the job prospects “of so many of the working poor.”

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“There’s so much about our food system that is failing our environment, and our health, and many people’s livelihoods.”

— Associate Professor Lesli Hoey

Hoey will study how a collaboration with street vendors in the Bolivian municipality of Montero is promoting access to more nutritional food.

Street vendors in urban areas in Bolivia congregate around schools, selling food in the morning and at lunchtime. Because they had been offering less healthy options like chips, candy, and fried and processed foods, Hoey says they distracted children away from the healthier meals they receive in the schools. As part of a six-year pilot project, the municipality worked with street vendors to develop and test menus with healthy food options. It also mobilized others to show there was a demand for healthier food. This set the vendors up for success in selling the healthier items, she says.

Her goal with her research project is not just to develop plans, but measures for implementing them. She wants to study the way the collaborative process succeeded in convincing street vendors to change their offerings. She says that’s critical for building the capacity of other municipalities to begin to change their food environments. And it provides a mechanism for other cities around the world that are trying to follow this model. “I want to show how informal food vendors actually are part of the solution that they’re trying to achieve,” she explains.

systems, she collaborates on teaching and research through U-M’s Poverty Solutions Initiative and other partnerships. Since few urban planning scholars focus on food systems, “I don’t fit that traditional mold,” she says. “Being able to teach classes that are so fundamentally wrapped up with everything that I do in my research enhances my research, too.”

Hoey brings her expertise to Taubman College students, teaching graduate courses in food systems policy and international development planning. As part of a campuswide cluster of faculty focused on sustainable food

Going forward, Hoey is interested in exploring the longterm impact of COVID-19 on food systems. She believes that the pandemic could provide an opportunity for “transforming our food systems in fundamental ways.”

She points to detrimental impacts resulting from restaurant closures, disruptions to grocery store food chains, and significant COVID exposure at meat packing plants: “All of it is really making people recognize that there’s so much about our food system that is failing our environment, and our health, and many people’s livelihoods.”

Through a Fulbright Fellowship, Hoey will study how a collaboration with street vendors in Bolivia is promoting access to more nutritious food.

In the U.S. and globally, small-scale farmers have rallied by developing innovative approaches for direct sales, delivery methods, and online ordering, she says: “So it’s a really critical moment.”

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Imagining What Cities Can Be Is Fair Game for All Through video games, Associate Professor Jose Sanchez is allowing citizens to provide more input into the creation of their cities

By Julie Halpert

JOSE SANCHEZ HAS TURNED a childhood passion into an innovative architectural pursuit. Like many children growing up in the 1980s, he spent a great deal of time playing video games. He put aside that “childish interest” until he began studying architecture and conducting research. “There was a particular moment in my research where I realized that I was developing technology and software that had certain similarities to what games do,” he says.

Sanchez is an associate professor of architecture who specializes in using gaming as a platform for participatory design in architecture. He was motivated by the social culture of his native Chile to engage in social issues.

Gaming, he says, provides an opportunity to deal with simulation and software development in a way that involves the general public. He views the players as people “inputting their own kind of perspective into software and sharing their contributions and creations” to create a community. As one of the few researchers designing architecture software that allows the public to play and engage in games, he feels like he’s blazing a trail.

Sanchez explains that there’s a strong tradition of participatory design in different urban contexts where people in a community are invited to provide input on how the city should grow. “I wanted to do that at a much more global scale through the use of software,” he says.

Through the games he develops, Sanchez wants to involve a general audience and make architecture more approachable and relatable. “We architects seem to have the prob22

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lem that we always talk to each other and we don’t engage the general public,” he says. He’s attempting to “create a ladder,” allowing a non-expert to become engaged and educated in architecture by playing a game. “I’m excited to see how people who are not necessarily architects engage with the issues presented in the game,” he says, noting that allowing citizens to provide more input into the creation of their cities leads to “a richer kind of imagination about what cities can be.”

In his games, the player is asked to consider such factors as how to achieve production of architecture through affordable means, deal with resource management within a community, and maintain moral self-sufficiency in the production of a community — the systems that will allow a community to be sustainable.

He started his first studio, called Plethora Project, in 2011.

His first game, Block’hood, was released in 2016 and took three years to develop. It’s a city simulator that requires the player to consider various environmental variables, like waste management, energy production, and food production, in designing a city block. It forces the player “to consider the ecological relationships between these parts,” he says.

His second video game, Common’hood, will be released by the end of this year. Inspired by Detroit, it follows the story of a character who occupies an abandoned factory and allows the player to build architecture and design communities. Sanchez hopes the game could be used

[Opposite] Block’hood (top) encourages players to consider ecological variables to create a city block while Common’hood players (bottom) design a community from an abandoned factory.

as a simulation for communities interested in building products like tiny houses and backyard communities in different forms.

Beyond creating the games, Sanchez also authored Architecture for the Commons: Participatory Systems in the Age of Platforms (Routledge, 2020). In the book, he argues that a “Lego-like” parts approach towards science has the potential to enable public participation. “If we are to consider public participation, we need to be designing in a particular way,” he says. He introduces the notion of a commons — an organization of citizens that create communal value for themselves as a collective. He explains that the book tries to create a framework for all the pieces — the architecture project and installation and the video games — and discusses the theory behind designing in a less traditional manner.

The conversations he has with colleagues at Taubman College and the contributions his colleagues provide to the school create an environment conducive to elevating his research and the professionalism behind it, he says.

Sanchez joined the faculty in 2020; he previously taught

at the renowned Architectural Association in London and the Bartlett School of Architecture at University College London. He was excited by the prospect of joining Taubman College: “I’ve always been a really big fan of what the University of Michigan is doing in architecture; I consider it one of the best schools of architecture in the country.”

Going forward, he hopes to focus on transitioning from the simulation in video games to real-world projects.

He recently heard from someone in New Zealand that they were trying to build a tiny house on wheels with his games. His goal is to follow up on situations like that to help members of a community get architecture executed out of a game that could help the larger community.

He’s encouraged that his field continues to grow and hopes that other types of strategies for public participation in architecture besides video games will emerge.

“The notion of participation is something that for many people is scary,” he says. “But I think that it’s a wonderful thing to embrace since it opens up a dialogue and platforms for new voices.”

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HEL P US BU IL D TOMORR OW With several architects in his family, Hudson Matz, B.S. ’22, was born with an appreciation for design. But growing up in San Francisco’s climate of environmental activism, he also was interested in sustainability. He is pursuing a double major in architecture and environmental studies, with a concentration in sustainable city planning. “I’m interested in designing places that are self-sufficient, that will continue to last,” Matz says.

“What’s the point of building something if you’re going to have to tear it down? I want to create spaces that minimize waste and improve the way people live.”

Outside of the classroom, Matz embraces the breadth of opportunities at the university, including the professional architecture fraternity Alpha Rho Chi and the club lacrosse team. “I could’ve gone to another school with an accredited five-year architecture program, but I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to pivot and try different things,” Matz says. “This is an amazing environment where we have the tools to create whatever we can imagine.” Trying different things included a summer internship at YKH Associates in Seoul this year, which opened Matz’s eyes to the global possibilities of an architecture career. His scholarship gave him the flexibility to embrace such opportunities and expanded his network. “Having the chance to connect with successful alumni, especially in California where I want to practice, is very helpful,” says Matz of talking with Gordon Carrier, B.S. ’79, M.Arch ’81, a founding donor to the scholarship that Matz receives. “Knowing that he provides financial support and is genuinely interested in my career is incredible. It’s another example of how unique the Michigan connection is even after graduation.”

A gift to Taubman College supports the next generation of leaders in architecture and planning — including Hudson, the recipient of the Rocky Mountain and Western States Scholarship. taubmancollege.umich.edu/give

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ALUM NI G I V I N G

GIVING: LAUREN LEIGHTY, M.U.D. ’11

My Degree Transformed My Career FOR LAUREN LEIGHTY, the geographical dichotomy of Taubman College was striking: this preeminent university was in her backyard — but her classmates came from all over the world.

During a virtual 10-year reunion this spring, it struck her again. “We had classmates Zooming in from Jordan, Dubai, and California,” says Leighty, M.U.D. ’11. “It was great to see everyone and hear what they’ve been up to.”

As a member of Taubman College’s Alumni Council, Leighty is committed to helping alumni stay engaged with the college and each other — which isn’t easy when that globally diverse student body becomes an equally dispersed alumni community. “I think people want to stay connected but lose sight of how to do that. It can be easy to drift,” she says.

Leighty’s post-graduation engagement with the college started with critiquing studio reviews. As principal and campus studio leader of SmithGroup’s Ann Arbor office, Leighty also has hosted students for Spring Break externships and as summer interns. She encourages others who are able to do the same: “Interacting firsthand with students and recent grads makes me feel like I am giving back in a really meaningful way,” she says.

In addition, Leighty gives to Taubman College’s annual fund, which provides flexible, immediate support for the college’s greatest needs. During the pandemic, student support was at the top of the list — something that Leighty, a former scholarship recipient, appreciates.

“I benefitted from the generosity of others, so now that

I can help others achieve their goals, it’s important to do so,” she says. “It’s my investment in the next generation.”

Her support of the college honors the educational experience that she says “transformed my life and work.

My degree changed the conversations I could have with potential employers by opening a whole new world of possibilities.”

Leighty came to Taubman College after a few years of practice as a landscape architect. Drawn to larger projects in her practice, “I appreciated how the M.U.D. program taught me to think across scales. We were looking at the impact of design decisions on individual users of a space, as well as on the environment and the community at a macro scale. That has greatly influenced my approach to my work.”

She was recruited by SmithGroup prior to graduating and joined their campus planning team. While the practice area was new to her, she found that it aligned well with her urban design training — and that she really liked it. So 10 years later, it is still the focus of her work.

Two of her most memorable projects were leading master plans for the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, her alma mater, and for California State University Chico.

The latter received a merit award from the Society for College and University Planning earlier this year.

At the midpoint of the Cal State Chico project, the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California’s history ravaged the area. “Overnight, the objectives of the campus plan changed,” Leighty says. As the university took in displaced residents and helped to coordinate recovery efforts, “it reinforced the importance of an institution within a community and shifted our thinking in terms of the social needs that must be addressed beyond an institution’s academic and research missions.”

That broad-focused mission is one of the things that makes Leighty passionate about campus planning. “I feel stakeholders are thinking long term about the legacy they’re leaving,” Leighty says. “When you consider sustainability and equity, universities tend to be willing to explore ideas that might meet resistance elsewhere. They’re willing to be on the leading edge, which allows us to challenge ourselves and think very creatively.” — Amy Spooner

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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 your alma mater. Contact the Taubman College advancement team at 734.764.4720 or taubmancollegeadvancement@umich.edu to learn more about establishing a planned gift for Taubman College or to let us know if you already have included the college in your will or estate plans.

DEFERRED GIVING OPTIONS GIFT TYPE

BASIC DESCRIPTION

BENEFITS

BEQUEST

Transfer property (including cash, securities, or tangible property) through a will or trust. A bequest can be a specific dollar amount or a designated percentage of your estate.

• Legacy • Simple and flexible

HOW IT WORKS Will

ESTATE Fixed $ or Fixed %

DONOR

HEIRS

BENEFICIARY OF RETIREMENT ACCOUNT(S)/ LIFE INSURANCE POLICY

Name Taubman College as a beneficiary of your retirement account(s) or life insurance policy.

• Legacy • Simple and flexible • Tax savings

RETIREMENT ACCOUNT(S)/LIFE INSURANCE POLICY

DONOR

HEIRS

CHARITABLE REMAINDER TRUST (CRT)

CHARITABLE GIFT ANNUITY (CGA)

A life income gift that benefits you and Taubman College. You choose the fixed percentage rate of return and transfer cash, an appreciated asset, or other property to a trust that the university manages to generate payments to you.

Payout amount fluctuates based on market value of investment.

Upon the passing of income beneficiaries, the balance comes to Taubman College.

• Legacy

A life income gift that benefits you and Taubman College. Based on your age at the time of the gift, the university sets a fixed percentage rate of return. The university then invests your gift and makes fixed payments to you. Upon the passing of income beneficiaries, the balance comes to Taubman College.

• Legacy

$$$

TRUST

• Tax savings • Lifetime income to donor

DONOR Donor receives payments for life

• Variable payments • Irrevocable

recieves remainder

DONOR

$$$

ANNUITY

• Tax savings • Lifetime income to donor • Fixed payments

DONOR Donor receives payments for life

• Irrevocable DONOR

recieves remainder

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GIVING: LEON ALLAIN, B.ARCH ’49

His Path Wasn’t Easy, So He’s Making Others’ Easier LEON ALLAIN, B.ARCH ’49, never really talked about it, but his daughters know that his journey as an architecture student and practitioner — especially early in his career — had to be difficult.

He was one of very few Black students at the University of Michigan at that time. Unable to find work after graduation in his segregated home state of Louisiana, he began practicing in New York City. When he finally returned to the South, to form Miller & Allain Architects in Atlanta, establishing a client base wasn’t easy. Let’s face it: white Southerners who didn’t want to share a drinking fountain with a Black person weren’t clamoring to hire two Black architects.

But Allain persevered, becoming a prominent architect in Atlanta whose portfolio includes the Georgia Dome, two concourses at Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport, Morehouse School of Medicine, and the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Chapel at Morehouse College.

Through the Leon and Gloria Allain Scholarship Fund, Allain is helping to make the journey easier for today’s and tomorrow’s Black architects.

Allain, who died in 2000, and his wife of 48 years, Gloria, who died in 2017, created the endowed scholarship fund when Allain retired and sold his practice in 1999. Recently, their daughter Renee Allain-Stockton and her husband, Dmitri Stockton, completed the pledge payments to fully endow the fund.

“Our parents were devout Catholics who upheld the church’s tradition of being of service to others,” says Allain-Stockton. “He never really said this out loud, but I believe that as my dad was selling his firm, he reflected on what got him to where he was and knew that the University of Michigan was instrumental. So he wanted to carry on the idea of giving back and helping others.”

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Allain began his college career by enrolling at Tuskegee University at the age of 16. After one year, he transferred to Michigan and then stepped away to serve in World War II before resuming his education.

He first met his eventual business partner, Edward Charles Miller, at Tuskegee, where Miller was on the faculty. Miller went on to become the first licensed AfricanAmerican architect in Georgia; Allain became the second.

They founded Miller & Allain Architects in 1959. Because of segregation, their bread and butter was projects for historically Black colleges and universities. Allain-Stockton recalls attending the first graduation ceremony at the MLK Chapel at Morehouse College: “It was very impressive to see how something that Dad visualized through drawings actually came to life. I’m obviously proud of him and his accomplishments, but what he did in his career is even more amazing when you consider the era he was living and working in.”

Allain founded his own firm in 1967, Allain & Associates.

His breakthrough within the Atlanta architecture community came when he partnered with other Black architects in a minority/majority joint venture in the high-profile Georgia Dome and Hartsfield Airport projects, aided by former Mayor Maynard Jackson’s policy that city contracts must have minority representation. Eventually, Allain’s portfolio extended far enough across Georgia that he earned a pilot license in order to travel more quickly between job sites.

It was a way of keeping his family front and center.

“He was always home for dinner,” Allain-Stockton says.

“I think he made a conscious decision to grow his practice enough to support us and bring some other architects along, but not to the point where it would command all of his time and attention.”

Now Allain’s daughter and son-in-law are continuing another aspect of his desire to bring other architects along — by finishing the work that he started to create a scholarship fund. “It’s the model of lifting as we climb,” AllainStockton says, “planting the seeds for future architects of color to be able to attend the University of Michigan.”

— Amy Spooner

“It’s the model of lifting as we climb, planting the seeds for future architects of color to be able to attend the University of Michigan.”

— Renee Allain-Stockton

Leon Allain, B.Arch ‘49, was one of just a few Black students in his class and struggled early in his career to establish a client base in the segregated South.

“What he did in his career is even more amazing when you consider the era he was living and working in,” says his daughter Renee.

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ALUM NI

How the Business of Building Is Building a Better Workspace Robin Chhabra, B.S. ’08, M.Arch ’13, has merged design thinking and business thinking to make Dextrus a hub of Mumbai’s co-working scene WHEN ROBIN CHHABRA LAUNCHED a business that would enable people to work in more cost-effective, flexible ways, he had no idea that just a couple of years later, the COVID-19 pandemic would upend practically everything about the global workforce. While it has been a challenging time, Chhabra, B.S. ’08, M.Arch ’13, sees opportunity.

“As society begins to reopen, people are going to want flexibility,” he says. “But at the same time, people are realizing how difficult it is to work from home.”

That’s good news for Chhabra, who is the founder of Dextrus, a Mumbai co-working enterprise that recently opened its second location in the megalopolis.

Before the pandemic, the original Dextrus location, in the heart of Mumbai’s bustling financial district, was at full capacity, with a mix of clients ranging from large banking and investment companies to small nonprofit organizations and startups.

While Dextrus does have space for individual workers to drop in — think of the pre-pandemic clusters of laptop users at your neighborhood coffee shop — its bread and butter is creating customized office spaces for longer-term use by companies with 20 or more employees onsite.

“When companies come to us, we show them a portion of our space that is just flooring and ceiling; everything in the middle, the walls, the layout, is waiting for the client,” Chhabra explains. “We provide enterprise solutions where we design, build, and operate the space along with the client who will ideally use it for several years.”

Beyond dedicated office spaces, Dextrus provides shared spaces like cafes and breakrooms for clients to comingle.

In the complex and expensive world of commercial real estate in Mumbai, long-term rental of a custom-designed space becomes more viable for many organizations: small, early-stage companies, as well as multinational corporations who need a home base in India. Dextrus’ foreign clients include a Japanese real estate company and a Korean firm that secures investments for largescale infrastructure projects. “We are able to help clients realize savings on costs without sacrificing on their needs,” Chhabra explains.

The design thinking at the core of Dextrus’ business model stems from Chhabra’s frustrations as a practicing architect earlier in his career. Between his undergraduate and graduate studies, Chhabra spent a couple of years practicing at a firm in Singapore; after his M.Arch, he spent three years as a senior architect with Serie Architects in Mumbai. At Serie, he worked on a variety of projects, including religious institutions, residential and hotel complexes, and interiors. “We jumped on projects and competitions where we’d have two weeks of working like crazy to make drawings and proposals, working very

Dextrus’ aesthetic is “matured and understated,” staying away from trendy brick walls and exposed ceilings but experimenting with color — including a lime-plastered pink ceiling.

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long hours and figuring it out as we went along. But it was a rich, nourishing, fulfilling experience,” he says.

Two of Chhabra’s biggest projects with Serie were unbuilt: a hotel in Goa and a residential tower in Mumbai. “I spent two years designing and redesigning it, with a lot of starts and stops,” Chhabra says of the Mumbai project, “and that happens a lot in Mumbai because of shifting legal frameworks and developers’ budgets,” he says.

An additional wrinkle with the residential project was its location on a heritage plot. The standards and framework Chhabra had to work within were challenging, reminding him of similar roadblocks with a hotel project he worked on during his time in Singapore. The recurring barriers felt like a pivotal moment, Chhabra says: “Over and over again, developers were not understanding design elements. There was always this push and pull, and by the time I was working at Serie, it was shelving projects on a regular basis.”

Developers who abruptly ran out of financing stopped returning his calls, and others loved everything about the renderings and kept saying they were on board with the plans — until one day they’d get cold feet about the cost and Chhabra would have to start over. “I wondered why we struggled so much to execute projects that we all said we believed in,” he says. “And I realized that we as architects don’t understand the business of building.”

In India, Chhabra says, that problem is especially acute: “Architects don’t really understand how to use design to enable profitability in a project, and developers don’t understand what the architects are trying to accomplish, so there’s a big disconnect from both sides.”

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As a result, Chhabra, who had labored to create beautiful designs that stalled in development, felt a growing existential crisis about the practice of architecture that was born during his time in Singapore but grew during his practice in Mumbai.

“I had been immersing myself in design — learning how to design, thinking about design and how important it is — but now I wanted to also understand how my design ideas and decisions materialize into costs and perhaps future problems. I wanted to rethink how architectural practices can evolve beyond just design studios.”

A friend told Chhabra about a new American company called WeWork, and as Chhabra learned more, he realized that creating a co-working space in Mumbai would give him the opportunity to explore his desire to merge design thinking and business thinking. The business thinking would provide a decision-making framework to enable Dextrus to survive and flourish over multiple decades.

The design thinking would enable Dextrus to create a space that would be attractive to clients.

“People spend a lot of time working, so it’s got to feel like something that they love going to every day,” Chhabra notes. “Design answers that problem, not business. But at the same time, since we are the ones designing, building, and operating, we’re constantly asking, ‘is this worth it?

Can we value engineer this? Are there better ways?’”

While Dextrus has space for individual workers to drop in, its bread and butter is creating customized office spaces for longer-term use.

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Chhabra describes Dextrus’ aesthetic as “matured and understated,” staying away from the trendy brick walls and exposed ceilings prevalent in many similar spaces.

“We’ve tried very consciously to keep it professional, but at the same time we’ve tried to bring some vibrancy,” he explains. That includes experimenting with color — including a lime-plastered pink ceiling that some worried would be too feminine for the traditionally masculine culture of Mumbai’s finance district. “I felt like we had to make a statement that we’re not worrying about the differences that people imagine and not reinforcing what people are used to,” Chhabra says.

The new Dextrus location, which opened in the Lower Parel area of Mumbai in March 2021, includes hydroponic plants and a live tree. “We’re very keen on bringing the outside in,” Chhabra says, “and pushing the envelope as much as possible for what office space can be.”

In addition to design, Chhabra also is concentrating on service and community. He says that’s the best way to affect change among Dextrus’ members, the companies that stay with them over time: “As a brand, we focus on being conscious, like attempting to go zero waste. Building our internal capabilities is not sufficient to accomplish this; we also must educate our community.” Chhabra sees this as a way for Dextrus members to come together and

celebrate its benefits, noting, “Having been through the isolations of COVID, we all could do with a little more community.”

Another part of Chhabra’s philosophy of pushing the envelope is his decision to expand even amid the volatility of the pandemic: Dextrus has jumped from a 15-person staff to nearly 30 in the past year. Now an entrepreneur in a time of global uncertainty, Chhabra insists he never thought entrepreneurship was for him. Maybe having his own architecture practice one day would be one thing, but “starting Dextrus was taking things to a level I never thought I’d be capable of.” The secret to taking the leap, he says, is “being a little bit blind so you can shut out the worries that creep in. And having a support network that will push you off the cliff.”

As he looks beyond the rockiness of the pandemic, Chhabra is thinking about how he can parlay Dextrus’ expertise in designing small office spaces into larger projects and a broader impact on the real estate industry. In doing so, he embraces the classic entrepreneurial mindset: “I’m a long-term thinker,” he says. “Something tells me that I have to just keep at it, that now is a good time to expand. The recent signs might have been troubling, but I’m anticipating what’s coming, and I want us to be ready.” — Amy Spooner

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Balancing Act: Design + Numbers + Career + Wellness Leekyung Han, B.S. ’94, says it’s time for a revolution in Korea’s hotel industry IT’S FITTING THAT LEEKYUNG HAN, B.S. ’94, is developing her own wellness retreat center in Korea — because at two pivotal moments, her personal health and wellness caused her to reevaluate her career.

Most recently, it nudged her to start her own real estate development advisory firm, Polaris Advisory Ltd., after serving for nearly six years as head of real estate development at IMC Octave, a Chinese lifestyle-based real estate conglomerate. At IMC Octave, Han oversaw the company’s investments, land acquisition, and projects in China, Japan, and Malaysia — work she describes as “the A to Z of real estate development.”

Han was drawn to IMC Octave because their vision of creating holistic wellness retreats and centers (they’ve built a couple of them throughout China) paralleled their equally holistic approach to business. “We had balanced conversations about design philosophy, budget and project management, and construction,” she says.

“It felt like a rare opportunity because so often either numbers drive decisions or design drives decisions.”

One of her biggest projects was Sangha Retreat, a mixed-use wellness retreat encompassing 1.7 million square feet in Suzhou. Over the course of six years,

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she maintained a grueling schedule to keep the development on track. She was so busy leading the creation of this healing retreat for others that her own health suffered.

When she had to have surgery, “I started to think about the life I want to live,” Han says. “No matter how hard I worked, it was for someone else. I wanted to build something for myself.”

Taking the knowledge she learned at Octave, Han is planning to secure investors and scout locations for a wellness retreat that she wants to develop in Korea. An important part of her vision is to make wellness accessible to everyone, not just those who can afford luxury resorts.

“As an architect, I thought creativity meant design. But design and numbers working together was a new way of being creative. Financial pro forma is basically drafting a scenario with numbers instead of drawings.”

— Leekyung Han, B.S. ’94

“There needs to be a revolution in the hotel industry, so that hotels are places for healing, not just business or vacation. Real healing and recuperation are different from relaxation, and especially after COVID, holistic wellness is more important than ever,” Han says.

While she lays the groundwork for building her own center, Han’s biggest client since launching Polaris has been Marriott Corp. She oversees technical services in Korea for the hotel chain, and in the past three years, she has opened 11 hotels, with another five scheduled to open by next year. She ensures that interior and exterior design and technical specifications are in order before opening the hotel and handing the reins over to Marriott’s operations team.

This fall she also published a book, Everything About Hotels, a tutorial about hotel development in nontechnical language. Her motivation was “to raise the bar of what people should expect from a hotel, in order to help the industry advance in Korea,” she says.

Han also hopes the book will establish her expertise in real estate development in her birth country, since she has spent most of her career elsewhere. Her real estate development career includes Intrawest in Reno, Nevada, and Pyramid Hotel Group in Boston, where her renovation of the Crowne Plaza Hotel in New York City, adjacent to Lehman Brothers, gave her a front-row seat to the collapse of the global economy and her own real estate development portfolio. In 2009, she joined Tourism Development and Investment Company, Abu Dhabi’s

(Left and opposite) Han’s previous work on Sangha Retreat — a mixed-use wellness retreat in Suzhou, China, that includes a ground-level skylight — fueled her desire to create a similar development in South Korea.

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developer of large-scale tourism projects. There, she helped lead the development of Saadiyat Cultural District, a multibillion-dollar project that includes branches of the Louvre, the British Museum, and the Guggenheim, designed by Frank Gehry. From there, she went to Hong Kong to serve as head of development, planning, and construction at Wyndham Hotel Group before landing at IMC Octave.

While she has a diverse and impressive resume as a developer, her career in real estate was born out of another moment where health concerns caused her to question her path.

After graduating from Michigan, she earned an M.Arch at Harvard and went to the Netherlands to practice with Wiel Arets. “After Harvard, I was a very artsy architect.

Design was all that mattered,” Han says. “So my time in Wiel’s studio was a beautiful period where I learned a lot.”

But something was wrong. Han worked long hours to the point where she made herself sick — ultimately leaving Europe to seek treatment in Korea, followed by a job with

an architecture firm in Boston. As her physical health improved, she remained troubled by what she saw as a flaw in architecture education. “The designer is not the one who realizes the design; the owner is by controlling the budget. I decided I’d rather be on the owner side.”

So she earned a master’s degree in real estate development at the University of Southern California, pivoting to her current path. “I love the balance between design and numbers,” she says of real estate development. “As an architect, I thought creativity meant design. But design and numbers working together was a new way of being creative. Financial pro forma is basically drafting a scenario with numbers instead of drawings.”

She appreciates the ability to think broadly and thoroughly about problems, which she says was born of her time at Michigan: “When I think of Ann Arbor, it still feels like home. Beyond the sense of community, what I enjoyed most was that there was no right answer. That’s different from the more formulaic approach to education in Korea, so I was mesmerized by the number of ways to consider a problem.” — Amy Spooner 37

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There Are High Standards Behind Affordable Luxury Hannah Dean, M.Arch ’14, M.U.R.P. ’15, is part owner-rep and part bad cop for citizenM in Europe SOME ARCHITECTS SPEND YEARS dreaming of working in Europe. Hannah Dean, who has lived in the Netherlands since 2016, was never one of them.

Dean, M.Arch ’14, M.U.R.P. ’15, is technical services manager in Europe for citizenM, a Dutch boutique hotel chain that boasts “affordable luxury.” The job hits her sweet spot: using her architectural skills in a more tech­ nical, instead of design-based, way.

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Within days of getting married, she and her husband, who earned a Ph.D. in 2016 from the naval architecture and marine engineering department within U-M’s College of Engineering, moved to the Netherlands so that he could join the faculty at Delft University of Technology.

“I’ve been extremely lucky,” Dean says of her educational path and the career that followed. “All the breaks I could have had, I’ve had.”

Dean, who hadn’t been “super keen” to leave her role as a technical designer in the metro Detroit office of Stantec, found it tough to enter the Dutch job market. Since graduates of Dutch architecture programs are licensed upon graduation, and Dean was not yet licensed, she was competing against better-credentialed candidates for very few jobs.

But in those early days after she quit a job she loved, moved overseas, and endured a series of job-hunting dead ends, those breaks felt few and far between.

After eight months, she got one of those aforementioned lucky breaks: a friend of a friend connected her with a Netherlands–based architect who just happened to be

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from Grand Rapids, Michigan. He hired her at his small shop, which gave her a pathway to not only a paycheck but also her architectural license — since her boss’s California license meant Dean’s time working with him qualified for NCARB AXP. Since she wasn’t in love with the concept design work she was doing, “I wasn’t sure if I was going to continue in practice, but it was important for me to get my license,” Dean says. After stretching out the exam process over two years of trips home to see her family, Dean became licensed in the state of Maine.

Another stroke of luck in Dean’s career was that a tenuous cell signal on an Arctic Circle vacation allowed her to know that citizenM had received her job application and was interested in speaking with her. “I knew that I liked construction, and the job used my architectural skills while allowing me to be on construction sites, which felt like a double win,” Dean says of what attracted her to the job. And since citizenM is a multinational company, the official language is English, another win since Dean’s lack of fluency in Dutch had closed doors on other opportunities.

When she joined citizenM in 2017, the company had opened 12 hotels: one in North America, one in Asia, and 10 in Europe. Today, there are 22 citizenM hotels worldwide, with five opening in North America this year and another five scheduled to open next year. Dean’s first solo project was in Copenhagen, followed quickly by Zurich and Geneva. Her current projects include hotels in Dublin and near Victoria Station in London.

Dean describes her job as being similar to an owner-rep, joking, “My job is to say ‘no,’ to be the bad cop. I’m a bit of a chameleon that a design manager needs to motivate the local teams, but basically I give final approvals from a brand and aesthetic perspective on every aspect of our buildings, including the exterior, the front of house, and the guest rooms. I’m not onsite every week taking measurements and making a punch list. I’m there to make sure that the feel is right, and then I’ll draw on my architectural knowledge and problem solve if it isn’t.”

Many of citizenM’s hotels in Europe are in historically protected buildings, so Dean has to liaise between internal teams to ensure that the brand standards are effectively modified to accommodate the retrofits. One thing

“Both my architecture and planning degrees taught me how to think, problem solve, and make connections, and that has served me well.”

— Hannah Dean, M.Arch ’14, M.U.R.P. ’15 that makes the process easier is that citizenM owns the buildings it operates. “In some ways, we’re more like a real estate investment company than a hospitality company,” Dean explains. As opposed to the franchise model of big chains like Hilton and Marriott, “we buy properties, develop them to our needs, and then operate and maintain the building ourselves. We’re vertically integrated, so if we want to make changes, we don’t need to get a bunch of owners in line. We just do it.”

That doesn’t mean it’s easy, though. Each country has its own standards and its own understanding of roles and responsibilities. For the Copenhagen project, Dean and her team didn’t realize that Danish architects don’t work past RIBA stage four. They produce the construction document set that goes out to bid, but they don’t vet the tenders or provide construction oversight. “There was that sense of being ready to break ground and looking around and saying, ‘Where is everybody?,’” Dean laughs. Brand standards also can be lost in translation, especially when local architects want to put their stamp on the work.

“We know what we want, and we tell you what we want.

There’s no room for interpretation, and that can feel constrictive to some architects.”

The biggest challenges, though, are the wildly varying accessibility and fire codes between countries, which can have a huge impact on design. “I spend a lot of time adjusting room layouts to comply with local regulations,” she says. “In Geneva, we had to replace all of our bamboo because it’s technically a grass so it didn’t meet fire requirements for hard, dense woods.”

Dean counts her time at Taubman College, which she says “took a chance on her,” as yet another lucky break — the one that set her up for her current success. “Both my architecture and planning degrees taught me how to think, problem solve, and make connections, and that has served me well,” she says.

“Beyond that, having talked with colleagues who went to other institutions, I think we had more fun at Taubman.”

— Amy Spooner 39

AL U MN I

As Ghana Grows, So Does Its Need for Great Architects Urban revitalization is essential, and Nana Bonsu Adja-Sai, M.Arch/M.U.D. ’11, knows that architects like him can find solutions STUDENTS COME FROM ACROSS the world to attend the University of Michigan. In the case of Nana Bonsu Adja-Sai, M.Arch/M.U.D. ’11, the university came across the world to him.

His first exposure to U-M’s architecture program was courtesy of Professor Jim Chaffers’ Ghanafocused studio. Adja-Sai was studying architecture at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi when Chaffers brought his students to the campus; eventually, Adja-Sai participated in an exchange program that brought him to Ann Arbor.

The opportunity to meet and collaborate with M.Arch students whose campus was half a world away “was fantastic,” Adja-Sai says. “They were like colleagues; many of us were in equivalent years

of our programs. I loved how we all bounced ideas off of each other.”

They also were integral to Adja-Sai’s enrollment at Michigan by encouraging him to apply, helping him with his personal statement, and critiquing his portfolio.

“I had the help and support of Michigan students before I was even enrolled there,” Adja-Sai says.

“There was a mutual sense of coaching and friendship that stayed with me throughout my time in Ann Arbor.”

Adja-Sai calls the University of Michigan “a wonderful soup with so many people doing exciting things,” and he ate heartily from that soup bowl during his studies. The cultural differences — like trying to understand the concept of “big box stores” for his studio focused on how to reimagine them — were perplexing but also enriching. At the same time, Taubman College expanded his interests beyond his initial pursuit of his master’s in architecture: he enrolled in the urban design program after arriving in Ann Arbor and learning about the work led by Professor Roy Strickland and others.

Growing up in Accra and Kumasi, Ghana’s largest cities — as well as spending several years with his grandmother in the village of Sekyedumase — Adja-Sai had long been interested in the complex issues facing urban areas. Through jointly studying architecture and urban design at Taubman College, “I was able to deeply explore how every individual building interacts with the environment and the neighborhood around it, how I need to

[Opposite] One of Adja-Sai’s biggest projects was Ghana’s largest affordable housing development, at Borteyman-Nungua in Accra.

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41

think about more than just designing iconic buildings that stand alone.”

He adds, “I don’t think you can be a great architect if you don’t understand and respect what’s around you.”

As Adja-Sai returned home to Ghana to practice, that idea was especially important. Recently, Ghana has been one of the world’s fastest-growing economies. Accra, the capital city, has been experiencing rapid growth, fueled by migrants from rural areas and other nationals seeking opportunities. The country is just 64 years old, and in the initial rush to develop, long-range planning and urban design fell to the wayside. In addition, the original infrastructure of modern-day Accra is being overstretched by the often unchecked sprawl.

“Like other big cities in Africa, Accra is the frontier of transit and of urban housing, and that’s where urban design comes in,” Adja-Sai says. “We don’t want businesses to leave the city core because of the strains on infrastructure and the lack of housing. Urban revitalization is essential, and as architects we can find solutions.”

The newly minted architecture and urban design graduate joined Modula Grup because he was impressed by the firm’s sizeable portfolio of projects — including government contracts that he saw as opportunities to participate in Accra’s sustainable growth. In addition, he knew that working with Ernest Banning, a Fellow of the Ghana Institute of Architects who founded Modula Grup in 1979, would be a phenomenal growth opportunity.

“He’s a proven professional,” Adja-Sai says of Banning.

“And I wanted to know how the business of architecture is run, from the initial idea to managing the construction.

He has lived through so many different governmental regimes and managed such a large volume of work, I knew he was someone I could learn from.”

During Adja-Sai’s nearly nine years at Modula Grup, he was involved in a lot of residential building projects, as well as banks and corporate buildings. “We don’t really specialize,” he says. “It’s good to have a mix of projects in a growing economy like Ghana’s.”

One of Adja-Sai’s biggest projects was the Government of Ghana/Social Security and National Insurance Trust Affordable Housing Project at Borteyman-Nungua in Accra — the nation’s largest such development. He worked on design but also managed about 125 contractors for the project, which consists of 106 buildings totaling about 1,400 residential units. He calls being the senior architect on the project “a privilege,” one that also proved 42

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to be that perfect learning opportunity he had envisioned when he joined Modula Grup — by the time the project was underway, he had risen through the ranks to become the managing architect of the firm’s Accra office.

Since Banning exposed his associates to every aspect of the business, managing the office meant a little bit of everything, Adja-Sai says: “Sometimes I greeted clients at the front desk. I’d chair meetings and write minutes.

I’d make sure contracts were prepared and administered properly, and I’d also be a driver if our dispatch service let us down. In soccer, I’d be known as the utility player, put where the boss needed me at any point in time.”

Earlier this year, Adja-Sai felt ready to take what he had learned at Modula Grup and forge his own path by starting his own firm. The news didn’t come as a surprise and had Banning’s support. “When I joined Modula Grup, I made it clear that I wanted to learn so that I could be able to do what Mr. Banning has done and even more,” says Adja-Sai, who notes that he will continue to consult and collaborate with his former firm. “I told him that now it’s time to take what I have been given and give back as the leader of my own practice.”

Adja-Sai named his firm Cinctamore, meaning “surrounded by love.” It’s a nod to the blanket of support that he says has permeated his personal and professional life — from his colleague-friends in Chaffers’ Ghana studio to Banning’s mentorship at Modula Grup to his mother, Christiana Akosua Nyarko, and his wife, Claudia Adja-Sai, a pediatrician whom he met in Ann Arbor while she was participating in U-M Medical School’s Global REACH Exchange Program. His support network also includes Richard and Peggy Lami and George Shutack, whom he calls his U.S. family. “I owe a great deal of my success to the belief and love they have had in me over the years,” he says of the Shutack and the Lamis, whom he first met during his undergraduate exchange program. “They spent enormous resources to enable me explore ‘Architecture Made in America’ and to have a Michigan education.”

The teamwork mentality that he learned at Michigan, which he describes as “a love and respect that brings out the best in all of us,” mirrors his feelings toward the globally known Ghanaian architect Sir David Adjaye.

Rather than seeing the starchitect Adjaye as casting a long shadow over architects doing day-to-day work in Ghana, “I see him as projecting a light ahead of everyone else,” Adja-Sai says. “The challenge is for the rest of us to carry forward what he has shown to be possible, and that is the heart of an urban design mindset: it’s not about one person; it’s about all of us working together for the greater good.” — 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.

1950s Robert Marans, FAICP, B.Arch ’57, an emeritus professor of architecture and urban and regional planning, was named a 2021 notable nonprofit board member by Crain’s Detroit Business. He was recognized for more than four decades of service to southeast Michigan’s greenspaces.

He is chair of the Huron Clinton Metropolitan Authority Board of Commissioners, a founding board member of the Detroit Riverfront Conservancy, and founding commissioner and immediate past chair of the Washtenaw County Parks and Recreation Commission. As the pandemic drove more people outdoors, Crain’s noted that Marans was part of the team that guided the nonprofits in their efforts to adapt staffing, budgeting, and programming.

1960s David Metzger, FAIA, FCSI, B.Arch ’68, received a Judges’ Commendation Award in the 2021 AIA Architectural Photography Competition for his photo “Carcassone.” He snapped the photo while in the countryside near the walled French hill town, whose fortifications date back to the Roman period. He was vice president of Heller & Metzger, an independent specifications consulting firm in Washington, D.C., until he retired in 2011.



1970s Jan (Jackson) Culbertson, FAIA, B.S. ’77, M.Arch ’79, received the Robert F. Hastings Award from the Michigan chapter of the American

Institute of Architects (AIAMI) in June in recognition of her effort and contribution to AIAMI and the profession. She is a senior partner at A3C, a multidisciplinary architecture and interior design firm in Ann Arbor that focuses on sustainable design. She serves as Leadership Council chair for the Ann Arbor 2030 District and on the Ann Arbor Public Schools Sustainability Advisory Committee.

In addition, she serves on Scio Township’s zoning board of appeals and planning commission. She also advocates at the state and national level for the architectural profession and the environment as the co-chair of AIA Michigan’s Government Advocacy Committee.

Robert Comet, M.Arch ’78, retired from Quinn Evans in June. A 2002 recipient of the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Virginia Society of the American Institute of Architects, he spent his career based in Richmond where he oversaw high-profile planning and design projects for school systems, local and state government agencies, churches, and nonprofits. A founding partner of BCWH Architects, he served as president of the firm until it merged with Quinn Evans in 2018. He currently serves as president of the Capitol Square Preservation Council in Richmond and has completed challenging restoration and historic preservation projects at such landmark properties as the Virginia State Capitol and the Virginia War Memorial.

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1980s Stephen Smith, M.Arch ’82, received the Gold Medal from the Michigan chapter of the American Institute of Architects in June, the highest honor awarded to an individual by the organization. He is a recently retired managing partner of TMP Architecture, a suburban Detroit–based firm where he spent the majority of his career. He started at TMP in 1985, assisting in the design and technical documentation of the Lansing Convention Center.

From there, he became a lead designer on many projects before shifting his focus to project management, where he led interdisciplinary teams on many award-winning, complex projects; collaborated on the design of myriad learning environments; and focused the last 25 years on elevating TMP’s library design expertise.

John Myefski, B.S. ’84, M.Arch ’86, and his firm, Myefski Architects, are exhibiting as part of “Time Space Existence,” a forum sponsored by the European Cultural Centre in conjunction with the Venice Biennale.

Running through the Biennale’s conclusion in November, “Time Space Existence” brings together a diverse group of participants working across disciplines and features completed and ongoing projects, innovative proposals, and utopian dreams of architectural expressions. Myefski’s exhibition includes designs for arts and cultural venues that coalesce architecture and society. He is the president and principal of the Chicago–based firm.

John Ronan, B.S. ’85, principal of John Ronan Architects in Chicago, led the design of the new Chicago Park District Headquarters, which broke ground recently and is scheduled to be completed in December 2022. The project consists of a 72,000-square-foot office building 44

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designed to make staff feel as if they’re working in a park, along with an adjacent 17-acre community space with playing fields, recreation areas, and playgrounds.

Committee, and as the immediate past national president and 1st vice president/president-elect of NOMA.

Trish VanderBeke, B.S. ’85, M.Arch ’87, principal and founder of P.K. VanderBeke Architect in Chicago, pivoted during the COVID19 pandemic from the high-end residential work that has been her mainstay and embraced the opportunity to work pro bono on two projects incorporating sustainability and social justice. The first was for Theatre Y, an “international incubator” and member-based free theater in Chicago that creates intersections between diverse artists. The second was the Big Shoulders Ensemble, a group of Chicago musicians dedicated to changing the face of classical music in the 21st century.

David Marchetti, B.S. ’01, has been named a partner at the awardwinning Stuart Silk Architects, an architecture and interior design firm based in Seattle. This is a new position and title at the firm and recognizes his passion and commitment to the firm’s success and values, as well as his ability to continue to build on the firm’s reputation for design excellence and exceptional service to clients. He is known for his work on custom homes in the Pacific Northwest and throughout the American West, including the widely published Thunderbird Heights Residence in Rancho Mirage, California. 

2000s

1990s Casey Jones, M.Arch ’92, the Design Leadership Council director at Perkins and Will, has been appointed to Chicago’s inau­ gural Committee on Design by the Chicago Department of Planning and Development. He joins a diverse panel of 24 volunteer architects, urban planners, artists, academics, and real estate professionals.

Kevin Holland, FAIA, M.Arch ’98, was elected to a two-year term on the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Board of Directors as an at-large director. He is the managing principal of k.michael architects LLC in Los Angeles, where he is committed to providing quality design to all income spectrums. He has supported the AIA, AIA Los Angeles, and the National Association of Minority Architects (NOMA) in a number of capacities, including serving as the secretary for the AIA Los Angeles Board of Directors, a member of AIA’s Government Advocacy

Amy Brooks, M.U.P. ’04, became executive director of Knoxville-Knox County Planning in April after serving as the interim head of the office for nine months. The department reviews planning and zoning requests and uses for Tennessee’s third-largest metropolitan area. She has been with the office formerly known as the Metropolitan Planning Commission for more than 14 years.

Mandeep “Mandy” Grewal, Ph.D. ’04, was appointed to the Michigan Municipal Services Authority Board in February by Governor Gretchen Whitmer. She is the township supervisor for Pittsfield Charter Township, adjacent to Ann Arbor.

Andy Harmon, B.S. ’04, is now a senior associate with Steele Associates Architects in Bend, Oregon. He is the firm’s in-house building envelope specialist and works with assisted living, memory care, and independent senior living facilities in Oregon, Washington, and California. In addition to earning an M.Arch from the University of Oregon, he completed graduate coursework on cold climate design and arctic engineering at the University of Alaska.

Erin (Sigelko) Andrus, B.S. ’05, M.Arch ’07, is the co-recipient (with Lisa Sauve, M.Arch ’11, M.S. ’14) of the 2021 Young Architect Award from the Michigan chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

She is a senior associate at WTA Architects in Saginaw, Michigan, where she serves as project architect in the areas of education, commercial, and public design. Her work includes the renovated Health Professions Building at Delta College in University Center, Michigan, and the expansion to Zehnder’s Splash Village – A Wave of Excitement in Frankenmuth, Michigan.

Sheena Garcia, B.S. ’05, was promoted to project designer/visualization specialist in the New Orleans studio of Trahan Architects. Her work as an architect and artist focuses on the development of 3D media techniques as a tool for the advancement of design through representation. Prior to joining Trahan Architects, she worked for the New York visualization studios DBOX and Visualhouse, as well as the Los Angeles–based Kilograph.

Elyse Agnello, B.S. ’06, is the founder of DAAM, which was named to Architectural Record’s 2021 Design Vanguard List. DAAM architects (Design, Architecture, Art, and Making) is a Chicago–based firm that she founded in 2016;

it focuses on adaptive reuse and renovation projects. She also is a co-founder of Guild Row, a club for creative and civic-minded Chicagoans, and is the design principal for Platform Managers, a real estate development and venture management firm.

2010s Lisa Sauve, M.Arch ’11, M.S. ’14, (with Erin (Sigelko) Andrus, B.S. ’05, M.Arch ’07) is the co-recipient of the 2021 Young Architect Award from the Michigan chapter of the American Institute of Architects.

With Adam Smith, M.Arch ’11, she is co-founder of Ann Arbor-based Synecdoche Design Studio LLC. She was named to Crain’s Detroit’s list of notable women in design in 2020 and to Forbes’ Next 1000 list in 2021.

Kyle Hoff, M.Arch ’12, the co-founder of Floyd, a Detroit– based, direct-to-consumer sustainable furniture startup, announced in April that the company raised a $15 million Series B funding round. The round was led by Walden Ventures with participation from Beringea, La-Z-Boy, 14w, and JPMorgan Chase. This brings Floyd’s total funding to $25 million. The company began with a 2014 Kickstarter campaign. Their goal was to raise $18,000, but within 30 days, Floyd had raised $256,000 from 1,400 customers around the world.

Julie Janiski, M.Arch ’12, was elevated to partner in the Boston office of Buro Happold in April. She is an integrated design and sustainability expert whose career has encompassed work in construction, building operations, architecture, and engineering, allowing her to direct projects at all scales to achieve sector-leading levels of carbon reduction and water conservation, as well as social equity and human health and wellbeing. Her recent

work includes consulting on the Massachusetts Commercial Energy Code; a number of embassy projects for the U.S. State Department; The House at Cornell Tech, a residential high-rise in New York City that is certified LEED Platinum and Passive House; and One Boston Wharf Road, a 630,000-square-foot office for Amazon that will be Boston’s largest Zero Carbon project. 

Omar Ali, M.Arch ’15, will serve as the 2021–2023 Architecture and Urbanism Fellow at Tulane School of Architecture. As part of the fellowship, he also will join the first cohort for the newly launched Deans’ Equity and Inclusion Initiative, a national partnership co-founded

by Tulane. He is co-founder of table of co., a cloud-based design and research practice. His research focuses on how liminal urban spaces, or “in-between” spaces like alleyways, can be leveraged to create a more equitable city.

Casey Carter, M.Arch/M.S. ’15, was named a 2021 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Video/Film. He is a filmmaker, designer, and photographer based in New York City.

His first feature film, “To Kill a Mountain,” which he co-directed, debuted in 2020. The New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) and the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) jointly administer the Artist Fellowship, offering a unique snapshot of contemporary arts across New York State.

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CL AS S NO TES

Two Alumnae Earn National Recognition  Lindsey May, B.S. ’10, is the recipient of a 2021 Architectural League Prize, one of North America’s most prestigious awards for early career designers.

She is the assistant director of the architecture program at the School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation at University of Maryland, where she also is a clinical assistant professor. She founded her Washington, D.C.– based firm, Studio Mayd, in 2017. Her recent and current projects include 7DrumCity Music Rehearsal and Performance Building, the expansion and renovation of a music education, rehearsal, and performance space; and Story District Community Arts Space, the renovation of a nonprofit arts organization to create a flexible, multifunctional workspace with improved acoustics. In 2020 she received the inaugural Architect + Educator Award from the AIA|DC, as well as the Dean’s Award and the Outstanding Educator Award from the School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, University of Maryland. She was a competition finalist, with architect Julia Chapman, for the Dupont Underground Re-Ball Competition.

The Architectural League of New York noted when announcing the award, “The studio’s competition entry provided a holistic approach to its residential projects and argued persuasively that unglamorous but critical aspects of architectural practice, from developing project proposals to compensating employees, merit greater attention and recognition in order to foster a more sustainable, equitable discipline.”

 Danielle McDonough, M.Arch ’13,

a senior associate at CambridgeSeven in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is a 2021 recipient of the AIA’s Young Architects Award.

She has provided architectural design and construction administration for several CambridgeSeven projects, including WBUR CitySpace and the Boston Museum of Science. She currently is coordinating the design during construction of The Foundry in Cambridge, revitalizing an 1880s industrial masonry and timber structure into a community hub for culture and innovation. She is the current New England representative on the AIA Strategic Council and an elected member of the Boston Society of Architects’ Membership Committee. She also has taught undergraduate and graduate studios at the Boston Architectural College and brought her design skills to several humanitarian organizations, including Architecture for Humanity, Hands-On Gulf Coast, and Freedom by Design.

The AIA noted when announcing her award, “Equal parts pragmatic and visionary, the contributions Danielle McDonough has made to advancing the profession reverberate through a number of organizations. From her days as a student to the dawning of her professional career, McDonough has a deft ability to guide mission-driven organizations as they strive to implement effective change.”

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In Memoriam Henry “Hank” Kowalewski, B.Arch ’60, professor emeritus of architecture, died on November 5, 2020, at the age of 88.

Theodore Degenhardt, B.Arch ’50 March 11, 2021

Kowalewski grew up in Buffalo, New York, attaining the rank of Eagle Scout as a Boy Scout. He served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War, and upon his return, he married the love of his life, Gerry. They settled in Ann Arbor while he attended the University of Michigan.

Robert VanSummern, B.Arch ’50 May 30, 2021

Kowalewski joined the architecture program’s faculty from 1962 until his retirement in 2000. He taught design, construction, environmental techno­ logies, advanced lighting, and building enclosure systems to undergraduate and graduate students. He also operated a successful architectural firm, Kowalewski & Associates, practicing for more than 40 years. He designed many residences and commercial buildings in the Ann Arbor area, but his crowning achievement was the design of a new church for his former neighborhood congregation in New York State, The Holy Mother of the Rosary Cathedral. He was a charter member of the Huron Valley Chapter of the American Institute of Architects and served as its president in 1969.

Kowalewski employed and mentored many students from the University of Michigan as they began their architectural journeys. Widely recognized as an outstanding teacher, in 1989 he received the student-sponsored Nobody Does It Like You Award. During his sabbatical year, he traveled the country photographing notable new cultural buildings, incorporating the latest innovations in lighting and design into his courses. He loved teaching architecture and had an easy rapport with students, who found him accessible and eager to answer questions outside of the classroom. Many stayed in touch over the years — some even called him “Hank-O.” He was instrumental in the creation and implementation of the annual Dinkeloo Lecture as a way to recognize the extraordinary contributions that John Dinkeloo, B.Arch ’42, made to the field and to honor his distinguished professional work. Dinkeloo’s son, Christiaan Dinkeloo, B.S. ’79, was one of the students who worked in Kowalewski’s office.

Held annually since 1984, the Dinkeloo Lecture exposes students and faculty to the minds of world-renowned architects.

Kowalewski is survived by his wife of 66 years, Gerry; and his daughter, Lynn.

He was predeceased by his son, Paul.

His natural optimism, generosity, and enthusiasm for life will be greatly missed.

Raise a toast to his life, well-lived.

Sol Silver, B.Arch ’51 April 30, 2021 Donald Goldsmith, B.Arch ’56 March 2, 2021 Marvin Flam, B.Arch ’57 March 21, 2021 Aivars Linde, B.Arch ’59 April 10, 2021 Edwin Drabkowski, M.C.P. ’60 May 23, 2021 Kent Johnson, B.Arch ’60 May 14, 2021 Arthur Hills, B.L.Arch ’62 May 18, 2021 Kenneth Cunningham, B.L.Arch ’64 February 27, 2021 Wayne Swanson, B.Arch ’65 April 5, 2021 John Kohler, B.Arch ’67 February 28, 2021 Thomas Beaver, B.S. ’72 May 10, 2021 Charles Lauer, B.S. ’77 March 28, 2021 Carol Molloy, B.S. ’83 May 29, 2021 Matthew Jaimes, B.S. ’91 April 20, 2021

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“It was gratifying over the past few days to see students conversing in small groups before and after class, meeting in the courtyard and Commons, forming new friendships. This year we have even more cause than usual to appreciate the social and intellectual energies animating our campus and residential learning community.”

— Dean Jonathan Massey, in a message to the Taubman College community after the first week of classes, which included the traditional welcome gathering (pictured above).

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P ORT ICO VOL . 21 , NO. 2 FA L L 2021 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 and Associate Director, Marketing and Communications Liz Momblanco Senior Graphic Designer

Contributing Writers: Amy Crawford, Julie Halpert, and Amy Spooner Image Credits: Courtesy of Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan (p. 29, bottom right), Jacob Cofer (pp. 4, 24, 48), Roy Cruz (pp. 3, middle + 34), Justine Ross (cover + p. 11), © SOM | City Tech Collaborative (p. 12)

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.

© 2021 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 Sarah Hubbard, Okemos Denise Ilitch, Bingham Farms Ron Weiser, Ann Arbor Katherine E. White, Ann Arbor Mark S. Schlissel (ex officio)

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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. This issue was printed by University Lithoprinters.

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