Portico Spring 2021

SPRING 2021

Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning University of Michigan

RE A LIT Y, UNTE THERED The COVID-19 pandemic sped up the embrace of design technology at schools everywhere. But the revolution was already fully underway at Taubman College.

A MESSAGE FR OM T HE DE A N Taubman College has long been known as a leader at putting theory into practice, allowing students and faculty to create, test, and re-create that which they imagine.

Since its creation in 2009, the FABLab has been a defining feature of Taubman College, setting the architecture program at the forefront of digital design and fabrication and supporting our culture of making. Amplified by internal grants in Research Through Making and Prototyping Tomorrow, these capacities helped faculty create the award-winning installations, assemblies, and design projects you’ve read about previously.

These distinctively 21st-century capabilities built on earlier accomplishments such as lift-slab concrete construction and the Unistrut assembly system. When Robert Swanson designed the Art & Architecture Building in the early 1970s, he planned for this line of research with a series of high-bay spaces that we continue to use for large assemblies and full-scale prototypes.

Today, we are extending and transforming this legacy.

Through the Guardian-Taubman Research Alliance, faculty are exploring how glass can promote wellness and conserve energy. With Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, faculty and students are prototyping robotic fabrication in timber and concrete, which draws on the research of Tsz Yan Ng, Mania Aghaei Meibodi, Arash Adel, and others. In parallel, we are developing some of the first online courses in computational design. Glenn Wilcox’s new design computing MOOC (massive open online course) has already enrolled 6,660 learners, some of whom will enter the certificate program in computational design that faculty are developing for launch next year.

Our faculty’s virtuosity in digital making also encompasses the images, cultures, systems, and effects of contemporary postdigital society. In recent years, a growing number of architecture faculty have partnered with colleagues across campus to convene multidisciplinary conferences on Becoming Digital and Living a Digital Life. Through research, teaching, and creative practice,

(Opposite) From the Unistrut assembly system (top) to a playground for robots (bottom), Taubman College has long been a leader in advancing architecture and planning through technology.

they are answering the question “how do we make architecture in an age when algorithms make everything?”

As you’ll read in this issue, our ahead-of-its-time thinking about technology and architecture is not new. Decades ago, Professor Jim Turner defined a neutral file format for the exchange of product design, analysis, and fabrication data that was the precursor to Building Information Modeling. Today, many of our faculty and students are creating architecture via virtual reality, augmented reality, and artificial intelligence, including several who have received support from the Center for Academic Innovation to bring XR (extended reality) to the classroom and studio. One of the things I’m most looking forward to when we kick off the fall semester is the new “robot playground,” seen on the cover and the opposite page. It was designed by Matias del Campo and Sandra Manninger using generative adversarial networks to exemplify and display the University of Michigan’s leadership in robotics.

You’ll also read about Daniel Kobran, M.Arch ’14, and Dillon Erb, M.Arch ’14, who parlayed their fascination with technology and architecture into a startup that enables high-performance cloud computing. Another innovator is Robert Yuen, M.Arch ’11, who co-founded a platform that helps architects work smarter. They are but two examples of how alumni carry our experimental mindset into traditional practice and beyond.

Technological innovation encompasses urban and regional planning, too. GIS has transformed planning and development, integrated into the research and teaching of Joe Grengs and Robert Goodspeed. Our new firstof-its-kind Bachelor of Science in Urban Technology is ramping up as we prepare for our inaugural class in January. In this issue, we feature Anthony Vanky, a faculty member shaping this emergent field.

Our clusters of research and discovery are bound by a culture of prototyping, the iterative process of mocking up and testing that moves an idea to reality, from one-off to impact at scale. Layered and compounded, these waves of innovation make Taubman College one of the world’s leading sites for the development of design technologies in architecture and planning.

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 / 2 0

04 News from the Art & Architecture Building and Beyond 08 Student Show Winners

20 How Data Can Make Communities Equitable and Enjoyable

Assistant Professor Anthony Vanky and other urban technologists are using data exhaust to measure the effect of planning decisions in new ways

C OVER ST O RY / 10 10 Reality, Untethered

The COVID-19 pandemic sped up the embrace of design technology at schools everywhere.

But the revolution was already fully underway at Taubman College.

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22 Craig Borum and Jen Maigret Are Not Niche Players

The 2021 Architectural League Emerging Voices honorees are researching and executing architectural design across a broad spectrum

26 In-the-Field Design with an Impact

The Taubman Public Design Corps builds partnerships between student designers and local nonprofits

A L U MN I / 3 0

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30 Crossing “Terra Incognita” to Create a Path for Others

Professor Emerita June Manning Thomas, Ph.D. ’77, is Taubman College’s 2020 Distinguished Alumna 32 Paperspace Is Making Something That People Want

Dillon Erb, M.Arch ’14, and Daniel Kobran, M.Arch ’14, enable high-performance cloud computing through their startup

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34 Jamaica’s Own Designs Its First Parliament

From Houston to Yangon to Kingston, Daimian Hines, B.S. ’99, M.Arch ’01, puts stories at the center of design

38 Planning and Design Make a Perfect Pair

Partners in life and work, Caitlyn Clauson, M.U.P. ’07, and Romil Sheth, M.U.D. ’06, M.S. ’10, help campuses and cities look to the future 40 Moving Detroit Forward

Meredith McLellan, B.S. ’02, and Angela Fortino, M.U.P. ’11, are part of the team making The District Detroit a reality 42 The Beauty of Making It Better

Amy Gilbertson, M.Arch ’01, is helping her firm and America’s historic landmarks leverage their past to ensure a vibrant future

C L A S S N OTES & GI V I N G / 4 5 45 David Johnson, M.Arch ’95 Designing Universities’ Futures and Giving Back to His Own

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49 Robert Yuen, M.Arch/M.S. ’12

“Bobby Digital” Solves Problems for Architects

I N MEMORI A M / 5 1 ON THE COVER:

“Robot Garden,” design by SPAN (Matias del Campo and Sandra Manninger) and Alexandra Carlson (Michigan Robotics)

C L OS I N G / 5 2

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ARO U ND TH E C O LLE G E

Larissa Larsen to Serve as Planning Program Chair Larissa Larsen will serve as the next chair of the urban and regional planning program, following a nomination from the program’s governing faculty and her appointment by Dean Jonathan Massey.

Larsen is an associate professor of urban and regional planning, director of the urban and regional planning doctoral program, and oversees the physical planning focus area within the master’s degree. Her two-year appointment as urban and regional planning program chair will begin on July 1.

She succeeds Associate Professor Joe Grengs, who has served as chair for the past four years.

“I am excited to take on this new role leading the urban and regional planning program,” Larsen says. “Our society is rethinking how to shape better communities to serve all people in ways that recognize the challenges and opportunities around social justice and sustainability — and planning is positioned to participate in making changes. I look forward to helping our students and faculty find ways to highlight their unique insights and abilities.”

“Our society is rethinking how to shape better communities to serve all people in ways that recognize the challenges and opportunities around social justice and sustainability — and planning is positioned to participate in making changes.”

— Associate Professor Larissa Larsen Larsen joined Taubman College’s faculty in 2005 and became director of the urban and regional planning doctoral program in 2019. Her research focuses on the urban environmental problems of extreme heat/urban heat islands, water pollution and infrastructure, and stormwater flooding. Her research is highly interdisciplinary, and she incorporates many physical/natural/health concepts 4

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in collaboration with faculty in public health and civil and environmental engineering. In 2014, Larsen began a research collaboration with Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia to study the city’s rapid, low-density development and how this impacts the provision of water and ecosystem services. She is expanding this research beyond Addis Ababa to ask questions about patterns of urbanization and water infrastructure in other East African cities.

In 2019, U-M President Mark Schlissel appointed Larsen to the U-M President’s Commission on Carbon Neutrality, which brought together the U-M community and regional partners to explore how U-M can reduce its carbon emissions to levels that are environmentally sustainable.

“By chairing our doctoral degree in planning and serving on our Executive Committee, Professor Larsen has provided valuable collaborative leadership to the planning program and to Taubman College,” says Dean Massey.

“As a member of the President’s Commission on Carbon Neutrality, she is showing the university how we can effectively decarbonize our campus and operations. We are fortunate that Larissa is stepping up to steer the program in urban and regional planning.”

As chair, she will oversee the Bachelor of Science in Urban Technology (launching next academic year), the Master of Urban and Regional Planning, and the Doctor of Philosophy in Urban and Regional Planning, as well as the graduate certificate programs in real estate development, healthy cities, and urban informatics and the new undergraduate minor in real estate.

“Dr. Dewar’s deep partnerships and engaged approach have made a remarkable difference in strengthening neighborhoods and improving access to safe and affordable housing.”

HazMat Competition Inspires Creative Solutions for Safe Gatherings In February, Taubman College’s academic innovation team announced the winners of the HazMat Suit Competition. Students were challenged to create a digital version of a functional, health-informed suit; finalist teams were awarded $150 each to fabricate their designs, which they then showcased.

“Six feet of distance may keep us healthy, but we could all use some hugs, so Taubman College needs HazMat suits,” the competition’s organizers said in the design brief. “The competition is a thinly veiled pretext to address topics of currency through design interventions at the scale of the body [and] … we welcome proposals of all varieties: humorous, sincere, nihilistic, or fantastical.”

— Luke Shaefer, director of U-M’s Poverty Solutions, as part of the announcement that Margi Dewar, professor emerita of urban and regional planning, was one of two recipients of Presidential Awards for Public Engagement for 2020. Presented by U-M President Mark Schlissel, the award recognizes faculty whose commitment and contributions significantly impact society through national and state leadership and efforts to address the challenges communities face every day.

29% The increase in applications for the 2021–2022 admission cycle among all degree programs at Taubman College.

Nearly 2,100 prospective students applied.

“It’s easy to talk about change, we’ve been doing that for many years, but it’s much harder to “ actually initiate and sustain it.”

— Roland Amarteifio, M.U.R.P. ’22, a member of the U-M men’s track and field team who also is a founding member of Wolverines Against Racism (WAR) — a new student-athlete organization that promotes conversations, safe spaces, and education in order to create a ripple effect that forces change.

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ARO U ND TH E C O LLE G E

Adel, Aguirre, and del Campo Receive XR Innovation Grants Three architecture faculty members were among 13 winners of the most recent round of grant funding from U-M’s Center for Academic Innovation. This round of grants specifically targeted faculty who would use a commercially available XR authoring platform to create content for their courses.

Immersive Material (Laida Aguirre, assistant professor) “Immersive Material” focuses on communicating the qualitative aspects of the architectural experience through XR. Thinking scenographically and with the intention of expanding architecture’s audience, this project will use XR for its ability to bridge student work to audiences outside of the discipline by making accurate visualizations of the textural and material qualities of the built environments they create. In addition, “Immersive Material” makes the argument that if we can accurately create digital architectural experiences, we can bypass the need for creating physical ones, thus avoiding the environmental consequences of extraction-based temporary architectural environments.

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 Bridge the Gap between Digital Design and Physical Construction in Architecture Education with XR (Arash Adel, assistant professor) Recent research projects have discovered that mixed reality (MR) technologies effectively augment the spatial information required for the fabrication of architectural structures. Furthermore, augmented reality (AR) techniques have been used on construction sites by architecture firms and have proven to offer advantages over traditional methods. Building upon these investigations, this proposal focuses on MR’s (and AR’s) capabilities as effective tools in augmenting the spatial information obtained from 3D models, especially when used to teach the fabrication and construction of scaled or full-scale physical counterparts of the digitally designed artifacts.

Fully 3D (Matias del Campo, associate professor) The very physical studio space has been challenged by the ongoing COVID-19 crisis. “Fully 3D” seeks to provide a possibility for an in-depth interrogation of projects within a studio setting by providing a threedimensional discussion space that allows students and faculty alike to explore architectural solutions. The combination of an online tool and augmented reality allows discussion of architectural projects with an additional layer of information beyond the flatness provided by Zoom reviews and similar linear, two-dimensional methods of representation.

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National Champs

Taubman College Team Runner-up in National Affordable Housing Competition

A Taubman College team won the 2021 Student Project Award from the American Planning Association for their 2020 capstone project, “Self-Management Law, Now! Fostering CommunityOwned, Permanently Affordable and Sustainable Housing in Brazil.” The team consisted of Alex Abramowitz, David Baker, Josh Childs, Meagan Gibeson, Jacob Hite, Kimberly Higgins, Neetu Nair, Mrithula Shantha Thirumalai Anandanpillai, Rebecca Yae, and Jessica Yelk.

The faculty adviser was Ana Paula Pimentel Walker, assistant professor of urban and regional planning.

“H.U.D., Sweat, and Tears” — a team of students Andrew Darvin, Katie Wheeler, Chris Prinsen, Avanti Krovi, and Alex Sulek guided by faculty adviser Marc Norman — are the runners-up in the 2021 Innovation in Affordable Housing Student Design and Planning Competition, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (H.U.D.).

Another team from Taubman College was among the four finalists in the national competition. Those team members are Tom Bagley (M.U.R.P.), Rowan Brady (M.U.R.P.), Mitch Deans (M.Arch), Mac Carroll (M.Arch), and Bronwyn Shields (M.U.R.P.). Sharon Haar, FAIA, a professor of architecture, served as their adviser.

The annual competition invites teams of graduate students in planning, public policy, architecture, real estate finance or development, and business to propose solutions that demonstrate an interdisciplinary understanding of community, population served, housing affordability, and the development process, including design and finance. The 2021 competition focused on how to design physical connections between five affordable housing complexes in Firebaugh, California.

“H.U.D., Sweat, and Tears” truly was an interdisciplinary effort: Darvin is pursuing a M.U.R.P. and an M.B.A., Prinsen and Sulek are M.Arch students, Wheeler is a dual-degree master’s student in business administration and public policy, and Krovi is a master’s candidate in planning at Harvard.

“In my mind, their success validates the multidisciplinary approach we take in teaching at Taubman College,” Norman said. “I was also impressed at how they took the time to understand community needs.”

58 Organizations participated in Taubman College’s virtual fall 2020 and winter 2021 Career Fairs. With the two fairs, the number of participating organizations remained consistent with pre-pandemic involvement.

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BES T OF CL A SS: S T UDEN T AWA RDS As part of closing out the 2020–2021 academic year, Taubman College rewarded excellence in the annual Student Show. While a sampling of the award-winning work is seen here, the complete gallery is viewable on www.taubman.show.

M.ARCH FIRST PLACE

Jiayang Wang, “Work Space” Faculty: Craig Borum The Building Anatomies Studio focused on exploring integrated approaches to environmental and structural systems, building envelope performance, and building economy as catalysts for design.

Projects were explored through drawings and digital models that describe the inter­relationships of these various aspects of architectural form and the various forces that differentiate its complex material organization. The Downtown Athletic Club, delineated in Delirious New York by Rem Koolhaas, is the premise of the studio. The rethinking of programs in the Downtown Athletic Club is at the very first place of the studio.

Specifically, the Loop Athletic Club is coming from the rearrangement of the programs and then considering spatial articulation, sustainable design, structure, and so forth separately in function and uniformly in the entire building design.

M.ARCH FIRST PLACE

Victoria Wong, “Foods of Tomorrow” Faculty: Jose Sanchez By repurposing a former reservoir into a market, the remaining water treatment facility produces and houses “food” for different agencies: groceries for humans, greeneries for animals, and bamboo for construction. Inspired by examining Detroit’s housing demolition and tree canopies, the module results from overlapping fields where the organic, forest-like column complements the orthogonal market. Internally, the open circulation is defined between segments of the food commons, allowing human and non-human agencies to roam freely on multiple levels. Serving as both water collection and wayfinding, the ceiling’s vertical undulations indicate a significant event in the plan known as “nodes.”

Externally, the furniture and column systems are integrated into the site like roots, effectively rewilding the module into natural elements.

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A ROU N D TH E COLLEGE

B.S. FIRST PLACE (TIE)

Caserta Chandler Faculty: Yojairo Lomeli In certain moments, the rigidity of the structural system determines form and intended use; in others, the system begins to break, and the space’s intended use loosens to blend programs and experiences. The project begins with a family of structural elements with different purposes: spanning elements, connecting elements, and end-cap elements. These are combined and organized into a structural array that serves as the boathouse and rowing shell storage shed. Triangular openings allow light to enter the lower level and allow a main staircase to the second floor, while the spanning elements connecting the boathouse and shed reach over a ramp that guides visitors from the parking lot to the river. Stairs allow for circulation between the boathouse and the shed and encourage interaction between skilled rowers going to their shells and novices heading to recreational kayaks.

B.S. FIRST PLACE (TIE)

Rachel Skof, “Mediation/Meditation” Faculty: Christian Unverzagt Two buildings attempt to remediate climatic risks and invite contemplation of the relationship between the natural landscape and the human interventions needed to preserve it. The first intervention is an underground battery facility acting as backup energy storage. Heat from the batteries is repurposed into a smoke-purification system as it rises through the watchtower above. Visitors see the watchtower as a marker in the desert landscape and a spectacle of the remediating infrastructural machine. The second intervention is a cross-laminated timber factory that provides a rapid deployment of cheap, sustainable building materials to rebuild buildings destroyed in wildfire-prone areas. A wind levee on the southeast façade produces and propels hot air upward to stop prevailing winds from pushing wildfires into the site, protecting the factory and the battery storage that sits uphill.

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COV ER S TO R Y

RE AL I T Y, UN T E T HERED The COVID-19 pandemic sped up the embrace of design technology at schools everywhere. But the revolution was already fully underway at Taubman College

By Amy Crawford EXPLORING THE PORTFOLIO OF SPAN, the architectural and design partnership of Associate Professor Matias del Campo and former Assistant Professor Sandra Manninger, is like peering into a future that seems somehow familiar, yet totally alien.

Their projects — often beautiful, at times uncanny — range from a 3D-printed porcelain tea set to a “robot garden” currently under construction at Michigan Robotics’ new North Campus building. While many of the forms and patterns appear organic, they’re actually anything but: SPAN specializes in design assisted by artificial intelligence.

“I’m always on the lookout for ways to use computational tools for the production of architecture,” says del Campo. “AI research, as well as other technology like augmented reality, is massively influencing the next steps that we’re making in architecture, both in terms of how we conceive it and design it, but also in the way we put it together.”

Mariana Moreira de Carvalho, M.Arch ’19, worked on her thesis under del Campo, a collaboration with Imman Suleiman, M.Arch ’19, and Hannah Daugherty, M.Arch ’19. Their project, “Augmented,” involved teaching an artificial neural network — a computing system

Artificial intelligence assisted Taubman College faculty who designed the robot garden at Michigan Robotics’ new North Campus building.

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COV ER S TO R Y

modeled after a biological brain, which can learn from large datasets — to create an engaging, futuristic spa for a “post-human era.”

the same methods have untethered us from the normative constraints of reality, pushing the envelope on what is possible to achieve in real space.”

“Artificial intelligence allows for unimaginable variations,” Carvalho says. “Using the computer as an active partner expands the architect’s imagination and creativity.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has sped up the embrace of design technology at schools and universities everywhere, as teaching moved to an online format. But the revolution was already fully underway at Taubman College, especially among the faculty who make up the Computational Design and Material Systems Innovation Cluster. Through their research and teaching, they are exploring the possibilities of neural networks, digital formwork, and robotic manufacturing. Their students are taking full advantage of the college’s state-of-the-art Digital Fabrication Lab (FABLab), which boasts six industrial robots, large-scale CNC machines, and other digital manufacturing tools.

They are forming partnerships across the University of Michigan, including with Michigan Robotics, Computer Science and Engineering, and the Center for Sustainable Systems. And they are helping the next generation of

As excited as many architects are about AI, it’s only one among a suite of digital design technologies that are revolutionizing both practice and teaching, from academic work at the cutting edge of theory, to the design and construction of traditional office towers. Extended, augmented, and virtual reality, or XR, AR, and VR, are helping architects, clients, and students explore spaces in new ways. Meanwhile, ever more sophisticated building information modeling (BIM) has simplified the planning, design, construction, and management of infrastructure projects, while furthering sustainability goals.

“These technologies [are] addressing questions around assembly, efficiency, innovation in building science, and quantitative performance,” says Anya Sirota, the associate dean for academic initiatives, who is leading the college’s effort to expand the boundaries of design technologies in education. “On the opposite end of the spectrum, 12

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(This page) Testing a robot’s interaction with the robot garden.

(Opposite top) “Augmented,” a thesis collaboration led by Mariana Moreira de Carvalho, M.Arch ’19. (Opposite bottom) SPAN’s 3D-printed porcelain tea set.

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architects and researchers to think differently about how we construct and inhabit the built environment.

“Faculty and students are redefining the way architects represent spatial conditions and communicate ideas, offering antidotes to disciplinary orthodoxies,” Sirota says. “What’s exciting, too, is that these tools invite students to design entire environments, including the atmosphere, the choreography of experience, and the avatars that inhabit them … [and] imagine empathetic ways in which architecture can communicate and shape culture.”

A GENERATIONAL SHIFT Much of the groundwork for Taubman College’s involvement in design technologies was laid by Professor James Turner, B.S. ’71, M.Arch ’73, who died in January. A member of the faculty from 1976 until his retirement in 2009, Turner developed early versions of programs that today’s architects and architecture students rely on, especially one that was a precursor to BIM. He also created or revised courses on CAD fundamentals and computer programming, including in 2D and 3D computer-aided design.

“From 1970 to 1982, there were few 2D drafting programs and no 3D modeling, visualization, or animation programs, so we wrote our own and made them available to students,” Turner recalled in a 2009 Portico essay.

By the time Turner retired, a host of commercial software applications had become ubiquitous at what is now Taubman College, and faculty and students no longer 14

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needed to build them from scratch. Meanwhile, design technology filtered into the mainstream, as even the most established firms have recognized the possibilities for making processes more efficient and unleashing the designer’s imagination.

“I’ve been saying this for probably 15 years now, but I think we’re in a generational shift,” says John Haymaker, B.S. ’90, a former student of Turner and director of research at the global firm Perkins & Will. “Some of the older designers are more comfortable starting with the fat pen first and understanding the big design moves from an intuitive and experiential perspective, and then they’re applying technology a little later in the process. But I think there’s a new generation of designers who are very comfortable sketching with the computer, doing design exploration right away using design technologies.”

With 25 studios around the world, Perkins & Will is continuously exploring the possibilities of design technologies, including through relationships with universities.

Another vehicle for generating exploration is Innovation Incubator, a firmwide program that distributes microgrants to employees who apply to investigate ideas of their choosing — including new technology, tools, and processes.

“It’s a bottom-up effort to make sure that we have our ear to the ground,” Haymaker says. “And we balance it with a top-down approach as well, with our research labs, which do longer term, more focused investigations to develop new tools and fold them into our work processes. What we’re really focused on is understanding the gaps or challenges in delivering built environments that are more sustainable, healthier, and more experiential — and

CO VER S TO RY

Akshay Srivastava, M.Arch ’19, a technical designer at the Chicago-based firm Solomon Cordwell Buenz, says that while much of the design technology he relies on at work is fairly new, it has quickly become ubiquitous.

Grasshopper, a visual programming language for a computer-aided design platform called Rhinoceros 3D, is “like using a calculator for designing,” he explains. “We use it to understand the form of the building, or set floor plans, or understand the area of a place, just to make our calculations a little quicker.”

identifying how to do that efficiently and economically.

As we learn, we translate that research into practice.”

Firms are finding that technology has a place at nearly every level, from conceiving a project to managing construction and even trouble-shooting a completed building.

“I think that the biggest way design technologies are changing architectural practice is related to communication,” says Andrea Springer, M.S. ’13, the Denver-based director of digital technology and innovation at Stantec, an international design and consulting company. Virtual reality, BIM, and XR now allow cross-disciplinary teams to collaborate remotely, as well as facilitate communication with clients. Stantec’s project teams have the ability to ask a facilities management team member to wear a camera-equipped, augmented-reality headset while walking around a building site, for example, which allows everyone to see the site in real time and communicate seamlessly from wherever they happen to be.

Taubman College graduates, Springer adds, “are in high demand” in the job market because they arrive having already used a variety of digital fabrication methods and design technologies as part of their education, and having been exposed to professors whose research is furthering the possibilities of these tools. “That background is part of the reason why I’ve been able to successfully chart a nontraditional architectural career path, with a focus on technology and innovation,” Springer says.

(Above) This series of complex, user-driven 3D architectural configurations, co-designed by Akshay Srivastava as a student, demonstrates what machine learning and AI can generate.

Srivastava earned his undergraduate degree in India, where he says architectural education is “very practicedriven — whatever I was studying in school had to be applicable in the real world.” He considers his Taubman College education more theory-based, which provided him with a valuable balance. “At Taubman, it was more about thinking out of the box, and it was important for me to explore more and delve more into the philosophical side of design.”

“These tools invite students to design entire environments, including the atmosphere, the choreography of experience, and the avatars that inhabit them … [and] reimagine empathetic ways in which architecture can communicate and shape culture.”

— Associate Dean Anya Sirota Dillon Erb, M.Arch ’14 and Daniel Kobran, M.Arch ’14, who cofounded the cloud-computing startup Paperspace, were also drawn to Taubman because of its investments in the technology side of design. The pair realized while still at Taubman that the cloud had the potential to broaden access to design technologies, which require more computing power than many people around the world have.

“There’s a whole lot of good engineering and technology, but it’s really hard to access,” explains Erb, whose work with Kobran is profiled in more detail on page 32. “We realized that it was a design problem just as much as anything else, so we were like, ‘Cool. We can do work here.’”

In 2020, as universities took education online, Taubman contracted with Paperspace to help far-flung students access the college’s technology remotely. The partnership 15

was part of a broader effort to ensure continuity and connection through the pandemic — and that has revealed the importance of incorporating technology into classes even after in-person learning resumes.

TECHNOLOGY FOR THE POST-COVID CLASSROOM This year, Matias del Campo was one of three Taubman faculty, along with Arash Adel and Laida Aguirre, to win a grant from U-M’s Center for Academic Innovation XR Initiative Fund. His project, called “Fully 3D,” aims to take remote education beyond the two dimensions of the laptop screen. “I’m trying to figure out a way to use a more three-dimensional approach for sharing information, especially if we’re talking about architecture, which is such a profoundly three-dimensional discipline,” he says.

As evidenced by the robot garden and other projects, even before the pandemic del Campo was already interested in the possibilities of extended and augmented reality, tools that overlay real-life images with additional layers of information, from text labels to ornamentation and special effects. “If we’re assembling a more complex figure or object, for example,” he says, “we can use augmented reality to show somebody where the specific 16

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elements go and how they’re assembled literally in space, instead of on a plan or a drawing.”

VR, XR, and AR often require high-tech hardware; in the classroom, del Campo has had students use a headset called the HoloLens to help them assemble their designs out of physical materials. The pandemic, however, highlighted the need to create a system that students could use with more readily available technology, such as their smartphones and Rhinoceros, a design software platform that every Taubman student now learns to use.

“It’s important to me that students actually focus on the problem at hand,” he says, “rather than having to solve the technical issues that come along with it.”

COVER S TORY

Jonathan Rule, an assistant professor of practice, received an XR Initiative Fund grant last year for a pilot project to incorporate VR and AR into his construction classes — with virtual visits to buildings and construction sites and an app that allows students to interact with 3D models as they create designs. Before campus shut down, some were able to use a virtual reality headset called Oculus Rift, an experience that Rule says helped them understand construction methods and materials far better than a textbook alone. “The ability to walk through a virtual space and understand it is very similar to how you can walk through an actual space,” he says. “When you’re seeing things on the page of a textbook, you don’t have a relationship with scale, you don’t understand how big something might actually be. But if you can get inside it, you’re immersed in this world with the freedom to look around.”

Rule notes that VR hardware is not always accessible to everyone — some people can’t use it because it makes them nauseated, while remote students don’t always have access to school-owned hardware. So Rule also provided his students with a first-person controlled desktop app to download onto their own devices. Everything is still in the testing phase, he says, but he hopes to fully implement the technology in his classes for fall 2021.

Last spring, when the pandemic forced all courses to transition to virtual, Glenn Wilcox, an associate professor of architecture, was already developing a fully online course on design computing with the programming language Python. The course would make coding more accessible

(Opposite) Students in Jonathan Rule’s class visit buildings and construction sites through VR- and AR-powered technology.

(This page) Glenn Wilcox’s fully online course makes coding more accessible to a broad range of students.

to a broader range of students — something that is a pressing necessity as the industry comes to depend on architects who are also skilled programmers.

Wilcox, whose father was an engineer, had been interested in coding from a young age, and he began teaching it at Taubman a decade ago so students would be able to work with the college’s digital fabrication technologies.

“When digital fabrication became more prominent and available, I realized that the way to really access the power of it was through a higher-level computation,” Wilcox says. “I always see computational stuff through a lens of what we can actually build with it.”

Wilcox is excited by the potential of digital fabrication to move construction beyond standard parts — the traditional brick, for example — and into a world of infinite variations. Digital design and fabrication have made possible stunning contemporary buildings like the Broad Museum in Los Angeles, designed by the firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro and completed in 2015, with its gravity-defying veil that resembles something one might find in a coral reef.

“Modernism produced industries where standardization was the hallmark of production,” Wilcox says. “The ability to vary things is a hallmark of the digital aesthetic.”

NEW TOOLS FOR RIGHTING OLD WRONGS Design technologies may have opened new aesthetic horizons, but they also hold potential for advancing other goals, including improving sustainability at every stage.

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With the initiation of a new project, teams and clients can now collaborate remotely and share virtual models, rather than flying around the world for in-person meetings. Building information modeling can be used to minimize embodied carbon — the carbon footprint of the materials that go into a structure, which currently makes up 11 percent of global emissions — as well as to maximize the energy efficiency of the building once it’s in use.

Digital fabrication allows for more precise use of traditional materials, especially concrete, and it can facilitate the use of greener materials, like mass timber.

“Additive manufacturing (a.k.a. 3D-printing) will be an important element of the future of sustainable building practices,” says Springer, at Stantec, explaining that it will mean far less waste as part of the building process, as well as less need to ship materials to a job site. “It will be a good day when we no longer need large flatbed trucks to deliver large building parts.”

There are also more surprising benefits to design technologies, including, perhaps, the democratization of architecture and urban planning. Associate Professor McLain Clutter, chair of the architecture program, has been exploring how augmented reality might be used to further social justice goals by broadening conversations about urban development.

In 2019, Clutter, along with Cyrus Peñarroyo, an assistant professor at Taubman College and Clutter’s partner in the Ann Arbor–based design practice EXTENTS; Assistant Professor of Architecture Laida Aguirre; and Mark Lindquist, assistant professor of landscape architecture at U-M’s School of Environment and Sustainability, created a unique installation in Cleveland’s Slavic Village that aimed to help members of this diverse community take part in a conversation about their neighborhood and its future. “Collective Reality: Image without Ownership” invited local residents into a vacant storefront, where the architects had installed a bare-bones array of foam shapes and steel frames. Participants were then given iPads loaded with an augmented reality app that could overlay virtual images on the shapes.

“We had asked people to go out and to take photographs of elements in the neighborhood that they valued,” Clutter says. “Then we used free software to make digital models, which were available in the storefront space for people to manipulate with augmented reality. We learned a lot

“Collective Reality: Image without Ownership” invited residents in Cleveland’s Slavic Village to use technology to imagine their neighborhood’s future.

about what kinds of interaction were intuitive for people.

The things that they valued were relatively unsurprising — markers of green development and new urban vitality.

They were also really interested in the kind of unique and quirky parts of their neighborhood, which might push against conventional patterns of development.”

The Cleveland installation, he notes, was merely a prototype — the long-term vision is to make software available to anyone with a smartphone as a way to engage people whose voices are not always included in urban design decisions. Many non-architects already have an intuitive sense of how they can creatively manipulate their environments using augmented reality — think of the popular videogame Pokémon GO, or apps developed by furniture companies to help people shop for the right sofa.

“People might be able to walk past the empty lot or disused park in a community, hold up their phone, and imagine different possibilities of what might go into that,” Clutter says. “They could take a screen grab and send it to their councilmembers. If you give people the tools to imagine how things can be different, you give them agency and they can create their own possibilities.”

VISIONS OF THE FUTURE From augmented reality to AI, digital technologies have brought with them a soaring, open-ended sense of possibility. The future they portend may not have arrived everywhere just yet, but for Taubman College alumni who have had the chance to explore distant buildings with VR headsets and realize their designs in the FABLab as part of their education, it can be exciting simply to imagine what else might be next.

After graduation, Carvalho became an associate architect at Hartshorne Plunkard, based in Chicago, where she works on hospitality and residential towers. It’s a bit more practical than the futuristic fantasies she created at Taubman, but she still uses her programming knowledge to help explore ideas and expand her imagination.

“If I want to, I can jump on my computer and train a neural network on an architectural element that I’m into that week — like columns, for example — and get some output images,” she says. “Often what it generates can be disorienting or intriguing, or evocative without being prescriptive. But in the end, it’s just a way of thinking, a way to create fun, intriguing spaces. And there are so many routes, and so many possibilities.”

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How Data Can Make Communities Equitable and Enjoyable Assistant Professor Anthony Vanky and other urban technologists are using data exhaust to measure the effect of planning decisions in new ways

By Amy Spooner

DIGITAL DATA AND PERVASIVE sensing technologies are optimizing traffic management, infrastructure monitoring, and security. But Anthony Vanky and other designers and planners working in the field of urban technology know those technologies can do more.

collaborators was the City of New York Planning Department, just after it completed a new flagship park.

During the planning process, the city had held community meetings in which residents said they didn’t need basketball courts; they wanted tennis courts.

Vanky says data can make cities healthier, more equitable, and more resonant with people — even more fun.

“That was a red flag,” Vanky says. “The city was worried it was coded language for ‘we don’t want minority residents here who would probably use basketball courts more than tennis courts.’”

“Through ‘data exhaust’ — the digital smog of our data world — we can measure the effect of planning decisions in new ways,” says Vanky, an assistant professor of urban and regional planning at Taubman College. “For example, cities have never really thought about whether people are enjoying the public space.”

Vanky also is co-founder of Social Studies, a consulting and research and analytics firm that guides governments, businesses, and nonprofits on these topics. One of his

Following the traditional planning process, the city didn’t have means to push back because that’s what the community said it wanted. So they put in one basketball court and many tennis courts. “But the question that we can examine with digital data is who is using these parks,” Vanky says. “Did a traditional community planning process create a less-equitable space that excluded a population?”

The answer comes from digital data “exhaust,” the by‑ products of cell phone data or mobile apps, which offers an understanding of the movements of people through space. From there, Vanky’s research seeks to move toward a paradigm of seeing whether people are enjoying a space and how they are using it.

“Then we can begin to test theories and processes that have been traditional to planning and urban design and really rethink them,” says Vanky.

The increased quantity and quality of data offers widereaching benefits to cities of all sizes.

As one example, public health officials have relied on annual hospital data on overdoses to identify areas hard hit by opioid addiction. That presents an incomplete

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picture because of the lag in data and the fact that all addicts don’t require hospitalization. Vanky mentored a startup that developed a way to perform high-frequency, neighborhood-level epidemiology by placing sensors in sewers to measure the collective microbiome in human waste.

“This platform bridges big urban cities and small rural ones because opioids are everywhere,” Vanky says. “Now we can focus treatment with greater precision, instead of spending more money in places where there are more people, which leaves smaller-but-hard-hit cities behind.”

As data becomes more sophisticated and sensors become more prevalent, privacy concerns are growing.

Vanky acknowledges, “We have to balance privacy and innovation.”

He points to Project Green Light in Detroit, a partnership between the Detroit Police Department and private businesses that installed real-time camera connections with police headquarters. The city touted the “blending … of real-time crime-fighting and community policing.”

But its use of facial recognition technology, like LinkNYC, “has many question marks,” Vanky says. “Because it’s under the umbrella of public safety, police and private companies may keep the data indefinitely, and there is a lot of opacity surrounding its use, including the inherent biases in the algorithms that make this surveillance useful for the police. That should give us pause.”

People willingly share their data all the time — clicking “agree to terms and conditions” boxes without hesitation.

But they’re trading their privacy for an immediate benefit, like ordering a product or watching dancers on TikTok. In the urban tech world, “it might take years until someone sees the benefits of improved public safety or traffic,” Vanky says. “That lag is problematic and poses questions around use and governance of urban data.”

Because urban tech is rooted in the places in which we all live, work, and play, Vanky says it presents a unique opportunity for thought leadership: “Part of it is about informing the public about these issues, but the other is about fundamentally rethinking these data regimes and the technology ecosystem to balance these trade-offs.

We need to co-create new visions that can re-center the conversation about people.”

“By engaging with citizens, we can begin to collect information about cities that promote happier and healthier places, but also create ways for people to connect with each other or look at their space in a new way.”

— Assistant Professor Anthony Vanky An important part of that re-centering, Vanky argues, is to focus on solving problems, not just increasing profits.

He points to innovative ideas that have existed informally in emerging economies for years, and he sees opportunities for urbanists to nudge technologists — from big-tech to startups —toward learning from these examples in order to make a difference in United States.

“Why isn’t DoorDash delivering medicine? Many long-existing services do that in Jakarta,” Vanky says. “Especially in the era of COVID, when travel and distance are issues, why not here? Can we learn from digitally enabled mutual aid systems in the Global South as we grapple with issues of the pandemic?”

He emphasizes that a core aspect of Taubman College’s urban technology program, and the mindset of the urban and regional planning faculty, is community need: “It’s not about us, the researchers. It’s us as part of a larger community thinking about problems, and solving them with residents. In this context, it happens to be solved through the language of technology and computation.”

But communities also need to have fun. Vanky sees a role for data in that, too.

What if those basketball courts in that New York City park not only measured who is using the courts but analyzed their style of play, identifying who mimics Kobe and who is more of a LeBron? Or tying the style of a pick-up game to the 1994 “Dream Team” Olympic gold medal game or a legendary NCAA tournament upset?

Beyond the data exhaust and sensors on poles, “by engaging with citizens, we can begin to collect information about cities that promote happier and healthier places, but also create ways for people to connect with each other or look at their space in a new way,” Vanky says.

“Sensors don’t have to be only serious; they can support playful engagements that open new types of humancomputer-city interfaces that we’re now only beginning to think about.”

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AT PLY+ ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN FIRM, no two projects are ever the same. Every day brings a host of new challenges.

“We approach each project as a unique opportunity,” says founder Craig Borum, FAIA, a professor of architecture at Taubman College. “Our work is guided by the terms of the project commission, the other players involved, and the collaborations we forge.”

Craig Borum and Jen Maigret Are Not Niche Players The 2021 Architectural League Emerging Voices honorees are researching and executing architectural design across a broad spectrum

By Claudia Capos

Since its launch in 1999, the Ann Arbor-based firm has designed and built or renovated more than 100 projects ranging from single–family homes, restaurants, and a school to an animal rescue facility, contemporary art museum, and hospital chapel. Borum currently partners with Jen Maigret, an associate professor of architecture, and they have a staff of six full-time architects and design professionals.

“Our design work encompasses a full, across-the-board spectrum that extends from highly particular technical requirements to very open-ended research questions,” Borum says. “In all of these commissions, we’ve taken an attitude toward learning and research that foregrounds each project as a unique set of circumstances. We don’t have a particular architectural niche.”

Maigret, M.Arch ’04, joined PLY+ as a principal in 2016. She says the firm has earned distinction in industry and academic circles for its rigorous research and creative invention.

“Over the last four years, we have more actively pursued design research supported by grant funding to align with our client-based work,” she explains. “This close alignment between targeted questions, such as how to improve a building’s thermal performance, and the broader design and aesthetic interests we bring to projects enables PLY+ to help its clients realize their vision and fulfill their mission in unconventional ways.”

In February, the Architectural League of New York recognized Borum and Maigret as 2021 Emerging Voices winners. The annual invited competition honors North American firms and individuals who have distinct design voices and significant bodies of realized work and who have the potential to influence their field. Their focus

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St. Mary Mercy Hospital won numerous awards, including the 2019 Society of American Registered Architects, NY Council, Design Award.

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on design research “simultaneously broaden[s] and deepen[s] our understanding of possibilities and opportunities across programmatic, technical, and material considerations,” the jury said.

exterior walls. Their idea did not fully come to fruition, however, until they began working directly with the brick masons from Davenport Masonry who were contracted to do the hands-on work to implement their design.

Working collaboratively PLY+ starts each project with a blank slate rather than a pre-set playbook.

“We needed to balance the masons’ tactile, engaged knowledge of brickwork with our desire to use the material to achieve the visual aesthetic character we wanted,” Maigret says. “We ended up doing a lot of special detailing in the building façade and interior of the chapel. It was complex and challenging, but also fun for all of us.”

“We engage from the very beginning in a collaborative approach with the clients, our consultants, and, ultimately, the tradespeople who perform the work and build the structure,” Borum says.

One hallmark of the firm’s success is the ability of its principal designers to listen. “We try to ask questions that draw out our collaborators’ knowledge in ways they might not otherwise think to deliver it,” Borum explains.

“We approach each project and each step along the way as a learning experience from our perspective.”

When PLY+ was commissioned in 2017 to design and build a 2,600-square-foot chapel at St. Mary Mercy Livonia Hospital in suburban Detroit, Borum and Maigret initially envisioned using brickwork in the design of the

The technology developed during the project — which allowed the masons to view a digital model of the structure on an iPad while they performed the actual work — led to a Prototyping Tomorrow research grant from Taubman College. PLY+ and Davenport Masonry plan to use the grant to explore how the patterning of brick can improve the thermal performance of a building envelope.

“Often an idea that develops in a particular project leads to another idea that takes a slightly different form,” Maigret says. “This progression enables us to extend some of the knowledge we gained and apply it elsewhere.”

Synthesizing knowledge Borum and Maigret hold weekly brainstorming meetings with their clients to establish the initial project criteria and evaluate various design approaches. They also explore ways to elevate the structure’s design through material expression or quality of light.

“The value we bring is our ability to synthesize and carry that knowledge from the initial client collaboration through various phases of research to implementation with the builders and tradespeople who execute the project,” Borum says. “We also ensure that everyone in that process feels a sense of ownership in the project.”

Maigret’s educational and professional experience — she earned a master’s in ecology and evolutionary biology as well as her M.Arch from U-M — set the groundwork for her growing expertise in building performance and technological research. Her focus on designing architectural structures as part of the overarching environmental and cultural systems landed Maigret a position on the U-M President’s Commission on Carbon Neutrality — she led the internal analysis team focused on building standards.

(This page) The new Michigan Animal Rescue League facility.

(Opposite page) Renovating the Albert Kahn–designed Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit entails uniting three parcels of land into a single campus.

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toric buildings located on the site of the former Marygrove College campus in northwest Detroit. The multiphase project will repurpose one building to provide K–6 elementary education and the other to serve middle and high school students.

The new “cradle to career” curriculum advances an initiative supported by the Detroit Public Schools, the Marygrove Conservancy, and the U-M School of Education to offer a continuous learning experience to students. “It’s exciting to take all these ideas and incorporate them into the architecture of the renovated schools,” Maigret says.

It also has enabled PLY+ to nudge its clients in a more sustainable direction on project work.

Prior to the coronavirus pandemic, PLY+ was commissioned to renovate the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, or MOCAD, which occupies a 1906 Albert Kahn– designed former auto showroom building in Midtown Detroit. The project work entails uniting three parcels of land into a single campus that will connect the museum more closely to the surrounding neighborhood. The design plans also call for transforming a gravel parking lot into an inviting open-air events space to stage outdoor concerts, art exhibitions, and film screenings.

Borum engaged Lars Junghans, an associate professor of architecture at Taubman College, to help conceptualize an environmental approach to infrastructure upgrades on the 22,000-square-foot building. The improvements will bolster the museum’s overall sustainability, reduce energy consumption, and thereby save money on operational costs that can be redirected toward arts programming.

More recently, PLY+ was commissioned to design a proposed net zero housing project in Ann Arbor. Borum and Maigret are working with Junghans to develop a range of energy saving and recovery strategies to enable the solar power generated on site to provide the entire amount of energy the building consumes.

“Energy efficiency and sustainability represent the future that we all should be working on together,” Maigret says.

PLY+ also is currently partnering with Integrated Design Solutions and Taubman faculty members Ana Morcillo Pallarés and Jonathan Rule on the renovation of two his-

Preparing the next generation In their dual roles as practicing architects and college professors, Borum and Maigret also have developed a creative conduit for ideas, talent, and collaboration that benefits Taubman College students and graduates, as well as their firm’s clients and community stakeholders.

In their practice, they continue to scan the discipline for new ideas, incorporate innovative technology and materials into their projects, and build their network of collaborators.

In their classrooms, they share this new knowledge and know-how with students. They also discuss their research findings and constantly question and reevaluate the assumptions they make in practice within the context of the university’s rigorous academic setting.

To prepare the next generation of architects, PLY+ is grooming the six Taubman College graduates on its full-time staff for future leadership roles in the firm: Andrew Wolking, M.Arch ’13; Taka Yoshikawa, M.Arch ’16; Yusi Zha, M.Arch ’16; Yibo Jiao, M.Arch ’16; Olaia Chivite Amigo, M.Arch ’17; and Kay Wright, B.S. ’20.

“Until now Craig and I have partnered to lead design work across projects,” Maigret says. “But in coming years, I expect to see members of our team continue to grow into leadership positions and take larger roles in project design and management. This is creating stronger collaboration and a more dynamic leadership structure within the firm.”

Reflecting on the past two decades, Borum says another PLY+ hallmark has been the firm’s laser focus on continuously building its practice and reinventing its structure: “We’re optimistic we can find ways to grow not just in a linear way, but in a more expansive way that will allow us to engage in a much broader range of issues and topics through our work.”

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In-the-Field Design with an Impact The Taubman Public Design Corps builds partnerships between student designers and local nonprofits

By Claudia Capos

LAST YEAR DETROIT RESIDENT Torri Smith, M.Arch ’21, saw firsthand how the coronavirus pandemic impacted vulnerable families and children. She wanted to find a way to use her architectural design skills to help those in need and to give back to her community.

Smith got that opportunity with the Taubman Public Design Corps, a new program that connects architecture and urban planning students with socially focused nonprofit organizations in southeast Michigan.

Over a six-week period in June and July, Design Corps student teams tackled pressing economic, environmental, social, and spatial challenges at six nonprofits. Putting their design tools, analytical skills, and imaginations into action, the students created both onsite and virtual solutions. Their work included designing outdoor activity areas, virtual arts and culture spaces, food distribution venues, and community outreach platforms.

“The Design Corps really inspired and influenced me,” Smith says. “I had an opportunity to work with nonprofit leaders and community members, which is not something we usually get to do as students.”

Taubman College launched the Public Design Corps to fulfill students’ growing desire to perform pro bono work for organizations serving disadvantaged families and individuals in metro Detroit. The initiative was met with enthusiasm by nonprofit leaders, who often cannot afford professional architectural services.

“There are many ways architects and designers can shape and inflect the future of a community organization,” says Anya Sirota, associate dean for academic initiatives. “They can offer organizational or urban strategies, as well as plans for the short- and long-term evolution of institutional infrastructure.”

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bounds of the traditional studio. By challenging students to apply their academic theory and training to actual clients in real time, the program created an experiential bridge from the classroom to the professional world.

“We framed the Design Corps to teach our students real skills through fieldwork and collaboration with mission-driven community organizations,” says Sirota.

“We wanted to offer boots-on-the-ground experiences within the context of a supportive institution committed to their academic and intellectual evolution.”

Faculty advisers, including Design Corps co-founders Irene Hwang and María Arquero de Alarcón, mentored the teams as they navigated the process of assessing an organization’s needs, proposing and refining design options, and completing their work in just six weeks.

“These projects were evocative and exciting for our students because they were grappling with complex conceptual issues that demanded finesse and an understanding

Taubman Public Design Corps teams’ clients included Detroit’s Carr Center (above) and the Zimbabwe Cultural Center of Detroit (opposite).

of the cultural context and economic requirements,” Sirota explains.

Jacob Comerci, academic innovation program manager and Design Corps adviser, says student designers often had no clearly defined objectives when they first met with nonprofit groups. The teams took the initiative to identify underlying issues and obstacles and then collaboratively created and implemented novel design solutions.

“We were building the airplane while in it,” Comerci says.

“The students’ confidence grew tremendously as they accomplished what they set out to do.” Based on the high level of interest in the Design Corps from students and nonprofit groups, Sirota says, “we’re now looking for strategies to institutionalize this effort and make it sustainable and equitable for everyone involved.”

Bringing families together, apart Torri Smith’s team partnered with Brilliant Detroit, which offers early childhood education and family services at eight community hubs anchored in renovated houses. After the pandemic curtailed its programming, the organization applied to the Public Design Corps for help. The students developed proposals for reconfiguring the existing floor plans of three houses to create safely distanced indoor spaces for family activities. They also proposed redesign options for the backyards and front porches to provide kid-friendly outdoor areas.

“The students showed their technical skills in architectural design, as well as a real passion for our mission,” says Emma Laut, Brilliant Detroit’s senior operations manager.

“They helped us face the world of the pandemic in a way that brought hope and greater safety for everyone.”

Designing a virtual arts center Ishan Pal Singh, M.Arch ’20, joined the Public Design Corps to gain a different perspective on design and realtime experience through pro bono work.

“In college, you design for yourself,” he explains, “but when you work with a nonprofit organization, your design must meet the clients’ needs.”

Singh volunteered for a project at the Carr Center, a multidisciplinary arts-presenting organization located in Detroit’s historic Park Shelton building.

“We have a family-like relationship with our audience,” says curator Erin Falker Obichigha. “With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we needed a way to gather people around the arts virtually and give them an authentic Carr Center experience.”

To achieve that goal, Singh and his teammates developed comprehensive plans for the Carr Virtual Center, an online platform featuring four interactive galleries and a performance studio to showcase live and pre-recorded events. The team used current photos and historic floor plans to give the virtual arts and performance space a vintage museum-like feeling, with a digital flair. They also created a virtual café to encourage real-time online conversations among visitors who come to the website to listen to concerts or view art exhibitions.

“I want my professional life to include public-interest work, and this was a stepping stone toward that goal,” Singh says.

Advancing LGBT outreach For Max Coolidge, B.S. ’22, the Public Design Corps was personal. “I’m gay and I wanted to work with an organization that helps my community,” says Coolidge, who worked with SAGE Metro Detroit to advance the advocacy and services they provide to LGBT older adults.

His team started with a “blank slate” and quickly determined that the organization needed marketing and archival materials to procure grant funding to sustain its outreach operations. The students recorded video interviews with five SAGE founding members and edited those narrations to create compelling testimonials and a promotional video for fundraising.

“The passion and commitment of the students far exceeded our expectations, and the quality of their products was top-notch,” says executive director Angie Perone.

Coolidge not only learned how to work collaboratively and communicate with a client but also forged valuable personal and academic relationships. “The experience reinforced my desire to stay in architecture and to try to make a difference in the community,” he says.

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HEL P US BU IL D TOMORR OW Dolores Perales — a first-generation college student — grew up in southwest Detroit surrounded by vacant land, blighted property, illegal dumping, and noise and air pollution. “I didn’t start putting the pieces together until I got older, that these environmental factors impact how I live and the quality of my life,” says Perales, who has severe asthma. In high school, she began volunteering with Cadillac Urban Gardens, part of the Southwest Detroit Environmental Vision Project (SDEV). She continued working there throughout college and now is their environmental sustainability specialist — a fulltime job on top of pursuing a dual master’s in urban and regional planning and environment and sustainability.

With Sarah Clark, M.U.P. ’15, Perales co-manages SDEV’s farms and orchard, including coordinating volunteers and working with the community to teach sustainability. Clark and other Taubman College alumni inspired Perales’s career path and introduced her to U-M; now Perales is doing the same for the youth and interns she mentors. “Environmental factors tend to be left out of the planning process, as well as the needs and wants of community — especially frontline communities and communities of color like mine — so I am going into this field to make sustainable, equitable change,” says Perales. “Having that deeper connection with interns because of the level playing field of our backgrounds shows them what is possible. And it reminds me that I need to work and study hard so I can continue to navigate these spaces in a way that makes life better for them in the future.”

A gift to Taubman College supports the next generation of leaders in planning and architecture — including Dolores Perales, the recipient of the Stanley and Margaret Winkelman Scholarship. taubmancollege.umich.edu/give

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Crossing “Terra Incognita” to Create a Path for Others Professor Emerita June Manning Thomas, Ph.D. ’77, is Taubman College’s 2020 Distinguished Alumna JUNE MANNING THOMAS was first drawn to the freedom of cities.

As an African American girl in small-town South Carolina in the 1950s and 1960s, freedom felt hard to come by.

She was one of a handful of students who desegregated her high school, suffering repeated racial trauma from her white classmates as a result.

But cities presented opportunities. On annual trips to Miami, she could dine in restaurants and enjoy the thrill of a drive-in movie. Jim Crow felt farther away.

“To drive somewhere and be treated differently, do different things, was liberating,” says Thomas, Ph.D. ’77.

It wasn’t until she was an undergraduate student at Michigan State University that Thomas realized she could make cities her life’s work. She began her studies at Furman University in South Carolina, where she was the first of three female African American students. Doing “double-duty desegregation work,” as she calls it, compounded the trauma she endured in high school. So she transferred to MSU on the advice of members of the Baha’i Faith community. There she embraced the oppor-

tunity to take classes in many different fields. She was captivated by one particular professor who taught urban sociology and by Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which she read for class.

“I saw that people study cities. They improve cities.

That was a revelation,” Thomas says. “I decided that urban planning would marry my interest in social and racial justice with this interest in cities that I’d had no idea what to do with.”

What she ended up doing with those interests was becoming a path-breaking voice about race relations and social justice issues related to urban planning in U.S. cities — work that she says was prompted by necessity.

“There were no visible Black scholars in urban planning.

It’s hard to describe what that’s like, but it was like terra incognita,” she says. “At some point, I realized if there was going to be a literature, I’d have to start it.”

As a Ph.D. student at Michigan, Thomas wrote a disser­ tation that explored the effect of tourism on Black land ownership on the Sea Islands of South Carolina. Her recent research considers racial oppression and Black community resilience during the civil rights era in South Carolina.

But Detroit has been the focus of her research and teaching. That’s because what Thomas thought was a temporary stay in Michigan for her education turned out to be a permanent relocation; shortly after leaving South Carolina, Thomas met her future husband, Richard, a native of Detroit who intended to build his life and career close to home.

Detroit, in the wake of the riots of the late 1960s and amid the decline of the American automobile industry, was a fertile ground for study. “What I found in the North was not a real escape from the Deep South because there were similar kinds of racial traumas and injustices up North,” Thomas says. “So it seemed that the charge was to take that passion for social and racial justice that I had gained

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in South Carolina and to apply it to the situation I found myself in, in Michigan.”

Her publications about the city include Urban Planning and the African American Community: In the Shadows (with Marsha Ritzdorf ); Redevelopment and Race: Planning a Finer City in Postwar Detroit; The City after Abandonment (with Margaret Dewar); and Mapping Detroit: Evolving Land Use Patterns and Connections (with Henco Bekkering). She won the 1999 Paul Davidoff Award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP) for Redevelopment and Race, which she wrote because “somebody had to write about the role of planning in the redevelopment of the Black community in Detroit,” she says.

“A lot of my work was just preparatory for everybody else.

I mean that when I say it,” she adds. “It’s not that I wrote seminal work. I just wrote some of the first work. I said, ‘If I don’t start writing something that people can use in classrooms, nothing is going to change.’”

That sense of responsibility also led her to national leadership within her profession. Although she served as president of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning, she is proudest of co-founding the ACSP’s Planners of Color Interest Group in 2007, a response to the alarming drop in the number of tenured and tenure-track Black and Latino urban planning faculty.

“What’s the use of creating a literature that supports people of color if you don’t have any academics of color?

They’re going to be the most motivated, and they’re the role models for students. You can’t have diverse programs unless you have those faculty,” Thomas says.

After earning her Ph.D., Thomas taught at Michigan State for nearly 30 years. As founding co-director of MSU’s Urban Collaborators Program and founding codirector of MSU’s Urban Planning Partnerships, she developed statewide initiatives to link urban planning services on campus with community development needs.

Her friend Margi Dewar, now a professor emerita of urban and regional planning at Taubman College, convinced Thomas to join the University of Michigan faculty in 2007. Now the Mary Frances Berry Distinguished University Professor of Urban Planning Emerita and the Centennial Professor Emerita of Urban and Regional Planning, Thomas taught in Ann Arbor until she retired in 2020; she also was one of the founding instructors in U-M’s Semester in Detroit program.

It was an odd sort of homecoming for the alumna, whose student days had been a blur; during her nearly seven

years as a Ph.D. student, she gave birth to her two children and also suffered a miscarriage. “We were here, but we weren’t here,” Thomas says of her and Richard’s early U-M days (he pursued a Ph.D. in history concurrently).

“But coming back as a professor, it felt like coming home, like it was just such a wonderful place to be. Not only was it my alma mater, but it gave me a chance to engage more deeply in Detroit by teaching classes that focused on specific neighborhoods and projects, writing more, taking people there, and teaching there.”

Despite being well regarded for her work in Detroit, however, Thomas says her least-known book is her best: Planning Progress: Lessons from Shoghi Effendi, which she describes as a case study about planning theory from the perspective of a religious leader — how he planned to lead a community from one point in its development to another. “In this case, the community was a worldwide religious community, which I happen to be a part of,” she says.

While the book is well known among Baha’is, Thomas says it’s relevant for anyone who “wants to know if there was a link between planning theory and planning spirituality” — a topic she also wrote about recently for the journal Planning Theory and Practice.

A Baha’i since age 21, Thomas’s faith is integral to her academic work. “My work in my faith community is as important as my work in my profession because of my faith’s race unity agenda. Through that vehicle, I work in an interracial environment with people who are constantly promoting the idea of overcoming racial prejudice.”

By connecting spirituality and planning, Thomas says planners can transcend the profession’s limitations: “I’ve never expected that urban planning could solve deeply entrenched social problems that are embedded within bigger forces because urban planning is tied to bureaucracies that are dependent on what policies do or do not exist.”

But because they see the ripple effect of past policies, she argues in Planning Theory and Practice, “urban planners can help lead the way in protecting the values that guard human civilization, tapping religious or spiritual as well as secular traditions. … This is easier if we can summon the best of us, our finest selves; understand the social and racial justice challenges that lie in front of us, as well as creative strategies for addressing them; and move forward, with confidence and even joy, toward enhanced social action.” — Amy Spooner

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Paperspace Is Making Something That People Want Dillon Erb, M.Arch ’14, and Daniel Kobran, M.Arch ’14, enable high-performance cloud computing through their startup THE GLOBAL PANDEMIC has accelerated conversations about the importance of technology in streamlining workflows, simulating onsite capabilities, and keeping teams connected. But Dillon Erb, M.Arch ’14, and Daniel Kobran, M.Arch ’14, have been having those conversations for a while.

The result of those conversations — as students in studio, as research assistants, as recent alumni who knew deep down that the traditional path of practicing architecture wasn’t for them — is Paperspace, the software-as-a-service (SaaS) company that they launched soon after graduation.

Through Paperspace, named as a nod to early AutoCAD, Erb and Kobran say they are unlocking the next generation of accelerated cloud applications “by providing effortless access to powerful cloud computing and devel32

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oper-first tooling.” Their flagship product is Gradient — a Kubernetes-based platform that enables more efficient operation of machine learning and artificial intelligence.

Paperspace’s client list includes HBO, Deloitte, and Dropbox; they’ve raised nearly $30 million in funding from investors; and their team is more than 30 engineers, salespersons, and marketers.

It’s a far leap from the early days when it was just Erb and Kobran — with a great idea but no real clue how to run a startup — doing everything from assembling office furniture to providing customer support.

“We were feeling that boundless creative high of being in architecture school, but we also were endlessly naïve,” Erb says of launching their business.

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But, Kobran adds, “We had this sense that it was a oncein-a-lifetime opportunity to pursue something risky.”

Although it is now ubiquitous, cloud computing was still a relatively nascent idea when Kobran and Erb were students at Michigan. As they looked at the work that Associate Professor Sean Ahlquist and other faculty were doing with CAD and 3D, the duo wondered how cloud computing could make it more efficient and more powerful.

“There was a lot of good engineering and a lot of good technology, but it was hard to access. We realized that was a design problem just as much as anything else,” Erb says.

“And we thought, great, that’s in our wheelhouse.”

Erb and Kobran saw that people were using graphics processing units (GPUs) — the technology that enables high-performance computing — for data processing, not for rendering or visual effects. “Today it’s called machine learning, basically using GPUs to build out intelligent applications,” explains Erb, whose M.Arch thesis explored machine learning. “Our insight was that the same thing that we were building for architects also would be good for this data science group doing machine learning.”

Seven years later, “visual effects and GPU rendering and machine learning have collapsed into a new industry,” Erb says. “And they’re not totally dissimilar. People are using machine learning to generate architecture models. They’re using machine learning to generate videos and media.

I think we were lucky in timing, but we also worked hard to orient what we were building to what people wanted” — or maybe what they didn’t yet know they wanted because they didn’t realize it was possible.

It’s a lesson that Kobran and Erb learned at Y Combinator, the Silicon Valley–based startup accelerator: make something that people want. Erb and Kobran participated in Y Combinator, whose other participants include Airbnb, DoorDash, Dropbox, Twitch, and Reddit, just months after graduating from Michigan.

“It sounds dumb because it’s simplistic,” Erb says. “But it’s deceptively complicated to make something that someone really, actually cares about.”

Based on Paperspace’s success, though, Erb and Kobran did just that.

(Opposite) Dillon Erb, M.Arch ’14, (right), and Daniel Kobran, M.Arch ’14, (left), launched Paperspace from “that boundless creative high of being in architecture school.”

“One of the main things we learned at Y Combinator was how to take customers’ needs and wants and synthesize that information into an actual product roadmap. Then how does that product actually get built? Dillon and I spend a lot of time whiteboarding, still using a lot of the same creative design tools we used at Michigan,” says Kobran, who oversees Paperspace’s business operations as COO while Erb is the company’s primary external face as CEO. New York–based Paperspace’s community of more than 400,000 users range from individuals to startups to universities. “We were fortunate in that this thing that we were building ended up exploding in the world, and a lot more people were using GPUs,” Erb says.

Their clients also are universities across the world — including Taubman College, which is using Paperspace machines and software to bridge the gap for students who don’t have onsite access to the college’s technology during the pandemic.

It’s been a tough year for most businesses, and Erb and Kobran have navigated challenges with Paperspace, too.

At the same time, “the pandemic has accelerated the shift to remote work and distributed teams, which is right in our wheelhouse,” says Kobran. “Although we of course wish it hadn’t happened in such an unfortunate way.”

Kobran, who studied environmental design as an undergrad, and Erb, who studied philosophy, have always had a strong interest in technology. “Michigan provided an amazing opportunity to work at the intersection of technology and design, so that’s how we both ended up there,” Kobran says.

They got to know each other through studios and by working on adjacent projects in Taubman College’s Liberty Research Annex, and they realized they had a shared interest in the fusion of technology and design.

They engaged in spirited debates as to which of them was the nerdiest. And now they’ve channeled that competitive fire outward as they’ve grown their business.

“The best way to find a co-founder is to stay up all night in an architecture studio and work with someone to achieve the impossible with zero time,” says Erb. “Launching our company was scary, but once we realized that we could work harder and smarter than anyone else, because we had just spent infinite hours in school designing projects and then pitching them, we became fearless.”

— Amy Spooner 33

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Jamaica’s Own Designs Its First Parliament From Houston to Yangon to Kingston, Daimian Hines, B.S.’99, M.Arch ’01, puts stories at the center of design DURING THAT AWKWARD moment at the start of a group brainstorm — when someone needs to step forward as scribe but most people uncomfortably look down to avoid being tapped to do so — Daimian Hines eagerly grabs the marker and heads to the whiteboard.

By grabbing control of the marker, he can better control the narrative, says Hines, B.S. ’99, M.Arch ’01.

As the founder of his own Houston-based architecture firm, he is similarly controlling the narrative of his practice, building it to be focused on impact-oriented projects worldwide.

His biggest commission to date is the one that currently consumes him and his team spread across the globe: the Government of Jamaica’s first permanent Houses of Parliament.

Just don’t ask him how it makes him feel.

“A conversation about design and process will be tectonic and academic. But if you ask what the project means to me, I just might get choked up,” says Hines, who was born in Jamaica and immigrated to Detroit as a pre-teen. He still has numerous family members on the island, and part of the terms of the commission is that his family will have a commemorative plaque on the building.

“My parents came to the United States so that I could have more opportunities for my education,” says Hines, who was born in a rural town in the Parish of St. Mary, in Jamaica’s Blue Mountains region. “To come from where I did and then many, many years later be able to do what I’m doing back there, well, it’s a project of passion, and it’s quite rewarding.”

Jamaica gained its independence from Great Britain in 1962. The building that was meant to serve as the temporary home of the new government has remained as such ever since. With the country’s 60th birthday on the horizon, the government instituted an international design competition in 2018 to design a permanent parliament building in the capital city, Kingston.

Hines happened to be on the island at the time that the competition’s patron, Gordon Gill, a partner in Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture and a native of Jamaica, made the announcement. The rules stated that teams had to be led by a Jamaican citizen who is also a registered and licensed architect in the country, and the teams also had to contain “at least 50 percent Jamaican citizens or persons of Jamaican heritage.”

Through a colleague in Houston, Hines was able to connect with Evan Williams, a celebrated Jamaican architect who agreed to serve as architect of record. Hines then assembled the rest of the team and “we worked feverishly to put forward a design that would capture the imagination of the country and respond to the brief in a way that layered design and culture.”

Each phone call with Williams “was about 45 minutes of him saying why this wasn’t the right project and why my ideas didn’t make sense,” Hines laughs about the man he now considers his mentor. “But that pushed me to be better, and when we won, he told the media that from day one he thought this was the right project.”

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“Out of Many, One People,” Jamaica’s first permanent parliament building, will be part of National Heroes Park in Kingston, a 52-acre project that includes areas for sports and cultural activities.

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In March 2019, their submission, “Out of Many, One People,” won the competition, securing both the Jury’s Award and the People’s Choice Award. Among the architecture heavyweights they bested was Sir David Adjaye, whose team placed second.

“I think what caught the imagination of the public was that we adopted the Jamaican motto, “‘Out of Many, One People,’” Hines says. “And then from a design standpoint, while all the other buildings had some geometric shape, squares, boxes, or so on, ours was a singular, round form.”

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Hines says the design presents an opportunity to transform downtown Kingston by implementing urban design strategies focused on enhancing walkability, revitalizing urban parks and streetscapes, introducing sustainable site innovations, and designing a public realm that focuses on community and civic functions: “The design stands as an enduring reminder of the connectivity between the government and the citizens it serves.”

The circular design was a natural response to the massive oval site, once a horse racing track, and provided a visual anchor for the broader planned developments. “I felt that the building should always present a front. There should be no sides and no back; it is always equally present no matter where you are and your point of view,” he says.

The confluence of architecture and urban design blends well with Hines’s passion for high-impact projects that now drive his career. After a three-year stint doing highend residential projects at MyefskiCook Architects in suburban Chicago, he moved to HOK’s Chicago office. One project he worked on was a dormitory for the University of Illinois–Chicago, historically a commuter campus.

He loved seeing what he had helped to create become the home of a bustling student community.

The team made intentional choices about the building materials, too — drawing on the island’s abundant concrete and cement plants as opposed to materials that would have to be imported. “The seat of the nation’s government should be built by its people with its local resources,” Hines says.

When he transferred to HOK’s Houston office a few years later, he worried that the city’s reliance on cars fragmented its communities. To attract new talent from the coasts, Hines told his corporate clients that “a building and a garage won’t do it. You have to create a walkable experience. You have to think about placemaking.”

“Out of Many, One People” is being constructed in National Heroes Park as part of a 52-acre project that includes surrounding areas for sports and cultural activities. It is part of a master plan led by Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture to redevelop downtown Kingston, and Hines says of collaborating with the renowned duo, “It has been cool to hold my own and gain their respect.”

A call from a former classmate and HOK Chicago colleague, Daniel West, B.S. ’99, M.Arch ’01, gave Hines the opportunity to think about placemaking in a place that

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Hines’s portfolio spans the globe, from projects during two years spent working in Myanmar (top) to a resort in Cape Verde (opposite), a nation of islands off the West African coast.

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was just opening up to outsiders: Myanmar. West had joined Singapore-based SPA Design and Project Services Ltd. to manage projects in Myanmar and asked Hines to join him.

During nearly three years in the capital city, Yangon, Hines focused on what he calls “nation-building projects,” including creating communities for upwards of 50,000 people, hospitals, schools, corporate office complexes, and low-income and middle-class housing. “We were teaching local architects and engineers as we were leading projects, and we did it with full passion,” Hines says. “By the time I left, I saw that we had made a significant impact in terms of what we had built, but also in the fact that our designs and our processes were being replicated by other architects throughout Yangon.”

Based back in Houston for the past five and a half years, Hines learned lessons in Myanmar that are the heart of his firm, Hines Architecture + Design. “If I hadn’t spent time in Asia, I think my perspective would still be a bit more acute, focused on the product and pushing the process of design to produce something interesting and noteworthy,” Hines says. In a country where most architects weren’t trained in architecture but rather in civil engineering, Hines saw the absence of placemaking. As a result, “I saw how design can be transformative and influence our environment in ways that make our lives richer.”

Building on the notions of placemaking that he had previously embraced at HOK, “in a more progressive and urbanist way, I began thinking about the impact of the types of spaces we create for people, what attracts them and makes them want to stay.”

While the Jamaican parliament project is the pinnacle, to date, of Hines’s global and impact-minded focus, that passion infuses his portfolio. His other endeavors include a resort in Cape Verde and the preservation of a historically Black area of Houston known as Freedmen’s Town, for which he is working to secure UNESCO World Heritage Site designation.

“It’s not about doing something whimsical,” Hines says of his work. “It’s about telling a story that benefits others.”

Part of that benefit comes not from his work but from who he is and the example he is setting as a result. Hines serves on five boards, including as president of the Houston chapter of the National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA). As the Black Lives Matter movement reenergized in 2020, Hines counseled numerous organizations within and outside of the profession on how to boost their diversity initiatives.

Being a Black architect with a global portfolio, he hopes, will open doors for others and encourage the next generation to think big or think differently. “I want to believe that because of the experience that those large corporations had with someone who looks like me, the next person who looks like me will have a shot at succeeding,” he says of his time in Myanmar.

“At the same time, by not just focusing on local work and by securing a major commission in another country, I think I am a part of a paradigm shift for other Black architects when they think about what is possible.”

— Amy Spooner

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Planning and Design Make a Perfect Pair Partners in life and work, Caitlyn Clauson, M.U.P. ’07, and Romil Sheth, M.U.D. ’06, M.S. ’10, help campuses and cities look to the future THE PANDEMIC GAVE many couples front-row seats to observe each other’s work lives. But for Caitlyn Clauson and Romil Sheth, co-working this past year hasn’t been much different than the earliest days of their relationship — sitting side by side when they’d always show up early to secure seats in Robert Fishman’s uber-popular History of Urban Form class. “Since 2005, I don’t think we’ve ever worked more than 20 feet apart,” Clauson laughs.

Today, the pair have moved from the classrooms of Ann Arbor to the leadership ranks at Sasaki, a Boston-based interdisciplinary design firm. Clauson, M.U.P. ’07, is a chair-at-large on Sasaki’s board and campus planning principal within the planning and urban design (PUD) discipline; Sheth, M.U.D. ’06, M.S. ’10, is an urban design principal within PUD. 38

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Because of Sasaki’s integrated approach, their work is far from siloed.

Since joining the firm in 2007, Clauson and Sheth have collaborated on multiple campus planning projects with larger interdisciplinary teams, including a new campus for a Chinese university currently under construction.

“It’s been rewarding to see the transition from master plan to a built project,” Sheth says. “Those are the kinds of projects we dream about at Sasaki, where we can deeply tie together planning, architecture, and landscape architecture, for example, to derive highly contextual, rigorously planned and designed places.” Bringing their distinct expertise to the table on multifaceted projects “has allowed us to develop and thrive as professionals,” adds Sheth, “while also having fun.”

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Together, they collaborated on the University of Washington (UW) campus master plan, which was especially fulfilling on a personal level for Clauson, a Seattle native who earned her bachelor’s degree there.

The project helped them maintain their ties to the Pacific Northwest, while Clauson says UW’s broad outlook made the work exciting: “They were looking at a long-term, aspirational vision for a campus situated within a rapidly growing city.” Part of that vision was integration with the broader urban district around the university and creation of new public spaces that bring the city and university to the water. “The regulatory nature of the plan required a lot of engagement with public entities. The plan ultimately served as the basis for the city’s formal zoning code guiding height limits and development capacity for the university,” says Clauson. Sheth adds, “It was rewarding to work not only with Caitlyn but also with other members of the multifaceted Sasaki community, like landscape architects and transportation planners, to look at the problem in a comprehensive way.”

Clauson has focused her career on campus planning; she estimates that she has partnered with at least 50 institutions. Currently, she is working with the University of California, Berkeley, a campus that, like UW, is intertwined with a dense urban area that continues to grow and experience challenges as a result. Through the campus master plan, Clauson, alongside a collaborative interdisciplinary team, is helping UC Berkeley respond to resilience factors ranging from seismic considerations to impacts of climate change to increasing housing capacity.

One issue that continues to gain importance for her university clients is diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Clauson co-authored a 2018 article in the Society of College and University Planning (SCUP)’s Planning for Higher Education Journal on how campus planning and physical space can reflect an institution’s commitment to these values. She emphasizes that the goal is to have welcoming spaces for all — from integrating multicultural centers and affinity group spaces to creating accessible campus environments. “There are explicit and implicit messages that are communicated through the built environment,” Clauson says. “Campuses should be spaces where individuals can see themselves, their histories, and narratives be reflected in the campus environment.”

Sheth, who practiced as an architect in Mumbai before attending U-M, has worked on many different kinds of projects for Sasaki around the world, including a

(Opposite) Caitlyn Clauson, M.U.P. ’07, and Romil Sheth, M.U.D. ’06, M.S. ’10, at the suburban Boston headquarters of Sasaki.

research and technology district for Arizona State University; an innovation hub in midtown Detroit; a financial center in Moscow; the Dead Sea Development Zone in Jordan; and universities in Indonesia, Mexico, and India, to name a few. One project, the Songzhuang Arts and Agriculture City near Beijing, China, won the American Planning Association (APA)’s Pierre L’Enfant International Planning Excellence Award, one of the APA’s highest honors.

The diversity of his portfolio is a natural extension of his lifelong immersion in cities and interest in their myriad layers, Sheth says: “Beyond the object of a building, I’ve always had that lens that I wanted to broaden my horizon and engage with larger issues of the urban condition and how cities are made and operate.”

Sheth’s current projects include master planning for Thu Duc City — formed in 2021 within the Ho Chi Minh City region. Vietnam’s first city within a city, it eventually will be home to two million people in one of the world’s most vulnerable cities with regard to sea-level rise and climate change. Two interesting aspects of the project have been to convince leaders to give citizens a voice in the planning process and to develop a comprehensive resiliency and flood mitigation strategy. “The changes the government has agreed to with regard to merging three districts into this one new city will allow the city to be more efficient in managing space and infrastructure, and be a catalyst for investment,” says Sheth, who will liaise with the World Bank and other global institutions that have signed on to the venture.

Like everyone, Clauson and Sheth have navigated challenges during the pandemic, working at home alongside their two daughters. But they’re also embracing opportunities. When Clauson had to cancel community forums in Berkeley, she worked with Sasaki’s in-house data visualization and programming specialists, Sasaki Strategies, to create a virtual open house and interactive website whose success will serve as a model for public engagement well beyond the pandemic. The rise of video conferencing means Sheth can reduce his carbon footprint and time away from home while connecting more frequently with his clients in Vietnam. The rise of work-from-home arrangements and the heightened awareness of racial socioeconomic inequities in 2020 have strong implications for campus and community planning and have prompted similar reflections and recalibrations within Sasaki, which Sheth and Clauson welcome with open arms.

All in all, “I think of this time as a great reset,” says Clauson. — Amy Spooner 39

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Moving Detroit Forward Meredith McLellan, B.S. ’02, and Angela Fortino, M.U.P. ’11, are part of the team making The District Detroit a reality THEY WERE TRAINED IN different disciplines, but together, Meredith McLellan, B.S. ’02, and Angela Fortino, M.U.P. ’11, are part of a team working to reimagine downtown Detroit.

Both are project managers at Olympia Development of Michigan (ODM), a part of the Ilitch organization, which was born from the Little Caesars Pizza franchise.

McLellan and Fortino began working for ODM within a month of each other in 2018. Prior to the pandemic, they even sat next to each other in the office.

“We’ve gained valuable insight on the different aspects of project management from one another,” McLellan says.

The pair joined ODM as part of a company growth spurt following its opening of Little Caesars Arena — the home of the NBA’s Detroit Pistons and the NHL’s Detroit Red Wings — and plans to develop the surrounding area as The District Detroit. Along with the Ilitch-owned Detroit Tigers baseball team at nearby Comerica Park and football’s Detroit Lions at neighboring Ford Field, The District Detroit also encompasses the historic Fox Theatre, the Mike Ilitch School of Business at Wayne State University, the new Little Caesars world headquarters campus expansion, numerous dining and shopping venues, and offices whose tenants include Google.

“When The District Detroit was first announced in 2014, I knew it was something I want to work on,” says Fortino.

She and McLellan were impressed by the passion of The District Detroit’s leadership, and, “I wanted to be part of the group who was helping to move Detroit forward,” McLellan says. “I understood the company’s commitment to steady and balanced development in Detroit, and I saw that the organization was structured for success.”

The move to ODM also allowed both of them to build on the skills and interests they had developed previously.

In more than 16 years at SmithGroup, McLellan had been a forensic architect who focused on exterior detailing and building failures, an interior architect, and ultimately 40

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a project manager. At ODM, her projects include the Eddystone Hotel, which is located across from Little Caesars Arena, within walking distance of the downtown business district. It will consist of 92 affordable and market-rate residential units and will have street-level retail and a restaurant. Built in 1924, the Eddystone Building is on the National Register of Historic Places and has been vacant since the 1990s. McLellan also is assisting with the pre-construction activities for the Henry Street Redevelopment proposal, which would restore seven 1920s-era historic buildings into new affordable and market-rate residential housing and include green spaces.

“I have a passion for old buildings and love to see them brought back to life,” says McLellan. “I love being able to modernize these historic structures, keeping the craftsmanship intact while providing modern functionality.”

Fortino came to ODM from Jones Lang LaSalle, a global commercial real estate services company, where she worked on projects ranging from workplace strategy initiatives to quick-service restaurant buildouts. “I learned that regardless of the type of project, the project manager must clearly identify and maintain focus on the project’s goal, set realistic expectations, encourage open communication, address challenges before they become major problems, and in the words of my former director, ‘have grace under pressure.’”

Those skills have served Fortino well at Olympia Development, where she was tapped to help the growing team develop tools, resources, and processes to be successful from project conception to completion. “At times, the learning curve was a challenge, yet I found it highly rewarding to work across the company to identify needs and set up systems that support our long-term goal for developing The District Detroit,” she says.

(Opposite) Meredith McLellan, B.S. ’02, (left), and Angela Fortino, M.U.P. ’11, (right), at one of ODM’s latest development projects along Woodward Avenue in Detroit.

The learning curve spiked sharply in March 2020. Fortino was gearing up to transition from developing organizational tools and processes to managing real estate development projects when the pandemic hit. So she pivoted her attention to developing remote work and project management systems and trained colleagues across ODM’s business units to work collaboratively while remote.

“As we settle into 2021, it’s exciting to talk with the various colleagues I met during our pandemic response planning and see how they have adapted the tool to further improve their work and own project management, pandemic or non-pandemic related,” Fortino says.

Fortino came to U-M knowing she wanted to be involved with revitalizing urban centers, a passion shaped by her father’s involvement in local government and observations of how economic hardship affects the built environment as she grew up near Flint, Michigan. She appreciated how Taubman College’s focus on Detroit and Flint blended with a studio in Iceland and her capstone project in Mexico City to “push me out of my comfort zone,

introduce me to new ways of designing cities, and inspire me to further explore the world.”

McLellan became interested in architecture as a sophomore at Michigan, liking how it combined art and engineering. Once she was enrolled in the architecture program, she found that she enjoyed the technical courses more than the design courses and credits Karl Daubmann, her instructor for her senior year studio, with “guiding my design and creativity, even when I felt defeated. He understood that architecture is more than being a designer, and that support helped me push through the tough hours in studio, knowing that my career would not be dependent upon being the best at designing.”

Now, as part of a team doing high-profile work in Detroit, McLellan and Fortino hark back to lessons learned at U-M. And Fortino says the importance of teamwork was a big one: “It doesn’t matter how knowledgeable or resourced a group of people are; if they can’t genuinely work together, they won’t be successful.”

— Amy Spooner 41

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The Beauty of Making It Better Amy Gilbertson, M.Arch ’01, is helping her firm and America’s historic landmarks leverage their past to ensure a vibrant future THERE’S A SYMMETRY TO Amy Gilbertson’s work and her leadership of the firm in which she does that work: a passion for making existing structures and conditions better.

In her practice, that passion drives her focus on historic renovation projects. She has been involved with several high-profile buildings and sites.

As a leader — a principal at St. Louis–based Trivers — it means making her firm look and feel different than the one she first joined fresh out of the University of Michigan.

“I love taking something that has been forgotten or isn’t running on all cylinders and helping it be the best that it can be,” says Gilbertson, M.Arch ’01. “Finding and celebrating the beauty in its history, and bringing it back to life.”

Gilbertson first discovered that love on one of her first projects as a new associate at Trivers. The renovation of the Old Post Office, an iconic building that fills an entire block in St. Louis, involved close collaboration with state and federal agencies, including the Department of the Interior, since it is a National Historic Landmark. Built in 1872 and designed by Alfred Mullett, who also designed the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington, D.C., the Old Post Office is one of the few Second Empire– style buildings still in existence in the United States.

Today, it is a vibrant mixed-use building that anchors an equally vibrant surrounding area. It’s home to the Missouri Court of Appeals, Webster University, the St. Louis Business Journal, St. Louis Public Library, the Attorney General, and the Missouri Secretary of State.

But when Gilbertson first visited the building, it was not somewhere that people wanted to be. It was vacant, along with most of the buildings in the vicinity, creating an atmosphere where people didn’t feel safe walking, much less want to spend time there for work or leisure.

The project was important not only in terms of the building but the neighborhood. “The building’s history made it significant, and I got to dive into that as our team figured out how to change as little of the historic fabric as possible while meeting modern needs,” Gilbertson says. “And then it was eye-opening to see what that project could do for the community because it became a catalyst for the surrounding buildings.”

As she gave the Old Post Office project her all, on nights and weekends over a few years, it solidified her path within the field of architecture. “I was working on it more and more because I loved it so much. It sparked my passion for historic renovation.”

Within a year of completing the renovation, however, Gilbertson chose to leave Trivers and join a startup firm in St. Louis. Yes, she had found her passion. But she was at a crossroads.

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The startup provided flexibility for raising her growing family, as well as holistic involvement with the firm’s projects, which included historic renovations of sites throughout St. Louis — the firm’s new headquarters among them. “I jumped in on things like financing and scheduling in addition to design,” Gilbertson says, noting that for the firm’s new studio, “we were the owners, the developers, the contractors, and the architects. Through that experience, I had a much greater exposure to the actual business practice of architecture.”

After eight years she returned to Trivers, but now she has the ability to honor the firm’s legacy while helping to guide it toward a more inclusive and vibrant future. Gilbertson is one of three principals, and as the only female leader, she is spearheading a culture shift that is making what was once an anomaly into the norm.

When Gilbertson first joined Trivers in 2001, she was one of just a few female architects. She was only the second employee — and the first architect — to have a baby in the firm’s 30-year history. Now she and her partners

The Old Post Office in St. Louis is one of the few Second Empire–style buildings still in existence in the United States.

are determined to make Trivers a place that offers the flexibility its employees need to thrive and to break the mold of what architecture firms traditionally have looked like.

The firm has a roughly even gender split, and the team for one of its biggest projects at the moment has seven women and one man. “He says he doesn’t even notice unless I bring it up,” Gilbertson says of her male colleague, “but I bring it up all the time because it’s amazing.”

In 2020 Trivers completed its first JUST Label — a platform through the International Living Future Institute for voluntary disclosure of organizational policies that improve social equity and enhance employee engagement.

The firm also revamped the EDI (equity, diversity, and inclusion) section of its website recently, leading with “We stand together committed to a future that welcomes all, hears all, values all, and offers opportunities to all. Period.”

For Gilbertson, who recalls early in her career being taken to meetings when there was a female client, part of this commitment is making sure all of her employees have experiences that will enrich their careers. “In those situations, my gender benefited me because it gave me valuable face-to-face time with clients,” she says, “so I think strategically about creating those same opportunities for 43

everyone in our firm.” It’s part of an intentional effort to “know each other better and to support each other better, which then allows us to challenge each other and create better work,” she adds.

Although Gilbertson jokes that she was afraid she had hit her professional peak with the Old Post Office renovation 15 years ago, she recently received St. Louis CNR’s Top 20 Women in Construction award. She also is one of the country’s first 30 Fitwel ambassadors and teaches the Architect as Entrepreneur + Leader course at Washington University in St. Louis.

Her portfolio continues to be filled with the kinds of projects that first captivated her when she began practicing.

Shortly after returning to Trivers in 2014, Gilbertson began leading the renovation of the Old Courthouse, which is part of Gateway Arch National Park. Two landmark cases that eventually went to the U.S. Supreme Court originated there: Dred Scott, a slave, sued for his freedom, and Virginia Minor, a suffragist, sued for the right to vote. Gilbertson also is working on the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Illinois, where presidential candidate Abraham Lincoln gave his “House Divided” speech, and she is serving as the lead historic architect for the renovation of the Moss Federal Building in Salt Lake City.

The Old Courthouse (left) and Old State Capitol (right) have witnessed significant moments in U.S. history.

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“I love being part of projects with a rich history and long legacy. With our work and our practice, we are being respectful of what has come before while ensuring what we build is useful and meaningful now and in the future.”

— Amy Gilbertson, M.Arch ’01 While many architects dream of creating something from scratch with a blank slate, Gilbertson is most passionate about revitalization. Whether discussing the future of her firm or the future of a historic building, leveraging the inherent beauty and legacy of a place and ensuring its longevity for future generations is where she finds inspiration and the drive to make a difference.

“I love being part of projects with a rich history and long legacy,” she says. “With our work and our practice, we are being respectful of what has come before while ensuring what we build is useful and meaningful now and in the future.” — Amy Spooner

Class Notes & Giving 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.

GIVING: DAVID JOHNSON, M.ARCH ’95

Designing Universities’ Futures and Giving Back to His Own DAVID JOHNSON’S CLIENTS live and breathe big ideas and see the architecture of a campus as a way to help incubate those ideas. “They understand that a building is the physical manifestation of an intellectual construct,” Johnson says. “I’m a little bit of an academic architect, so I find my groove with that higher education crowd.”

Part of Johnson’s role at SmithGroup is to serve as a design leader, and throughout his career, he has specialized in higher education projects. He led the planning

and concept design of the renovated U-M Dental School and the new research facilities within the Biological Sciences Building. He has done work for Harvard and Yale — including a current project to relocate Yale’s psychology department to its medical campus — but he’s also done work for community colleges in Arizona.

“I have a deep conviction that higher education is a social good and benefit and that it is a key to unlocking social mobility and breaking down barriers. So I work across the spectrum of higher education to support that,” says Johnson, M.Arch ’95.

Currently, Johnson also is working on his third project for Virginia Tech — the innovation campus affiliated with Amazon’s new HQ2. He calls it an attempt to create a new type of urban environment in which “the entire building and place are organized around intersecting concepts of creating humanist settings that deliver this highest level of performance.”

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Chaffers’s model that showed what Ann Arbor could be if it had been redeveloped differently. “That was a significant recognition of all the decisions we make about the built environment and all the dimensions of the built environment. These were nascent ideas about social justice; history, motive, and intent; and the theatrical nature of the built environment. It depends on what assumptions we bring to it.”

The project is pursuing carbon neutrality at the campus scale and the building scale. The building is optimized for solar PV generation, and Johnson has been working with the City of Alexandria to negotiate how an adjacent cityowned park can support the campus’s energy efficiency through a thermal energy exchange with the sewage wastewater. “We’re helping reconceive what it means to have passive and active recreation and ecosystem services combined in the public realm,” he says.

But design is just part of Johnson’s role at SmithGroup.

As strategist, he engages with clients and conducts primary research, including with the Center for Higher Education and Research at UC Berkeley, in order to lead a conversation about how the built environment can respond to the changes within higher education.

Part of his work was a recent partnership with Jones Lang LaSalle to write a piece on creating campuses that are physically and financially resilient.

“2020 has been disruptive and terrible, but it’s also been a rich opportunity to think about things differently,” Johnson says.

Thinking differently was an important part of Johnson’s Michigan education. He credits former professor Jason Young with teaching him “how to be critical of the built environment at the same time you’re learning to shape it” in a studio environment based on “highly intellectual, open-ended exploration.” He also recalls Professor Jim

(Previous page) Johnson’s latest project for Virginia Tech — the innovation campus affiliated with Amazon’s new HQ2 — will use an adjacent park for a thermal energy exchange with the sewage wastewater.

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Today, he sees Taubman College as a place that continues to question assumptions and embrace big ideas, which is one reason why he supports the college as a donor and volunteer. “I’m excited by the perspectives that leadership are bringing to architectural education and about the potential for deeper integration with the other professions that shaped the built environment,” he says. “Plus the students have incredible access to fabrication technology that changes the way they think about shaping space.”

“I’m excited by the perspectives that leadership are bringing to architectural education and about the potential for deeper integration with the other professions that shaped the built environment.”

— David Johnson, M.Arch ’95 Johnson increased his giving to the annual fund in 2020 — celebrating the 25th anniversary of his graduation and his daughter’s enrollment at the university made his connection to U-M feel “more present,” he says — and he also has participated in portfolio reviews and alumni panels in the past few years. He wants to do even more, as a donor and volunteer, in the years to come, as a way to say thanks for the support he received along the way. As a scholarship recipient, “I need to acknowledge the role that public education and the University of Michigan played in my life. And I need to do what I can to repay that gift by making it available to other people,” Johnson says.

Beyond the financial support he received, “There’s no question that Michigan’s reputation opened doors for me and also made me better prepared than many others.

It gave me strong technical training coupled with a humanist understanding of how the built environment can and should make the world better.” — Amy Spooner

1960s Daniel Caudy, M.Arch ’66, is still practicing architecture in Elmhurst, Illinois, with a classmate from Ohio University, where he earned his B.Arch before attending Michigan as the Albert Kahn Scholar. The duo specialize in commercial and industrial structures, as well as tenant improvement. They also have worked on automobile dealerships for General Motors, Ford, Toyota, and Nissan nationwide.

1980s Karen Fairbanks, FAIA, B.S. ’81, was elevated to the AIA’s College of Fellows in February. She is a partner at Marble Fairbanks Architects, a Brooklyn-based firm specializing in cultural and institutional work and the integration of digital technology into design and production.

She also is chair of the Department of Architecture and professor of professional practice in architecture at Barnard College.

James Simeo, FAIA, B.S. ’83, was elevated to the AIA’s College of Fellows in February. He is a principal at CO Architects in Los Angeles, which he joined in 1993. He focuses his practice on science and technology, higher education, healthcare, and justice projects. His experience includes projects for five University of California campuses and other universities and healthcare systems across the country.

Elissa Scrafano, FAIA, B.S. ’85, of Scrafano Architects, and her husband, Tim Sullivan, completed a vacation home in Colorado that was featured in the Wall Street Journal.

It’s an off-the-grid back country modernist cabin built at 12,000 feet elevation, so everything had to brought up by a Sno-Cat or helicopter. The materials used in the solar-powered home include

reclaimed wood, corrugated metal panels, standing seam metal roofing, and local stone.  Richard Bories, B.S. ’86, M.Arch ’89, and his design partner, James Shearron (Bories & Shearron Architecture), were named to Architectural Digest’s 2021 AD100 listing. Originally launched in 1990 as a stand-alone special issue, the AD1OO has evolved into an annual survey of the top names in interior decoration, architecture, and landscape design. Bories & Shearron Architecture is one of 22 firms from around the globe making their first appearance on the list this year.

AD100 said, “The classically grounded but modern-minded couple have brought their unerring taste and inspired renovation talents to bear on memorable projects.”

tal, small, and reimbursable. Under her leadership, the Office of Project Delivery has developed processes designed to better manage project risk, a national project resource board to leverage the best available talent is matched to the risk profile of the project, and a project delivery method selection tool.

Michael Van Schelven, B.S. ’87, M.Arch ’89, joined Wolverine Building Group in October as a senior project manager. Prior to joining Wolverine, which is based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, he served as a senior construction manager at CWD Real Estate Investment, where he oversaw the implementation and delivery of all development projects for the firm. He specializes in education, commercial office, restaurant, and retail construction. He works alongside all of Wolverine’s divisions, including industrial, commercial construction, multifamily, and North America.

Umayal Ramanathan, FAIA, M.Arch ’87, was elevated to the AIA’s College of Fellows in February.

She is a principal at Shepley Bulfinch, based in Boston, where she leads the planning and programming effort for a wide range of institutions’ healthcare operations — with a focus on pediatric environments. Her projects include Children’s Hospital of Michigan and Boston Children’s Hospital.

Laura Stagner, FAIA, M.Arch/ M.S.E. ’86, was elevated to the AIA’s College of Fellows in February.

She is retired from the U.S. General Services Administration, where she led the successful consolidation of project management functions into the Office of Project Delivery (OPD), evolving an organization that was responsible for capital projects into an organization that is now responsible for all projects, including capi-

Leila Kamal, B.S. ’89, M.Arch ’91, joined HGA in January as associate vice president and principal in the science and technology practice group in Boston. She focuses on the Northeast region while collaborating across firm-wide offices and practice groups in higher education, healthcare, public, and corporate. Before joining HGA, she led design, research, and marketing strategies at leading architecture and engineering firms in Boston.

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1990s  Susan Barnes, B.S. ’95, M.Arch ’97, has been promoted to principal at Skylab in Portland, Oregon. She joined the firm in 2012 and most recently was the director of architecture. She brings her prior experience working on museums and integrated lab design to Skylab’s portfolio of custom residential, multifamily, snow-country hospitality, and creative office clients. She is currently the project director of the Nike World Headquarters’ Serena Williams Building.

 Kemba (Thomas) Braynon, A.B./B.S. ’95, M.Arch ’97, was promoted in October to senior architect in the Ann Arbor office of Quinn Evans, where she spearheads the restoration of buildings that are listed or eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places. Prior to joining Quinn Evans in 2015, she worked for the City of Detroit as a grant writer and project manager for Certified Local Government Historic Preservation Grants to rehabilitate historic buildings, including the Belle Isle Aquarium.

tural designer, he has become an integral member of the Bryan Health team, providing design and project management for projects across both campuses.

 Greg Hanson, M.Arch ’99,

recently joined Billtrust, a B2B accounts receivable automation and integrated B2B payments company, as chief product officer.

Previously, he was senior vice president of product development for PrecisionLender at Q2, a leading SaaS platform for commercial loan pricing, profitability, and portfolio insights. Before that, he was the chief product officer for The Gordian Group, a construction software, data, and services company.

2000s Paul Urbiel, B.S. ’00, M.U.P. ’04, is now senior principal planner at McKenna, a community planning, design, and building services firm in metro Detroit. He will be responsible for ongoing planning and zoning services to the cities of Fraser, Grosse Pointe Farms, and Harper Woods.

He also will help lead future community-wide and neighborhood-based master planning projects. After beginning his career as a project planner with the Downtown Detroit Partnership, he spent 14 years as an urban planner with the Detroit office of Gensler.

Alberto Sanchez, B.S. ’03, has been promoted to senior associate at Davis Design, a full-service architecture, engineering, and interior design firm headquartered in Lincoln, Nebraska. Since joining Davis Design in 2005 as an architec-

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Patricia Gruits, B.S. ’04, M.Arch ’06, senior principal and managing director at MASS Design Group, received the 2020 Earl R. Flansburgh Young Designers Award from the Boston Society for Architecture. Since joining MASS in 2013, she has led the design of projects across Africa, including the Ellen DeGeneres Campus of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund. She also has managed a range of design projects aimed at proving the impact of the built environment on individual and community health in the United States. She was recently awarded the “Top 40 under 40” for Sustainable Design by Impact Design Hub. Heather Rule, B.S. ’06, was promoted to associate at Pfluger Architects Inc. in October. She previously was a project architect in Pfluger’s Austin, Texas, office, which she joined in 2020 after serving as a project leader and architect with GFF Architects in Austin. Pfluger Architects plans and designs educational facilities and has offices in five Texas cities.

2010s Kevin Bush, M.U.P. ’10, is now serving in the Biden administration as the deputy assistant secretary for grant programs at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (H.U.D.). He previously spent three and a half years working for the District of Columbia as chief resilience officer and chief of the district’s resilience and emergency preparedness division. Earlier, he served for six years at H.U.D. during the Obama administration. (continued on pg. 50)

GIVING: ROBERT YUEN, M.ARCH/M.S. ’12

“Bobby Digital” Solves Problems for Architects AS A THESIS STUDENT, Robert Yuen wandered around the studio late at night with a Microsoft Kinect gaming device. No, he was not taking a study break.

His thesis involved hacking the device to determine how its technology could be applied to architecture. “Graduate school was a chance to push myself,” says Yuen, M.Arch/ M.S. ’12. “Michigan allows students to pursue what inspires them and see what comes out of it.”

“Seeing what comes out of it” drives Yuen’s career.

Yuen is co-founder of Monograph, a San Francisco–based technology company that he soft launched in 2017 and officially launched in 2019 with two other architects.

Their flagship product is a dashboard that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to help architecture and engineering firms track and analyze their finances and operations by combining project planning and management with time tracking, forecasting, and reporting.

Monograph spun out of the trio’s design agency, which Yuen joined shortly after they met through a mutual friend. Through the agency, they did contractual work for well-known Bay Area technology startups. They learned a lot about how they operated, where the business opportunities lay, and the relationship between business, product, and design. Yuen and his fellow partner-architects talked about how productivity in architecture has dropped over time because of the growing complexity of designing and constructing a building. They talked about how their software could help architects understand the relationship

between their time and projects. “That all infused into a moment where we were sitting around the office saying, ‘How can we solve this problem,’” Yuen says.

“No one was building software for architects other than Autodesk,” he adds. “So we saw an opportunity for a scrappier, younger company because we knew there was a lot of innovation that could happen.”

They were right. Monograph has had two significant rounds of venture capital funding. The company began 2021 with eight employees and set a goal of 30 by the end of the first quarter. As they built their company, they also created a culture focused on balance and growth. In May 2020, Yuen published a piece in Fast Company about Monograph’s four-day workweek, which he says gives employees valuable time for creative thinking while recharging: “I believe the value of time and the value of improving yourself are extraordinarily important.”

That idea of improving oneself has been another hallmark of Yuen’s life; he says its origins lie in his roots as the son of immigrants. After earning his bachelor’s degree in architecture from the University of Illinois-Chicago, Yuen spent 10 months traveling around Europe and Asia on a fellowship, absorbing the breadth of architecture and landscapes; then at Michigan, he became fascinated with Rhino and Grasshopper and joined the inaugural M.S.D.M.T. cohort. Even before his thesis days, he was known as “Bobby Digital” by his classmates.

As he applied for jobs after graduation, Yuen also began building a website called Section Cut to archive architectural books, readings, and software tools. As it grew in popularity, he brought three Michigan classmates — Kyle Sturgeon, Jono Sturt, and Dan Weissman — on board, and they began offering workshops for academic institutions in addition to their expanding digital interface. Yuen left his job at an architecture firm to focus on Section Cut full time; shortly after realizing he couldn’t monetize it adequately, he met the duo that became his Monograph co-founders. “My life has been like peeling an onion; there’s another layer of interest that is starting to bear fruit,” Yuen says. “I’m grateful for the people who pushed me to shoot for the next thing that I have to reach for.”

Recently, Yuen made his first gift to Taubman College’s annual fund; he also participates in alumni panels and opportunities to connect with students. “I attribute a lot of my current success and future potential success to Michigan because it played such a big role in opening my eyes to how I see the world and understand problems,” he says. “It’s always going to be dear to my heart to support the endeavors of Taubman College.” — Amy Spooner 49

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 Caroline Souza, M.Arch ’10, was promoted to principal at David Baker Architects (DBA) in San Francisco, which she joined in 2014. She specializes in social justice design, including affordable housing and design for nonprofits in underserved communities. Her projects with DBA include Five88 Workforce Housing in San Francisco and La Fénix at 1950, an affordable housing project in San Francisco. Currently, she is working on The Phoenix, a modular housing midrise project in West Oakland, California.

Chantal Cotton Gaines, M.U.P. ’11, became deputy city manager of Palo Alto, California, in October.

She had most recently served as Palo Alto’s assistant to the city manager for three years, where she worked on high-priority projects such as the Connecting Palo Alto Rail Grade Separation. The new appointment expands her responsibilities to include furthering intergovernmental relations and managing the city’s race and equity initiatives, including public safety policies.

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 50

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self-funded shops, and pre-revenue startups in every region of the country — all with under $10 million in revenue or funding and infinite drive and hustle.” With Adam Smith, M.Arch ’11, she is co-founder of Ann Arbor–based Synecdoche Design Studio LLC.

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 has also 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. 

Lauren Cooper, M.U.P./M.S. ’12, has been appointed by Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer to the new Council on Climate Solutions, which formulates and oversees the implementation of the MI Healthy Climate Plan to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and transition toward economy-wide carbon neutrality.

She also will serve as co-chair of the Natural Working Lands and Forest Products Workgroup. She is the director of the forest carbon and climate program at Michigan State University’s College of Agriculture and Natural Resources.

Alexis Galinis, B.S. ’12, M.Arch ’14, was promoted to architect in the Ann Arbor office of Quinn Evans in October. She joined Quinn Evans in 2015 and also holds a master’s degree in historic preservation from Eastern Michigan University.

Dan Clunis, B.S. ’14, M.Arch ’18, was promoted to architect in the Ann Arbor office of Quinn Evans in October. He has been with Quinn Evans since graduating with his master’s degree.

 Lisa Sauve, M.Arch ’11, M.S. ’14,

was named to the Forbes “Next 1,000” list for 2021, which “showcases the ambitious sole proprietors,

Florent Mettetal, M.U.R.P. ’19, with his design partner, Neil Reindel, was one of three winners of a competition sponsored by the Chicago Mayor’s Office to provide COVID-safe patio dining during the winter. More than 640 submissions came from 15 countries. The design, called “Block Party,” proposed two-person modules that could be reconfigured, stacked, and grouped together to accommodate larger gatherings.

In Memoriam

William Prine, B.Arch ’50 October 21, 2020 Pamela Ritter, B.Arch ’52 November 24, 2020

James A. “Jim” Turner, B.S. ’71, M.Arch ’73 James A. “Jim” Turner, B.S. ’71, M.Arch ’73, professor emeritus of architecture, died on January 17, 2021, in Ann Arbor.

Turner was born in Detroit on his mother’s birthday and was valedictorian of his Walled Lake High School class. After earning his bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Michigan, he served on the architecture faculty from 1976 to 2009, where he was praised by students for his knowledge, geniality, accessibility, helpfulness, and ability to tie together research and education. His mantra was, “a job worth doing is worth doing right.”

Early in his career, Turner wrote a user manual for a computer graphics program and then worked as a research scientist in the Architecture Research Laboratory (ARL). Many of the programs he and his colleagues invented and implemented in the ARL are still considered advanced today. He was also investigator or co-investigator on a number of large sponsored research projects where he helped define a neutral file format for the exchange of product design, analysis, and fabrication data. This was the precursor to building information modeling, a program that is critical to the modern design and construction industry. He received the Award of Excellence in Teaching from the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA) in 2002. He served on more than 30 doctoral dissertation committees. As one student wrote, “Of all the professors I have studied with, no one was able to communicate the subject matter to me with such skill, succinctness, lucidity, efficiency, and humor.”

Turner cherished playing the piano and alto and tenor saxophones in local big bands; in his retirement, he also enjoyed repairing and restoring saxophones and ukuleles. Intent on keeping active, he also loved riding and repairing bicycles, running marathons, playing hockey, and mastering cup-in-ball and the yo-yo.

His surviving family includes his wife, Beverly, and daughter, Summer Alexis.

His family says, “There was never a man with more whip-smart humor, initiative, or can-do than Jim,” and they ask his former students and colleagues to celebrate his life by doing something he loved: learn an instrument, ride a bike, write a line of computer code, go ice skating, build a deck, eat ice cream, or write your autobiography.

As Jim would say, “Yeah, man!”

Ralph Bergsma, B.Arch ’59 January 12, 2021 Henry Kowalewski, B.Arch ’60 November 5, 2020 Kenneth DeCorte, B.Arch ’62 November 15, 2020 Robert Wakely, B.S. ’74 November 4, 2020 Charles Bobay, M.U.P. ’83 October 30, 2020 Kevin Putz, B.S. ’87 November 1, 2020 Mark Stranahan, B.S. ’87, M.Arch ’98 December 30, 2020 Michael Dolecki, B.S. ’97 October 13, 2020

Leave a Lasting Legacy Including Taubman College in your estate or financial plans is one of the easiest ways to make a lasting impact.

You can even generate income for yourself and your family while benefiting the college and generations of students.

Types of planned gifts include gifts from a will or trust, beneficiary designations, and property.

Making a planned gift is a rewarding way to support the causes you care most about while providing for yourself and your family. Contact the Taubman College Advancement Team at 734.764.4720 or taubmancollegeadvancement@umich.edu to learn more about leaving a planned gift for Taubman College or to let us know if you already have included the college in your will or estate plans.

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“It speaks to our ethos of leveraging the tools of the internet to create different types of productive, collaborative environments that facilitate serendipitous interaction and bring us closer together.”

— Jacob Comerci, program manager for Taubman College’s academic innovation team, which in the past year has reimagined what is possible for online events. They’ve created vibrant, immersive experiences in which speakers inhabit carefully calibrated digital scenographies that are engaging and interactive for the audience, including for the 2021 Wallenberg Lecture (left, top and bottom) and the Grenoble Biennale (right).

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P ORT ICO VOL . 21 , NO. 1 SPR ING 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 Liz Momblanco Senior Graphic Designer

Contributing Writers: Claudia Capos, Amy Crawford, and Amy Spooner Image Credits: Courtesy of Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan (front inside cover, top), Hedrich Blessing (p. 43), Jacob Cofer (p. 28), Adam DeTour (p. 38), Sam Fentress (p. 44, left), Carol Highsmith (p. 44, right), Levi Hutmacher (cover, inside front cover, + p. 12), Jamie Lee (p. 5), courtesy of Olympia Development of Michigan (p. 41), Johnny Pelhank (p. 42), PLY+ (pp. 24–25), Adam Smith (p. 23), and courtesy of SmithGroup (p. 45)

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)

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

For other University of Michigan information call 734.764.1817.

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

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

SAVE THE DATE

WE HOPE TO SEE YOU THIS FALL SEPTEMBER 24–25, 2021 We are proceeding with plans to have a Homecoming gathering in Ann Arbor this fall, if conditions allow.

Mark your calendar, and look for updates from us this summer.

taubmancollege.umich.edu/alumni/events