Sheng-Hung Lee, assistant professor of urban technology at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning and director of the d-mix lab, spoke at the 2026 Seoul Design International Forum, held Sept. 15 at Dongdaemun Design Plaza (DDP) in Seoul, South Korea. His talk, “Vital Cities for Longevity: People, Process, and Platform,” was part of the forum session “Urban Ecosystems Evolving Through Design.”

Organized by the Seoul Metropolitan Government, the international forum brought together leaders across design, architecture, science, technology, and urban policy to explore how cities can evolve toward more life-centered futures. Lee’s presentation connected this conversation to his research in design for longevity and urban technology, asking how cities can better support people across longer lifespans and increasingly multigenerational societies.

Drawing from research at d-mix lab, Lee introduced a human-centered system design approach that combines evidence-based research, service innovation, and emerging technologies to create healthier and more equitable multigenerational products, environments, services, and cultures. 

The presentation focused on the interconnected dimensions of people, process, and platforms. Through this lens, Lee shared his ongoing community-based research with Dexter Senior Center in Dexter, Michigan, on reimagining senior nutrition and communal dining not simply as a meal program, but as a broader service ecosystem connecting experiences with funding, policy, governance, infrastructure, service providers, staff, volunteers, and older adults.

Lee also presented his emerging research with Rejara on AI-mediated longevity, examining how digital platforms can help people navigate life planning and caregiving. This work introduces a Designing Across Life Horizons (DALH) framework that considers how we might design not only for a person’s needs today, but across changing circumstances, relationships, and possible futures.

Together, Lee says these projects frame longevity as an urban technology and systems-design challenge, exploring how emerging technologies, services, policies, physical environments, and community infrastructure can work together to support people throughout longer lives that are more connected, equitable, and meaningful.

The 39th volume of Taubman College’s student-produced architecture journal Dimensions has received the Douglas Haskell Award for Student Journals from the Center for Architecture and AIA New York. Dimensions was one of four recipients this year and one of two top-tier winners. This marks the journal’s second Haskell Award, following its first win in 2024 and an honorable mention in 2012. 

Established in the late 1980s, the Haskell Award supports the ongoing publication of student-edited journals focused on architecture, planning, and related subjects. Named for architectural journalist and editor Douglas Haskell, the award seeks to cultivate a culture of intelligent criticism among future professionals through writing about architectural design, history, and theory.

Dimensions contributes to the critical discourse of architectural education by documenting compelling work across the Taubman College community, including that of students, faculty, fellows, and visiting lecturers. The 39th volume, themed [Dis]positions, considers architecture not as a static backdrop but as a set of dynamic conditions open to multiple interpretations. The volume invites readers to reorient their perspectives, both metaphorically and literally, through bold graphic choices that encourage engagement with its pages forward, backward, and even upside down. 

Students can pick up their complimentary copy of Dimensions 39 during the public unveiling on Monday, Sept. 28, from 11:30 a.m.–12:50 p.m. in the Commons. Printed copies are also available for sale at dimensionsjournal.us.

Dimensions 39 team: Mortimer Ackerman, Malavika Anand, Jacob Brookhouse, Emma High, Suchita Hire Matada, Cory Hoffmann, Fulin Liu, Dana O’Connor, Danah Owaida, Angie Perez-Jimėnez, Erin Roberts, and Ruixue Yang.

Faculty Advisor: Christian Unverzagt

Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning welcomes two faculty members and two fellows for the 2026-2027 academic year. Bringing expertise in architectural history, real estate development, community resilience, and environmental technology, the new cohort will expand Taubman College’s teaching, research, and creative practice.

New Faculty

Alexander Bala, Lecturer in Architecture

Alexander Bala, Ph.D., is an architectural historian and theorist whose research focuses on 20th-century architectural and artistic avant-gardes and neo-avant-gardes in Central and Eastern Europe and the United States during the interwar and postwar periods.

Bala has served as a Fulbright research fellow in Warsaw and as a Visegrád research fellow at Central European University’s Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives in Budapest. During the 2024-25 academic year, he served as an American Councils Title VIII research fellow in Warsaw. His writing has appeared in volumes published by Routledge, as well as in journals and online publications including Fabrications, the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Architektúra & urbanizmus, Places, and Drawing Matter.

He holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Virginia Tech, and master’s and doctoral degrees in architectural history from the University of Texas at Austin.

Gabriel Schuchman, Adjunct Practice Instructor

Gabriel Schuchman is the chief executive officer of Alrig USA Development in Bingham Farms, Michigan, and a principal at Mid-America Michigan. He oversees site selection, construction, and development for more than 60 new projects annually and has overseen 500 projects during his career. His company specializes in construction and land development, with an emphasis on car washes, retail properties, and medical properties. He also oversees leasing and acquisitions for a 2 million-square-foot portfolio of medical, office, and retail properties.

Schuchman has served in his current roles at Alrig USA Development and Mid-America Michigan for 15 years. He has also served as president of the board of Hillel Day School of Metropolitan Detroit.

He holds a bachelor’s degree in business from the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business.

New Fellows

Justin Brazier, Taubman Fellow

Justin Brazier’s research investigates architectural practice and pedagogy through an expanded definition of community resilience, working at the intersection of climate, culture, and spatial politics. His work is grounded in the conviction that architecture is a civic and cultural discipline operating among material systems, social histories, and collective futures.

Brazier is co-founder and principal of AGONY, the Architecture Group of New York, a collective whose work spans urban agriculture, affordable housing, and cultural space. The collective’s work was included in MIT Architecture’s “The Next Earth: Computation, Crisis, Cosmology” at the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale. His work has been featured in MIT News and designboom. He has taught at the MIT School of Architecture and Planning and served as an adjunct faculty member in the School of Architecture at Northeastern University’s College of Arts, Media and Design.

He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Architectural Design from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where he received the Academic and Community Leadership Award, and a Master of Architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Stephanie Rae Lloyd, Barnett Fellow in Environmental Technology

Stephanie Rae Lloyd’s creative practice, Public__Matter, explores how architecture can respond to infrastructural decline, climate vulnerability, and aging buildings through experimental civic and material assemblies. Her current project, “Support Structures,” examines support as both a tectonic practice that sustains aging or obsolete infrastructure and a civic practice that provides publicly accessible social services.

Lloyd’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale and the 2025 Lisbon Architecture Triennale. She has taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, the Architectural Association in London, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Lloyd was named the 2023 Boston Society for Architecture Rotch Scholar and has worked as a designer and researcher in London, Boston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.

She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture, with high honors, from the University of California, Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design, where she received the Eisner Prize for Architecture. She also holds a Master of Architecture, with distinction, from the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Organized around the theme of CRAFT, Taubman College’s fall 2026 series of lectures and public programs collectively examine what we make, how we make it, with whom, and to what ends. Together, these programs consider how spatial knowledge takes form before it becomes style, system, or standard.

Visiting architects, authors, designers, educators, industry leaders, and policymakers will address topics ranging from the use of living organisms and natural systems to design’s role in transforming land, energy, and economic systems.  

The full schedule follows.

Out of the Ordinary | the work of John Ronan Architects

Exhibition · Johe Lecture Series
Exhibition dates: Sept. 4-Dec. 4
Public hours: Fridays, 6-9 p.m.; Saturdays, 1-4 p.m.
Location: Liberty Annex, 305 W. Liberty St., Ann Arbor

Out of the Ordinary showcases the work of Taubman College alumnus John Ronan and his Chicago-based practice, John Ronan Architects, an internationally recognized firm known for conceptual innovation and rigorous attention to detail. Through a research-based, iterative design process, the studio orchestrates materials, systems, and details to create buildings and spaces defined by functionality and beauty. Working across a wide range of scales and project types, the firm’s searching approach consistently produces compelling and memorable work.

gru.a | Looking at the Intersection Between Architecture and Art

Correa Lecture
Time and date: 6 p.m. Sept. 21
Location: Auditorium, Lecture Hall 2104, U-M Art and Architecture Building

gru.a is an architecture studio founded in 2013 by Caio Calafate and Pedro Varella. The studio works across diverse scales and typologies, focusing on the intersection of architecture and the arts. Its work is shaped by the academic, research, and design practices of its members.

Emerging Innovations in Mass Timber: Regional Advancements in Policy, Practice, and Education

Climate Week · Climate Futures and MassTimber@MSU
Time and date: 9:30 a.m.-2:30 p.m. Oct. 2
Location: The Commons, U-M Art and Architecture Building

Building on the momentum generated by MassTimber@MSU’s leadership in fostering and expanding Michigan’s mass timber ecosystem, this event convenes leaders in policy, industry, design and education to explore the innovations needed to scale mass timber adoption across the Great Lakes region. The symposium is organized into three thematic sessions: Networks, Programs and Policies; Educating Future Professionals; and A Full Systems Values Approach.

Aroussiak Gabrielian | Working with Living Organisms, Natural Systems, and Atmospheric Phenomena

Johe Lecture Series
Time and date: 6 p.m. Oct. 5
Location: The Commons, U-M Art and Architecture Building

Aroussiak Gabrielian is an environmental designer and bioartist who works with living organisms, natural systems, and atmospheric phenomena. Her work aims to torque our imaginaries, helping us rethink our interactions with human and nonhuman agents on this planet.

Amelyn Ng | Seeking Alternate Narratives to the Status Quo of Building

Johe Lecture Series
Time and date: 6 p.m. Oct. 15
Location: Auditorium, Lecture Hall 2104, U-M Art and Architecture Building

Working across exhibitions, publications, cartoons and media experiments, Amelyn Ng addresses how media shape architecture’s material realities, politics and practices. By attending to the gap between representation and reality, she troubles architecture’s default settings and seeks alternative narratives to the status quo of building.

Billy Fleming | Building Postcarbon Futures: Land, Justice, and Energy Transitions

Book launch · Climate Futures and R+CP
Time and date: 6 p.m. Oct. 26
Location: Auditorium, Lecture Hall 2104, U-M Art and Architecture Building

Billy Fleming is a leading voice on design’s role in responding to the climate crisis in cities, communities and landscapes. His book, Building Postcarbon Futures, guides readers through case studies of people transforming their social, ecological and economic systems in response to the climate crisis. It is both a celebration of work underway and a clarion call to the planners, designers, policymakers and activists pushing the planet toward a future of collective flourishing.

The event will include a panel discussion with Fleming, Shalanda Baker and Jen Maigret, moderated by Kathy Velikov.

Suzanne Lettieri and Anya Sirota | Junior Architects: New Paradigms in Design Education

Book launch · Johe Lecture Series
Time and date: 7 p.m. Nov. 4
Location: The Scarab Club, 217 Farnsworth St., Detroit

Suzanne Lettieri and Anya Sirota, editors of Junior Architects: New Paradigms in Design Education, will host a conversation about efforts to advance equity in architecture and design education in the United States amid widening political divisions over race and class.

Bringing together contributors to the book and leaders of local enrichment programs, the event will take stock of this work, its history and its ambitions, and ask where it might go next. It is an opportunity to reconnect, reflect and consider how more equitable pathways into architecture and design might continue to be built. Participants will include Sharon Haar, Jonathan Massey, Harley Etienne and others.

Jia Yi Gu and Kate Yeh Chiu | Material Feast: Interrogating the Contemporary Role of Materials in Design

Wallenberg Lecture
Time and date: 6 p.m. Nov. 16
Location: The Commons, U-M Art and Architecture Building

Jia Yi Gu is an architectural scholar, curator, and designer whose research explores the materiality of buildings and the history of cultural techniques in architecture. Kate Yeh Chiu is a designer and arts organizer whose work investigates material flows and labor conditions at the peripheries of architectural and cultural production. Together, they co-curated the major exhibition Material Acts: Experimentation in Architecture and Design.

Josephine Majid has always been good at drawing and recently took an interest in buildings, especially the homes in her neighborhood on Detroit’s East Side. The rising junior at Detroit’s Renaissance High School had been considering architecture as a career but wasn’t sure it was right for her.

“Before I was fully set on it, I felt like I needed to have some type of experience to let me know what architecture could be in the future,” she said.

When Josephine learned about the ArcStart program at Taubman College, it sounded like a perfect opportunity to gain that hands-on experience.

“When they told me it was three weeks away at college, I was like, ‘That’s even better!’” she said.

The intensive, residential pre-college program helps high school students build their personal portfolios and explore architecture through designing, sketching, building models, collaborating, and participating in critiques, all while making new friends from around the world.

A new iteration

This year’s cohort was the largest in the program’s 15-year history, with 69 students representing 19 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and four countries. 

“This has been a highlight of the program for as long as it’s been around … mixing perspectives, people, and different backgrounds to inform the work that’s being done here,” said Jacob Comerci, ArcStart director, managing director of Academic Initiatives, and a lecturer in architecture at Taubman College. “The exchange is mutual: students bring as much to the experience as our Taubman College team does.”

In his first year as director, Comerci worked with colleagues on the college’s Academic Initiatives team to revamp the program’s business model, staffing, and curriculum. They aimed to draw a strong, diverse group of students while expanding access through scholarships and a partnership with Wolverine Pathways, a free, year-round college-preparatory program for eligible middle and high school students in Detroit, Southfield, and Ypsilanti. Another goal was to find the “sweet spot” between exploring the university experience and producing portfolio-ready work on a compressed timeline.

This new iteration comes as Taubman College’s pre-college programs are being aligned and expanded as Michigan Design Sessions (MDS), a suite of nondegree and pathway programs aimed at broadening access to design education. In addition to the existing MDS: ArcStart and MDS: Detroit — a workshop-based program formerly known as ArcPrep — for high school students, opportunities are being explored for adult learners, including continuing education for practicing architects and pre-architecture programs.

“We already have two robust programs, and the Michigan Design Sessions umbrella is intended to strengthen and better connect them, create opportunities to reshape those programs, and identify new ways to expand our pre-college and non-degree offerings,” Comerci said.

Getting to work

After arriving in Ann Arbor in July, students settled into the residence halls, met their studio mates and instructors — many of them recent Taubman College alumni — and received workstations in the Taubman College studio before touring the facilities.

Over the three weeks, students tackled three projects: designing an accessory dwelling unit for a fictional client on a real parcel of land in Ann Arbor; analyzing Detroit’s network of greenways through physical site conditions, historical records, and community perspectives; and designing a large vendor shed for Detroit’s Eastern Market to replace a structure demolished in the 1950s.

For Josephine, some projects resonated instantly. Engaging with stakeholders and designing residential spaces felt like work she could picture doing professionally. Other exercises were more challenging, pushing her out of her comfort zone.

“I realized I was getting all the experiences that I need, so I can know exactly what I want, and what I want to go for,” she said.

Students moved between digital and analog tools, using computer drafting software alongside pencil sketches, physical models, and collages. Each project involved collaboration, and students participated in regular pinups and critiques, culminating in a final review with visiting critics and nearly a dozen Taubman College faculty members.

“Regardless of whether students pursue a degree in architecture, learning to clearly communicate their work to people who haven’t seen it before is an essential skill, and one that ArcStart uniquely prepares them for,” Comerci said. “The students worked incredibly hard over the last few weeks, with truly impressive results.”

Beyond the studio

It wasn’t all work. During their downtime, students took part in workshops, contests, and both architecture-themed and general trivia. 

The cohort also toured U-M’s Central Campus, where they visited the Law School, Nickels Arcade, the Michigan Theater, and the University of Michigan Museum of Art. In Detroit, students visited Belle Isle, the Guardian Building, and the Detroit Institute of Arts. They also visited HOK + Rossetti for an overview of the design firm’s history and current projects. Comerci noted that students impressed the firm principal leading the tour with their thoughtful questions.

On their second-to-last day, the students blew off steam with a recent online trend: “pieing” a few willing staff members with whipped cream. Comerci happily took the hit, with Josephine doing the honors. Afterward, staff surprised the cohort with a basket full of water balloons.

“Architecture school is tough, and the program also has a lot of moving parts,” Comerci said. “To see them learn something but also smiling and having fun and meeting new friends from across the country and around the world was a real joy.”

Celebrating success

To close out the program, students and their families gathered in the Taubman College Commons to celebrate their accomplishments and view their work, which was displayed in the studio upstairs. Comerci addressed the students before inviting instructors to present certificates and lighthearted awards, ranging from “most likely to be an architect” to “most likely to bring a snack.”

“I’ve been floored by how sharp all of you are,” Comerci said. “Your curiosity, your creativity, your openness to the curriculum that we put forward. I’m so appreciative to all of you.”

Josephine left the program more confident that she could pursue architecture and more interested in how design could improve housing in her neighborhood and around Detroit.

Her advice to future cohorts?

“Really pay attention, go to the workshops — especially the software ones, where I learned so much — and just get out of your comfort zone as much as possible,” she said.

— Eric Gallippo

With support from U-M’s Strategic Initiatives Fund, a new initiative led by faculty from the School of Social Work and Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning will work to remove barriers that prevent immigrants and refugees across Michigan from participating in civic life.

Voices in Civic Belonging: Strengthening Immigrant and Refugee Engagement in Michigan is led by Odessa Gonzalez Benson, associate professor of social work and urban and regional planning, and Ana Paula Pimentel Walker, associate professor of urban and regional planning. The initiative has received $300,000 to strengthen civic and democratic engagement among immigrant and refugee communities across Michigan by building partnerships at the local, state, and national levels.

The project was one of 37 selected to receive a share of $40 million in initial funding from the Strategic Initiatives Fund through its inaugural call for proposals. Nearly 500 proposals were submitted following the announcement last November of the $1 billion, 10-year fund. Proposals were required to align with one or more of the five impact areas identified in the Look to Michigan vision and encourage collaboration among scholars and staff across academic departments, U-M campuses, colleges, schools and other units.

Researchers and community collaborators will co-design the work of Voices in Civic Belonging. Activities will include engaging community stakeholders, collecting data, developing educational and capacity-building programs, implementing a statewide training program for immigrant and refugee leaders, and evaluating the program’s impact.

Expected outcomes include stronger civic knowledge, media literacy, public communication skills, and leadership capacity among immigrant and refugee leaders. The initiative is also expected to strengthen connections among participants, journalists, public officials, faculty members, and service providers.

The project builds on Gonzalez Benson and Pimentel Walker’s ongoing participatory action research with migrant- and refugee-led organizations in Michigan. Their related work has appeared in the Journal of Community Practice, the Journal of Urban Affairs, and Health Security.

A new book edited by Taubman College professor Łukasz Stanek explores the continuing impact of architecture donated by socialist countries to newly independent nations during the Cold War.

The Gift: Spaces of Global Socialism and Their Afterlives, published by Berlin-based JOVIS, examines how the moral, temporal, and racial dynamics of gift exchange shaped the design, construction, and subsequent use of buildings provided by Soviet, Eastern European, Chinese, and Cuban institutions. These projects, including factories, schools, hospitals, and housing, transformed cities and landscapes in newly independent countries across Africa and Asia, including Ethiopia, Ghana, Tanzania, Mongolia, and Vietnam. The book considers how the generosity and violence inherent in gift exchange shaped — and continue to shape — urbanism across the two continents.

Stanek is a professor of architecture at Taubman College. His 2020 book, Architecture in Global Socialism: Eastern Europe, West Africa, and the Middle East in the Cold War (Princeton University Press), received the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion from the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain. He also co-curated the 2024 exhibition The Gift: Stories of Generosity and Violence in Architecture at the Architekturmuseum der TUM in Munich and the 2025 exhibition Intersections: The Architecture of Victor Adegbite and Charles Polónyi in Ghana at the Wende Museum in Culver City, California.

In addition to Stanek, The Gift features contributions from Fantahun Ayele, Darisuren Azbayar, Boris Chukhovich, Yanjinlkham Dashtseren, David Kojo Derban, Alice Korkor Ebeheakey, Claudia Gastrow, Ana Ivanovska Deskova, Damjan Kokalevski, Vladimir Kulić, Ksenia Litvinenko, Ye Liu, Kulshat Medeuova, Thục Linh Nguyễn Vũ, Kwasi Ohene-Ayeh, Jennifer Robinson, Uurtsaikh Sangi, Christina Schwenkel, Alevtina Solovyeva, Setiadi Sopandi, Ke Song, Paul Sprute, and Miruna Stroe.

The project received support from the British Academy; the Architekturmuseum der TUM; the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts; the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art; the U-M Weiser Center for Europe and Eurasia; the U-M Year of Democracy Research Grant; Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning; the U-M Office of the Vice President for Research; and the U-M African Studies Center.

Our industry is changing rapidly as technology advances, but are we keeping up? For those unwilling to accept the status quo, how do we effect change, both as intrapreneurs and as entrepreneurs? What differentiates a good idea from a good business idea?

These questions were fundamental to Taubman College’s Professional Intensive: Innovation in the Built Environment, which wrapped up in June. Designed for leaders at all stages of their careers across architecture, real estate, construction management, urban planning, urban design, and landscape architecture, the summer cohort of 27 participants represented a wide range of locations, backgrounds, and experience in their respective practices. One thing they all shared was a desire to help drive change in the industry.

Over six weeks, the Professional Intensive offered online sessions covering Innovation and the Entrepreneurial Landscape, Value Chains and Industry Structure, Opportunity Framing, Incumbent Models, and Startups and New Entrants, culminating in a two-day in-person session in Detroit. 

From industry stagnation to discovery  

Led by guest instructors Evelyn M. Lee, FAIA, and Larry Fabbroni, the program builds on their combined experience across industries and dedication to rethinking traditional practice models, leveraging technology, and launching new business ventures grounded in a strong understanding of entrepreneurial finance and market conditions. The program was developed in collaboration with Bryan Boyer, associate professor of practice at Taubman College. 

“Productivity in construction and the built environment has been flat for 50 years or more, while other sectors have radically transformed how they do business, make things, and serve customers,” Boyer said. “Evelyn and Larry brought keen insight to how this decades-long flatline can be addressed through new business and operational models.”

Learnings from the Professional Intensive will be embedded within Taubman College’s newly announced Master of Urban Technology, which launches in fall 2027 with Boyer as faculty director. The one-year degree will equip students with the systems thinking and business acumen needed to rethink the work of the built environment in a way that stretches beyond current silos of planning, design, architecture, and real estate.

“Taubman College has long been a hub for discovery and education in architecture, urban design, planning, and real estate. This degree extends our leadership to the growing realm of business innovation that leverages emergent technologies and platforms,” said Dean Jonathan Massey.

Tracing problems, pitching solutions

Through a deep dive into value chains and market conditions, participants sharpened their entrepreneurial skills and learned how their work both fits into and impacts a larger sequence of operations. This allowed them to look more critically at their day-to-day work, using new frameworks to apply what they just learned, backed by data and research. Following the program, participants reflected on how it might support large-scale improvements in the industry.

“If I see a problem, I tend to chase it all the way up the chain to figure out what caused it in the first place, so it’ll never happen again,” said participant Ross Hamilton, design manager at Gensler. “At the same time, you often have to convince other people that it’s worth investing their time and resources in a cause that they don’t even consider a problem. This course gave me a lot of really helpful language around doing just that.”

New tools for modern workflows

Participants also leaned into the challenges and opportunities presented by technology’s growing influence on the industry. Informed by a “start-to-finish” approach to products and services imagined as one stream, they developed business concepts and pitches targeted at improving systems. 

Hamilton, for example, is investigating how intelligence moves through organizations and imagining tools that might capture context and intelligence to improve deliverables. His concept pairs 2D drawings with the “project brain” and collective memory behind them.

Ingy El-Hennawy, senior design architect at Fishbeck, envisions a platform that empowers young architects and props up learning and teaching on their path to licensure. With support from colleague Bob Pomeroy, senior vice president at Fishbeck, who also participated in the program, Ingy is imagining a “playbook” for workflow changes that would impact large firms and startups alike. 

Rethinking the business of practice

These experiences were complemented by those seeking to practice as entrepreneurs, using precedents presented throughout the course as a foundation to establish new values, processes, and methods for their work to support a more effective service model while understanding where they sit within a competitive landscape.

“The Professional Intensive taught me to question everything. No matter what the decision is — whether it’s writing a proposal, developing a fee, or shopping for insurance — that should reflect my personal business mission,” said participant Kristen Dahlquist, founder of Placekeep, a practice focused on design and community engagement for mission-driven organizations, nonprofits, and tribal nations. “It’s a design problem in itself for how I conduct business and how I show up in the world to reflect my business’s design concept.”

— By Brooke Dexter, B.S. Arch ’14, M.Arch ’16

Seven students from the A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning were named 2026 scholarship recipients by the Michigan Architectural Foundation (MAF), which awarded a total of $59,500 to 16 architecture students across Michigan.

The annual MAF scholarship program recognizes students for excellence in design, leadership, academic achievement, and community involvement, and provides support for the rising cost of architectural education. This year marks the 35th year of MAF scholarship awards.

Taubman College’s 2026 MAF scholarship recipients are:

• Sumayah El-Ganainy, B.S. Arch ’27 — Richard M. & Sidney K. Robinson Scholarship  
• Krzysztof Lower, M.Arch ’27 — Katherine & John Banicki Scholarship  
• Monserrat Molina, B.S. Arch ’27 — Hausman Family Scholarship  
• Amber Mortzfield, M.Arch ’27 — Daniel W. Toshach & AIA Saginaw Valley Chapter Scholarship  
• Ann Nguyen, M.Arch ’27 — Leslie Tincknell Scholarship  
• Katherine White, M.Arch ’27 — Kenneth Neumann Design Scholarship  
• Joyce Zheng, M.Arch ’27 — Rossetti Legacy Scholarship

The recipients were honored during a ceremony at SmithGroup’s offices in Detroit’s historic Guardian Building. This year’s scholarship program also introduced several new awards, including the Rossetti Legacy Scholarship and the Hausman Family Scholarship, both awarded to Taubman College students.

Read more at the MAF’s website.

Two projects by Master of Urban and Regional Planning dual-degree students aimed at revitalizing Detroit’s East Village neighborhood and using rain gardens to manage stormwater in Ann Arbor have been recognized by the Michigan Association of Planning. Geoffrey Batterbee, M.U.R.P. ’26/M.S. Environment and Sustainability ’26, was part of a team of students from the School for Environment and Sustainability that received an Outstanding Graduate Student Award, and Renee Magyar, M.U.R.P. ’26/M.S. Environment and Sustainability ’26, received an Honorable Mention for Graduate Student Planning Project. Details on each project follow.

East Village Catalyst Plan: Building Community-Engaged Resilience in Detroit

The East Village is a historically underserved neighborhood in eastern Detroit that has experienced severe disinvestment and vacancies in recent decades. The East Village Catalyst Plan is a collaboration between students from the University of Michigan and the nonprofit organization AboutFaceDetroit, which focuses on revitalization efforts in the East Village. This project was initiated to develop a framework for landscape improvements that enhance the neighborhood’s social character and ecological resilience and included site-level designs, a landscape design toolkit, and the catalyst plan itself. 

Jurors said, “We liked that the toolkit breaks down park strip widths and appropriate plant materials — something we see missing from a lot of landscape guides.”

Students: Geoffrey Batterbee, Devin Derr, Anna Peppet, Mujie Sui, and Minxuan Zhang

Advisors: Lisa DuRussel and Isabella Shehab

Read more about the project on the U-M Library website

Residential Rainscaping: Analysis of Residents’ Participation in Rain Garden Programs and Stormwater Management in the City of Ann Arbor, Michigan

This project is the first to formally evaluate the long-term effectiveness of Ann Arbor rain garden programming. The project uses a three-part assessment model that includes analysis of the spatial distribution of rain gardens by sub-watershed; analysis of a previously conducted countywide survey; and interviews with survey respondents. 

Jurors said, “We appreciated that the student evaluated an existing program to quantify impacts that to this point were not well understood. We think the assessment methodology is repeatable for other communities with rain garden programs.”

Student: Renee Magyar

Read more about the project on the Taubman College website.

In a recent article about U.S. homes without air conditioning, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning’s Larissa Larsen told the Washington Post that roughly a third of Detroit residents live in homes that are 80 years or older, which can become heat traps during hot stretches because they lack proper insulation and newer windows.

Larsen, professor of urban and regional planning, has spent years researching and advocating for solutions to the potentially deadly consequences of extreme heat on vulnerable populations. In the article, she also notes that some of these older Detroit homes are made of brick, which absorbs heat during the day and radiates it in the evening instead of allowing the home to cool down.

“Those kinds of things are an impediment to having, if you have an AC system, for it to function efficiently,” Larsen said.

The Post also reports that residents of neighborhoods with a higher number of homes without air conditioning often suffer higher levels of chronic disease and social isolation. In Michigan’s Wayne County, nearly 1 in 10 households lack cooling, according to U.S. Census Bureau estimates. In Detroit, an estimated 37,000 households — about 17% of the city — don’t have air conditioning, with as many as 1 in 5 homes lacking cooling in some neighborhoods.

Read the full article at the Washington Post. (Registration or a paid subscription may be required for full access.)

Taubman College’s Robert Goodspeed, associate professor of urban and regional planning, was quoted in a recent Vox article on the U.S. housing crisis. The article, by Marina Bolotnikov, examines how America’s long-standing development model centered on single-family zoning, suburban expansion, and car-oriented infrastructure has contributed to housing scarcity and affordability challenges.

While the article discusses recent zoning reforms advanced by the “yes-in-my-backyard” movement, it emphasizes that deregulation alone will not produce well-designed, livable communities. Goodspeed argues that urban planning remains essential.

“I think that the YIMBY movement has completely missed the importance of planning,” Goodspeed said. “Even if we repealed all zoning, it still doesn’t realize a well-designed, well-planned community that has high quality of life.” 

The article suggests that future housing reform will require not only allowing more homes to be built, but also strengthening the role of planners in shaping streets, transit, parks, infrastructure, and public spaces. In this view, planners must move beyond zoning enforcement to help create more connected, affordable, and livable communities.

Read the full article at Vox. (Registration or a paid subscription may be required for full access.)

Mania Aghaei Meibodi, assistant professor of architecture at the A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, will receive a 2027 Henry Russel Award, the University of Michigan’s highest honor for faculty members at the early to mid-career stages of their careers.

Aghaei Meibodi’s research integrates new robotic methods with novel computational design technologies — including machine learning and physics-based algorithms — to unlock the full potential of 3D printing for material, productivity, and environmental efficiencies in both the construction process and the building in service, while prototyping the next generation of building elements that reduce material use, waste, construction time, and energy consumption.

In 2025, she received an NSF CAREER Award, a notable distinction for architecture. Her scholarship on 3D concrete printing methods has appeared in Automation in Construction, Additive Manufacturing, and Virtual and Physical Prototyping.

Aghaei Meibodi was one of four winners announced at the June 25 Board of Regents Meeting. Read more at the University Record.

Projects by three architecture firms founded by Taubman College faculty members were recognized with AIA Michigan Design and Honor Awards at an event hosted earlier this month. The awards recognize the best architects, firms, and projects from across the state. This year, honorees were selected by a group of Arkansas-based architects for their creativity, dedication, and vision.

M1DTW, founded by Christian Unverzagt, professor of practice, and SYNECDOCHE, co-founded by Lisa Sauvé, assistant professor of practice and incoming faculty director of the urban technology program, were recognized with Interior Awards for their projects in Detroit and Grand Rapids. PLY+, founded by Craig Borum, professor of architecture, was recognized with a Community Impact Award for the firm’s design of a Detroit community center. More on the projects is below.

Bamboo Coworking

SYNECDOCHE

This 35,000-square-foot coworking and event space transforms a purpose-built downtown Grand Rapids art gallery into a dynamic workplace that embraces, rather than conceals, the building’s character. Exposed concrete, soaring volumes, and expansive spaces are paired with carefully crafted interventions that introduce warmth, identity, and flexibility. Features such as The Vault amphitheater and thoughtfully scaled work areas support collaboration, events, and individual focus. Through strategic planning, adaptive reuse, and partnerships with local creatives, the project prioritizes well-being, natural light, acoustic comfort, and community connection, positioning coworking as a vibrant form of civic infrastructure. 

Signal-Return at LANTERN

M1DTW

Signal-Return, a Detroit nonprofit dedicated to preserving and teaching traditional letterpress printing, expanded into a new 4,300-square-foot adaptive reuse space to support growing educational and production needs. The design reorganized key program areas to strengthen public engagement, placing educational presses near the storefront to showcase the craft to the community. Minimal interventions preserved the building’s character while introducing new architectural elements, including a plywood-wrapped core and bright yellow structural accents inspired by the organization’s former space. Through adaptive reuse and thoughtful material choices, the project creates a flexible, light-filled environment that celebrates creativity, collaboration, and the tradition of letterpress printing.

Helen Moore Community Center & Ed Davis Park

PLY+ Architecture

The Helen Moore Community Center and Ed Davis Park mark a significant investment in Detroit’s west side and honor two community pioneers. Guided by extensive public input, the project preserved key gathering spaces while introducing new amenities, including a STEM lab, reading room, art studio, learning kitchen, and flexible community spaces designed to serve a wide range of ages and interests. Renovations improved accessibility through reconfigured circulation and new ADA-compliant connections, while a central spine links interior spaces with the adjacent park. Community-selected materials and colors create a welcoming identity, supporting connection, learning, and long-term community growth.

Read more about this year’s award winners at the AIA Michigan website.

How can autonomous vehicles help foster adolescent independence or expand access to transportation? These are just a couple of big questions urban technology students spent the winter semester working to answer with industry partners General Motors and ATLAS.ti (Lumivero), as part of Sheng-Hung Lee’s UT210: Listening—Design Ethnography Methods course at Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. 

UT210 explores how design ethnography can inform the development of future autonomous urban systems through a human-centered, systems-oriented lens. Led by Lee, assistant professor of urban technology and director of d-mix lab, the course brought together 18 students in a studio-based, team-driven format to investigate real-world challenges at the intersection of mobility, equity, and everyday life.

“I’m also learning from everyone; I’m also a student,” said Lee, who joined the college in January. “How do you practice listening? It’s very abstract. How can you make it tangible?

Structured across three interconnected scales — peoplescape, servicescape, and cityscape — the course guides students from understanding individuals’ lived experiences to mapping service interactions and ultimately envisioning systemic urban transformations. Through ethnographic methods including interviews, observation, and qualitative analysis, students develop grounded insights into diverse contexts such as childhood autonomy, mobility exclusion, transportation deserts, and family life futures.

The course is distinguished by its close collaboration with industry partners, which allowed students to explore real-world perspectives, research tools, and feedback throughout the semester and situated their work within ongoing explorations of autonomous mobility and future urban experiences, bridging academic inquiry with applied innovation.

During a final presentation attended by representatives from GM and several Taubman College faculty and students, Wade Bryant, design manager in Advanced UX Insight and Human Interface Design at GM, said the opportunity to partner with the class was one he couldn’t pass up.

“The course itself is extremely relevant and very aligned with what we need to do,” Bryant said. “The observations and insights they’ve already uncovered are very useful to a project that we’re working on at GM that will be fairly transformational.”

Working in four teams, students translated ethnographic findings into design opportunities to address complex socio-technical challenges. The overarching theme of the course is envisioning future autonomous experiences. Within this theme, each team explored a distinct focus: in-vehicle experience and trust-building, designing for vulnerable communities, systems-level thinking, and family-centered scenarios.

Suzette Malek, Global Customer Research Manager at GM, was interested to learn about the research methodologies currently taught at the university level, especially the mixed-methods approach used in UT210.

“It’s been amazing to see the insights from the students,” Malek said. “[They] have a great way of looking at it from a fresh pair of eyes.”

Final presentations demonstrated how team-based, research-driven design can reframe pressing urban issues and generate actionable visions for inclusive, autonomous futures. By integrating ethnographic rigor, cross-sector collaboration, and multi-scalar thinking, UT210 positions design as a critical tool for shaping the future of cities, grounded not only in technology but in human experience.

When the program was over, Lee charged students with carrying what they learned forward, focusing on their passion for the process and making a difference, rather than on assignments and grades. 

“This is not the end of class: This is the beginning of class,” Lee said. “You should bring this human skill to solve different problems.”

Read more from Lee about design ethnography and UT210 at DesignWanted and in the summer issue of Michigan Alum.

From smarter concrete printing to clearer data-center planning, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning researchers are putting AI to work on real-world challenges across the built environment, earning university-wide recognition in the process.

Three teams featuring professors and students from Taubman College were awarded University of Michigan Empowering Research Through AI awards. The awards were presented by the AI Institutes at Michigan and recognize the teams’ use of artificial intelligence to advance knowledge or practice in research fields.  

To be considered, teams had to demonstrate that AI was central to their research, not just a supporting tool. AI methods ranged from established approaches, such as machine learning and computer vision, to generative and multimodal AI. The selection criteria also included the responsible use of AI, project impact, and clarity. 

A total of 86 projects received first, second, and third-place awards out of 180 submissions across the university. The winning Taubman College teams and a brief description of their projects are listed below.

AI-Enabled Multimodal Learning and Decision Making for Robotic 3D Concrete Printing: Linking Process Pre-Planning with In-Line and Post-Process Data Collection to Construct 

Yuxin Lin, Ph.D. student; Mania Aghaei Meibodi, associate professor of architecture; Kira Barton, professor of mechanical engineering and robotics at U-M College of Engineering

This project develops a data-driven framework that integrates multimodal sensing, machine learning, and predictive decision-making to improve the reliability of 3D concrete printing. By linking process planning with in-line and post-process data, it replaces trial-and-error fabrication with measurable, model-informed workflows. 

Generative AI Design Model to Enable Scaffolding-Free Robotic 3D Concrete Printing of Vaulted Structures 

Abdallah Kamhawi, Ph.D. student; Mania Aghaei Meibodi, associate professor of architecture;  Jesse Capecelatro, associate professor of mechanical engineering at U-M College of Engineering

This project is part of Aghaei Meibodi’s ongoing research into 3D concrete printing. The project requires tools and computational models to allow architects and engineers to design high-performing, printable building components and robust robotic 3D printing systems capable of fabricating complex geometries without extensive trial-and-error. Read more about this work in the Taubman College Newsroom.

Governing AI’s Footprint: Making Data Centers and Zoning Legible 

Xiaofan Liang, assistant professor of urban and regional planning; Zhixuan Qi, Ph.D. student; Matthew Wizinsky, associate professor of practice in urban technology; Sarah Mills, associate professor of practice in urban and regional planning.

This project is an ongoing research initiative that originated from a MIDAS/Microsoft-funded project (2025–2026) to develop AI-driven methods for representing and extracting zoning regulations related to data centers and renewable energy facilities. It has since expanded (2025-2026) to include the Data Center Complexity Visualization Project, which informs urban planners about the complex implications of data centers through a white paper and design visualizations.

With a $3 million gift from the A. Alfred Taubman Foundation, the University of Michigan will establish a new endowed professorship at the A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. The Taubman Family Professorship is the college’s first endowed professorship and will support a leading faculty member in architecture, urban planning, or urban technology.

“We are grateful to family members and Foundation trustees Gayle Taubman Kalisman, Bobby Taubman, and Bill Taubman for their engagement with Taubman College, and the support that this gift provides,” said Dean Jonathan Massey. “The new professorship will help us recruit and retain distinguished researchers, practitioners, and educators who raise our capacity through teaching, peer mentoring, and field leadership.”

“We are proud to establish Taubman College’s first endowed professorship. We hope it will inspire others to help shape the future of architecture and planning by making a gift to the college,” said the Taubman family in a joint statement.

In 1999, real estate developer, investor, and U‑M alumnus A. Alfred Taubman made a $30 million endowed gift to the University of Michigan’s College of Architecture and Urban Planning. At the time, the gift was one of the largest in U-M history and the single largest donation to a U.S. school of architecture and urban planning. His support continues to shape the college today. Carefully stewarded and grown over time, the endowment strengthens student success through the merit-based Taubman Scholars program, travel opportunities, and enriched learning experiences, helping keep Taubman College a premier destination for the next generation of architects and urban planners. Since its inception, more than 2,000 students have benefited from scholarships supported by the endowment.

Alfred Taubman remained a steadfast champion of the college, visiting often and helping to advance its fundraising efforts until his passing in 2015. Today, Bill Taubman serves on the college’s Dean’s Advisory Board.

“Our father’s original gift to the college created critical scholarships that have helped the best and brightest students study at Taubman College,” the Taubman family said. “With this gift, we help ensure those students continue to learn from world-class architecture, planning, and design faculty.”

About the A. Alfred Taubman Foundation

Established in 1978, the A. Alfred Taubman Foundation is a private family foundation based in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. The foundation supports philanthropic priorities of the Taubman family in honor of A. Alfred Taubman (1924–2015).

About the A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning

For more than 100 years, the A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan has pursued solutions to the built environment’s most pressing challenges. Programs in architecture, urban design, urban and regional planning, urban technology, and real estate development prepare students to shape a more just, inclusive, and sustainable world.

Two Taubman College faculty members have been recognized by the Tulane Prize for Climate Change Curriculum in the Built Environment with Honorable Achievements for Climate Change Curriculum. 

El Hadi Jazairy, director of the Master of Urban Design and professor of architecture, received an Honorable Achievement for Climate Change Curriculum in Urban Design for Post Carbon Necklace: Designing for Climate Change in Boston. The studio focuses on how urban designers can help dismantle spaces of environmental violence and structural inequity brought on by climate change in the northeastern U.S. Through design informed by their own travel experiences, students articulated a concrete set of proposals to decarbonize the city of Boston, amplify public space, and better equip communities for the forthcoming effects of climate change.

Kathy Velikov, FAIA, associate dean for research and creative practice and professor of architecture, received an Honorable Achievement for Climate Change Curriculum in Innovative Studio Pedagogy for Arid Logics: Climate Coexistence in Desert America. The thesis seminar and studio explores architectural and infrastructural development as a territorial and environmental agent in the Las Vegas Valley. This once lush meadowland faces threats of water scarcity and increasing urbanization. Working across territorial, infrastructural, and material design scales, students developed design strategies embedded within ecological paradigms and speculative scenarios to envision future climate-conscious and place-based architectural practices for coexistence with the changing climate and communities in the region. This seminar and studio, including travel to the region, was sponsored by J. Windom Kimsey, B.S.Arch ’83, M.Arch ’85.

The Tulane Center on Climate Change and Urbanism, within Tulane University’s School of Architecture and Built Environment, hosts the Tulane Prize to honor faculty members for significant achievements in teaching climate change. The prize is awarded annually to faculty members who demonstrate excellence in the development of core and elective curriculum in climate change and the built environment. 

Among an international roster of nominations, selected awardees and honorees represent benchmark contributions for their work in developing cutting-edge curriculum relating to climate change mitigation and adaptation in the training of future urban planners, architects, landscape architects, urban designers, and other allied professions of the built environment.

Read more at the Tulane School of Architecture and Built Environment.

Taubman College recognized seven undergraduate students with 2026 Wallenberg Studio Awards during a May 1 symposium. The winners were B.S. Arch ’26 students Constanza Capriles, Fatema Almoamen, Emma High, Misk Aldulaimy, John Watha, Gulshat Roziali, and Taylor Horsfall.

Each year, senior undergraduate students in the Taubman College B.S. in Architecture program complete the Wallenberg studio, named after renowned alumnus Raoul Wallenberg. As the final studio required for completion of their degree, students build on their past skills and experiences to explore the transformative power of architecture through a focus on broad humanitarian concerns.

At the end of the semester, the top students are awarded the Wallenberg Studio Award. Funded by the Raoul Wallenberg Endowment, awards are offered as a stipend for international travel to a country of the student’s choosing. Building on Wallenberg’s legacy, the stipend encourages students to engage with the people, architecture, and culture of the country they visit and return with a broadened understanding of the world. This year, there was a winner awarded for each studio, as well as eight honorable mentions.

The guest jury consisted of three visiting architects from across the country: Rhania Ghosn, associate professor of architecture and urbanism at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Jerome Haferd, assistant professor of architecture at City College of New York; and José Ibarra, assistant professor of architecture at Penn State University.

More details about the winners and their projects, with an excerpt from the guest jury’s decision, are below.

Constanza Capriles, “Tierra de Gracia: Thresholds”
Studio: Imagineries for Patchy Ecologies
Instructor: Zain AbuSeir

“Speaking personally as a Venezuelan, one of the things that struck me most was the thoughtfulness of remapping the country away from its 25 states and federal dependencies into 13 territories grounded in Indigenous forms of knowledge. These territories become ways of gathering, listening, and rebuilding collective agency. The representation and exhibition setup were especially compelling because they performed the project’s argument: dense, layered, beautiful, and precise, while still carrying emotional and public clarity.”

Fatema Almoamen, “reFramed: A Series of Do-It-Yourself Reactivating Assemblies”
Studio: Salvaging: Material and Memory after Demolition
Instructor: Tess Clancy

“Addressing the widespread vacancies and demolition that have reshaped block life in Detroit through imposed decisions about form, density, and value, the project took a powerful position: to acknowledge the house that stood before, and through salvage and reassembly, to invite connections amongst neighbors back into the block. We were especially struck by the way it embraced Detroit’s living do-it-yourself heritage, framing building assembly – and the steel joint itself – as a tactical and social act of reactivation.”

Emma High, “Ambler Medevac + Trauma Clinic”
Studio: THE AMBLER ROAD – Cosmopolitics of Arctic Territory 
Instructor: Nitzan Farfel

“This project distinguished itself through the clarity, conviction, and humanity of its architectural response. In a studio attentive to the many lives shaped by the road, it focused with particular force on those who labor on the land and construct it, asking who bears the risks of infrastructure and who remains unseen within its promised benefits. In a permafrost landscape located hundreds of miles from the nearest hospital, the project identified a profound humanitarian condition: emergency care cannot be assumed, and public health is inseparable from planetary, territorial, and infrastructural realities.”

Misk Aldulaimy, “Land as Memory”
Studio: Celestial Artifice + Subterranean Clouds
Instructors: Dawn Gilpin and Gina Reichert

John Watha, “Beyond Babel”
Studio: Swamp Logics 
Instructor: Neal Robinson

Gulshat Roziali and Taylor Horsfall, “End of the American Dream”
Studio: Mavericks, the Multitude, and the Mesa 
Instructor: Geoffrey Thün

“By recasting the haunting remnants of decommissioned missile silos into a network of cultural and territorial interventions, it thickened the history of the desert as a site shaped by Cold War securitization and contemporary regimes of surveillance and migration, while redirecting that inherited infrastructure—and the cultural legacy of land art—toward refuge. What made the project especially powerful in the context of the Wallenberg legacy was its understanding of refuge as an architectural obligation.”

Honorable mentions included Alexandra Mercier, B.S. Arch ’26; Noorhan Moustafa, B.S. Arch ’26; Anthony Miller, B.S. Arch ’26; Eduardo Cardenas Denova, B.S. Arch ’26; Madeline Tay, B.S. Arch ’26; Audrey Bellak, B.S. Arch ’26; Mariam Reyes-Toidze, B.S. Arch ’26; Anna DeYoung, B.S. Arch ’26; and Watson Baek, B.S. Arch ’26.

Taubman College recognized nine graduating students in the Master of Architecture program for their final thesis proposals this spring. In addition to an overall award and student voice award, awards were presented in various categories, including representation/new media, history and theory, storytelling, social impact, and more. 

A list of finalists and winners, along with an excerpt from each winning thesis, is below.

Burton L. Kampner Award for Best Thesis

Winner: Brianna Manzor, “Edible Commons: Restaurant as Microcosm of Worlds”

(Studio: Microcosm Thesis: Architecture as Microcosm of Issues, John McMurrough)

“Formally porous and programmatically unresolved. Boundaries are collapsed between domestic and productive space. The form becomes a highway for flora and fauna. Migratory birds, livestock, native grasses, minerals, and microbes are a short list of users. Systems are intentionally inefficient, slowing processes of production and consumption to reorient users toward the land. Ingredients are locally foraged and hunted. Slaughter becomes political theater and composting becomes a public ritual.”

2025-2026 Thesis Class Choice Award

Winner: Jordan Lindberg, “A Kitchen that Grows: Care and Cultivation in the Home”

(Studio: Bio-logics: Experimental Practices in Architecture’s Biological Turn, Kathy Velikov)

“This thesis envisions a kitchen where growth, care, and cooking merge. Counters, prep areas, and shared spaces host multiple processes at once, allowing humans and algae to exist in rhythm. Daily acts of misting, observation, and tending form occupiable spaces that hold moisture, while vessels catch light and air. The home becomes an ongoing network of care between people and the microbes around them.”

Representation/New Media

Winner: Roman Marra, “Peripheral Obsolescence”

(Studio: Iridescent Irises, Perry Kulper)

“The device carries diverse material, ranging from stepping motors to rotating armatures, each which was previously fixed to certain axes and protocol. The nature of the thesis is to understand that while the pieces are being retrained to serve a role of production, their previous lives as tenets to the visual field machine are not forgotten. The pieces hesitate, they are relying on memory and their prior routines to be agents of their new work. The pieces become contingent on memory and the past to produce the exercises of its new afterlife.”

Materials, Tectonics, & Construction

Winners: Felix Lam and Andrew Masternak, “Cured Creases”

(Studio: Concrete Labor_Circularity, Tsz Yan Ng)

“Inspired by Japanese origami, and the research of J. Choma and E. Lloret-Fritschi, our project seeks to perfect a system of concrete formworks by simply using folded paper membranes and corrugated cardboard supports to cast  column components. The interest in using recyclable paper products as the basis for our formwork system is both pragmatic and conceptual.”

History & Theory

Winner: Brianna Manzor, “Edible Commons: Restaurant as Microcosm of Worlds”

(Studio: Microcosm Thesis: Architecture as Microcosm of Issues, John McMurrough)

Sustainability/Environmental Stewardship

Winner: Jordan Lindberg, “A Kitchen that Grows: Care and Cultivation in the Home”

(Studio: Bio-logics: Experimental Practices in Architecture’s Biological Turn, Kathy Velikov)

Storytelling

Winner: Jacob Brookhouse, “Renewal Power Station: Energy as Microcosm of Heliolatry”

(Studio: Microcosm Thesis: Architecture as Microcosm of Issues, John McMurrough)

“This power station, like others, provides utility; it powers. It converts natural sources of energy into electricity to be used by those connected to it across the grid. The building itself embraces this utilitarian nature. It provides shade, warmth, respite. It has places to sit, to look, to listen. It has bathrooms. These basic practicalities become venerated, lifted to a state that necessitates reflection, urges reverence. The power station elevates the most basic of human needs. It renews.”

Social Impact

Winner: Jack Smith, “Detroit Center for Architecture and Repair (D/CAR)”

(Studio: Architecture School*, Sharon Haar)

“The project repositions architectural education around adaptive reuse, building repair, land regeneration, and civic stewardship. D/CAR teaches students through direct engagement with real conditions of vacancy, deferred maintenance, environmental damage, and neighborhood change while fostering a creative environment for students to explore their own interests.”

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Thesis faculty for 2025-2026 were Adam Fure, Sharon Haar, Irene Hwang, Perry Kulper, John McMorrough, Tsz Yan Ng, and Kathy Velikov. This year’s Thesis reviews took place on April 29 and 30, where students presented their work to a group of guest critics:

• Ila Berman, University of Virginia
• Joseph Choma, Florida Atlantic University
• Karl Daubman, Lawrence Technological University
• Sarah Dunn, University of Illinois-Chicago
• Joyce Hwang, University of Buffalo
• Max Kuo, University of California-Los Angeles
• Amelyn Ng, Columbia University
• Christopher Romano, University of Buffalo
• Georgeen Theodore, New Jersey Institute of Technology
• Gretchen Wilkins, Lawrence Technological University
• Jason Young, University of Tennessee

This year’s George G. Booth Traveling Fellowship has been awarded to Maya Fraser, who will investigate shared-space initiatives as a solution to the U.S. housing crisis. Fraser, M.Arch ’23 and a former Taubman Scholar, is the recipient of the 2026 Fellowship, which began in 1924 and provides recent Taubman College graduates with a $13,000 stipend toward architectural research that requires international travel.

Her project, “Common Ground: Addressing the Housing Crisis Through Shared Space,” will build on her past research into co-operative housing models to create a design toolkit for shared housing in the United States. Fraser will visit cities across Denmark and Germany — including Copenhagen, Hamburg, Berlin, and Freiburg — to engage with residents in co-housing and Baugruppen buildings — a German practice of self-owned and communal, multi-family buildings.

“How to share space with others is personal for me,” writes Fraser in her abstract. “My whole adult life has been spent living in shared situations, including 8 years spent with roommates and 5 years in a housing co-op. When I decided to design a co-op for my M.Arch thesis project, I soon became frustrated with how few architecture-specific resources about shared space existed. My mission became clear: I realized that I wanted to create the design guide that I wished I had during my thesis.”

Fraser is a staff designer at Quinn Evans Architects and 2024 Health and Design Fellow at Michigan Medicine. As an M.Arch student, she was a Taubman Scholar and awarded a 2022 Longo Internship with MASS Design Group.

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The George G. Booth Traveling Fellowship provides the opportunity for recent alumni/ae to research a special aspect of architecture that requires international travel. Each year, one recent M.Arch graduate is awarded the fellowship. Congratulations to Maya Fraser.

Ten Taubman College students have been recognized in the annual Saarinen Swanson Essay Contest. Their essays explored the role of architecture in an uncertain world through global case studies in Bangladesh, China, and Jordan. 

This year, there were two winners, three runners-up, and five honorable mentions. Hanae Somoa, Ph.D. U.R.P., and Annie Zhang, B.S. Arch ‘27, were awarded $3,000 each in prizes. Rand Makarem, Ph.D. U.R.P., Maddie Tay, B.S. Arch ’26, and Eda Bozkurt, Ph.D. Arch, were awarded $2,000 each as runners-up. 

Honorable mentions received $1,000 each: Tazkira Amin, M.U.R.P. ’27; Mishbah Shahid, B.S. Arch ’26; Maryam Bade, B.S. Arch ’25; Sumayah El-Ganainy, B.S. Arch ‘27; Elyse Cote, M.U.R.P./M.U.D. ’25.

Established in 1994, the contest encourages the use of writing to generate and disseminate ideas about architecture and planning. It is open to all students at Taubman College, at any level, in any program. The competition seeks 1,000- to 1,500-word essays addressing contemporary issues in architecture, planning, and related topics. The essay can be a new text or work produced for a course. Submissions were judged by architecture and urban planning professors Kimberly Kinder, Sharon Haar, Scott Campbell, and Gabriel Cuellar.

Here are the titles and an excerpt from each of their essays:

Somoa for “Not Always ‘Self-Built’ or ‘Self-Made’: The Conditionality of Housing Material Choices in Dhaka’s Informal Settlement”  

Excerpt: “It is a hot and humid afternoon in June. The monsoon season has just begun in Bangladesh, bringing heavy rainfalls and flooding, while the hot sun after the rain clears turns the environment to brutal humidity. Informal settlements, often located in low-lying areas and particularly vulnerable to natural disasters due to their location, as well as their densely settled structures and less durable materials, face additional challenges during this season. As we discuss concerns about housing construction and modification in the heated room of a structure built from corrugated tin sheets, the standing fan circulating warm air and wrapping our bodies in heavy, humid air, a tenant wishes they had more freedom to alter their living space.”

Zhang for “Whose City: Beijing’s Public Space Transformation in an Age of Uncertainty”  

Excerpt: “The renovation around 2020 transformed the Dirty Street into a “clean street”: uniform facades, planned storefronts, tidy streetscape—all conforming to the aesthetic order of a modern metropolis. A bar owner who once lived through the Dirty Street’s golden era returned to open a new spot on the same block, but the past could not be recreated. The informal vendors who once provided affordable food and goods are gone. The young people who once gathered spontaneously now find no belonging among Instagram-style storefronts. People now come here for shopping, taking photos, and following trends—a destination for influencers, a backdrop for the camera, a place to see and be seen in the digital age—a place designed for consumption rather than congregation.”

Makarem for “RE BUILD Learning to Build When the Ground Keeps Shifting” 

Excerpt: “The RE:BUILD project offers a direct response to the challenges of building under extreme conditions of uncertainty. Through its re-deployable and ecologically responsive structures, the project demonstrates how architecture can emerge from scarcity rather than be constrained by it. Constructed using raw, readily available materials found in and around the camp such as sand and gravel alongside standard construction components like scaffolding and steel framework tubes, the system challenges the notion that meaningful architecture requires permanence or complex technologies (Franco, 2015).”

Tay for “Designing for Protest and Public Discourse” 

Excerpt: “An example of how architecture has served protest can be found locally in the heart of Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan. In the middle of central campus, the University’s most iconic campus buildings surround a public square known as the diag. When the weather is fair, there’s a buzz of activity—students gather, study, picnic, set up hammocks, and play spike ball. Every now and then, it also becomes active ground for protest, serving as a key site over Michigan’s long history. Some instances in the past couple years include: the continued assembly of the Graduate Employee’s Organization to negotiate for increased salary and benefits in 2023, and the month-long encampment to protest the University’s investment in Israel’s military campaign in Gaza in the spring of 2024. In these cases, and many more, the diag functioned as a crucial foundation for these protests, providing a central and impactful location to gather and an environment designed to the scale of the human.”

Bozkurt for “Designed to Wait” 

Excerpt: “I had been trained to read spaces like this differently; to look for intention, function, completion. To understand uncertainty as something design responds to; something to be managed through flexibility, contingency, or adaptation. Within that training, gaps like these appeared as temporary vacancies, phased delays, and technical inefficiencies within an otherwise coherent plan. But this framing is itself a form of displacement. It displaces lived experience from what can be recognized, measured, or planned. It assumes that the map is the truth, and that lived experience is the error.”

Amin for “Learning from the Arsenal of Democracy” 

Excerpt: “In reviewing the history of cities like Detroit, it is important to focus on concepts like grit and joy in order to move beyond the deficit frame often utilized by individuals with power (like planners and architects) who enter communities as saviors. In reframing, practitioners can reimagine a future alongside residents where Detroit can thrive through investment in communities that have been crucial in uplifting the city from the beginning. Further, those in the field would greatly benefit from looking to Black legacy residents and legendaries. Not only do they have ‘sacred place-based wisdom,’ as the author of Black Public Joy Jay Pitter says, but also because they have and continue to survive during times of uncertainty oppression (Pitter, 2026).”

Shahid for “Between Two Grounds: Belonging, Migration, and Designing Through Uncertainty” 

Excerpt: “Travel also revealed something deeper about cities themselves. They are never static. People constantly move between places, bringing different languages, traditions, and ways of living, and cities absorb these movements and transform over time. In this sense, uncertainty is not an interruption, it is a permanent condition of urban life. The streets and public spaces I encountered in the Netherlands and Belgium reflected this reality. Flexible public environments such as canalsides, plazas, and shared streets allowed people from different backgrounds to occupy the same spaces comfortably. These places did not demand a single identity. Instead, they created room for many identities to exist together.”

Bade for “To Design for The Uncertain Body” 

Excerpt: “If uncertainty, like pain, unravels one’s experience of the world (unmaking), then designing within such conditions (making) cannot begin from assumptions of stability or resolution. Instead, architecture must be understood as a form of making that responds directly to this unmaking—not by restoring a fixed order, but by offering conditions through which the body can reorient itself. Design, in this sense, is not the imposition of certainty, but the conscientious construction of frameworks that allow for the gradual rebuilding of meaning, continuity, and a belonging of the body.”

El-Ganainy for “A Thought In Progress” 

Excerpt: “That being said, design is never so simple. One might claim to hold a neutral design philosophy, but design is never autonomous. Every project relates to its context. Every design should dance and weave itself around the lives of its users. But what do we do when these things become uncertain? When we do not know what’s to come or how people, land, war, and climate will change? In times of unpredictability, I believe it is the duty of a designer to confront these questions directly: How will my design engage with war? How will it coexist with the climate? These are the questions we should be asking, especially in times of local and global unease.”

Cote for “In Plain Sight: Authoritarian Inheritance”

Excerpt: “Built in the 1930s as a local headquarters for the Fascist regime, the Ex Casa del Fascio in Settecamini embodies complexities of Italy’s 20th-century history. It stands as a relic of totalitarianism, propaganda, and the pursuit of imperial revival – revealing how Mussolini weaponized architecture, urbanism, and art to project legitimacy, modernity, and authority. Settecamini, a once rural-village along the Tiburtina road, became a self-built working-class settlement near industrial zones. The Casa del Fascio here shows how the regime’s architecture extended beyond Rome’s monumental core, swiftly spreading political influence across the national landscape. The regime’s architectural strategy had advanced beyond symbology and form into infrastructural networks for ideological dissemination.”

Taubman College awarded prizes to six graduate and undergraduate architecture students as part of the 2026 Leonard B. Willeke Portfolio Competition, the oldest and most prestigious award recognizing student architectural work at the college.

Named after the late Detroit architect Leonard B. Willeke and funded by the Willeke endowment fund, the competition recognizes students’ design excellence and innovation through their portfolio work. Winning portfolios were carefully curated and demonstrated a clear design intent.

All undergraduate and graduate students enrolled in the B.S. Arch, M. Arch, M.S.D.M.T., and M.U.D. programs were eligible to receive the award. An invited alumni jury reviewed all submissions separately and selected winners from each group.

Here are the winners and their monetary awards:

Graduate Winners

• 1st Place – Sayyoung Chang, M.Arch ’26 , ($10,000)
• 2nd Place – Katherine White, M.Arch ’27 , ($5,000)
• 3rd Place – Riley Montgomery, M.Arch ’26, ($3,000) 

Undergraduate Winners

• 1st Place – Anna DeYoung, B.S. Arch ’26, ($10,000)
• 2nd Place – Xiaoyu Xu, B.S. Arch ’26, ($5,000)
• 3rd Place – Elliot Lavigne, B.S. Arch ’26 , ($3,000)

M.U.R.P. students develop frameworks for memorializing racial terror with care, honesty, and accountability

Content warning: This story includes descriptions of racial terror and lynching, including torture and murder.

Looking out over an empty patch of land surrounded by woods outside of Memphis, Irene Nguyen, M.U.R.P. ’26, felt uneasy. This same site had drawn a crowd of thousands for the racially motivated lynching of Ell Persons 109 years ago. People read about it in the paper and traveled far and wide to participate in the violence or just watch. But on this day, it was covered in tall grass and vines with no sign of the public racial terror that had taken place there.

“It was really jarring to see this memory get grown over, both metaphorically and physically,” she says. “There’s definitely a weight to it. I remember thinking, ‘This place is haunted.’”

Nguyen was visiting the site with her classmates and Lauren Hood, assistant professor of practice in urban planning, last March as part of their research for Hood’s M.U.R.P. capstone course. For their project, Hood’s students explored what it means to design spaces that memorialize racial terror, using the Persons site as a real-world case study.

“They’re being asked to think through what an authentic, comprehensive acknowledgement looks like,” Hood says. “We had to think beyond the historical plaque and understand the extent to which we are willing to let history reshape how we plan, steward, and inhabit space.”

Surveying the Site

Ell Persons, a Black man, was accused of killing Antoinette Rappel, a white teenager whose body had been found in the woods near where he lived. Before he could stand trial, historical accounts indicate that he was tortured while in custody and forced to confess. A white mob later seized him while he was being transported for court proceedings, took him to the lynching site, killed him, and mutilated his body.

Greater Memphis witnessed the murder of an estimated 20 Black victims by lynching between 1877 and 1950, but the Persons site is particualry relevant because of the present-day interests of three independent groups: 1) The National Parks Service (NPS), which is conducting a study that could bring it under federal jurisdiction, 2) The Wolf River Conservancy, which is developing plans for a greenway project that would draw people to the remote area, and 3) the Lynching Sites Project (LSP) of Memphis, the class’s partner in the project, which has been working to memorialize this and several other local sites.

Over the course of the semester, Hood asked students to weigh the pros and cons of the site joining the NPS registry, particularly in light of recent shifts in priorities and funding, while also thinking through ways to leverage the greenway to acknowledge its history of racial terror in a way that didn’t sanitize it or turn its trauma into spectacle.

Creating Space for Critical Consciousness

Hood joined Taubman College in 2023 to change the way planning is “taught at arm’s length.” 

For this capstone course, her first, she encouraged students to embrace ambiguity and trust the process of listening, reflecting, and imagining new possibilities, expanding their practice beyond data analysis, mapping, and site planning.

“We need technical expertise, but we also need a critical consciousness,” she says. “I need students to situate themselves in this work and not be agnostic.”

To help build that consciousness, students brought in photos of their younger selves as a reminder of each other’s humanity and spent the first part of the course laying out ground rules for working through sensitive subject matter. They also visited the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit and the Zekelman Holocaust Center in Farmington Hills, Michigan, and held impromptu class discussions about notable monuments and what makes them memorable. One early assignment asked them to present ways their own cultural identities had been memorialized.

“Lauren encouraged us to explore our own vulnerabilities,” says Amina Dunn, M.S./M.U.R.P. ’26. “We had to be able to disagree and talk about things that we don’t want to talk about — to create space and mechanisms that allow us to establish boundaries, break down walls, and interrogate our own failures in this work as well.”

“This topic requires a lot of trust, more so than any group project we have done in the past,” Nguyen says. “Urban planning is very collaborative, but this required a certain sensitivity and openness to communicate.”

Big Hugs, Bigger Conversations

In Memphis, LSP volunteers led the class to the unmarked site of Persons’ lynching; to the existing historical marker in the city, placed where members of the mob used his remains to further terrorize Black residents after his murder; and to another local lynching site. The students spent hours talking with LSP board members about their goals and how the NPS survey and greenway project might impact them, met with the Wolf River Conservancy, and visited the National Civil Rights Museum. 

Xilong Wang, M.U.R.P. ’26, joined Hood’s capstone for a different experience from his previous focus on data and GIS, which he often worked on alone. Working with others was a new challenge, as was learning about different cultures and aspects of American history that were unfamiliar to him as someone from China. He was surprised to learn the complex history behind each story.

“For one event, there might be several locations involved, but only some of them have been confirmed,” he says. “A lot of details have been lost.”

Even though she arrived a day after her classmates, Dunn felt immediately embraced and respected by their hosts at LSP.

“It was like, open with a hug, and then, ‘These are the sites. Let’s start having really deep conversations about them,’” she says. “They really took our impressions and thoughts on how to engage with the sites seriously, because they are very interested in outside perspectives and what people feel about them, seeing them for the first time.”

Informed by their work on the ground, following weeks of preparation back in Ann Arbor, the project began to take shape.

“Once we talked to folks and spent time there, things emerged for us,” Nguyen says. “After sitting with it and actively listening, observing the sites, the people, the organizers, and the city at large, that was when a lot of our gears started turning about how we should move forward.”

Looking Back to Move Forward

For their final presentation on their work, Dunn, Nguyen, Wang, and M.U.R.P. ’26 classmates Ali Eletrache, Jordan Hunter, and Rubin Malik, presented the report they had produced, including guidelines for planning the Persons lynching site. 

“Stories, Spaces, & Sankofa: Frameworks for Commemorating Sites of Racial Terror” emphasizes the importance of “Sankofa,” the Ghanaian concept that “It is not taboo to go back for what you forgot.” In this case, acknowledging the history of lynching in many U.S. communities, like Memphis, is the “first pathway toward reconciliation.”

Ultimately, the group recommends that LSP help oversee and inform any future plans for the site, whether or not it is added to the NPS. To fund its work, the group recommends that LSP partner with a nonprofit, such as the nearby National Civil Rights Museum, which has a similar mission. While they do not recommend a design for the memorial itself, the group cited two examples of successful memorializations of lynchings for reference: the Ed Johnson Memorial in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.

“I appreciate projects like this because it shows that you can look into yourself as well,” Malik says. “Approaching our work intentionally, following the principle of Sankofa, and going back step by step was really critical in our process.”

Growing up in white spaces, Hunter says she tended to shy away from the harder aspects of Black history, which she now realizes only causes more harm.

“In urban planning, we have a tendency to distance ourselves from our work and from the community, but the more we do that, the more ineffective we become in our role,” she says. 

Through her capstone, she’s come to realize, “My work is informed by the fact that I am Black. I can try to separate those things all day long. It’s never going to happen.”

“This capstone really allowed me to be more comfortable with that and to articulate that in ways I didn’t really think I’d be able to.”

— Eric Gallippo

B.S. Arch seniors explore land, climate, and memory in the Sonoran Desert

When choosing the final studio of her undergraduate architecture education, Anna DeYoung, B.S. Arch ’26, was excited to look beyond the Midwest for inspiration. She found herself drawn to designing for the Sonoran Desert in a studio led by Geoffrey Thün, professor of architecture and associate vice president for research at the U-M Office of Research.

“There’s an interesting design opportunity that comes with working in the desert, where it’s super harsh, and you have to think about things a little bit differently,” DeYoung says.

The final studio in the undergraduate series, the Wallenberg Studio, is designed to expand students’ understanding and appreciation of architecture through travel, research, and design exercises. Each year, the studio focuses on a theme that addresses humanitarian concerns. This year’s theme, “Land,” explored architecture’s role in how ground and territory are claimed, commodified, and exploited, as well as its potential to undo harm.

Desert as Studio

In Thün’s “Mavericks, the Multitude, and the Mesa” studio, students engaged with the extreme climate, vast geography, and long history of experimental, visionary, and outcast culture in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert to produce design propositions. Thün has offered “Mavericks” in some form for the past seven years, but this was the first time it was offered to undergraduate students. Teams worked on place-based projects including the world’s largest aircraft storage facility, a ghost-town turned artist commune, and a rare oasis near the U.S.-Mexico border wall.

“I tell them that it needs to be bigger than an object and smaller than a city, and may be developed through any medium,” Thün says. “People are working in landscape, they’re working in architecture, they’re designing infrastructure. They are designing through different media, from cartography to ecosystems, from actor networks to spatial frameworks and all of those things at once.”

Early in the course, students developed “detective methods,” compiled as a bilder atlas, and explored a variety of mappings to survey the territory and techniques. As they narrowed in on their projects, teams identified the various groups, policies, and social forces shaping their chosen locations and the situations they uncovered. They also studied and presented material from a list of documentary films and cartographic monographs, all carefully curated to inform the work.

“It felt like we were continuously working on one project while having these smaller assignments to help guide us, which I really appreciated,” says Gulshat Roziali, B.S. Arch ’26.

“My personal favorite was looking at the cartography books,” DeYoung says. “It was a very effective way of showing all these different styles and ways to put data into images and visual communication.”

Verifying the Field

In February, the class traveled to Arizona to verify in the field what they had been studying in Ann Arbor. The five-day intensive included visits to a copper mine, military infrastructure, artist communities and installations, and a biological research center. And that was mostly on day one. 

“The field trip is meant to complement their understanding through a deeply immersive, experiential way of encountering the profoundly different, strange, and sublime conditions of the Sonoran Desert,” Thün says.

The trip was the first west of the Mississippi River for Taylor Horsfall, B.S. Arch ’26. Highlights included a nighttime visit to the Lowell Observatory, where Pluto was discovered; seeing the striking geometry of Biosphere 2; and the “staggering” experimental architecture of architect Paolo Soleri’s Arcosanti urban laboratory. 

“I had seen pictures of this landscape, but I never conceptualized the vastness of it and just how big some of these complexes and how impressive these efforts were,” she says.

Watson Baek, B.S. Arch ’26, was impressed by the unconventional artwork and artist communities they encountered, as well as the desolate conditions that seemed to produce — or attract — them. Non-architectural visits to the Grand Canyon and hiking at Red Rocks were also inspiring and even “spiritual,” as students pushed themselves beyond their comfort zones in unfamiliar terrain.

Above and Below

For their project, Baek and DeYoung proposed a series of underground spaces built into the mountain that is home to Kitt Peak National Observatory. The spaces would serve as both a refuge from extreme heat and a series of vaults for preserving stories, artifacts, and biological specimens. The team’s research turned up estimates that the region will likely experience more than 100 days a year with temperatures above 100 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100. They started thinking about ways to make the region more habitable in the face of climate change. 

Built into the granite mountain through excavation, the spaces would be protected from surface heat and interconnected by a walking path, offering intentionally framed views of the sky above, along with dramatic temperature shifts, as users dip in and out of the mountainside. Excavated granite would be repurposed to build above-ground structures.

The team’s project incorporates existing observatory infrastructure and draws inspiration from the Tohono O’odham Nation’s understanding of the relationship between land and sky. Because the observatory is located on the Nation’s land, the team was challenged to develop its plan in a way that respected tribal sovereignty and avoided extracting value from Tohono O’odham land.

“A pivotal moment for us was looking at how the climate phenomenon is going to happen and affect the region, and it doesn’t care about cultural or national borders,” DeYoung says. “It’s something that affects us all. Moving away from an isolated framework and more toward a collective one, where we need to do this for everyone in the region, but in a way that is sensitive to the nation’s culture and honors it, was big for us.”

An Enduring Archive

Horsfall and Roziali’s project also includes a subterranean archive, but for a different purpose. Their project, “End of the American Dream,” adapts one of Arizona’s Titan II Missile Silos into a repository for artifacts related to undocumented people crossing the border from Mexico into the U.S. In an age when digital historical records can disappear on a whim, the team set out to create a permanent, physical record of what is happening along the Arizona-Mexico border. 

More than 50 underground silos were built in the U.S. during the Cold War to house massive intercontinental ballistic missiles. Most have since been destroyed, but the one remaining silo serves as a museum where visitors can observe the 100-foot-tall missile and underground control center. As the team researched the history of Cold War paranoia and military surveillance, they noticed parallels to conversations and practices around immigration in the borderlands where the museum is situated.

“The Cold War was built on the idea of othering and ‘us’ versus ‘them,’ so we were looking at that in terms of the border condition of the U.S.,” Horsfall says.

“Today, migrants are targeted as they search for the American dream, which was heavily advertised in the U.S. during the Cold War,” Roziali says. “That prosperity was promised in the land of freedom.”

An early version of the project called for repurposed Titan II sites as a series of art installations that doubled as guideposts for migrants traveling north. Realizing the idea could do more harm to those they wanted to help, the students shifted to proposing a 150-foot-deep archive that would contain everything from a military helicopter used in border patrols to pocket-sized Bibles and distressed hair braids left behind by border crossers.

“A time capsule is like the bare data of what’s happening, and we wanted to preserve that knowledge for the future,” Roziali says.

Final Review

Despite long hours in the studio, Baek says the time went quickly, thanks in part to Thün’s meticulous syllabus, complete with the infamous “squiggle” diagram of the semester.

“It gave us the perfect opportunity to get the feedback we needed to progress further into our work,” he says. “I really appreciated the way everything worked together as a culmination for the final project.”

Looking back on her final studio and undergraduate years, DeYoung says she will cherish the connections she made along with the skills she developed.

“It definitely instills a level of confidence in your work,” DeYoung says. “I know that I’m ready for whatever comes next.”

— Eric Gallippo

For more photos from this studio’s Arizona travels, visit the Taubman College Flickr page.

Katie Johnson, B.S. Arch ’03, M.Arch/M.B.A. ’10, and a member of the Dean’s Advisory Board, shares why she supports Taubman College and how philanthropy advances groundbreaking research in sustainable, inclusive design.

Associate Professor Robert Goodspeed and students help uncover racially restrictive covenants in Michigan

A massive collaborative research project, including work by Taubman College faculty and students, helped uncover more than 9,000 racially restrictive covenants in Michigan’s Washtenaw County, which have been published as part of an interactive online map and accompanying toolkit to help homeowners and neighborhoods repeal them. 

Justice InDeed published the map last fall, when it also hosted a series of community shareout events at Taubman College, Ypsilanti District Library, and Ann Arbor District Library. The community collaborative, comprised of University of Michigan faculty, staff, and students, along with local community organizers and residents, led the five-year project, enlisting more than 1,000 volunteers to help. 

Robert Goodspeed, chair and associate professor of urban and regional planning, a project participant since 2020, played a key role in the mapping phase completed last year. Other key U-M participants were Michael Steinberg, professor from practice and director of the Civil Rights Litigation Initiative at U-M Law School; Justin Schell, director of digital scholarship and creative spaces at U-M Library; Hillary Poudeu Tchokothe, A.B. ’26; and U-M Law students Edward Madrigal and Johnathan Johnson. 

Yodit Mesfin Johnson and Jessica A.S. Letaw from Future Root, a community-centered design and strategy lab based in Ann Arbor focused on addressing racial injustice in land use planning and fostering community engagement, led the two-year community-engaged mapping process in partnership with the U-M participants. Goodspeed also recruited students to help with research, including the incoming M.U.R.P. class of 2026, who attended a transcription session as part of their orientation at the college.

“These covenants shaped where people could live, excluding Black families and others from neighborhoods across the county,” Goodspeed says. “Their legacy is still with us.”

Starting in the early 1900s, restrictions added to deeds across the county forbid mainly Black families, as well as other racial, ethnic, and religious groups, from living there. While these bans are now illegal, they were used to segregate the county in the 20th century and still exist in property records today. Until the Supreme Court ruled in 1948 that the restrictions could not be enforced, courts throughout the U.S., including Washtenaw County Circuit Court, voided sales of homes to Black families. The majority of covenants discovered were found in deeds of homes built between 1920 and 1950, but some dated as far back as 1900 and as recently as the 1960s.

Volunteers devoted more than 5,000 hours to the project, transcribing approximately 12,500 property records suspected of including racist covenants. Documents were provided by the Washtenaw County Clerk/Register of Deeds. During the Ypsilanti shareout event, organizers and volunteers spoke about the importance of uncovering the truth and what participating in the project meant to them, personally. 

“I think about what it means to reclaim belonging and to tell the truth about what’s happened, not for shame and blame, but so that we can imagine what might be possible,” Mesfin Johnson said. “It matters because justice begins with memory. It begins with remembrance as a radical act, and I believe it can transform grief into grounding and knowledge into power.”

In addition to the map, Justice InDeed also published a do-it-yourself “repeal toolkit” to help property owners remove racist restrictions. Site visitors can search the map to determine whether their property has racial restrictions, then use that information to fill out a template that repeals them and adds protections against future discrimination, which they can then file with the county. The project’s map is included in the City of Ann Arbor’s Comprehensive Plan, and the team is now turning to efforts to use the map and data to contribute to conversations about reparations, regional equity, and affordable housing in Washtenaw County.

The project joins a consortium of efforts to expose racist covenants and repair harms caused by them across the U.S., including in Washington, Minnesota, and North Carolina.

Explore the interactive map and other projects at Justice InDeed.

— Eric Gallippo

Main Image Caption: Yodit Mesfin Johnson (right) and Hillary Poudeu Tchokothe present during a community shareout event at Taubman College. Photo by Johnny Lee.

Beloved professor, architect, and colleague retires after 36 years at Taubman College

As Melissa Harris, associate professor of architecture, retires after 36 years at Taubman College, colleagues Anya Sirota, associate dean for academic initiatives and professor of architecture, and Antje Steinmuller, chair and professor of architecture, offer this reflection on her extraordinary legacy as a teacher, administrator, architect, and beloved member of the college community.

Dear Taubman College Community,

It is with deep appreciation (and, candidly, disbelief) that we share the news of Melissa Harris’ retirement from Taubman College. For more than three decades, Melissa has been a singular force here: a teacher with uncommon passion, an administrator who never dodged the hard work, and an artist-architect whose eye and curiosity have shaped generations of students and colleagues alike.

Those who have worked with Melissa know that her moral compass doesn’t break. She brings together a fierce sense of principle and a candor that disarms. It’s the kind of clarity that cuts through noise, throws open a window, and restores the oxygen in a room. And the Southern twang only makes her points sharper. She speaks plainly because she knows exactly what’s at stake.

Melissa joined the University of Michigan in 1990, after formative stints at Esherick, Homsey, Dodge and Davis; with Edward Larrabee Barnes; with Helmer Stenros in Helsinki; and even as the excavation architect at the Seila Pyramid in Egypt. Her early professional trajectory reads like a catalog of architectural touchstones, but it only hints at the broader terrain of her work here at Taubman College: Associate Dean, Interim Chair, Undergraduate Director, tireless committee member, reviewer, juror, advisor, and asker-of-the-right-questions across three decades of service. The list is long because Melissa always said yes to the work that mattered.

Teaching, for Melissa, has never been a performance of expertise but a full-bodied act of care. She knows every student’s name, remembers every mark made on every sheet of paper, and carries an almost astonishing belief in the potential of each person she encounters. Direct Drawing, The Sketchbook, first-year design studio — these courses have become the college’s de facto initiation rites. Under Melissa’s eye, students learn not simply to see, but to look: slowly, structurally, imaginatively, and with a disciplined ethic of attention.

Her sketchbook (analog and digital), which she has treated as a daily site of inquiry for some 40 years, is the clearest map of her sensibility: part analysis, part delight, always attuned to the behaviors of buildings and the idiosyncrasies of place. These drawings, shown in national and international exhibitions and recognized by the American Society of Architectural Perspectivists, are acts of thinking. They model the whimsical but rigorous interpretation of the world that Melissa invites all of us to practice: architecture as a way to read, to wonder, to stay alive, to be present, and to remain relevant through the simple, enduring superpower of the pencil.

What makes Melissa’s career so striking is the sheer range of her curiosity. Few architects toggle more deftly between the social, the technical, the artistic, and the pedagogical. She created the first cadette-level Girl Scout badge in architecture; she shaped the Yosemite design guidelines; she amassed teaching awards; she was licensed; she built exhibitions; she built trust; and she instilled a discipline of close observation here that will continue to shape us for years to come.

And through it all, Melissa has been an engine for humanity, a generous colleague who raises standards not through pressure but through care, and who consistently reminds us why this work matters. We refuse to believe she is truly leaving our daily orbit, because we know she will continue to influence this college in the way the most indelible teachers do: through the gestures, habits, and insights that stay with us long after the studio lights have dimmed.

In true Melissa fashion, she’s asked that we wait to celebrate until the end of the spring semester, giving all of us the time to take in the news and to gather ourselves. And when we do come together, we can offer the collective awe and warm applause she so fully deserves.

Melissa, thank you for your years of service, your sharp eye, your wholehearted teaching, your inexhaustible curiosity, your humor, your drawings, your twang, your questions, your capaciousness, your heart, your infinite inspiration. You have given this community far more than we can adequately name.

We wish you a retirement filled with wonder, days in your sketchbook, new discoveries, and the same expansive joy you have given so many.

With admiration and immeasurable gratitude, Anya and Antje (and the wider Melissa Harris Fan Club)

Through a planned gift, Steve Riojas, M.U.P./M.Arch ’80, aims to offer students opportunities like he was given

Steve Riojas’ career in architecture and urban planning spanned the automotive, education, and tech industries and took him around the globe as a designer and business director before he retired in 2022. Not one to sit still, Riojas, M.Arch/M.U.P. ’80, then launched his own consulting studio in 2024.

To this day, he credits his success to having the opportunity to study at Taubman College, thanks to a full-ride scholarship he received. Now he has decided to honor that opportunity with a planned gift to the college.

“I have to give to the university,” Riojas says. “If it wasn’t for its generosity, I might not be where I am today.”

A Life-changing Offer

Riojas’ journey into architecture started while working with T-squares and parallel bars in his high school drafting class.

“There was a certain balance of creativity and logic and rules and order,” he says. “I really kind of fell in love with that discipline.” 

He attended Lawrence Technological University in Southfield, Michigan, for his undergraduate studies, where his interests grew to include large-scale planning. After earning his bachelor’s, he was accepted to U-M’s newly formed dual-degree program in architecture and planning. Deciding to attend wasn’t easy.

“I came from a modest family,” Riojas says. “My parents had put me through undergrad, but they had my younger brother to put through school, so I was kind of on my own.”

He wrote a letter withdrawing his application and shifted his focus to working and saving money. But when the university’s reply came with an offer of full tuition and a stipend through a program for students with financial need from underrepresented backgrounds — Riojas’ father was born in Texas to parents who had immigrated from Mexico — he jumped at it.

“I couldn’t believe what I was reading. It was such a generous offer,” he says. “I absolutely took it and moved to Ann Arbor.”

Riojas thrived at Michigan. He fondly recalls late nights in the studio with classmates, Saturdays at the Big House, and immersing himself in campus culture. Studying under renowned architect Gunnar Birkerts taught him discipline and drove him to do his best work.

“I can’t say I was his class star, because I don’t think I was,” Riojas says. “I worked really hard to please him.”

From Town Halls to Tech Centers

After earning his dual master’s degree, Riojas got a job with an urban planning and design firm in Detroit. He quickly learned on the job about the importance of public speaking, writing, and appreciating different perspectives, as he addressed residents at town hall and planning meetings about changes in their communities.

“It was a maturing process for me that sharpened my sense of empathy, to always imagine what it’s like to be in the other person’s shoes,” Riojas says. “That attitude took me a long way in my career, just always thinking about the other person, the client, your colleagues, your employees.”

Soon, Riojas missed designing buildings and dreamed of seeing his ideas get built. After three years in planning, he applied for a job he felt unqualified for at Southfield’s Giffels Associates, where lead designer Harutun “Harry” Vaporciyan took a chance to bring him on and mentor him. There, Riojas worked on large-scale automotive and tech-related projects, including the Chrysler Tech Center in Auburn Hills, Toyota’s first U.S. assembly plant in Kentucky (which included travel to Japan), and an early semiconductor facility for IBM in upstate New York.

“I was developing this portfolio in really high-tech buildings. Some of them were first of their kind,” Riojas says. “It was complicated and very challenging, but a lot of it was very gratifying.”

In the late ‘80s, Riojas met his future wife and moved to where she lived in Chicago. Working for Lester B. Knight & Associates, he expanded his portfolio to include work on state-of-the-art research buildings for the U.S. Department of Energy, including the Argonne National Laboratory research and development center, best known for its work on particle acceleration. 

Designing Strategy, Building Teams

Riojas later transferred to San Francisco, where he and his wife raised their children. In 2005, he joined employee-owned, global design firm HDR as a regional director for science and tech.

“My job was becoming less about designing and more about building a business, developing strategies, being the principal in charge of projects,” he says. “I shifted from being a designer and a planner to being a leader of teams.”

As new opportunities and challenges were presented, Riojas raised his hand to take them on. He rose through the ranks as national and, eventually, global director for science and tech, supporting teams in Australia, Canada, China, Germany, the United Kingdom, and across the U.S. When he retired 17 years later, the company’s science, tech, and education business had grown from around $35 million to more than $120 million amid challenges such as the global financial crisis and Pandemic.

Transitioning to retirement was hard for Riojas, who enjoyed the fast pace and purpose his work gave him. 

“I was making the world a better place in my own little way, being a small part of these research projects and education facilities, ” he says. “Then I went to zero, and I started wondering, ‘What am I going to do? I have too much energy.’”

When his former employer invited him to consult on a project, he established Studio Riojas. While that project didn’t materialize, he found purpose as an external board member for other architecture firms, sharing his wealth of experience to help them grow.

A Full Circle Gift

Over the course of his time with HDR, Riojas built a “nest egg” investing in the company’s employee stock ownership plan. When he and his wife began estate planning recently, he knew immediately that he wanted to give back to Taubman College. With his planned gift, he hopes to show gratitude for the opportunity he was given and make a similar impact on future students. 

“It’s come full circle,” he says. “The university was a big part of kicking off my career,  and I look forward to helping other students find that same success.”

— Eric Gallippo

Renée M. Russell, B.S. Arch ’75, M.Arch ’76, empowers the next generation through a planned gift and endowed scholarship

Renée Russell’s, B.S. Arch ’75, M.Arch ’76, pursuit of architecture led her from the Detroit suburbs to the East Coast to military bases in Germany and Virginia. As an architect, planner, and project manager with the U.S. Army and the Army Corps of Engineers, her overseas tour overlapped with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the launch of operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, which relied heavily on U.S. deployments from Germany.  

Returning to the United States, Russell transferred to the U.S. Navy, serving as an architect at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard (NNSY) in Portsmouth, Virginia, for 23 years, during which she advanced to senior architect for the Naval Facilities Engineering Command. Since retiring in 2017, she has continued to work as a registered architect (mostly on jobs that sound fun) and stay active in her professional and local communities; she’s an emeritus member of the American Institute of Architects and board member of the Naval Civilian Managers Association – NNSY Chapter. 

Russell’s interests have shifted from entrepreneurial to philanthropic in recent years. In addition to making a planned gift to Taubman College, she has also established an endowed scholarship. Through the Renée M. Russell Architecture Scholarship Fund, she hopes to help the next generation of architecture students follow their passion, wherever it may lead them. 

“I want to inspire students to embrace architecture, not just as a career, but as a calling,” she says.

Early adopter

Russell’s own calling came after taking part in a drafting class, which was still rare for girls at the time, as a high school senior in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. 

“I loved drawing, was good at math, and loved the Prairie architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright,” Russell says. “I decided that architecture would be a good profession for me.”

At the University of Michigan, her first architecture classes were held on central campus before moving into the new Art & Architecture Building on North Campus. Russell loved studying design, construction, and environmental technology, as well as classes on landscape architecture and historic preservation. She enjoyed learning new skills and adopting new tools, from large-format photography with Harold Himes to exploring 3D models with innovative video techniques developed by Norm Barnett in the college’s Visual Simulation Lab.

Russell was also active in organizations and clubs. As part of the Professional Exposure Program (PEP), she led her mock firm’s technical efforts by developing an electronic payroll system to manage complex earnings and deductions. Computers were still new, and lines of code had to be entered onto punch cards and processed at the North Campus computing center. 

She also joined the Construction Specifications Institute and became a student member of the American Institute of Architects, which she led at U-M in 1975 and 1976. The latter took her to Tempe, Arizona, to attend the Associated Student Chapters of the AIA’s annual forum. 

“The big topic was solar architecture and passive systems for conserving resources,” Russell says. “At that time, solar systems were very experimental and costly. We all became more environmentally and sustainability aware.”

Russell excelled despite being one of only a few women in her class and sexist attitudes toward women architects at the time (she recalls being told, “The best thing for you to do is marry an architect, and then you can be an architect”). She served on the college executive committee as a student and, after graduating, received the Marian Sarah Parker Award for Outstanding Woman Student of the Year. She also served on the NAAB Review Board as a student representative reviewing Howard University for accreditation.

Over there, and back

After graduation, Russell struggled to find work in architecture. She took a job as a technical illustrator in Boston and then as a freelance photographer and graphic designer during New York’s booming disco scene before getting hired as an architect by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. 

“My original thought was, ‘I’ll get on-board experience for three years to qualify for the architectural registration exam.’ Three years stretched into five years. Five years stretched into an overseas appointment.”

At the U.S. Military Community Activity (USMCA) in Aschaffenburg, Germany, Russell served as master-planning supervisory architect, responsible for developing and maintaining the base’s master plan and property documentation. In her free time, she travelled and volunteered as the neighborhood troop committee chair for the U.S.A. Girl Scouts in Aschaffenburg. After transferring back to the Army Corps of Engineers a few years later, she became a master planning project manager in Frankfurt. Her work included supporting the development of U.S. embassies in the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union, as well as developing and managing contracts for master planning products across Europe. Those contracts included environmental surveys for endangered and threatened species on military training lands.

At the end of her tour, Russell transferred to the U.S. Navy at Norfolk Naval Shipyard (NNSY) in Virginia, where she worked as an architect for the rest of her career. As architect-in-charge, her projects included industrial building renovations, adaptive reuse of existing facilities, expansion of production facilities, and historic preservation. She also oversaw the implementation of major regional efforts to conserve energy, from developing renewable sources to modernizing facilities to auditing opportunities for improvement.

Today, Russell still visits the shipyard for meetings of the Naval Civilian Managers Association, stays in touch with fellow retirees, and contributes to the Friends of the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard Museum.

“It’s a very historic base. NNSY is older than the country, so it’s a pretty interesting place to be,” she says.

Shaping the future

After deciding to make a planned gift to Taubman College as part of her estate, Russell realized she wanted to do more to benefit students today.

“I want my legacy to extend beyond my own achievements,” she says. “I believe in empowering the next generation.”

With her new scholarship, to be awarded for the first time this fall, she hopes to help lessen the burden for busy students working to complete the program, land internships, and become registered architects, all while managing the growing responsibilities of young adulthood.

“I encourage students to engage in professional and civic activities, recognizing that true success is found in protecting the health, safety, and welfare of the public,” she says. “By fostering collaboration between architects, engineers, clients, and regulators, today’s students will become architectural leaders who shape the future.”

— Eric Gallippo

Main Image: Renée Russell during her time at Michigan

M.Arch thesis students rethink concrete labor, formwork, and sustainability

A week before final reviews for their master’s thesis studio, M.Arch ’26 students Andrew Masternak and Felix Lam had a problem. They had just poured the base of an 8-foot-tall concrete column, and something was wrong. The paper-based formwork they designed was holding on the sides as planned, but a seal at the bottom had leaked, allowing concrete to flow where it wasn’t supposed to and causing it to balloon on one side.

A complication wasn’t completely unexpected: After a dozen iterations and a semester’s worth of experimenting, this was their largest piece yet, at 45 liters of concrete weighing nearly 200 lbs. The larger scale meant adjusting how their careful formwork was assembled. Now it would take days before the concrete had set enough for them to attempt any of the workarounds they were brainstorming on the spot.

“The parts that were designed for this are holding up,” Masternak said, optimistically. “All the new stuff is seeming to fail, which is unfortunate.”

Laying the Foundation

Learning through failure is part of the experience when experimenting with an unforgiving material like concrete, a fact students in Tsz Yan Ng’s M.Arch studio were well aware of at this point in the year.

Students in the final year of their M.Arch degree at Taubman College participate in a year-long thesis, starting with a seminar course in the fall, followed by a design studio in the winter. Each studio has a theme, which students select through balloting. This year, 81 students took part in seven studios covering architecture’s agency in society, rethinking architectural education, architecture’s place in the natural world, and more.

In Concrete Labor_Circularity, students worked with Ng, associate professor of architecture, for an intensive exploration of concrete formwork with a focus on advanced digital fabrication. To support that work, the studio is paired with Professor Wes McGee’s Advanced Robotics class, giving students more opportunities to push their research and explore cutting-edge tools and software alongside traditional concrete-forming techniques. Over the semester, teams experimented with a range of methods and materials, from using fabric as formwork to casting with clay. 

“The question is how new technologies would inform the way that we design with concrete,” Ng says.

This year’s studio also centered on “circularity,” with an emphasis on building efficiency and reducing waste. Concrete construction is widely reported as a major contributor to Earth’s carbon emissions, accounting for 8% globally. Working in six teams of two, thesis students were charged with reducing construction waste and cement use by developing more efficient, reusable processes and formwork systems. Each team worked toward casting a 1:1, full-scale prototype of its design. 

“Part of the course is really trying to understand the full gamut of how we form concrete, so we can rethink how we use concrete as a building material,” Ng says. “How can we employ new technologies to reduce formwork labor and material waste, and also what new designs could emerge out of it?”

Inspiring Innovations

After getting an overview of the history of concrete formwork and basics of mixing and casting in the fall, students narrow in on a technique to explore in depth in the winter studio. To help inspire them, Ng took her students to Japan at the start of the term. Through site visits in Tokyo, Kyoto, and elsewhere, they encountered time-tested practices alongside innovative uses of concrete beyond what many had experienced before.

“They really were looking at the different techniques for concrete work that they can relate to in their production,” Ng says.

“We were able to see a lot of experimental forms of technologies and ways the concrete has evolved over the years and ways that materials come together,” Lam says. “That was really eye-opening.”

“They have a level of craft that was inspiring,” says James Sotiroff, M.Arch ’26. “Here, concrete is used for your floors, some precast walls, and that’s kind of it. But over there, it was definitely pushed. You saw it as a finished surface, you saw it as entire buildings. It was inspiring to see how expansive their designs could be.”

Lightening the Load

Back in Ann Arbor, Sotiroff and teammate Pablo De La Garza visited a local concrete recycling center in nearby Whitmore Lake for a tour and overview of how it breaks down demolished concrete into rubble. Seeing the process in person got them thinking about expanded uses for recycled rubble that would also use less concrete overall.

“In the U.S., concrete is just broken down and used as base material for roads and foundations, but that’s it,” De La Garza says. “It’s downcycled. For us, it’s about, ‘How can we upcycle it?’”

Inspired by others’ work with reused materials and their own research on autoclaved aerated concrete (AAC) — popular in parts of Europe for its light weight and thermal, acoustic, and fire-resistant properties — they began mixing foam, concrete, rubble, and other additives to produce a series of sample cubes of varying densities. Their eventual goal was to create a lightweight material to fill the hollow sections of a 4-by-4-foot composite wall, drawing inspiration from a design they had seen in Japan and a concrete tilt-up wall precedent in Los Angeles.

After hours of research and experimentation, they landed on a mixture they felt hit the mark for weight and strength. The rubble never quite cooperated, though, either settling to the bottom or floating to the top. Shifting gears, they incorporated it as reinforcement into the wall’s concrete outer frame. 

The frame and formwork for their wall were also optimized for efficiency. Originally working with a hand-assembled rectangular frame, McGee helped them develop a structurally efficient design featuring CNC-routed formwork, which allowed for a better ratio of concrete to foam-crete. Their resulting wall weighed 343 lbs — 170 lbs lighter than a comparable panel cast in solid concrete — and reduced carbon emissions by an estimated 55%.

Gripping Discoveries

Cayla Ellis and Amely Wackerbauer, both M.Arch ’26, were inspired by the textured surfaces they encountered across Japan. Hand-stippled “pokey patterns” at the Kyoto International Conference Center, rough aggregate blended with smooth panels at the Tokyo Metropolitan Festival Hall, and wood grain imprinted into slabs in Shinjuku Rurikoin Byakurengedo temple invite touch, break up monotony and scale, and add warmth to concrete.

For their investigation, they decided to explore how textured surfaces could help components “stick” together. They created a series of sand-cast textured slabs to test which patterns worked best through friction, and also the angle at which they started to slide. Next, they cast concrete blocks with high-friction surfaces and carefully adjusted centers of mass, enabling the team to stack them into an arch without support scaffolding before setting the keystone.

To cast their blocks, the team used robotic 3D printing to produce precise molds, which they then packed in a simple mixture of sand and bentonite. Once the printed mold is removed, concrete is cast into the relief cavity left in the sand. When the blocks are finished, both the printed molds and the sand can be reused. One happy accident: the 3D-printed molds left behind an additional grooved texture in the sand that transferred to the blocks.

Wackerbauer was drawn to Taubman College for its fabrication capabilities and chose Ng’s thesis for more hands-on work.

“It’s one thing to take an elective that’s heavy in fabrication, but then to take the entire studio … I was really excited for it,” she says. “I would rather be in the research room working on physical things versus staying up late staring at a screen.”

Into the Fold

Japan influenced both the form and function of Masternak and Lam’s thesis project. Inspired by origami, the team developed a process for casting concrete with folded paper and outer cardboard ribs. The result was an easy-to-produce, compact, and reusable formwork system for installing columns in places where heavy machinery is difficult to deploy, from dense cities to remote mountain villages.

“The Japan trip taught us to kind of keep it minimal and keep a clean aesthetic to it,” Lam says.

“For me, there’s been a lot of reflection on the urban environment and how our scheme fits into that context,” Masternak says.

The team produced a dozen prototypes over the semester, along with rigorous analysis of how the positioning and number of folds, as well as the overall size of the piece, affected the hydrostatic pressure of fresh concrete. Computational design and the use of the Zünd cutting machine added accuracy and speed to manufacturing their formworks by scoring the folds, making the manual labor of folding much faster.

For their final project, they produced a column from four pieces, interlocked with plug-and-socket flanges. When the first attempt at pouring the base went sideways, Ng encouraged them to try again rather than spend time trying to correct it. Within one day, they were able to remake the formwork and recast, given their previous experience through trial and error. That extra effort paid off; the column stood strong in the middle of the review space, surrounded by their classmates’ experiments.

At the final review, Lam and Masternak were praised for both pushing boundaries and their thoughtful documentation. Among the admirers was Joseph Choma, professor of architecture and director of the Foldable Structures & Materials Lab at Florida Atlantic University, whose work had influenced the team.

Designing the Workflow

Beyond the studio, Ellis is eager to bring a fabrication perspective to her passion for computational and equitable design after graduation. 

“It’s interesting to understand the process behind it, and it helps me with detail work, specifically understanding tolerances, offsets, the type of material that’s needed, and the durability of materials in the process of building,” she says. “I think that’s going to benefit all of us in the field.”

After all the iterations and hiccups along the way, Lam says he and his classmates have learned what it takes to not only design their individual projects but also the process of getting from start to finish.

“It’s the workflow we’re designing: everything that goes into making the thing that we’re making,” Lam says. “It’s not just a physical, tangible thing. It’s also this mindset and instruction handbook to pass on.”

— Eric Gallippo

B.S. Urban Tech students explore urban systems for a historic Detroit hub in Strategic Design Studio

Upstairs in the East Wing of Taubman College, tucked in a back section by expansive bay windows, you’ll often find a group of students debating, collaborating, and designing. The Urban Technology studio brings students together in a setting that mirrors the pace and complexity of professional design practice.

Across the Urban Technology studio sequence, students build skills in user interface design, public service design, and urban ethnography. The sequence culminates in Strategic Design and Urban Systems, a senior studio that asks students to bring those approaches together in response to complex urban questions. During the fall 2025 semester, seniors visited Detroit and developed innovative visions for the future of Eastern Market. 

Unlike past studios, where students worked on multiple projects over the course of a semester, Strategic Design assigned seniors a single, semester-long project. For Breandan Cullen, B.S. Urban Tech ’26, the new format made the work more immersive.

“The project became more interesting as it went on, and it remained engaging the whole time,” Cullen said. “It was cool to see it from start to finish and get to go from this established system in the world that’s very complex and related to a lot of different social and cultural phenomena in Detroit, and break that down into one issue and really explore that whole world in full.”

Co-taught by Bryan Boyer, faculty director of the B.S. in Urban Technology, and Wonyoung So, assistant professor of Urban Technology, the studio began with a visit to Eastern Market, where students heard from Katy Trudeau, president of Eastern Market Partnership. A few days later, they visited the market on a Saturday to conduct in-depth field research on topics such as transportation and accessibility. The Detroit site visit was a shift from previous studios, which had focused on projects closer to Ann Arbor.

“Eastern Market was really a treat to visit and design for,” said Owen Woertink, B.S. Urban Tech ’26. “Just a bustling vibrance of local histories and possible futures that inspire a growing Detroit.”

Using what they learned from their site visit, students drafted research reports on the market and were eventually grouped for the semester by topics: real estate, transportation, data commons, farming, and the social value of time. In past studios, students focused on solving a specific problem, but Boyer emphasized imagining possible futures and goals. 

B.S. Urban Tech ’26 students Cheyenne Haller, Emma Vitet, Dylan Ingui, and Trini Sernas reimagined Eastern Market as a daily community hub powered by a time-based economy.

“Our project proposes a time-banking system that activates Detroit’s abundant historic spaces and vibrant community,” Haller says. “In this economy, participation is currency. As participants contribute time and care to the city and their fellow residents, they earn access to free events and gain the trust required to host gatherings of their own in currently underutilized spaces.”

Although their proposal pushed beyond conventional assumptions and prompted discussion during the final review, Haller said it was important to get out of the group’s comfort zone.

“It was really encouraging to see all of it finally come together,” Haller says. “This studio differed from others because it forced us to push beyond the guidelines of previous studio projects. We were continually challenged to make our solutions more creative, innovative, and applicable, which allowed us to produce work that we were really proud of.”

As the final course in the studio sequence, Strategic Design offers students the opportunity to use everything they have learned in the Urban Technology program before graduating. Students said the studio also strengthened skills they expect to carry into their careers, including presenting complex ideas, responding to critique, and revising their work.

“I can take a critique and improve from it, which I realize now is a developed skill,” Cullen says. “I’m very comfortable presenting in front of people, talking to people, talking about my thought process, and being very transparent about that.” 

Haller echoes Cullen’s sentiments and emphasizes the importance of separating herself from her work.

“You are always worthy, even when your work is challenged,” she says. “In fact, the challenges at hand are present because your work is valuable enough to be improved. The critiques will only grow your character and the quality of your work.”

– Joshua Nicholson, B.S. Urban Tech ’26

Highlighted UT Strategic Design final projects can be viewed in the 2026 Student Show.

Arya Tumuluri, M.Arch ’28, first discovered her love for architecture through a college program for high school students, even though it didn’t go as originally planned. Taken during the pandemic, the Cal Poly San Luis Obispo course had to meet online, but Tumuluri still remembers the excitement of receiving materials, listening to lectures, and making models from cardboard and popsicle sticks. 

“It was basically studio as a high schooler,” she says.

Growing up in Redwood City, California, Tumuluri was always interested in spaces but wasn’t sure about architecture as a career. After earning a degree in architectural studies from Boston University, she chose Taubman College’s three-year M.Arch program to turn a creative interest into a professional path.

Tumuluri is especially interested in learning more about sustainability and affordable housing. The college’s emphasis on care, reuse, and repair, as well as its diverse faculty, helped her connect with it when deciding where to study.

“I really wanted to learn more about what architecture can do for the environment and also people in need,” she says. 

A semester abroad in Venice while at BU also shaped her thinking about cities. Traveling through Europe, she fell in love with Amsterdam’s canals, urban fabric, and biking infrastructure. The city showed her the environmental and social value of designing around people rather than cars. After graduation, she imagines working in a city like New York or Chicago, where she can meet many kinds of people and learn about the spaces they want to inhabit.

Tumuluri is the first recipient of the Gordon Ray Carrier and Robin Wilson Carrier Scholarship, established by Gordon Carrier, B.S. ’79, M.Arch ’81, who serves on the Dean’s Advisory Board, and his wife, Robin Wilson Carrier, to support architecture students.

“I’m very thankful for people like the Carriers who want to help others, especially students who are trying to figure out their lives,” she says. “It means a lot to receive help from those who want to give back.”

The scholarship allows her to focus on learning and pursuing her passion for sustainable, affordable design “free of financial worry.”

“I’m really grateful for this opportunity and that I’m able to showcase what I can do here,” she says.

Sidewalk Labs co-founder, former Michigan Central CEO Josh Sirefman, M.U.P. ’03, on managing complexity, building community, and delivering on potential

Josh Sirefman, M.U.P. ’03, has spent the last 30 years making change at scale. He has overseen major developments in multiple cities, including New York, Washington, and Chicago; co-launched an Alphabet-backed company that reshaped how people think about cities and technology; and, most recently, helped transform Detroit’s Michigan Central Station into a globally recognized innovation hub after decades of dormancy.

Sirefman was named a Taubman College Distinguished Alumnus last fall, and he remains deeply involved with the college, having served on the Urban Tech Advisory Board and the urban planning external review committee. His insights were key to launching the Urban Technology degree program — a curriculum he now experiences from a new perspective as the parent of a student — and the newly announced Master of Urban Technology.

Whether working as a planner, developer, or executive, he attributes his accomplishments to the people he’s worked with and learned from over the years and to his knack for envisioning possibilities and realizing them.

“My one true superpower is navigating the complexity that must be solved to make things meet their potential,” he says.

Detroit Crash Course

Sirefman first came to the University of Michigan from New York, in part, to follow his girlfriend at the time. Once he started his planning studies, he soon “fell hard” for nearby Detroit.

Faculty members and mentors Margaret Dewar, Robert Marans, and June Manning Thomas were instrumental in fostering his engagement with the city. Through an AmeriCorps program, Sirefman worked with nonprofit Islandview Village Development Corporation to revitalize an industrial corridor on the city’s east side while working toward his master’s. 

“That work, in some ways, was the heart and soul of the urban planning degree experience,” he says. “It was a real crash course in what it means to do community development, to do planning, to foster growth, and to do it equitably.”

It also led to a position with the Detroit Economic Development Corporation, where he designed citywide programs to retain industry and continued to work after graduation. (Although he technically earned his degree after submitting an outstanding paper in 2003, Sirefman finished his coursework in 1996). 

Extraordinary Experiences

Returning to New York, Sirefman worked with the New York City Economic Development Corporation for a few years during the Rudy Giuliani administration, where he laid the groundwork for new baseball stadiums for the Yankees and Mets. As principal at HR&A Advisors, he managed the planning of Brooklyn Bridge Park and Washington’s Anacostia Waterfront Initiative before returning to the city as COO and interim president of the NYCEDC and chief of staff to the deputy mayor of economic development under Mayor Michael Bloomberg. There, he oversaw a dozen city agencies focused on planning, development, housing, small business, and economic growth, and led large, complex initiatives with major impact across New York City. He served as a point person for developing the World Trade Center after 9/11, brought Brooklyn Bridge Park plans to fruition, and led the deal to acquire Governors Island from the federal government.

“It was incredibly challenging, but also an extraordinary experience to learn so much from so many amazing people and to play such an active role in nearly every aspect of the city’s future, working side by side with communities,” he says.

Sirefman returned to the private sector as senior vice president of U.S. Development for Brookfield Properties before launching Sirefman Ventures in the late ‘00s.

“I essentially became a rented CEO, driving large-scale projects that were transformative both for places and for the entities doing them,” he says.

For the Cornell Tech applied sciences campus on New York’s Roosevelt Island, he helped develop a talent anchor in the city focused on tech-oriented, postgraduate education and entrepreneurship. In Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood, he helped build a vibrant commercial district and community near the University of Chicago.

A New Approach to Cities and Tech

In 2015, Sirefman teamed up with his former boss at City Hall, Dan Doctoroff, to form Sidewalk Labs, a subsidiary of Google’s parent company created to produce tech-driven urban solutions. There, Sirefman led efforts to develop new tools and services that used data and smart technologies to address construction, mobility, energy usage, and more. 

“We were at the forefront of the collision of tech and city shaping, laying the groundwork for so much happening now in cities,” he says.

Plans for a modular, sustainable “smart neighborhood” in Toronto generated excitement, as well as debate about potential data collection and privacy. However, the project eventually stalled due to uncertainty around the COVID-19 pandemic.

Sidewalk Labs was folded into Google in 2021, but its influence is still felt. At Taubman College, the first-of-its-kind Bachelor of Science in Urban Technology program was developed by associate professor Bryan Boyer, a former Sidewalk Labs consultant, with input from Sirefman and others in the emerging field. The program is now in its sixth year, and a one-year Master of Urban Technology will launch in 2027.

“It’s one of the most exciting things happening across the university,” Sirefman says. “My strong hunch is that it will increasingly become a model for adapting what it means to prepare university students for the world.”

A Perfect Opportunity

Sirefman was ready for a break in 2022, when Ford Motor Co. approached him about leading its Michigan Central innovation hub in Detroit. The automaker purchased the historic, abandoned train station and adjacent properties in 2018 with plans to convert it.

“Driving that rebirth and creating a talent magnet for innovation while also creating a place that could be a meaningful part of people’s lives again made it the perfect opportunity,” he says.

Since reopening in 2024, the 30-acre campus has become home to nearly 250 businesses and more than 2,000 workers representing startups, Fortune 500 companies, and artists, as well as retail and hospitality spaces. Reactivating the long-abandoned space was personal for Sirefman.

“It’s an anchor for driving economic growth and transformation in Detroit that should carry forth in perpetuity and that, for me, is deeply rooted,” he says.

Last fall, Sirefman stepped down as CEO. He’s not sure what’s next, but he intends to continue making an impact, whether serving on nonprofit boards, driving transformative projects, or exploring new approaches to technology and financing in a slow-adapting built environment.

“I think a lot about a different model of large-scale city-building,” he says. “I don’t know yet where I go with that, but these are the kinds of things I think about.”

— Eric Gallippo

Christopher Locke, M.Arch ’16, advances spatial justice through architecture

After graduating from Taubman College, Christopher Locke, M.Arch ’16, sold his car, packed his things, and bought a one-way ticket to Los Angeles. There, he hosted a workshop, “Designing in Color: Disrupting Proceedings,” at the National Organization of Minority Architects’ (NOMA) annual conference, which challenged how architecture is taught and practiced and explored how design could confront racism, exclusion, and power in the built environment.

That experience led him to co-found Designing in Color (DCo), a collective of designers working in L.A. and other U.S. cities to build community, amplify marginalized voices, and challenge systems that have excluded Black and Brown communities from architectural education and practice. At the same time, Locke was launching his own architecture career, which, over the next eight years, included work with ZGF Architects, Egan Simon Architecture, and Steinberg Hart.

In 2024, Locke left his day job to work full-time as CEO of DCo after securing multiple projects through community organizing, architecture, and advocacy. A year later, he launched Collective UNBound, a new group of designers and organizers equally rooted in community activism and racial justice with an extended reach into planning and development.

“For us, it’s not enough just to design buildings,” he says. “I like to think of it also as visioning and organizing to support communities in the civic and equity infrastructure needed to build justice in the environment.”

Last fall, Locke was awarded Taubman College’s Outstanding Recent Graduate Award.

Early Vision

Locke first discovered architecture through CAD classes and the ACE Mentor Program of America while attending high school in Bloomfield, Connecticut, just outside his hometown of Hartford. Between his junior and senior years, he completed an unpaid internship, making models and “playing around” with an early version of Revit.

While earning his B.F.A., Locke became only the second student from the University of Massachusetts Amherst to study abroad in Dubai, an early example of his drive to find new challenges and blaze new trails.

“If I’m not going to have to go above and beyond, it might not interest me,” he says. “I’m a person who’s very much about visioning things and trying challenging things, but also doing things that other people haven’t done before.”

Locke continued to push himself and seek out new experiences, cultures, and architecture as a student at Taubman College. He was involved in the ARC and NOMAS student organizations, served as a Venice Biennale fellow in Italy, and studied with Robert Adams in China and Mitch McEwen in Brazil. He fondly recalls his relationship with Adams, who oversaw the pre-thesis work that encouraged him to explore his identity and put him on the trajectory he’s on now.

After a difficult thesis experience — one he later connected to broader questions of race, pedagogy, and exclusion in a 2020 Portico essay — another professor, Sean Vance, encouraged him to attend the NOMA conference in L.A. and speak about his experiences.

A Mission to Change Architecture

At ZGF Architects, Locke contributed to design concepts and construction plans for a 150,000-square-foot services building at Cal State Los Angeles, as well as the firm’s own office improvement project. He also led workplace diversity programming and an initiative to introduce students of color to architecture through job shadowing. 

At the same time, DCo began to grow from a series of conversations into a platform for impact. The group hosted workshops at conferences and universities and engaged with communities through partnerships with organizations like CicLAvia. By 2019, DCo was recognized as an honoree of the AIA Diversity Recognition Program.

“It wasn’t meant to be a business,” Locke says. “It was about a mission of changing the way architecture is taught and changing the way we produce things, especially for students in academia.”

When George Floyd was murdered in 2020, DCo created a new program exploring racial justice, racialized space, and design justice. Designing with Action partnered with AIA National and smaller firms around the country. The organization also began partnering with larger firms in L.A. to launch projects in underrepresented communities, including the Watts Community Center, a new strategic plan for West Hollywood, and design justice criteria for new community development in Expo Park.

Boundless Opportunities

Those projects gave Locke the experience needed for his latest venture, Collective UNBound SPC (Social Purpose Corporation), a new group of collaborators focused on creating space for Black and Brown people to thrive. The group provides services including design and architecture, pre-development, planning and visioning, design justice education, and design equity consulting.

UNB brings both a for-profit social purpose and a nonprofit approach to its work, with a wise council of industry and community experts to “forge new paths and learn from our ancestors on how to build a just society for everyone.” 

“Collective UNBound designs boundless opportunities for communities to flourish, free from the legacies of exclusion and colonial harm,” Locke says. “We envision a future where extractive models of architecture and design are replaced by a liberated, justice-driven practice that transforms environments and empowers communities.”

The group’s current projects include leading the formation of a Black Cultural District in West Altadena, California, and reparative community organizing and design for a visitor center in Allensworth, one of California’s most prominent and historic Black townships. The team is also designing a community workplace for the Arming Minorities Against Addiction & Disease Institute, a Black and queer-led organization providing social services in Watts.

Last year, the team was one of 38 firms selected from 353 submissions for UCLA’s Small Lots Big Impact competition, and is actively pursuing opportunities to build their housing model alongside community-centered developers in L.A. Most recently, the team was selected as lead consultant for the African American Historic Places initiative, developing neighborhood preservation strategies in three of L.A.’s most prominent Black communities.

Building Sustainable Systems

UNB is also launching Root Ready Rise Collaboratory, a program centered on design equity and building a solidarity economy for community organizers and design professionals, and the Futures UNBound Network (FUN), a nonprofit that incubates and supports community-led efforts in neighborhoods facing displacement, disaster, and erasure, and looking to celebrate their cultural heritage.

“We have to find ways to not only do our work in a self-determined approach, in which we’re working with communities from the ground up, but also build systems that are sustainable to make long-lasting change,” Locke says.

In a world of expanding AI tools and growing community needs, Locke believes a people-centered, justice-centered approach will keep design and architecture professionals essential, and that a pipeline of emerging practitioners must be nurtured to keep the industry viable, diverse, and ready to support communities.

— Eric Gallippo

Deborah Moelis, FAIA, B.S. Arch ’90, principal at Handel Architects, and Christina Barber, B.S. Arch ’27, discuss Moelis’ journey in architecture and Passive House construction.

Through Fresh Graphics, Julia McMorrough is helping future architects rethink accessibility and inclusion in the built environment

Growing up with a disabled sister with complex access needs, Julia McMorrough learned at an early age about the challenges disabled individuals can face in going about their daily lives. However, because her family simply did what was necessary to help her sister move through the world, she was well into her 15-year career as a practicing architect before she realized the important connection between architecture and access.

“As an architect, I was slow to recognize that the built environment should be doing more to design accessible spaces that are enabling, rather than disabling, for everyone,” says McMorrough, associate professor of architecture at Taubman College and co-founder of studioAPT, an Ann Arbor-based research and design collaborative. 

“Looking back at the years I worked at professional architectural firms in the Midwest and on the East Coast, I now realize how often designing for accessibility was treated more as an afterthought than an objective, even though it is required by law,” she remarks. The Americans with Disabilities Act became law in 1990. 

In 2025, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that more than one in four adults in the United States has some type of disability. For many of these individuals, barriers often amount to just a few inches. Navigating stairs, steps, and steep slopes can be challenging. Doorways are often too narrow for wheelchairs and other mobility devices, while countertops, cabinets, and closet shelves may be too high to reach.

After McMorrough left full-time professional practice to join the faculty at Taubman College in 2011, she made a conscious decision to embrace accessible design thinking and integrate it into her studios, seminars, and courses.

“I realized students had difficulty understanding the concept of designing for accessibility and disability, because, historically, it has not been prioritized as part of a general architectural education,” McMorrough explains. “In my teaching, I am fortunate to have a platform to reach students early in their training and to ingrain this concept into their thinking.”

McMorrough’s ARCH500 seminar, Fresh Graphics, breaks the concept of designing for accessibility into bite-sized pieces for students. Launched in 2013, the class prioritizes graphic communication to demystify big concepts. In its current focus on accessible design, it connects students with the disability community and provides the tools and opportunities to disseminate information about accessible design to a broader audience.

“The goal of the class is to help students utilize their visualization skills to communicate ideas that may be difficult for other people to understand,” McMorrough says, noting that professional architects often need similar skills to impart their design ideas and rationale to their clients. 

In the seminar, students hone their “inclusive-communication” abilities by creating graphic designs for print and digital media that convey easy-to-understand messaging about different accessibility topics ― such as the need to include the voices of people with disabilities in design culture and how changes to the built environment can foster greater independence and freedom.

In 2025, a U-M Arts Initiative grant enabled McMorrough to compensate disabled individuals from a local nonprofit advocacy group, Disability Network Washtenaw Monroe Livingston, who agreed to collaborate directly with the Fresh Graphics class. During in-person meetings, network members (“knower-users”) talked about their personal stories and insights on living with a disability, the advocacy work they do, and the need for more accessible places and spaces.   

For their class project, students created, produced, and distributed a print magazine, Approachable, Too, which visually retold these personal stories in a compelling, approachable way through graphic illustrations.

Makenna Karst, M.Arch ’25, says her interest in the intersection of disability, architecture, and graphic communication prompted her to take the Fresh Graphics class in the winter 2025 semester.

“I was motivated to better understand perspectives beyond my own and share the lived experiences of those who are so often overlooked in the design process,” she explains. “Speaking directly to individuals in the disability community and translating their daily experiences into the Approachable, Too magazine made the work in this class feel personal, and, in turn, deeply meaningful.”

Karst and her classmates learned how choices about color, layout, and text can affect who is able to access and engage with their work. The class also reinforced Karst’s belief in participatory architecture and the importance of designing with people rather than for them.

“Accessible design has become central to my design process rather than an afterthought,” Karst says. “I plan to apply what I’ve learned to continue advocating for more-inclusive solutions throughout my future career.”

During the winter 2026 term, students developed print advertisements, short films, and a standalone exhibit to raise awareness of accessibility issues among their peers and to share ideas for incorporating accessibility into architectural design thinking.

With funding from a U-M ADVANCE SUCCEED grant, McMorrough is also currently writing a comprehensive new book on inclusive design that will serve as a resource for students anywhere at any time.

“This all centers on raising students’ consciousness about disability and accessible design and then empowering them to share what they’ve learned with others,” she says.

— Claudia Capos

Taubman College faculty and regional partners advance nature-based solutions to reduce flood risk and bolster biodiversity

Across Southeast Michigan, more frequent and severe rainstorms are overwhelming aging combined sewer systems, while the loss of wetlands and other natural features has reduced the landscape’s ability to absorb floodwaters.

For decades, efforts by local communities to address the growing risks associated with flooding have been hampered by a lack of regional coordination; the legacy of a massive, outdated combined sewer system; and insufficient funding to maintain operations. New solutions — and coordinated action — are needed.

Over the past two years, Taubman College faculty members Kathy Velikov, María Arquero de Alarcón, and Geoffrey Thün have collaborated with public, private, and academic partners to advance large-scale, nature-based solutions and visualize how they could mitigate urban flooding and protect biodiversity in the region.

Nature-based solutions (NbS), such as wetlands, rain gardens, re-naturalized streams, and bioretention ponds, use natural processes and biological systems to help cities manage stormwater, adapt to climate change, and build resilience. These approaches can reduce flood risk, improve water quality, reduce pollution, increase biodiversity, restore ecosystems, and support health and well-being.

“Urban flooding is a complex problem,” says Velikov, FAIA, professor of architecture, and co-principal investigator on the project. “Devising novel approaches to large-scale, nature-based solutions in our region requires transdisciplinary collaborations to integrate innovative governance, sustainable finance tools, and public awareness of the related socioecological and economic benefits that attend these solutions.” 

Supported by the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation’s (NFWF) National Coastal Resilience Fund, the project included faculty from U-M, Michigan State University, and Wayne State University’s Healthy Urban Waters Program, as well as environmental engineers from LimnoTech Inc. Engaging with local and regional government, environmental nonprofits, and community groups was also essential to the project.

Making the Data Accessible

“One of the benefits that architects, urban designers, and planners bring to teams is the ability to integrate knowledge across domains,” explains Velikov, who is also associate dean for research and creative practice at Taubman College. “We can bring together a wide range of design methods and visualization techniques to translate complex scientific datasets and make them accessible to broad audiences.”

Arquero de Alarcón explains that the project advances three interrelated components to steward regional climate resilience: 1) infrastructure design that integrates natural processes to aid the combined sewer system’s performance; 2) multi-jurisdictional strategies for siting, financing, and management of large-scale NbS; and 3) biodiversity conservation to rebuild ecosystem health.

Paving the Way 

The study focuses on three watersheds ― the Clinton, Detroit, and Rouge rivers ― within the Great Lakes Water Authority’s service area and across Macomb, Wayne, and Oakland counties. The Taubman College research team co-created tools, frameworks, and workflow processes that integrated the broader team’s range of expertise, spanning engineering, finance, and ecosystem health. 

Project contributions include:

• Organizing and facilitating partner advisory workshops that engaged stakeholders from 36 organizations across Southeast Michigan. Participants included watershed and municipal leaders, community organizations, environmental managers, drain commissioners, and fish and wildlife conservation groups. 
• Creating an online geographic information system (GIS) interface and thematic maps that display multiple data layers needed to assess the siting of NbS to mitigate stormwater flooding and biodiversity loss.
• Developing project materials to support communication with stakeholders, including card sets featuring relevant precedents across the U.S., wildlife habitats, and NbS typologies. These card sets help community partners and constituents visualize which large-scale, nature-based solutions would be most appropriate, manageable, and beneficial, and consider next steps for implementation.
• Exploring new finance and governance models to support future NbS planning and development in communities affected by stormwater flooding across the region.

Lessons Learned from Partner Engagement

Taubman College research associate Ehsan Alam, M.U.D. ’24, says the project has been a valuable platform for applying knowledge and skills he began to develop in graduate school. He also saw firsthand the complexities of applying research methods and theoretical frameworks in real-world projects.

“As urban designers, we are comfortable looking at a GIS map with 50 interactive layers,” Alam says. “However, community partners told us the maps were too complex to understand, so we had to adjust them to make them legible for different stakeholders.”

Alam says this “reality check” is something he intends to take with him as he advances his design research career.

Continuing Efforts to Drive Change

The commitment to co-design solutions for climate resilience will continue with new funding from a grant secured through Research Universities for Michigan (RU4M). As part of the Livable Futures – Water Collaboration initiative, the RU4M grant, “Rewilding Urban Waters: Scaling-up Nature-based Solutions through Sustainable Operations and Management Regimes,” will extend this research to create enduring societal benefits. 

The team from U-M, MSU, and WSU is partnering with regional organizations and governmental agencies to explore practical pathways for improving the operations and maintenance of nature-based solutions and adapting those models for use in other communities. 

“This type of research project — engaging pan-sector partnerships with a range of external entities — is precisely the model that is likely to create strong connections between our research enterprise and impact that benefits the communities we serve,” says Thün, who also serves as Associate Vice President for Research: Social Sciences, Humanities and the Arts at U-M.

“Water is a fascinating matter that reveals much about our cultural and environmental values and our societal priorities,” says Arquero de Alarcón, who will serve as principal investigator on the RU4M project. “These projects are unique opportunities for academia to join ongoing community efforts to steward this incredible resource right here, in the heart of the Great Lakes.”

— Claudia Capos

Main Image: Fish and Wildlife Habitat Planning Cards foreground ecological considerations for priority species in NbS design.

Kristen Padavic, B.S. Arch ’98, director of design at Cedar, and Tyler Spitzer-Wu, B.S. Urban Tech ’27, discuss Padavic’s career and how Spitzer-Wu’s background in both architecture and coding made him an ideal candidate to intern at Cedar.

Three urban technology students traveled to Italy in April to present their work at Milan Design Week. B.S. Urban Tech ’27 students Jack Bernard, Pranav Boopalam, and Elijah Stowell showcased their project “Community Energy Futures” at UNFOLD, a student design competition hosted at BASE Milano. They also presented their project to an international group of designers, professors, and fellow students during the day-long conference on April 23.

Project submissions were evaluated by Domus Academy, a globally recognized design school. Student designers were encouraged to move beyond buzzwords and embrace the generative potential of friction as part of this year’s theme, “Engage: Friction.” Twenty design schools from around the world participated in this year’s UNFOLD exhibition, with one project from each school accepted through a competitive review.

“Community Energy Futures” uses Interaction Design and UX/UI methods to present multiple, sometimes competing, scenarios enabled by renewable energy microgrid systems. Inspired and directly informed by the city of Ann Arbor’s pursuit of a Sustainable Energy Utility (SEU), the project focuses on unanswered questions about the “social” side of this proposed socio-technical system. Ann Arbor’s SEU envisions a community-funded, opt-in network of 100% renewable energy resources, such as solar, wind, and battery storage systems.

“I found inspiration in seeing the large variety of global design perspectives, and gaining better visibility into how other parts of the world approach design challenges and what factors shape their outputs,” Bernard said. “This international context helped me develop a stronger individual positionality as a designer, student, and global citizen.” 

Although the project was initially a UI/UX proposal, exhibiting the work required a physical prototype. With support from the Taubman College SEED Fund, M.Arch ’27 students Shaguun Patel and Naman Desai joined the team to help create physical representations of the scenarios presented in their project.

“The collaboration really challenged and bettered both sides’communication skills to be able to find a common language and to trust the other’s decision-making in their expertise,” Stowell said.

For more on Jack, Pranav, and Elijah’s journey to Milan, including photos from their trip, visit the Urban Technology at the University of Michigan substack.

Taubman College conferred degrees on more than 250 graduate and undergraduate students over the weekend of May 3 and presented awards for excellence to students and faculty. The event took place at the University of Michigan’s Hill Auditorium.

Graduating students join the college’s global alumni network, which is more than 10,000 strong.

Here’s a list of the awards:

Doctoral Studies

• Distinguished Dissertation Award in Urban & Regional Planning: Meixin Yuan
• Doctoral Student Award in Urban Planning: Morgan Fett

Master of Urban and Regional Planning

• Academic Achievement Award: Nate Fisher and Bridget Damon
• APA Outstanding Student Award: Irene Nguyen
• Eric Dueweke Service to the Community Award: Jade Prange
• Service to Taubman College and the Urban and Regional Planning Program: Makenna Litteral

Master of Architecture 

• AIA Medal for Academic Excellence: Ravi Kumar
• Alpha Rho Chi Bronze Medal: Talia Morison-Allen
• ARCC King Student Medal: Riley Montgomery
• Architecture Program Distinction Award: Ngoc Minh Dang
• Thesis Award of Excellence for Representation/New Media: Roman Marra
• Thesis Award of Excellence for Materials, Tectonics, & Construction: Felix Lam & Andrew Masternak
• Thesis Award of Excellence for History & Theory: Brianna Manzor
• Thesis Award of Excellence for Sustainability/Environmental Stewardship: Jordan Lindberg
• Thesis Award of Excellence for Storytelling: Jacob Brookhouse
• Thesis Award of Excellence for Social Impact: Jack Smith
• 2025-26 Thesis Class Choice Award: Jordan Lindberg
• The Burton L. Kampner Award for Best Thesis: Brianna Manzor

Bachelor of Science in Architecture 

• Architecture Program Distinction Award: Fatema Almoamen
• Raoul Wallenberg Competition Awards: Misk Aldulaimy, Fatema Almoamen, Constanza Capriles, Emma High, Taylor Horsfall, Gulshat Roziali, John Watha

Bachelor of Science in Urban Technology 

• Urban Technology Award for Academic Excellence: Ethan Casler

Faculty Awards – Donna M. Salzer Award for Teaching Excellence

• B.S. Arch: Zain AbuSeir
• M.Arch: Julia McMorrough
• M.U.R.P.: Larissa Larsen
• Urban Tech: Alex Johnston

Photos from the event can be found at Taubman College’s Flickr Page. 

A team of five Master of Urban and Regional Planning students was awarded second place in the American Planning Association’s Student Planning and Design Competition in April. Jeremy Kailing, M.U.R.P. ’27, Renee Magyar, M.U.R.P. ’26, Kristin Hollenbeck, M.U.R.P. ’26, Irene Nguyen, M.U.R.P. ’26, and Alisa Sehgal, M.U.R.P. ’26, made up Team Joe Cool, which won for its small area plan of a part of Detroit’s Joe Louis Greenway. 

Now in its ninth year, the Student Planning and Design Competition allows students to contribute to real-world planning solutions. Award winners contribute to excellence in planning, promote planning education, and empower citizens. This year, the competition focused on Detroit, the APA conference’s host city. Team Joe Cool was one of three finalists from 35 entries from around the world, alongside teams from Harvard University and the Georgia Institute of Technology.

The team’s plan, titled “canopy[detroit],” proposes redeveloping parts of the Davison-Schoolcraft neighborhood. The proposal emphasizes mixed-use zoning, sustainability, and new forms of micromobility to transform the area from a former industrial hub. Rehabilitation of existing homes would provide new affordable housing, and creative financing would facilitate greater connectivity to the Joe Louis Greenway and improved community spaces.

Upali Nanda, professor of practice at Taubman College, has received a 2026 ICON Award from the International Interior Design Association. The award recognizes extraordinary service and contributions to the interior design profession.

In addition to her teaching and research, Nanda is executive vice president at global architectural firm HKS Inc., overseeing a range of innovation practices. From 2013-2023, she led the firm’s research efforts with a focus on evidence-based, culturally responsive methods. 

At Taubman College, her ARCH 509: Health By Design course emphasizes practical, actionable change through evidence-based and evidence-challenging design practices. Key topics include public health, clinical outcomes, safety, technology, and human perception, highlighting interdisciplinary approaches that support primary care in health delivery systems. The two-semester course culminates in the creation of an open-source web publication for the healthbydesign website. For the Fall 2025 semester, students explored the lived experience of diabetes, traced the decision points where individuals and families make daily health choices, and tested how design shapes these moments.

Nanda’s research is the recipient of the AIA Upjohn Grant, European Healthcare Design Research Award, and Journal of Interior Design Scholarship Excellence Award. She was also recognized with the Architectural Record’s 2018 Women in Architecture Innovator Award.

“Dr. Nanda’s research sets a powerful precedent for how design can serve as a force for health and healing,” says Cheryl S. Durst, Hon. FIIDA, executive vice president and CEO at IIDA, in a statement. “As IIDA looks toward the future of design, we are privileged to have leaders like Dr. Nanda continue to shape the industry’s innovation, empathy, and lasting human impact.”

Founded in 1994, IIDA aims to unite interior designers from diverse regions and specialties. Its Design Competitions and Awards recognize excellence in global design, celebrating innovative techniques, originality, and effective design solutions. With 11 annual and one biennial competition, IIDA honors projects across various categories, firm sizes, and regions, including student work and product design.

Dash Marshall, a New York-based architecture firm co-founded by Taubman College’s Bryan Boyer, was recently featured in the New York Times for its “Courtyard House” project in Detroit. The hybrid structure merges loft and courtyard home styles, serving as a “disconnected extension” that provides enhanced space, flexibility, and variety to the nearby primary residence of Boyer and Laura Lewis.

Boyer is an associate professor of practice in architecture at Taubman College and the founding faculty director of the Bachelor of Science in Urban Technology. Earlier this year, he was named faculty director of the University of Michigan Center for Innovation, which will open in Detroit in 2027.

In addition, Boyer operates at Dash Marshall, where he leads the strategic design practice, concentrating on how technology can enhance urban living and lifestyles. “Courtyard House” contributes to the firm’s research on enhancing residential design to address social and environmental factors.

Completed in 2024, the 1,800-square-foot house in Detroit’s Core City neighborhood is part of an emerging trend of experimental homes and development in the area. According to the Times, Boyer selected Core City for its affordable real estate and influx of new residents and businesses. Overall, the project has garnered positive responses locally.

“There’s always a question of balance,” Boyer told the Times. “We’re taking advantage of the context that we’re in, which, in this case, is a highly naturalized urban environment, without going too far.”

Read the full article on the New York Times website. (Registration or a paid subscription may be required for full access.)

Republished from The University Record article “Taubman senior learned how to experience, not just see, new spaces,” as part of “Senior Profiles: Meet five prospective graduates from Class of 2026” (April 27, 2026; by Genevieve Monsma)

As a child, Lilijana Gregov spent hours building houses in “The Sims,” a video game that enables players to design and create unique spaces.

“One time, I was showing my grandmother what I’d made, and she was like, ‘You know, this is a job people actually do in life,’” Gregov said, laughing.

That was when Gregov began to think architecture might make for an interesting career.

At her home in St. Louis, she was also picking up lessons in design from her parents. Her mother, whom Gregov describes as “the best designer I know,” would transform the interior of their house by rearranging the furniture, while her father introduced her to a maker’s sensibility through tools and model-building.

Architecture and design were, however, not Gregov’s only passions growing up. She was also a highly competitive swimmer and at one point considered pursuing Division I athletics. 

But, after a serious skateboarding accident in high school, Gregov found herself rethinking her future. While she did return to the pool and even broke her school’s record in the 50 freestyle, the experience clarified her path. 

“It was a change of mindset,” she said. “Swimming in college would’ve been incredible, but I wanted to do architecture more.”

The A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning was at the top of her list and, after getting in and receiving a financial package that made attendance feasible, she looked forward to applying the design skills she’d been informally learning since childhood.

Now a senior at Taubman, Gregov has distinguished herself in numerous ways. In addition to her major in architecture, she earned a minor in art and design from the Penny W. Stamps School of Art & Design, garnered university honors for multiple terms, and was named a James B. Angell Scholar.

Gregov also won first place for her designs in two consecutive Taubman undergraduate shows.

What she has learned at Taubman has not just shaped her as a designer, though. It’s also given her room to grow as a leader. In the spring of 2024, Gregov helped co-found ARCH1, Taubman’s first architectural competition team, which now includes about 35 undergraduate students working in teams on major international design competitions.

The team’s efforts have already produced notable results. Last fall, Gregov and two teammates earned third place in Archcontest’s “Schrodinger’s Room” competition, winning a juried award and €500, or $588, in a global contest that included professional designers.

Outside the studio, Gregov still skateboards, rides one of her three bikes around Ann Arbor, and makes time to see art whenever her schedule allows.

As graduation nears, she is applying to design firms in New York and San Francisco, and plans to attend graduate school after gaining professional experience. What she expects to miss most about U-M is the creative culture she found at Taubman and the Stamps School, the people and her peers, and the access to tools and studios and mentors like Anca Trandafirescu, associate professor of architecture, and Claudia Wigger, a lecturer IV in architecture.

“You have to learn a different language coming to school here,” she said. “You start to look at everything a bit differently.”

Republished from The University Record article “A Taubman professor’s final work of art: her students” (April 27, 2026; by Hanna Quinlan)

For 36 years, Melissa Harris has approached teaching the way an architect approaches a design: with intention, curiosity, and a deep belief in what can be built over time. 

Harris, an associate professor of architecture in the A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, teaches design and visual thinking. She plans to retire at the end of the academic year. 

Her impact extends well beyond the classroom. Harris was honored as a featured Guest of Honor to speak at Michigan Housing’s recent Honored Instructors event. 

This year, 162 U-M instructors from across 14 schools and colleges were also nominated for their meaningful impact on students living in the residence halls.

Students are given the opportunity to nominate instructors across U-M whose teaching has positively impacted their college experience.  

But the words — and actions — of sophomore Lily Paddock made Harris’ final year of teaching poignantly special.

Paddock nominated Harris for this year’s honor. After learning Harris would retire, she enrolled in every course she could during her first two years in the Taubman undergraduate program — three classes in total. 

Instructors, Harris included, do not know who nominated them until the ceremony, when they are reunited with students in real time and presented with a certificate and copy of the student’s submission. The event celebrates both instructors and students coming together. 

“I am constantly learning new things in her class. She always has stories to tell us that somehow connect back to the things we are drawing,” Paddock wrote in her submission about Harris.

“These stories stick better in my brain than any lecture I have ever listened to. She is always excited to teach her students and always willing to help extra when students need it.”

In support of U-M’s academic mission, Michigan Housing has hosted the annual event since 2018. As of 2026, nearly 900 instructors have been honored by over 1,000 students, the majority of whom are first-year students and all living on campus. 

Since 2018, Harris’s name has surfaced again and again — nominated in seven different years, sometimes by more than one student at a time. 

“Every year, we see common themes of passion for the course content, providing additional support well beyond class and office hours, and engaging lessons which deeply inspire students,” said Mary Vincent, assistant director of academic initiative in Michigan Housing and event organizer.

“This is an opportunity for students living in our residential communities to recognize the instructors they learn from who help shape their current experience at U-M and lay the foundation for their growth,” said Jasmine P. Clay, director of residence education in Michigan Housing. 

This year’s Honored Instructors event followed Harris’ retirement celebration hosted by the Taubman College. Her 92-year-old mother traveled to attend both events, seated in the front row alongside Harris’ wife and Paddock.

In the classroom, thousands of students have had a front row seat to Harris’ teachings over the course of her career. Like any great architect, Harris leaves behind more than a finished project, she leaves behind a framework. 

One that continues to shape the landscapes for students — like Lily Paddock — to go on to design, once she steps away.

Main Image: Melissa Harris, left, was nominated to be honored at Michigan Housing’s Honored Instructors event by student Lily Paddock. (Photo by Jasmine P. Clay, Michigan Housing)

Work by DESIGN EARTH, a design research practice directed by Taubman College’s El Hadi Jazairy with Rania Ghosn, is now on display at Diriyah Art Futures in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, as part of its Of the Earth exhibition, running through May 16.

Curated by Irini Papadimitriou, Of the Earth explores the complex and entangled relationships between technology and the natural world, hybrid ecologies, and extractivism, as well as our own place within the vast networks that shape our planet. Bringing together works by more than 30 artists, the exhibition examines how technology reshapes our relationship with the natural world, revealing the material, environmental, and human infrastructures behind digital systems.

DESIGN EARTH’s “The Planet After Geoengineering” portrays Earth following the deployment of five speculative technologies. Through stunning animation, the film contextualizes our ambitions for planetary control against the backdrop of historical climate-control projects.

Opened in 2024 by the Saudi Ministry of Culture, Diriyah Art Futures is the first museum in the Gulf region designed exclusively for digital art. 

Read more about Of the Earth at the Saudi Press Agency.

Taubman College student Molly Conlin, B.S. Arch. ’26, was recently awarded a scholarship by the national Alpha Rho Chi (APX) Foundation for excellence in academics and service to her community and APX chapter. Conlin is one of four recipients to receive the $3,000 John R. Ross Scholarship, awarded to members of the co-ed architecture fraternity.

The Ross scholarship is given to members of the fraternity who exemplify service to their chapter, university, and the architecture profession. Conlin served as pledge committee chair and represented APX on the student council. Through her efforts, the chapter received funding from the University of Michigan for the first time. Outside of APX, Conlin helped organize the sustainability event “Planet Party” alongside eight other students. She also volunteers as a youth basketball coach.

“Seeing such a strong turnout made me realize that my work helped make an overwhelming climate crisis feel approachable and actionable,” Conlin said of Planet Party, which brought together 25 different organizations and eight sponsors.

Conlin currently works as an architecture assistant with Dangerous Architects P.C. The scholarship will help her finish her degree and prepare for the next step in her professional journey.

“I really value the opportunities that I have been given to be an active member of many organizations where I am introduced to new perspectives, shown more opportunities and am able to make an impact,” Conlin said. “In everything I have pursued, I have put my full effort to foster a collaborative and inclusive community.”

Taubman College’s new Master of Urban Technology program was highlighted in a recent article in The Michigan Daily, which also featured interviews with future M.U.T. director Bryan Boyer and former urban technology student organization president Emma Vitet, B.S. Urban Tech. ’26.

The M.U.T. program will be offered in Fall 2027 at the new University of Michigan Center for Innovation in downtown Detroit. Boyer, who helped establish the undergraduate urban technology program, will step down from his previous role to oversee the new program.

“The people that we expect to join the program are ones that have both a passion and a realistic view of how change happens in cities,” Boyer said. “You graduate with all this optimism, and then you sit at a chair at an office somewhere and you’re like ‘I want to do the dreaming. I want to do the strategy. I want to do the cool stuff.’ And your boss is asking you to figure out how many cars pass an intersection in Livonia on a Tuesday.”

The program meets a growing demand globally. Cornell Tech, host of the annual Urban Tech Summit, currently offers a two-year, dual-degree master’s in urban technology and applied information science. Other programs, like Trinity College Dublin, offer a one-year master’s in smart and sustainable cities.  

“I don’t think a bachelor’s is super accessible for people who are already working and want to add something to their skillset,” Vitet said. “Starting a master’s in urban tech addresses that. So if professionals or planners or even architects want to branch out a little bit and are interested in UT, you can’t really do that and get another bachelor’s, but you can do it with a master’s.” 

Read the full article on The Michigan Daily website.

Main Image: Audrey Rosenberg/DAILY

Republished from The University Record article “Seven projects awarded to promote faculty and student engagement between U-M and Detroit” (April 21, 2026; by Kathleen England)

Now in its fifth year of funding, the 2026 Engage Detroit Workshops grant program has selected seven projects for awards, including a series on cost-effective home weatherizing for Detroit Land Bank Authority homebuyers, organized and led by several faculty members from Taubman College and the School of Information.

The Engage Detroit Workshop program supports small teams of University of Michigan faculty, staff, students, and community partners in organizing workshops that strengthen partnerships between U-M and Detroit.

The grant provides up to $15,000 to support workshops or speaker series that build meaningful relationships and connections around topics linking U-M faculty and staff with Detroit communities. The provosts’ offices on the Ann Arbor, Dearborn, and Flint campuses jointly support the program.

“This year, we received a record number of applications, and we’re excited to award seven projects. These proposals continue to inspire because they translate into meaningful, on-the-ground impact in Detroit,” said Morgan Yuncker, assistant vice provost for domestic engagement. “Across our three campuses, faculty, staff, and students are generating ideas with the potential to spark similar efforts in cities across the country.”

This year’s awarded projects include: 

From Compliance to Climate Resilience: Public Weatherization Workshops for Detroit Land Bank Homeowners

Description: This workshop series will support Detroit Land Bank Authority homebuyers working toward “compliance” — DLBA’s minimum livable conditions — by demonstrating best practices for cost-effective rehabilitation upgrades that improve energy performance and reduce operating costs. Hosted with the DLBA, the series will live demonstrate high-impact improvements, including air sealing, insulation, and finish upgrades, while clarifying which tasks are appropriate for DIY and which require professionals. By strengthening the path from compliance to climate resilience, the series advances equitable homeownership and collaboration between U-M and Detroit partners.

U-M faculty/staff: Adam Fure, associate professor of architecture, A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning; Scott TenBrink, lecturer III in information, School of Information; Ellie Abrons, associate professor of architecture, Taubman College; Sharon Haar, professor of architecture, Taubman College; Matthew Wizinsky, associate professor of practice in urban technology, Taubman College.

Community partners: Detroit Land Bank Authority

For more on this year’s winners, see the full story in the University Record.

(Photo by Scott C. Soderberg, Michigan Photography)