Faculty Directory

Kathy Velikov is Assistant Professor of Architecture at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan where she teaches design studio and courses in ecology and technology. She is a licensed architect and a partner in the research-based practice RVTR, which serves as a platform for exploration and experimentation in the agency of architecture and urban design within the context of dynamic ecological systems, infrastructures, technologically mediated environments and emerging social organizations. The highly collaborative research and work ranges in scale from that of the regional territory and the city, to high performance buildings, to full-scale installation-based works that explore responsive and kinetic envelopes that mediate energy, atmosphere and social space. These operational scales are tied together through a methodology that entails an ecological approach; one that assembles around each project a multiplicity of agents, forces and contexts and actively uses these multivalent and sometimes contradictory agents to drive new potentials for the work.

Kathy's work has been highly awarded and published widely. Awards include a 2012 ACSA Faculty Design Award, a Royal Architectural Institute of Canada Award of Excellence for Innovation in The Practice of Architecture (2011), a Special Jury Prize from EcoStructure Magazine (2011), an R&D Award from Architecture Magazine (2010), a Young Architects Forum Award from the Architecture League of New York (2008) and a Canadian Architect Award of Excellence (2005). In 2009, Kathy and RVTR partners Geoffrey Thün and Colin Ripley were recipients of the Professional Prix de Rome in Architecture from the Canada Council for the Arts, and they used the travel award to explore sustainable communities in the circumpolar regions of Europe, as well as mass-custom zero energy housing manufacturing in Japan. Critical writing and projects have been published in [bracket] Goes Soft, MONU, New Geographies Journal, Journal of Architectural Education, in books by MIT Press, Princeton Architectural Press and Jovis Verlag and with forthcoming chapters in a Routledge publication on High Performance Homes and a Taylor and Francis book on Sustainable Energy Landscapes.

Registered Architect: Ontario, RAIC, LEED