Adam Miller is a designer and teacher. Currently, Adam is the Muschenheim Fellow at University of Michigan, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. From 2019-2021 Adam was the two-time recipient of the Race & Gender in the Built Environment Fellowship at UT Austin’s School of Architecture. Adam is founder and director of Pneu-Stars, a collaborative design group that produces stage designs and installations since 2014. Pneu-Stars has design-built numerous large-scale installations for music festivals in Oakland, CA, working with clients including John Waters, Iggy Pop, Devo, and more.
Adam’s research investigates the relationship between taste, power, and identity through the lens of the queer body and queer architecture. Adam’s interests lie in renegotiating the legacies of Modern architecture and its taste culture by using queer theory, feminist theory, biopolitics, and aesthetics to develop design that takes marginalized perspectives into account.
Adam is interested in the reflexive interaction between how the built environment shapes our visions of ourselves, and how through design we engender the environment with our own identities and value systems. Adam posits that if architecture has performative and semiotic power, then it can act as a lens through which to encounter who we have become, to trace our maps, or change trajectory.
Adam asks: How does architectural style confer an aesthetic value system, and how can we come to recognize and reappropriate its tools for proposing alternative ways of seeing, making, and ultimately identification? If the prevailing conception of beauty is not a reflection of how we see ourselves, whose beauty is it?
Adam holds an M.Arch from UC Berkeley, and B.A.’s from Cornell University. Adam taught architecture studios and theory at UC Berkeley and UT Austin, and has been an invited critic at UC Berkeley, CCA, San Jose State, UT Austin, Texas A&M U, U of Cincinnati, and other institutions. As part of Adam’s research, Adam conceptualized and co-edited a 345-page collected volume of original essays, interviews, and visual work for UC Berkeley’s architecture journal, Room One Thousand, Issue 5, interrogating the subject of the “Timeless” in architecture.