Antje Steinmuller

Antje Steinmuller is chair of architecture and professor at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. She is an architectural designer and urbanist recognized for her research on alternative – and more collective – forms of housing.

Prior to joining Taubman College in 2024, Steinmuller was the chair of undergraduate architecture at California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco where she co-directed the Urban Works Agency, CCA’s urbanism research lab. She is also a co-founder of ideal X, a collaborative practice focused on the intersections between public/urban space activation, urban research, public art design, art, and architecture.

In her work and teaching, Steinmuller explores the role of designers at the intersection of citizen-led and city-regulated processes in the production of urban space. Her current research investigates new typologies of urban commons, new forms of collective living, and the agency of architecture vis-a-vis the current housing crisis. Together with Neeraj Bhatia, she is the author of “Learning from Collective Living: An Overview of How We Live Together”, a policy white paper that was instrumental in changing San Francisco’s Group Housing legislation in 2022. Steinmuller’s recent publications include book chapters in Fabric[ated], Everyday Streets – Inclusive approaches to understanding and designing streets, and AD: Housing as Intervention, as well as articles in Disc Journal and Places. She is the recipient of the ACSA Creative Achievement Award (2023), the ACSA Housing Design Education Award (2018), and other honors. Her work has been exhibited at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, SPUR Urban Center, and the Venice Biennale of Architecture.

Steinmuller holds a Master of Architecture degree from University of California, Berkeley, where she was a John K. Branner Fellow, an undergraduate degree in Architecture from Technische Universität Berlin, and a Diploma in Interior Architecture from Hochschule für Technik Stuttgart, Germany.