Julia McMorrough

Julia McMorrough is a registered architect and associate professor in architecture at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, where she teaches architectural design and representations courses. She has more than 15 years of experience in professional practice in architecture firms in Kansas City, New York, Boston, and Columbus, Ohio, where she was lead designer on a wide range of project types throughout the country, including libraries, academic buildings, and housing. She is the co-founder of studioAPT (with John McMorrough), a research and design collaborative that seeks to join the expeditious with the unexpected, through such projects as “All Access House,” “Measures of Access,” “Platform for Architecture,” “Makin’ It” (a situation comedy about architecture), “Habitat Shift,” and the “400:1 House.”

With a research agenda that focuses on accessibility, design for disability, and communication of ameliorative architectural ideas to expanded audiences, McMorrough was primary investigator on the Research on the City projects, “Re:Tool-Kit for Detroit” and “The Second City: Chicago’s Funny Urbanism.” She is the author of Materials, Structures, and Standards: All the Details Architects Need to Know But Can Never Find (Rockport Publishers, 2006), with a second edition titled Architecture: Reference and Specification (Rockport Publishers, 2013; third edition, 2018). More recently, she authored Drawing for Architects (Quarto Publishing, 2015).

McMorrough holds a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Kansas and a Master of Science in advanced architectural design from Columbia University. She studied for one year at Technical University Dortmund in Germany, and received the 1998 Rotch Traveling Scholarship from the Boston Society of Architects.