Booth Fellowship recipients Taylor Korslin and Charles Weak to study repurposed urban infrastructure, rural initiatives across Europe

This year’s George G. Booth Traveling Fellowship recipients will investigate how cities and villages across Europe are adapting, whether through repurposed urban infrastructure or strategically resourced rural zones.

Taylor Korslin, M.Arch ’19, and Charles Weak, M.Arch ’18, are the recipients of the 2025 Fellowship, which began in 1924 and provides recent Taubman College graduates with a $13,000 stipend toward architectural research that requires international travel.

Korslin’s project, “Urban Transformations: Repurposing Infrastructure Sites for Neighborhoods,” will explore recent land-use transformations across Europe to reimagine how the built environment could change over time in the United States. He will visit sites in London, Copenhagen, Hamburg, Utrecht, Venice, Barcelona, Madrid, and Bilbao to immersively examine how each has been integrated into the city to address distinct challenges, from a ‘90s port transformation to more current projects to redevelop a power station and remove an elevated highway.

“Each site is master planned to address unique characteristics and challenges, including environmental adaptations and resilience, sustainability, adaptive reuse, historic character, public space and parks, community and public health, housing (demand, affordability, displacement, gentrification, inclusivity), mobility (walkability, multimodal, transit, car infrastructure), and city identity (cultural landmarks, tourism),” notes Korslin in his abstract. “Each site is thoughtfully designed with respect to the built context and city-life in which they are embedded within.”

The Alumni Council Committee, which selected the fellowship winners, praised Korslin’s holistic approach to research, rooted in Jane Jacobs’ urban ecology framework. They noted that the Taubman College community will benefit from the in-depth study of these diverse locations as “examples that we can relate to where we all live and practice.”

For his “Smart Rural Futures: Mapping Successful Resiliency Strategies In Rural Europe” project, Weak will spend close to two months documenting a dozen small towns in Austria, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, and Sweden to examine the successes and failures of the European Union’s Smart Villages program.

“European rural zones suffer from the same problems that pervade rural areas in America: depopulation, lack of essential services and economic opportunities, energy crisis, and lack of connectivity,” notes Weak in his abstract. “However, the European Union has organized initiatives at an international level to combat the death of small villages across Europe.”

Notable sites include a carbon-neutral island of 22 small villages working toward independence from fossil fuels, a town of less than 1,000 residents that boasts nearly 300,000 tourists, and a Swedish town of 115 looking to expand to 300 in the next decade with help from local resource sharing and regional tourism.

The Alumni Council applauded Weak’s interest in architectural opportunity in often overlooked communities as compelling and his effort as especially significant to the Taubman College community, given Ann Arbor’s proximity to Midwestern rural areas. 

Korslin is a project architect with Deep River Partners in Milwaukee, where he is also actively involved in the community as a board member of the Downtown Neighbors Association and a volunteer with the Rethink 794 initiative to transform an underutilized freeway, his renderings for which have been featured in many local and national publications.

Weak is a project coordinator with BVH Architecture in Omaha, Nebraska. Previously, he was an architectural designer with ZGF Architects in New York and adjunct professor at New Jersey Institute of Technology. He is also a contributor to Architects Newspaper, New York Review of Architecture, and Untapped.

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; however, in 2025, two awards were given, as a result of not having awarded the Booth Fellowship during 2021. Congratulations to Taylor Korslin, M.Arch ’19, and Charles Weak, M.Arch ’18.