Taubman College welcomes new faculty and fellows for 2026-2027
Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning welcomes two faculty members and two fellows for the 2026-2027 academic year. Bringing expertise in architectural history, real estate development, community resilience, and environmental technology, the new cohort will expand Taubman College’s teaching, research, and creative practice.
New Faculty
Alexander Bala, Lecturer in Architecture
Alexander Bala, Ph.D., is an architectural historian and theorist whose research focuses on 20th-century architectural and artistic avant-gardes and neo-avant-gardes in Central and Eastern Europe and the United States during the interwar and postwar periods.
Bala has served as a Fulbright research fellow in Warsaw and as a Visegrád research fellow at Central European University’s Vera and Donald Blinken Open Society Archives in Budapest. During the 2024-25 academic year, he served as an American Councils Title VIII research fellow in Warsaw. His writing has appeared in volumes published by Routledge, as well as in journals and online publications including Fabrications, the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Architektúra & urbanizmus, Places, and Drawing Matter.
He holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Virginia Tech, and master’s and doctoral degrees in architectural history from the University of Texas at Austin.
Gabriel Schuchman, Adjunct Practice Instructor
Gabriel Schuchman is the chief executive officer of Alrig USA Development in Bingham Farms, Michigan, and a principal at Mid-America Michigan. He oversees site selection, construction, and development for more than 60 new projects annually and has overseen 500 projects during his career. His company specializes in construction and land development, with an emphasis on car washes, retail properties, and medical properties. He also oversees leasing and acquisitions for a 2 million-square-foot portfolio of medical, office, and retail properties.
Schuchman has served in his current roles at Alrig USA Development and Mid-America Michigan for 15 years. He has also served as president of the board of Hillel Day School of Metropolitan Detroit.
He holds a bachelor’s degree in business from the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business.
New Fellows
Justin Brazier, Taubman Fellow
Justin Brazier’s research investigates architectural practice and pedagogy through an expanded definition of community resilience, working at the intersection of climate, culture, and spatial politics. His work is grounded in the conviction that architecture is a civic and cultural discipline operating among material systems, social histories, and collective futures.
Brazier is co-founder and principal of AGONY, the Architecture Group of New York, a collective whose work spans urban agriculture, affordable housing, and cultural space. The collective’s work was included in MIT Architecture’s “The Next Earth: Computation, Crisis, Cosmology” at the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale. His work has been featured in MIT News and designboom. He has taught at the MIT School of Architecture and Planning and served as an adjunct faculty member in the School of Architecture at Northeastern University’s College of Arts, Media and Design.
He holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Architectural Design from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, where he received the Academic and Community Leadership Award, and a Master of Architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Stephanie Rae Lloyd, Barnett Fellow in Environmental Technology
Stephanie Rae Lloyd’s creative practice, Public__Matter, explores how architecture can respond to infrastructural decline, climate vulnerability, and aging buildings through experimental civic and material assemblies. Her current project, “Support Structures,” examines support as both a tectonic practice that sustains aging or obsolete infrastructure and a civic practice that provides publicly accessible social services.
Lloyd’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale and the 2025 Lisbon Architecture Triennale. She has taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, the Architectural Association in London, and the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Lloyd was named the 2023 Boston Society for Architecture Rotch Scholar and has worked as a designer and researcher in London, Boston, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.
She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture, with high honors, from the University of California, Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design, where she received the Eisner Prize for Architecture. She also holds a Master of Architecture, with distinction, from the Harvard Graduate School of Design.
