Taubman College launches timely Climate Futures platform with architecture Professor Jen Maigret at the helm.

In many ways, the seeds of Taubman College’s new Climate Futures platform were sown about five years ago when the University of Michigan established the President’s Commission on Carbon Neutrality just as new threads of sustainability research were taking
root in the college.

Architecture Professor Jen Maigret, M.S. ’96, M.Arch ’04, would co-lead the commission’s interdisciplinary task force on building standards, along with fellow Taubman College faculty member Lars Junghans. The commission would produce tangible steps to reduce carbon emissions in new campus construction and major renovations.

Maigret’s training and experience in biology and sustainable design inform her approach to architecture as a component of broader environmental systems. A built environment relies heavily on building performance, she notes, yet other environmental, cultural, and social justice factors must also be considered, including water preservation, food systems, and equitable housing.

It’s this integrated, interdisciplinary approach to architecture and urban planning that will help define the Climate Futures platform. Maigret will serve a three-year appointment as faculty director of the platform, which is supported by Taubman College and the Office of the Provost. The timely launch of Climate Futures coincides with U-M’s Vision 2034 and the continued growth of climate-­focused work in the college. 

“The timing is perfect for Climate Futures,” Maigret says. “The platform will elevate our growing impact in discovery and education for climate action, sustainability, and environmental justice. By supporting students, faculty, staff, and partners in research and creative practice, teaching, outreach, and engagement, we aim to partner across and beyond the university to achieve inclusive, vibrant, and just futures.”

Dean Jonathan Massey says Maigret brings scholarly expertise, insights from teaching key sustainability courses at Taubman College, and experience as a practicing architect. “All of this gives Jen a broad and grounded understanding of how the many people and projects in our college contribute to climate-related work,” he says.

Wide-Ranging Expertise

In addition to her work on the President’s Commission, Maigret touts deep experience as an award-winning architect and sustainable design researcher. She serves as a faculty affiliate at the U-M Graham Sustainability Institute and director of the Dow Sustainability Fellows Program, which allows architecture students to tackle environmental issues with students from other disciplines.

Sophie Gabrysiak, Project Associate Manager for Climate Futures, and Jen Maigret, Faculty Director, Climate Futures

“One exciting aspect of Climate Futures is that we can grow interdisciplinary faculty and student work across the university, and I’ve seen how profoundly impactful this can be from a student perspective with the Dow program,” she says. “The students gain so much when they’re working with other students in different disciplines. All of a sudden they’re bringing different expertise together, different processes together, and the solutions they offer are really exciting because of it.”

Joining Maigret on the Climate Futures team is Sophie Gabrysiak, an environmental biologist who previously worked in outreach and community engagement for U-M’s Life Sciences Institute. Gabrysiak will serve as associate manager, a newly created staff position, to handle the day-to-day logistics of the platform. “I’ll be working with students, faculty, and staff across campus and beyond to identify who is engaged in climate work and facilitate connections that enhance the efforts and successes already underway. I aim to bring more voices and perspectives in conversation to address the many critical facets of climate futures,” she says.

Maigret says the first year of the platform will involve taking stock of the climate-focused efforts throughout Taubman College and bringing awareness to that work. Taubman is distinctive, she says, for its wide-ranging expertise across its architecture, urban and regional planning, and urban technology programs. 

“Taubman is a very dynamic unit and changes are always underway from a research and teaching perspective,” she says. “Through Climate Futures, we’ll be hosting conversations across the different groups at the college to allow us to see what everybody has been working on that may not be completely visible to one another. We are starting within our own community to underscore the strengths that exist, identify any gaps, and determine how the platform can help promote and accelerate all the things we as a college are capable of doing.”

Antje Steinmuller, chair of the Taubman College architecture program, said the many consequences of climate change — ranging from climate migration to issues with material availability – have “so much impact on everything we do as architects and planners.” 

“The launch of the Climate Futures platform will lend increasing importance to the question of climate as it relates to everything we do within the college,” Steinmuller says. “Like when we talk about material technologies or AI, we should also be thinking about climate. When we talk about housing, we should think about health and climate at the same time. When we talk about form-­making in early design studios, we should also think about climate in some way.”

Looking ahead

In the second and third years of the platform, the Climate Futures team will work to expand existing partnerships and build new alliances with organizations across U-M and outside the university, including design and planning firms, municipalities, and nonprofits in Michigan and beyond. Maigret says many Taubman College faculty members are working with local and international partners on climate-focused projects, so in those cases, it’s just a question of supporting and promoting their work.

As an architect, Maigret has worked on regional projects that intersected environmental and cultural concerns, such as stormwater design in Detroit. She sees Climate Futures expanding on larger-scale sustainability work and furthering the efforts to improve building performance by the President’s Commission on Carbon Neutrality.

“There was a lot of work that we couldn’t capture within the President’s Commission that is now starting to gain attention and investment at U-M that the Climate Futures platform can connect with,” she says. “So in some ways, it is a continuation of my involvement in those early efforts and how they’re growing and in new efforts at the university.”

The platform could also lead to completely new ways of creating, designing, and planning. “Some of the innovation may happen by asking questions about expectations of our built environment. How should buildings, cities, and regions interact from a systems perspective?” Maigret says. “And some innovation will happen physically through the invention of new materials, workflows, and processes to construct the built environment. And through innovations in policies, community participation, and infrastructure.”

Ultimately, there is a lot at stake in addressing climate issues within the built environment. 

“I strongly believe that the quality of the built environment has the capacity to foster collectivity, health, and wellness,” Maigret says. “In my view, our future success in tackling climate challenges is intimately related to how architecture and urban planning can foster social justice and environmental justice to work toward everyone having access to high-quality built environments.”