Michigan Architecture Visiting Faculty

W08

Coy Howard

Eliel Saarinen Visiting Professor

Coy Howard is the principal of Coy Howard & Company. He holds a B.Arch. from the University of Texas and an M.Arch. from UCLA. His work has been published widely, and his awards include Progressive Architecture (PA) citations 1977, 1980; Architecture magazine Record House 1988; Woodworkers Institute of America Award 1986; Western Art Directors Club 1980. In 1999 his work was part of an exhibition at the Galleri Rom in Oslo. His Palevsky Residence and Ashley Residence, as well as designs for furniture, were published in Coy Howard: Enough About Me (1995).

W07

Douglas Graf

Colin Clipson Visiting Fellow and Charles Moore Visiting Professor

Douglas Graf will be both the Colin Clipson Visiting Fellow and the Charles Moore Visiting Professor during the winter semester. He received an A.B. in architecture and urban planning from Princeton and a M.Arch. from Harvard and currently teaches courses in design and architectural theory at the Knowlton School of Architecture at the Ohio State University. His teaching career has included the Kentucky, Washington, and Yale, as well as positions in Britain, Germany, and Finland, where he first went on a Fulbright to study the work of Alvar Aalto. He has received five teaching awards.

His interest in design theory has a primary focus on formal analysis, which is applied not only to architecture but also to urban form, landscape, photography, painting, product design, and graphics. One of his signature investigations has been into the structure and use of diagrams as tools for ‘close reading,’ beginning with an article in Perspecta. Many of his investigations have explored ‘metaphoric time’ as a central design strategy with essays on buildings as diverse as the Sancturary of Aesklepios, Ronchamp, Villa Mairea, and Vaux-le-Vicomte. He has also written about the idea of the ‘encyclopedic set’ as a persistent means of modeling complexity and the use of ‘fictive landscapes’ to derive narratives for the city.

He currently divides his time between Columbus (the one in Ohio) and London (not the one in Ohio), where he has been researching the design strategies in English gardens and the formal structure of the pre-industrial village. He is one of the principals in Mid-Ohio Design, a firm of architects and urban designers whose work elides from the real to the academic and who have won a number of urban design competitions.

F07

Robert Somol

Max Fisher Visiting Professor
A.B., Brown University, J.D., Harvard University, Ph.D., University of Chicago

Robert Somol is the incoming Director of the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Formerly a Professor in the Knowlton School of Architecture at the Ohio State University he previously taught design and theory at Princeton University, the University of California, Los Angeles, the University of Illinois at Chicago, Rice University, Columbia University and the Harvard Graduate School of Design. His writings, which have appeared in publications ranging from Assemblage to Wired, focus on modernism and its modes of repetition, the emergence of the diagram in postwar architecture, landscape and interior urbanism, and the criticism of contemporary architectural practices and pedagogy. He is the co-designer of "off-use," an award-winning studio and residence in Los Angeles (2002) that extends his interest in combining the speculative discipline of modernism with the material excesses of mass culture or, as he describes it, "beinehe nichts meets la dolce vita." As co-guest editor of Log 5, he continued efforts to link a projective discipline with a cool and easy design agenda, instigating the expected reaction-formation in subsequent issues and conferences from the "still critical" set. His collection of essays, Nothing to Declare, is forthcoming from ANY Books and the MIT Press.

Blaine Brownell

Visiting Professor in Sustainable Design

Visiting Professor in Sustainable Design Brownell is a practicing architect and author of Transmaterial: A Catalog of Materials that Redefine our Physical Environment (Princeton Architectural Press). He holds a bachelor's of architecture degree from Princeton University and received his master's of architecture degree from Rice University. Brownell has practiced architecture in Tokyo, Nagoya, Houston, and Seattle. His work has been published in A+U, Architectural Record, Architecture, BusinessWeek, New Scientist, Popular Science, Sustainable Industries Journal, and the Seattle and Portland Daily Journals of Commerce. His work has been exhibited at the Seattle Architectural Foundation, Center on Contemporary Art, and Consolidated Works in Seattle, as well as at DiverseWorks in Houston and the Centre Universitaire Méditerranéen in Nice, France. Blaine was selected for a 2006 '40 Under 40' award by Building Design & Construction magazine, and is the recipient of a Fulbright fellowship to Japan for 2006–2007. He is currently living in Tokyo, researching Japanese sustainable design innovations for a future book.

Past Visiting Faculty