Architecture Program Research

The Architecture Program at Michigan aspires to play a leading role in broadening the disciplinary contours of architectural design, in engaging the diversity of world cultures and geographies, and in crafting innovative applications for emerging forms of practice, new materials and sustainable technologies. Each of these three areas forms a core focus of our current work, and each is part of Michigan’s distinctive mission for the future.

Broadening Disciplinary Contours

Our discipline is strengthened not only through healthy exposure to related practices and expertise, but also through seeing design challenges where others have failed to see them. Physical infrastructures, social networks and natural systems all become issues for architectural investigation. We want students to understand cultural complexity more and impose top-down schemas on it less—to play a role in enhancing our understanding of being part of a broader and more complex world.

The results of this creative work are diverse and range from the design of sustainable furniture and award-winning interior installations to building projects, urban landscapes and proposals for regional development. Studio pedagogies at Michigan, while methodologically diverse, all emphasize project-based learning, strong design fundamentals, the intelligent exploitation of (and experimentation with) new digital media, and a healthy skepticism towards unquestioned, entrenched and conventional attitudes.

Engaging Cultures

Our goal is not simply to “expose” students to a broad range of social and cultural issues but to actively develop new models of architectural research and collaboration. Our operating assumption is that international work can be as politically relevant as we imagine it to be at home, especially in the context of globalization and the increasing interconnectedness of distant places.

Academically, our faculty is noted for its research in international settings, including Europe, Asia, South America, and Africa. Several faculty members work at the forefront of scholarship that seeks to challenge older disciplinary canons and paradigms, enabling our students in history, theory and design studies to benefit from insights into non-Western settings, practices and discourses.

Emergent Technologies

Digital production has blossomed into a range of visual, physical and distributed works that are intrinsic to the College. Whereas TCAUP faculty members once developed software for decision making systems, most students and faculty today build communities of practice around group communications, online courseware and shared project data, as well as visual production. In order to avoid seduction by the possibilities of the latest technological advances, our curriculum has focused on incremental change in three main areas: the social role of information, the design of visual communication, and the development and fabrication of physical form.