The Michigan Advantage
The Taubman College of Architecture + Urban Planning
One of the MUD Program's significant advantages is its location within the A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning (TCAUP) at the University of Michigan. TCAUP, celebrating its centenary in 2007, is one of the nation's leading schools of design and planning. Its recent receipt of a $30 million gift from A. Alfred Taubman, one of the most influential post-World War II American real estate developers, is the largest gift ever made to a school of architecture and planning. New faculty, increased student financial aid, and new technology and classrooms are results of the Taubman gift, reinforcing TCAUP's intellectual strengths and enhancing its facilities, including the country's largest academic design studio—three quarters of an acre in size—where architecture, planning, and urban design students and faculty have the opportunity to engage in each others' work and exchange ideas.
Resources and Activities
A rich array of resources and activities are open to MUD Program students. These include:
- Travel as part of program studios and seminars. Because nothing quite equals experiencing real places for developing ideas for and perspectives on urban design, program students visit major cities such as New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Detroit, Portland, OR and Venice, Italy as part of their studio and seminar work. (Travel costs are partially subsidized by the program.)
- The international study option, which allows program students to satisfy their elective requirement by taking an additional spring half-term in the College's study-abroad courses, which recently have been located in countries such as India, China, Ghana, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, Japan and the Czech Republic.
- The annual Detroit Design Charrette, bringing leading designers and planners from around the country to work with MUD and other UM students for four or five days on real projects for the city. These workshops, typically conducted in Detroit to address planning and development opportunities identified by the city's leadership, are arguably the nation's largest academic or annual charrettes and have become a major milestone in Detroit's public discourse. They culminate in well-attended public presentations that help develop projects and policy, and result in annual publications that may be used by students as part of their portfolios.
- The Charles Moore Visiting Professorship, which each winter term brings a prominent designer to co-teach with program faculty in the Charrette and MUD studio. (Past appointments include Ken Greenberg, Max Bond, Steven Peterson, Barbara Littenberg, Ghislaine Hermanuz, and Michael Dennis.)
- The TCAUP lecture series, which brings distinguished practitioners and academics from around the world to present and debate important issues about design. The recent Michigan Debates on Urbanism, for example, included designers and critics Peter Eisenman, Peter Calthorpe, Lars Lerup, Margaret Crawford, and Michael Speaks, who discussed the topics of Everyday, New, Post, and ReUrbanism.
- TCAUP Architecture and Planning Programs offering both wide-ranging courses that may be taken by qualified MUD students and special events, seminars, lectures, and exhibitions that are open to all TCAUP students. A local symposium of TCAUP faculty and a major international conference is planned for the College's Centennial Celebration in 2006–2007.
The University of Michigan
And then there is the University of Michigan. One of the great universities of the world, Michigan is a center of learning in the arts, humanities, social sciences, sciences, and the professions (including top nationally-ranked schools in law, medicine, business, education, and engineering) for almost 40,000 students from across the globe. With some $750 million in federal research, it is arguably the nation's leading research university. On America's largest university campus, a rich panoply of exhibitions, concerts, lectures, cultural events and sports (including football played in the country's largest university stadium) is offered throughout the year. Indeed, to choose among Michigan's many offerings is typically one of the MUD student's biggest and most pleasant challenges. With a diverse and international student body, cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary associations and friendships are common among students, who become part of Michigan's alumni body of over 400,000 people, the nation's largest alumni group, with over 60 countries represented by TCAUP alumni alone. The alumni provide a global network in the professions, academia, government, and the arts and sciences.
MUD students, for whom experiencing cities is an essential part of their education, find Ann Arbor a rich environment.
The University Michigan, for example, contains some of the finest examples of campus design anywhere, from the classic collegiate buildings of its central campus by Albert Kahn, a leading architect of America's industrial era; York and Sawyer's Law School, an outstanding example of Collegiate Gothic architecture; and Eero Saarinen's serenely Modernist Music School on North Campus; to recent additions by Charles Moore, Roche and Dinkeloo, James Stewart Polshek, Maya Lin, and Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown; and planned projects by Brad Cloepfil, Centerbrook, Robert A. M. Stern, and Renzo Piano. The University's three contiguous campuses respectively represent 19th-, 20th-, and 21st- century planning paradigms, featuring splendid courtyards and promenades, elegant gardens and parks, and dramatic juxtapositions of historic and cutting-edge design that can be enjoyed, analyzed, and debated.
Ann Arbor, the city surrounding the University, is repeatedly listed among the most livable cities in the United States. Jazz clubs, coffee houses, an international array of restaurants (many affordable), sports bars, cinemas, and concert and recital venues are all within walking distance or a short ride on the University's bus system from North Campus, where TCAUP is located. Combining the character of a small Midwestern city with the University's cosmopolitanism, Ann Arbor is an increasingly vibrant regional center where people come to walk Victorian streets, browse plentiful bookstores, and sit under the trees in its many outdoor cafes. Parks, the Nichols Arboretum, and the Huron River wind their way through most parts of the city, offering jogging and bicycle paths, swimming, and golf. Given Ann Arbor's quality, city residents are particularly conscious of planning and environmental issues, recently approving a greenbelt around the town's perimeter and encouraging higher-density, mixed-used development in the downtown area, where Calthorpe Associates has recently been commissioned by the City to do a planning and zoning study. Development plans are always a town topic, creating an excellent environment for learning about urban design and creating opportunities for the MUD Program to become part of the planning process, as it has done in suggesting concepts for the proposed redevelopment of Lower Town, the connections between downtown and the proposed Greenway, and the build-out of North Campus—all of which have influenced public discussion of and action on these important projects.