Charles Moore Visiting Professorship
- Robert M. Beckley
(fall 2008) -
Robert M. Beckley is Dean and Professor Emeritus of the A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Bob retired from teaching and academic administration in June 2002 to devote full time to consulting in architecture, urban design and planning and his own writing and photography projects.
Beckley was born in Cleveland, Ohio and has a Bachelors Degree in Architecture from the University of Cincinnati and a Masters Degree in Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Prior to moving to Michigan in 1987 to take the position of Dean, he taught and served as Chair and Acting Dean in the School of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee, a program he helped establish in 1969. Beckley’s professional projects in Milwaukee included assisting in the creation of two urban design centers, one in the African American community and one in the Latino community. He also worked on projects with the City of Milwaukee Economic Development Department investigating infill housing options and the Milwaukee Redevelopment Corporation (MRC) on downtown development.
In 1980 he founded the firm Beckley/Myers Architects with colleague Sherrill Myers. Under Beckley’s direction the firm completed urban design plans for the Milwaukee RiverWalk, the Milwaukee Theater District and the Bellevue Downtown Park in Bellevue Washington as well as numerous architectural commissions. Beckley left the firm in 1992 to devote full time to academic administration and teaching.
Since stepping down as Dean in 1997, after ten years of service, Beckley resumed his professional activity. He has participated in designs for a downtown park in Lake Oswego, OR and the development of urban design guidelines for the State Street Redevelopment Project in Ann Arbor, MI. He has served as planning consultant to the Genesee County Treasurer’s Office helping to establish the Genesee County Land Bank and the Genesee Institute, the planning and research arm of the Land Bank. He is currently working with Taktix Solutions, a real estate consulting firm, on planning and urban design projects in Battle Creek and Kalamazoo, MI.
Beckley was made a fellow of the Urban Design Institute in 1990 and the American Institute of Architects in 1985. He has worked on research grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the U.S. Departments of Housing and Urban Development and Department of Transportation. He also served as Urban Research Scientist while at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He has received recognition and awards for design, research and service from the NEA, Progressive Architecture Magazine, the American Institute of Architects in Wisconsin and Michigan, the City of Milwaukee and the Urban Land Institute.
Selected Public Projects:
- State Street Development Project Urban Design Guidelines: Ann Arbor, MI 2000, Const. 2002-03
- Millennium Plaza Park: Lake Oswego, OR., Phase I 2000, Phase II 2001.
- Bellevue Downtown Park: Bellevue, WA., Competition Entry 1984, Phase I 1987, Phase II 1990
- City of Milwaukee RiverWalk: Milwaukee, WI., Design Guidelines 1984, Phase I Const. 1986.
- Milwaukee Theater District: Milwaukee, WI., Urban Design Guidelines Phase I 1980-82, Phase II 1982-84, Theaters occupied 1987
- Douglas Graf (winter 2008)
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.
- Philip Enquist (2007)
- FAIA, Partner in Charge of Urban Design and Planning,
Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP -
Mr. Enquist is an urban design and planning partner in the Chicago Office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP. He has focused his work towards strengthening the physical, social, and intellectual infrastructure of cities. In his work, Mr. Enquist strives to create the underlying structure for humane and rational habitats, workplaces, open spaces, and agricultural areas on a rapidly urbanizing planet. Over the last two decades, Mr. Enquist has directed development and redevelopment initiatives for college campuses, existing city neighborhoods, new cities, rural districts, downtown commercial centers, port areas, and in the case of Bahrain, master planning an entire nation.
During his career, Mr. Enquist has collaborated closely with a wide cross-section of significant governmental and private planning entities. These include the cities of Shanghai, Detroit, Chicago, Los Angeles and Orlando, Harvard University, Bowdoin College, the Kingdom of Bahrain, and others. A key to Mr. Enquist’s work is his belief that long-term planning on urban, regional, and even national scales are both necessary and possible for the creation of a culture and ethic of sustainable development.
- Michael Dennis (2006)
- Principal, Michael Dennis & Associates
-
Michael Dennis has been in private practice in Boston since 1981, and prior to that in Ithaca, New York from 1970. He is actively involved with each of Michael Dennis & Associates' projects as principal-in-charge. Since 1992, Mr. Dennis has been Professor of Architecture at MIT and teaches Urban Design and Theory in the post-professional program.
He has lectured widely, and, in addition to numerous articles, is the author of Court and Garden: From the French Hotel to the City of Modern Architecture (MIT Press, 1986). He has taught at Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Kentucky, Princeton, and Rice. In 1986 Mr. Dennis was Thomas Jefferson Professor of Architecture at the University of Virginia, and in 1988, the Eero Saarinen Professor of Architecture at Yale University.
Mr. Dennis is an authority on the development and form of the American campus and has led campus planning initiatives at several of the country's leading universities including the University of Virginia, the University of Southern California, the Ohio State University, and Texas A&M University.
- Ghislaine Hermanuz (2005)
- Principal, Hermanuz Ltd., New York
-
Ghislaine Hermanuz, an architect and urban designer, is Professor of Architecture at the City College of New York School of Architecture, Urban Design, and Landscape Architecture (SAUDLA) and teaches design, housing theory, environmental justice and African Architecture. She also is the Director of SAUDLA academic advising, the Coordinator of Independent Studies, Chair of SAUDLA Committee on Course & Standing, and the former Director of the City College Architecture Center.
Ms. Hermanuz’s professional work in the United States has concentrated on community design, starting with the Architects’ Renewal Committee in Harlem, the first design center created by black architects, later as the director of the City College Architectural Center and now as a consultant to the Urban Technical Assistance Project/Columbia University. Her work consists of neighborhood development plans and visualization of physical development concepts and proposals. She regularly contributes to UN-sponsored efforts to advance shelter provision, with a focus on the needs and perspectives of women. Recently, her research has dealt with the impact of the Environmental Justice movement on the transformation of inner-city neighborhoods and the introduction of sustainable development in these communities.
- Steven Peterson and Barbara Littenberg (2004)
- Principals, Peterson/Littenberg Architecture and Urban Design
-
Steven Peterson and Barbara Littenberg are principals of Peterson/Littenberg Architecture and Urban Design, one of the seven design teams selected by the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation to present proposals for the World Trade Center site after the complex’s destruction on September 11, 2001.
Steven Peterson has a forty-year involvement with urban design and city planning. He was Assistant Chief Deputy Architect for Milton Keynes New Town in England, Executive Director of the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York, and Director of the Syracuse University Post-Professional Program in Architecture in Florence, Italy.
Since 1979, Barbara Littenberg has been responsible for her firm’s award-winning design work ranging from private houses to urban projects. She also is Visiting Professor at Yale University School of Architecture.
For the 2006–2007 academic year Steven Peterson and Barbara Littenberg joined the Rome Faculty as Visiting Professors at the School of Architecture, University of Notre Dame.
- J. Max Bond, Jr. (2003)
- FAIA, Principal, Davis Brody Bond, LLP, Architects & Planners
-
J. Max Bond, Jr. is recognized internationally as one of the United States’ leading architects and educators. Mr. Bond won early recognition for the design of the Bolgatanga Library in Ghana, and has followed that with such projects as the Birmingham Civil Rights Museum, The Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, and major research laboratories at Harvard, Columbia and Northwestern Universities. In addition to recognition for award-winning architecture,
Early in his career, Mr. Bond lived and worked in France and Ghana. Upon returning to the United States, he helped establish and became Executive Director of the Architects Renewal Committee of Harlem (ARCH), one of the early community design centers that developed during the late 1960s and early 1970s. After two years with ARCH, he co-founded Bond Ryder and Associates which quickly became one of the leading African-American architecture firms in New York and the East Coast. As a Commissioner of the New York City Planning commission from 1980–1986, Mr. Bond was actively involved in the city’s approvals and planning process. Mr. Bond merged his firm with Davis Brody & Associates in 1990 and has since served as Partner-in-Charge of many of the firm’s significant academic and institutional projects which include the World Trade Center Memorial Museum. In 2007 he was award an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from the University of Michigan.
- Ken Greenberg (2002)
- Principal, Greenberg Consultants INC, Toronto, Canada
-
Architect and Urban Designer Ken Greenberg is the Former Director of Urban Design and Architecture for the City of Toronto. He also is the Principal of Greenberg Consultants in Toronto and has played a leading role on a broad range of assignments in highly diverse urban settings. Much of his work has focused on the rejuvenation of downtowns, waterfronts and neighborhoods, campus master planning, regional growth management, and new community planning in his own city Toronto and in such cities as Amsterdam, Paris, New York, Boston, Montreal, and San Juan, Puerto Rico.
A frequent lecturer and teacher in North America and Europe, Mr. Greenberg has led two studios in urban design at Harvard's Graduate School of Design and has taught in the Masters Program in Urban Design at the University of Toronto and at the University of Pennsylvania Department of City and Regional Planning. He is a Fellow of the Royal Canadian Institute of Architects, the Toronto Society of Architects, and the Institute for Urban Design as well as a frequent participant in Mayors Institute conferences. His work has received awards from the Canadian Institute of Planners, Progressive Architecture, the City of Toronto, and the American Planning Association.
About Charles Moore
Charles Willard Moore graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in architecture in 1947. Moore developed a humanistic approach to architecture in which each design attempts to engage users within a clearly defined spatial environment. He shifted the design emphasis from architectural formalism to a re-examination of the nature and function of architecture in today's world. Instead of using architecture to moralize an ideal, he used it to generate an environment to stimulate the user. Moore was a teacher during much of his career, at the University of California at Berkeley, at Yale, and at the University of California Los Angeles.