student update
Jen Maigret traveled with a group of students to Iceland. Left to right: Ian Wilson, Njia Johnson, Jen Maigret, Andrew McCarthy, Samuel Chlebana, Drew Bergstrom, Heain Shin, Elizabeth Yarina, Claire Stupica, Johanna Brandt, Laura Peterson.
Left to right: Bryan Robb, Dustin Sommer, Michael Combs, Padraig Hughes, Pramoth Kitjakarnlertudom, Te-Ping Kang, Professor Leinberger, Robert Wyman, Kristin Baja, Tyson Macomber, Sarah Pavelko, Dan Hazekamp, Ning Wang, Matthew Watkins, Jordan Twardy, and Mark Jensen preparing to take a hardhat tour of a two-tower office, residential, and retail project in Clarendon (Arlington, Virginia).
home countries. She also received a Rackham Travel Grant to present her paper “Foreclosures and Commuting Burden of Households: Linking the Affordable Housing Problem with Transportation Problems in Detroit MSA” at the 2010 Conference of Urban Affairs Association in Honolulu.
infrastructures of architecture through the program of public swimming pools that demonstrate spatial, social, and environmental interconnectedness as mediated with built form. Student travel was supported by UM’s International Institute and the Benard L. Maas Foundation’s Raoul Wallenberg Endowment.
Assistant Professor of Urban Planning Larissa Larsen and Ph.D. student Nick Rajkovich received an OVPR award for their project “Constructing an Urban Climate/Heat Island Network (UrCHIN) Mobile Measurement Cart.” A group of 11 students, in their final semester of the undergraduate architecture program, spent their winter break traveling from Michigan to Manhattan to Reykjavik, Iceland to study the relationship between architecture and water infrastructure. This design studio, led by Assistant Professor Jen Maigret, introduced students to Iceland and its unique relationship with water. Culturally, water plays a significant role relative to public pools and outdoor hot springs. Iceland also harbors the cleanest water in the world, a resource that has serious social, economic, and environmental implications within the global context of an increasingly water-challenged future. While on the ground in Reykjavik, the studio’s travel was guided by Orri Gunnarsson, M.U.P.’07 and the studio was able to tour everything from waste water treatment facilities to geothermal bore holes to some of the most advanced renewable energy harvesting techniques and technologies in the world. Throughout the rest of the semester, students developed design proposals that re-imagined the water
22 portico | spring 2010
Brian Larkin, urban planning Ph.D. student, and Urban Planning Professor June Thomas received a Rackham SpringSummer Research Grant to study “Land Use Strategies of Community Development Corporations.”
Over spring break, UM real estate, architecture, urban planning, and business school graduate students came to Washington, D.C. to visit the five types of walkable urban places that exist in metropolitan areas—one for each day of the break. Professor of Practice Chris Leinberger led the students on tours of downtown D.C., a downtown adjacent place (Dupont Circle), a suburban town center (Silver Spring), strip commercial redevelopment (Clarendon, pictured above) and green field development (National Harbor). At each place the group met with the leading developer, the government planning official, and the place manager. Second-year master of urban planning student Sophonie Joseph received a UM Rackham Graduate Student Research Grant to fund her master’s thesis entitled, “Have West Indians’ Spatial Assimilation Patterns in South Florida Changed?” As part of her research, Joseph will use a spatial