Portico Spring 2019

SPRING 2019

Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning University of Michigan

LE ARNING C OMMUNIT Y Taubman College helps students and alumni make a difference for communities

A MESSAGE FR OM T HE DE A N The University of Michigan’s mission is “to serve the people of Michigan and the world through preeminence in creating, communicating, preserving and applying knowledge, art, and academic values, and in developing leaders and citizens who will challenge the present and enrich the future.” At Taubman College, we pursue this mission by offering an exceptional education to talented students from across our state and around the world and by putting the collective knowledge of our students, faculty, staff, and alumni to work building a better tomorrow for Michigan and the world.

Buildings and cities are full-spectrum, immersive, dynamic environments. We can study and shape them through documents and drawings, but they come most fully to life through direct experience. Experiential learning through public engagement is especially well suited to the fields of architecture and planning, and it also furthers the two ways we fulfill our public mission. By working with external partners to address real challenges and opportunities, students develop the expertise that will advance them in practice and professional life even as they help communities near and far improve their built environments.

Our cover story in this issue touches on two of our flagship opportunities: the Master of Urban and Regional Planning capstone courses and the Master of Architecture Systems Studio. In the M.U.R.P. capstone, planning students and faculty work with real clients to generate solutions for their needs. Last issue, we shared the work of a capstone taught by Ana Paula Pimentel Walker and María Arquero de Alarcón near São Paulo, Brazil. Here we share the work that Eric Dueweke and his students have done in showing how infrastructural investment can improve the job market for neighborhood residents. Meanwhile, over the past three years the Systems Studio has mobilized the expertise of Taubman College’s M.Arch students in partnership with Detroit’s Planning and Development Department

(Clockwise, from opposite top) Michigan Architecture Prep students with Taubman College faculty in Detroit. Dean Massey (center) with fellow DIA Plaza / Midtown Cultural Connections competition jurors. Competition finalists included Associate Professors John Marshall and Anya Sirota and Assistant Professor Harley Etienne as part of the Agence Ter team.

to model potential outcomes of the city’s innovative housing and community development strategies.

Beyond these curricular examples, Taubman College students, faculty, and alumni are every day advancing the public good through community engagement. Our Michigan Architecture Prep program each semester gives two to three dozen students from public schools in Detroit a robust introduction to architecture and urban design, opening pathways to higher education and a professional career for the city-makers of tomorrow. The DIA Plaza / Midtown Cultural Connections competition, for which I served as a juror, drew an impressive international roster of architects, urbanists, and landscape architects, yielding three finalist teams that each featured Taubman College alumni or faculty. And this summer, we launch the new Longo International Internships program by sending two architecture graduate students to Kigali, Rwanda, to work with the award-winning not-for-profit MASS Design Group, whose co-founder Michael Murphy taught at the college this year.

These examples are just some of the ways that Taubman College brings to life the university’s mission. I hope you will share with us the work you are doing to build better futures.

Jonathan Massey, Dean Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning University of Michigan

CON T EN TS

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04 News from the Art + Architecture Building and Beyond 08 Best of Class: Student Awards

18 Bringing Data to Justice

Through his research on evictions and smart transportation technologies, Assistant Professor Robert Goodspeed is harnessing the power of data as a force for social justice

C OVER ST O RY / 10 10 Learning Community Taubman College students gain practical training for the world of practice while making a difference for communities 2

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20 Revitalizing Home

As a practitioner, teacher, and president of NOMA, Lecturer Kimberly Dowdell has a passion for communities that fuels her work

A L U MN I / 2 4 24 Success behind the Scenes

For crisis management expert and crime-story author Rhonda Barnat, M.U.P. ’76, fiction always should be stranger than truth 26 All in a Day’s Work

From the Bay Area’s best-known startups to India, Randy Howder, B.S. ’99, is helping companies work better by making work better

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28 Poetry by Design

John Ronan, B.S. ’85, adds a new stanza to Mies’s IIT campus and civic-minded projects nationwide 32 Numbers Game

Thanh Bui, M.U.P. ’97, managing director at Clarion Partners LLC, structures deals with a planner’s view of real estate markets 34 Linear Thinker

As project manager for urban design at AECOM Beijing, Wilson Qian, M.U.D. ’12, is drawing a straight line to the future of cities

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36 Burn Crew

Samantha Okolita, M.Arch ’17, reflects on building The Orb at Burning Man 2018

C L A S S N OTES + GI V I N G / 3 9 40 Robert Fishman Fishman Fellowship in Urbanism builds bridges to academia

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43 Martin Woodrow, B.S. ’89, M.Arch ’91 “Now Is the Time to Reengage” 44 Paul McBride, M.Arch ’15 Reflects on Booth Fellowship

I N MEMORI A M / 4 6 C L OS I N G / 4 8

ON THE COVER:

Salam Rida, B.S. ’11, M.Arch ’17, and Travis Crabtree, M.U.D. ’16, at the Ecoshed, an industrial space in Jackson, Mississippi, that they are converting into a closed-loop food incubator.

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Future Cities, Equitable Development

Brother/ Sister Act Adam Fure, assistant professor of architecture, has been collaborating with his sister, composer Ashley Fure, on The Force of Things: An Opera for Objects, an immersive work of music theater that wrestles with the animate vitality of matter and the mounting hum of ecological anxiety around us.

Inspired by climate change — an immense threat to humankind that at the same time is invisible to most on a daily basis — Ashley Fure posited how to make the dangers of global warming trigger the same rush of emotion as a tiger let loose in a room. The New York Times described the performance, for which Adam Fure designed the environment, as “a cross between a gallery art show and a black-box theatre spectacle.” The work had its New York debut at the Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival in 2018. It premiered at the Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt in Germany in 2016.

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In November, the Shaping Future Cities Symposium convened interdisciplinary panels to discuss how new technologies and development practices are transforming cities operationally, socially, and spatially — and the correlating opportunities and challenges for architecture and planning. Topics included disruptive private-sector innovations like ridesharing, the questions that ubiquitous sensing raises about data privacy and ownership, and how technology-enabled services are changing our experience of the city yet excluding many and expanding existing social divides. In addition to faculty from Taubman College and U-M’s College of Engineering, School of Information, and School for Environment and Sustainability, participants were Allison Arieff (SPUR), Michael Bell (Columbia GSAPP), Walter Greason (Monmouth University), Toni Griffin (Harvard GSD), Vicente Guallart (IAAC Barcelona), Laura Forlano (IIT), Nigel Jacob (City of Boston), Brooks Patrick (Esri), and Bianca Wylie (Center for International Governance Innovation). Josh Sirefman, M.U.P. ’03, of Sidewalk Labs — who was featured in the fall 2018 issue of Portico for his work with Sidewalk Toronto, among other projects — delivered the keynote address.

The Building Better Futures: Innovations in Equitable Development Conference took place at the college in February and was co-sponsored by U-M’s Poverty Solutions and the Ross School of Business, as well as the Urban Land Institute. It featured experts at the forefront of designing, financing, developing, and promoting better buildings, outcomes, and futures for all — across race, income, age, ability, household type, and geography — and examined the ground-breaking policy mechanisms, design innovations, and financial incentives that connect communities, build wealth, and create frameworks to promote equity across demographics. Architect Carlo Ratti (Senseable City Lab/ Carlo Ratti Associati) delivered the keynote address. Other participants not on the U-M faculty were Oscar Perry Abello (Next City); Chase Cantrell (Building Community Value); Sam Butler, M.U.P. ’07 (Doing Development Differently); Melinda Clemons (Enterprise Community Partners); Jared Della Valle (Alloy); LoriAnn Girvan (Artscape); David Heller (NRP Group); Greg Morrow (University of California, Berkeley); Jonathan Mueller (Bedrock); Kevin Ryan (Ford Foundation); Ann Yoachim (Tulane University); Jess Zimbabwe (Rose Center for Public Leadership in Land Use); and Maurice Cox, Kimberly Driggins, and Julie Schneider, M.U.P./M.P.P. ’12 (City of Detroit).

UPSA Honors

“ One of the things that stuck with me the most was the idea of roots and rootedness in a neighborhood, which came out of the Urban Neighborhoods Initiative meeting. This had me thinking: How do we cultivate roots in a neighborhood? And how do we ensure that revitalization doesn’t lead to gentrification, pushing people out of their neighborhoods? As we move forward, we need to remember to keep these Detroiters and their individual stories at the forefront of the work we do.

Without the people, there is no city.”

— M.U.R.P. student Sam Henstell, who participated in Expanded Horizons 2018 in Detroit last fall. Launched by the Urban Planning Student Association in 1989, Expanded Horizons annually takes students on an immersive, long-weekend trip to a different city to visit development sites, network with alumni, and interact with public and private sector leaders and community-​ based organizations.

The Urban Planning Student Association (UPSA) received Honorable Mention for the 2019 Outstanding Planning Student Organization Award from the American Planning Association (APA). Only one winner and one honorable mention were awarded nationally. UPSA received its award at the APA National Planning Conference in San Francisco in April. UPSA works to connect Taubman College students with educational, professional development, and social opportunities. For more than 20 years, UPSA has been led by peer-nominated student leaders who work to advocate for master’s and Ph.D. students, organize events, and connect current students with professionals. As part of the award, UPSA received $500 to further the group’s efforts.

pounds were supported on a 4-ounce flat-deck bridge during Professor Peter von Bülow’s Structures I course in the fall. Two teams, “Bridge to Nowhere” and “Trussworthy,” tied for top honors with the record-setting weight.

Larissa Larsen, associate professor of urban and regional planning, was named to the U-M President’s Commission on Carbon Neutrality by President Mark Schlissel. The commission brings together the U-M community and regional partners to explore how the university can reduce its carbon emissions to environmentally sustainable levels.

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“They don’t need anything to lower demand.”

Haar Elevated to AIA College of Fellows Sharon Haar, professor of architecture and chair of the program, was elevated to the AIA College of Fellows in February. Her current research investigates the role of entrepreneurship, design innovation, and global networking in the transformation of architectural practices devoted to social activism and humanitarian relief. Haar’s publications include The City as Campus: Urbanism and Higher Education in Chicago (University of Minnesota Press, 2010) and Schools for Cities: Urban Strategies (Princeton Architectural Press, 2003). She also has published numerous articles, book reviews, and book chapters and previously served as reviews editor for the Journal of Architectural Education. She has received grants from such institutions as the Graham Foundation, the Richard H. Driehaus Foundation, the Fannie Mae Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the American Architecture Foundation.

Elevation to the AIA College of Fellows honors the achievements of the architect as an individual and also recognizes before the public and the profession those architects who have made significant contributions to architecture and society. Only 3 percent of the AIA’s more than 91,000 members are recognized as fellows.

“ Since the 1960s, the noise level in hospitals has gone up.”

— Mojtaba Navvab, associate professor of architecture and an expert in sound levels, in a December New York Times article, “Why Hospitals Should Let You Sleep.” His acoustical changes to Michigan Medicine’s hospital corridors made them three times quieter.

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— Margaret Dewar, professor emerita of urban and regional planning, in a Bridge magazine story about delays to the $4 million Fitzgerald neighborhood revitalization project in Detroit and how an economic downturn could adversely affect its success.

The Architect’s Newspaper’s “Best of ” Honors Taubman Faculty, Alumnus Chris Myefski, B.S. ’18, and Assistant Professors Ellie Abrons, Adam Fure, El Hadi Jazairy, Wes McGee, Meredith Miller, and Thom Moran received 2018 AN Best of Design Awards. McGee and his firm, Matter Design, won Best of Design: New Materials for “Cyclopean Cannibalism.”

T+E+A+M (Moran, Abrons, Fure, and Miller) received an Honorable Mention in New Materials for “Clastic Order.” Jazairy’s firm, Design Earth, won a Temporary Installation Honorable Mention for “Blue Marble Circus.” Myefski and Myefski Architects earned Best of Design: Unbuilt – Public for “The American Construct,” which he began designing in his Raoul Wallenberg studio under the instruction of Neal Robinson, an assistant professor of practice.

Hail, Class of 2019 The smiles were as bright as the skies when nearly 275 students became Taubman College alumni during Commencement.

Following the ceremony in Hill Auditorium, graduates and their loved ones celebrated with faculty on the adjacent Ingalls Mall.

“My creativity is sharpened by my relationship to the place. I’m not back in my comfort zone remembering; I’m actively engaging.”

— Sir David Adjaye OBE, on why he has offices on three continents, during a February lecture at Ann Arbor’s Michigan Theater. Adjaye was the Clipson Visiting Professor at Taubman College for the Winter 2019 semester, teaching an advanced prototyping studio with Associate Professor Catie Newell on the creation of silence. Adjaye was the lead designer of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C.

Four Taubman College alumni joined 38 students and faculty, including Dean Jonathan Massey, at the annual Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA) conference in Mexico City in October. Associate Professor Kathy Velikov is ACADIA’s current president; Associate Professor Matias del Campo and Assistant Professor Tsz Yan Ng serve on its board of directors.

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BES T OF CL A SS: S T UDEN T AWA RDS In April, the Architecture Student Show exhibited faculty-selected fall semester work by students across degree programs, juried by the AIA Huron Valley Chapter and the Taubman College Alumni Council. At graduation, awards for excellence in the undergraduate Wallenberg Studio and the graduate thesis studio were announced.

See a complete gallery of winners at taubmancollege.umich.edu/flickr/albums.

BURTON L. KAMPNER MEMORIAL AWARD – FIRST PLACE (THESIS / M.ARCH)

Nathan Echstenkamper, “Castle Grange: Gathering Material for a Waystation.” Faculty: John McMorrough.

The tower house castle was an agrarian bulking-point along trade routes through the medieval countryside similar to the contemporary waystation along America’s highways. The castle injects increased potentials for the waystation typology, especially in the manner in which it is assembled. The design concentrates the materiality of the site like a bulking-point for the texture of the Castle Grange.

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A ROU N D TH E COLLEGE

WALLENBERG STUDIO AWARD – STUDIO WINNER AND SPECIAL COMMENDATION (B.S.)

Malcolm Brom and Lejia Li, “Desert Currency.” Faculty: Gabriel Cuéllar.

Individuals begin to donate portions of property to conserveation

Landfill mining operation distributing mechanical and plumbing services to residents participating

This proposal alleviates the precarious living conditions in Pajarito Mesa, New Mexico, by exploiting loopholes in property systems, activating unwanted resources, and leveraging the value of the mesa. Its three interventions — a resident-operated land trust, a landfill mine, and an infrastructure system — will create an urban fabric that is more democratic and environmentally sustainable, and allows for the preservation of the desert identity.

The Wallenberg Awards are made possible through the generosity of the Benard L. Maas Foundation.

STUDENT SHOW / AIA HURON VALLEY AWARD – FIRST PLACE (M.ARCH)

Yousun Nam, “All Access.”

Faculty: Christian Unverzagt.

The design of a new city hall for Grand Rapids, Michigan, critiques the existing monolithic plaza and its unwelcoming buildings. It uses circulation as an activator of the public space and takes advantage of ramps and stairs to generate fluid spaces. The design proposes a new city hall covered with occupiable ramps that offer better access and a new architectural experience to the building’s users and visitors.

STUDENT SHOW / ALUMNI COUNCIL AWARD – FIRST PLACE (B.S.)

Everritt Phillips and Lejia Li, “Street (Play).” Faculty: Mireille Roddier.

Street(Play) is a space of encounters and a condensation of urban activity where life crisscrosses in the most intricate and enchanting way. While theater stages actors, streets stage everyone.

In this community theater, the insularity of the theater production is broken down and made accessible through its engagement with the public “street” domain. It produces a spontaneous theater, blurring the line between life and performance.

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COVER S TORY

LE ARNING COMMUNI T Y Taubman College students gain practical training for the world of practice while making a difference for communities

BY A M Y SPOONER

S OW ING FER TILE GROUND WHEN TRAVIS CRABTREE looks around his new hometown of Jackson, Mississippi, he sees opportunity — opportunity to rethink automobile infrastructure and industrial infrastructure. And with his partner, Salam Rida, he has gone all-in on seizing it. Among their numerous projects since moving to the city not even two years ago, the pair have reimagined a 15,000square-foot crumbling industrial warehouse as a closedloop incubator for sustainable food systems, a decrepit bridge as a community greenspace, and streets as parks.His thinking about adaptive reuse of infrastructure developed during his studios at Taubman College, says Crabtree, M.U.D. ’16, senior urban planner for the City of Jackson.

“It was definitely a theme. My studios focused on the future of post-industrial cities through working in various parts of Detroit,” says Crabtree, who also highlights the importance of traveling through Germany’s Ruhr region with Associate Professor María Arquero de Alarcón’s studio. “The Ruhr was once one of the most industrialized and polluted parts of the world. Our research there explored how industrial artifacts could

As part of their work in Jackson, Mississippi, Salam Rida, B.S. ’11, M.Arch ’17, and Travis Crabtree, M.U.D. ’16, developed the state’s first parklet.

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be reprogrammed and landscape design interventions could energize and humanize a region that was once designed only for industry. That period we spent in the Ruhr is extremely influential in my work today,” he says.

Together with Rida, B.S. ’11, M.Arch ’17, an urban designer for the City of Jackson, Crabtree is spearheading a vision of making the city more equitable and human scale, drawing parallels from his student days in the Rust Belt.

“Similar to Detroit, Jackson is not a human-scale city,” says Crabtree, a native of Mississippi. Nearly all residents drive everywhere, putting stress on roads and exposing the city’s flawed development plan. In 2018, Crabtree and Rida led Jackson’s successful bid for a $1 million grant

(Top) Crabtree and Rida at the Ecoshed. (Bottom) Crabtree calls parklets “an example of how tactical urbanism can transform a street into a better human experience.”

from the Federal Transit Authority to plan and develop ONELINE, a five-mile, multimodal public transportation corridor. Since crumbling infrastructure and a lack of repair funds have closed many city bridges to car traffic, Rida and Crabtree are involved in conversation with a community about transforming one of those bridges into a neighborhood park. They also developed Mississippi’s first parklet, which Crabtree describes as “an example of how tactical urbanism can transform a street into a better human experience. When we moved to Jackson, we immediately started thinking about how current mobility patterns and food systems are contributing to the city’s quality of life,” he says.

They found a close negative correlation in Jackson.

The city is a food swamp, meaning the most readily available food is the high-calorie and low-nutrient offerings in the ubiquitous fast-food chains and convenience stores. Combined with the sedentary reliance on automobiles, Jackson has the dubious honor of being one of America’s fattest cities. “We’re looking at food access through the lens of urbanism and the urban scale and trying to inspire dialogue about cities’ roles in providing better food access for their people,” says Rida.

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“Salam, Travis, and their team have conceived a very forward-looking, innovative approach to engaging people with diverse perspectives and capacities to explore linkages between food and health as a form of urban transformation.”

— Associate Professor Geoffrey Thün Through their practice, Carbon Office, Rida and Crabtree are developing a former industrial building into a mixeduse incubator space known as the Ecoshed. Conceived as a closed-loop food system, the Ecoshed’s tenants include an urban farmer who farms small parcels; an entrepreneur who uses worms to transform food waste into fresh, high-nutrient soil; and Nick Wallace, the first chef from Mississippi to win Food Network’s Chopped championship, who will operate a “food lab” that trains local chefs in farm-to-table cooking. Crabtree and Rida’s former Taubman College professors Geoffrey Thün and Kathy Velikov — with whom Crabtree worked after graduation at their firm, RVTR — advised on the project; they also have signed on to be part of Rida and Crabtree’s larger effort, “Fertile Ground: Inspiring Dialogue about Food Access.” The city-wide exhibition in Jackson will feature installations, performances, and programming that aims to inform policy related to nutrition by using art as a medium to communicate the complexities of the issue in the city. The project, which includes the Ecoshed as an anchor site, received a $1 million Bloomberg Philanthropies Public Art Challenge Award in late 2018. Rida is serving as Fertile Ground’s curator.

“Salam, Travis, and their team have conceived a very forward-looking, innovative approach to engaging people with diverse perspectives and capacities to explore linkages between food and health as a form of urban transformation — and we are excited to be part of it,” say Thün and Velikov, whose installation will highlight food production and high-tech food systems. “And they have bottom-

Before and after photos of the Ecoshed, part of “Fertile Ground: Inspiring Dialogue About Food Access,” which recently won a $1 million grant to inform policy related to nutrition by using art as a medium to communicate the complexities of the issue in Jackson.

Organic Urban Farm

existing cell tower vegetable production greenhouses vermicomposting processing area/ dry cold storage tool container gravel parking lot entry

less energy, charisma, and curatorial sass,” adds Professor Anya Sirota, whose firm, Akoaki, which designed the Oakland Avenue Urban Farm in Detroit, is designing a consumption-themed installation for Fertile Ground.

“When you traditionally talk about food access, people ask how art is part of it,” says Rida. “But our experiences at Taubman College and our work with our professors showed us that when you think more fluidly about what art is, you can create new scenographies to explore unconventional urban interventions.”

Getting buy-in early and often from the community also is important because it allows everyone to see the value of that fluidity, Rida notes. “One of the main aspects of my education that informs my work today involves exposing the process and system of design work, as opposed to only celebrating the ‘final’ or ‘finished’ product. This way, architecture becomes accessible in its various forms and the public can learn about what we do and how they are involved in the structure of the built environment.”

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COV ER S TO R Y

R E IM AGINING HOUSING ENGAGING THE COMMUNITY through their work is central to architecture students’ experience, especially for students in the Master of Architecture program’s Systems Studio, which was revamped in recent years to focus on various aspects of housing in Detroit.

The Systems Studio relaunched in fall 2016 after a series of “what if?” conversations among Professor Sharon Haar, the chair of the architecture program; City of Detroit Planning Director Maurice Cox; and Lars Gräbner, a professor of practice who also leads Detroit-based firm VolumeOne with Christina Hansen, a lecturer. With a city-wide renaissance underway, Detroit was undergoing massive, multifaceted redevelopment, much of it focused on local neighborhoods. Cox and his staff wanted students to reimagine sites that the city identified as priorities.

Their goals were to spark innovation among prospective developers and start a discourse of what inclusive housing can look like for future generations of Detroiters, how changing lifestyles can be sustainably integrated in new neighborhood developments, and how innovative development in Detroit can serve as an inspiration for other American cities. They also wanted to build a culture of design in the city. “The Systems Studio is about inspiring solutions that elevate the status quo for housing in Detroit,” says Gräbner. “In recent years, the status quo has been low. Architecture hasn’t been important because there are so many other issues facing the city. But we are working with our students to change that.”

About 150 students take the Systems Studio each year, working with around 13 faculty in several districts

throughout Detroit. Teams develop design proposals for housing sites selected from the Detroit Planning and Development Department master list and focus on a specific design challenge like senior living, multigenerational housing, live-work environments, healthy living, or cooperative housing. The teams create comprehensive urban and building strategies, from initial analysis to early-phase design development; internal and external faculty, practicing architects, and representatives from the Detroit Planning and Development Department then review the plans. Eight designs from the studio’s first year were selected for inclusion in “A City for All: Future Housing Models for the City of Detroit” — a biennial public exhibition co-sponsored by the city and real estate firm Bedrock as part of Detroit Design 139, a coalition of business, education, and nonprofits that promotes equity, design excellence, and inclusion. The exhibit’s concluding symposium featured the students’ work as the basis for discussion.

“Their work is visionary yet realistic and gives the public a sense of what’s possible,” Gräbner says. “And because the work of architects, non-architects, students, and non-students was exhibited together, it was an incredible opportunity for our students to showcase their ideas and invite critique before a real-world audience.”

Being able to watch the public study his project was indeed a coming-of-age moment, says Masataka Yoshikawa, M.Arch ’17, who was part of the Sky Bar team that was included in the Detroit Design 139 exhibition. “People were talking about it and taking pictures of it. Our design was very different from what Detroiters are used to seeing,” he says. In designing Sky Bar, which Yoshikawa and his classmates dubbed “Detroit’s iconic gateway,” they elected to elevate the residential building in order to optimize circulation and recreational use of the landscape, as well as provide future development opportunities. “It was interesting to present to city officials and others who live in Detroit — many for their whole lives — and to hear them say, ‘I hadn’t thought about it that way before,’” says Yoshikawa, a native of Japan who had never visited Detroit prior to attending Taubman College.

He participated in Gräbner’s studio — co-taught with Hansen — which tasked students with designing a housing development near the Dequindre Cut, a two-mile-long greenway that opened in 2009 and offers a pedestrian link between several neighborhoods and community landmarks. “I was interested in the sites in Lars and Christina’s studio because these communities were bisected by major highways and other infrastructure and now are being

Work from M.Arch Systems Studio students was featured as part of the biennial Detroit Design 139 exhibition in 2017.

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reconnected by the Dequindre Cut,” says Yoshikawa, whose team chose a site along Gratiot Avenue, overlooking the popular Eastern Market and iconic Lafayette Building, for their Sky Bar concept. “Where I grew up, there were singular communities, but Detroit’s neighborhoods have distinct identities and histories and a strong sense of pride. Architects have to balance honoring that tradition while being innovative.” He also appreciated that Gräbner and Hansen’s holistic approach encouraged students to not just focus on an eye-catching concept but to emphasize the structural and environmental aspects that “made us approach and analyze our designs from multiple directions.”

The studio also was a unique opportunity for Yoshikawa, who now is an architect at PLY+ in Ann Arbor, to understand how to work with a different kind of client.

“I learned that working with a community is not like working for a company that has a specific set of requirements. In a community, different people want different things and see things in different ways, so my approach has to be organic.” Understanding those nuances is an important goal of the Systems Studio, Haar notes.

“A major point of the collaboration is that in working with the Planning and Development Department, our students become more aware of the interests and needs of the city and its citizens.”

The Systems Studio also exemplifies how a leading university can serve as an idea generator and the means for igniting positive change, Haar says. “It is an excellent instance of architecture research and design at a world-​

“Students who participate learn not only how to design exquisite buildings but how to have an impact in their work and how to serve the public interest.”

— Maurice Cox, City of Detroit renowned university being driven toward community need. In addition to teaching students the value of research in architectural design, we are demonstrating how their work can impact contemporary rebuilding in a major American city. Our student teams generate pre-​ design thinking that typically doesn’t happen in spaces like these, and we present multiple ideas for individual sites. As a result, this studio is a catalyst for broader, deeper, bolder thinking on the part of practicing architects throughout the City of Detroit.”

Cox, whom Gräbner describes as “closely involved” with the studio and the students’ work, agrees: “Students who participate learn not only how to design exquisite buildings but how to have an impact in their work and how to serve the public interest. There is no better relationship with a college of architecture and urban planning than that of U-M and Detroit.”

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BR ID GING BUSINE S S DURING A NETWORKING reception in Detroit on a cold February night, the Michigan Hispanic Chamber’s CEO chatted with Ryan Michael about the chamber’s effort to build a statewide, Latino-based contracting association. “I told him I used to do that with Paving the Way,” says Michael, M.U.P. ’10. “He said that was the project they were working with, and I replied, ‘I helped write the plan to launch it.’”

It was a coming-full-circle moment for Michael. As director of Pure Michigan Business Connect, part of the Michigan Economic Development Corporation, he helps Michigan-based companies get the necessary tools and access to compete for global business opportunities.

The roots of his work stem from his student days in Eric Dueweke and Margaret Dewar’s urban and regional planning capstone studio. In “Paving the Way: Linking Southwest Detroit to Infrastructure Jobs,” the Southwest 16

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Detroit Business Association (SDBA) asked Michael and his classmates to study the neighborhoods affected by two proposed infrastructure projects: the Detroit River International Crossing — a new bridge between Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, now known as the Gordie Howe International Bridge — and the expansion of the Detroit Intermodal Freight Terminal. The team proposed ways to help southwest Detroiters access construction jobs related to the projects, as well as long-term employment in jobs associated with their ongoing operation.

The capstone — which won the 2011 Outstanding Student Project Award from the Michigan Association of Planning — was a natural bridge from Michael’s AmeriCorps work the previous summer with the SDBA. Then he returned to SDBA after graduation to launch Paving the Way as a job connector, before moving to the Detroit Regional Chamber to help establish the operating model for the Connection Point program, which eventually merged with Pure Michigan Business Connect and led to his current work.

“I love my job, and my ability to be here stems from my

COVER S TORY

“Through my capstone, I learned how to consider how the voices of the many and the voices of the few can interact for a suitable outcome.”

— Ryan Michael, M.U.P. ’10 experience at Taubman College,” Michael says. “Through my capstone, I learned how to consider how the voices of the many and the voices of the few can interact for a suitable outcome.”

While Michael’s capstone experience helped launch his career, it also provided the SDBA with workable recommendations. That dichotomy is exactly the point, says Dueweke, who has led more than 50 urban and regional planning capstones during his tenure at Taubman College, including many in Detroit: “We’re simulating the real world of planning, and when students leave, clients have steps they can take right away, without much cost, to effect change. It’s exciting for the students and the organizations.” An experiential project — either a group capstone studio or an individual thesis — is required in a planning student’s final year. Recent projects include expanding a bike-sharing program in the Detroit suburbs; developing a neighborhood plan in Flint, Michigan; and designing an Allen Creek Greenway in Ann Arbor.

In 2018, “Stabilizing MorningSide,” which addressed housing concerns in a Detroit neighborhood hurt by mortgage and property tax foreclosures, won a nationwide award from the American Institute of Certified Planners.

“Through our capstones, students can put what they’ve learned to use in service of a client that desperately needs their expertise,” says Joe Grengs, associate professor of urban and regional planning and program chair. “It speaks to the heart of who we are as a public university and as a profession, while providing experience and connections that cannot be replicated in the classroom.”

With “Paving the Way,” in addition to the job connector program that Michael went on to launch, students analyzed the proposed expansion of the freight terminal in

(Opposite page) Ryan Michael, M.U.P. ’10, stands near the future site of the Gordie Howe International Bridge. Gathering community input (this page) was an important part of Michael’s work with his capstone and after graduation.

the context of the broader transportation infrastructure in Southwest Detroit. They recommended establishing a strong working relationship with the Michigan Department of Transportation, the state’s vehicle for implementation. “The students helped the community learn how to leverage its standing,” says Kathy Wendler, former executive director of the SDBA, the client for “Paving the Way.” Another less tangible but important outcome: goodwill and neighborhood pride. “What impressed the community about the students’ work was their clear assumption that the community had a role to play,” says Wendler.

“The lasting value of the university’s engagement is its corporate memory of the Southwest Detroit community

and our progress toward true community benefit.” The college continues to work in the neighborhood — a winter 2019 capstone led by Dueweke and Professor Jonathan Levine explored ways to mitigate the increased noise and air pollution that will be generated by traffic from the Gordie Howe International Bridge, which is scheduled to open in 2024.

“Traveling to Detroit multiple times a week, seeing the faces of the potentially displaced people, seeing the contractors and knowing what they could do with the right opportunities makes homework become real-life work,” Michael says. “It takes on a different meaning.”

Linda Fitzgerald contributed to this story.

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Bringing Data to Justice Through his research on evictions and smart transportation technologies, Assistant Professor Robert Goodspeed is harnessing the power of data as a force for social justice

By Amy Crawford

LOSING A HOME CAN BE devastating, especially for families whose lives are precarious already. Jobs and benefits are hard to secure without a permanent address, children may be forced to change schools, already meager possessions often are lost in the shuffle, and the search for another affordable place to live can be grinding. But the impact of eviction is not limited to the displaced tenants themselves; it ripples through communities, destabilizing neighborhoods and contributing to a cycle of intergenerational poverty.

“Research has shown that experiencing eviction can be harmful for a whole variety of things that we care about from a policy point of view,” says Robert Goodspeed, assistant professor of urban and regional planning. “That includes not only school enrollment and well-being of children in the affected households but also the employment and health outcomes of adults.”

Goodspeed, who earned a bachelor’s degree in history at U-M before earning his Ph.D. in urban studies and planning at MIT, is interested in how planners can use new information technology and so-called “big data” to build better places. Now he is taking that approach to examine the phenomenon of eviction, with an eye toward prevention. Along with Professor Emerita Margaret Dewar, Goodspeed recently was awarded a research grant from U-M’s Poverty Solutions Initiative and the Detroit Community-Academic Urban Research Center to study data about court-ordered evictions in Michigan — which, for reasons that he and his colleagues hope to elucidate, has one of the highest eviction rates of any state. The U-M researchers are teaming up with the Michigan Advocacy Program, a legal aid nonprofit that works with many of the tens of thousands of Michigan households that face 18

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eviction every year, to collect and analyze data that will help them better understand the broader patterns of eviction — and perhaps point to policy changes that could help reduce the number of families who lose their homes.

It’s already clear, Goodspeed says, that access to justice is a factor. Although the law establishes certain rights for tenants, it’s easier for landlords to evict people who don’t have a lawyer to advocate for them. Administrative issues that delay affordable housing benefits also can lead to evictions, as can simple miscommunication. “Some level of eviction is probably inevitable,” Goodspeed acknowledges. “But our project really subscribes to the broader belief that there’s quite a bit we can do to reduce the rates that we observe.”

The project will begin with a quest for reliable data — something that, Goodspeed says, “doesn’t really exist right now.” The team, which includes three students, will seek detailed court records about eviction cases in three Michigan counties: Monroe, Washtenaw, and Lenawee. These were selected because Michigan Advocacy Project lawyers have plenty of experience in their courtrooms and they illustrate the differences between urban, rural, and suburban areas, as well as among the 105 district courts where eviction cases are heard across the state. “While the court rules and procedures are supposed to be the same, there's a great deal of local variation,” Goodspeed explains.

Next, the team will conduct a statewide analysis of data from the Eviction Lab, a clearinghouse for eviction research at Princeton University, drilling down to the level of the census tracts to look for patterns that might suggest causes — and solutions. “Is it affordable housing or discrimination?” Goodspeed says. “Is it reforming the way

“Is it affordable housing or discrimination? Is it reforming the way that courts work? Are there other policy and administrative changes that could really impact a lot of people?” — Assistant Professor Robert Goodspeed that courts work? Are there other policy and administrative changes that could really impact a lot of people?”

The effort also demonstrates how urban and regional planning can be a force for social justice — a theme that will carry over into Goodspeed’s next big project: examining the potential for smart transportation technologies in the city of Benton Harbor, Michigan, a small city where half the residents live in poverty, a quarter are unemployed, and many rely on a limited public transit system to get around. Goodspeed is part of a team that also includes faculty in the College of Engineering, and the work will be funded by a four-year, $1.4 million grant from the National Science Foundation. Meanwhile, he also is at work on a book (to be published by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in November) about scenario planning, a method planners and members of a community can use to make decisions that take into account the myriad uncertainties that cities and regions will face in the future.

It may simply be because more and more Americans are living in urban areas, but Goodspeed and others in the field have observed a growing — and welcome — interest in urban planning, as well as an eagerness to collaborate across disciplines. Goodspeed’s class in urban informatics, for example, attracts students from outside Taubman College, including from the Ford School of Public Policy and the School of Information. “In the real world, professions work together,” Goodspeed says. “Planners have a unique perspective, but they need to engage with people who have other expertise. That’s why we’ve been really open to building bridges to other disciplines.”

Fairer, better, and more sustainable cities may offer answers on issues that affect everyone, from climate change to racial disparities. “If we’re going to tackle those problems, because so many people live in cities, it has to start there,” Goodspeed says. “I also think of cities as the locus for innovation — the place where solutions are created and tested.”

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Revitalizing Home As a practitioner, teacher, and president of NOMA, Lecturer Kimberly Dowdell has a passion for communities that fuels her work

By Safiya Merchant

KIMBERLY DOWDELL CAN STILL remember the finer details of her two childhood homes in Detroit. For the first nine years of her life, Dowdell, a lecturer in architecture, lived in a three-story home with a pitched roof near Belle Isle. Her grandparents purchased it back in the 1940s and became the first black family to integrate the neighborhood. Her second home sat on the west side of the city, near Grand River Avenue and Hubbell Street, and featured a prominent porch.

But while Dowdell’s memories live on, both of her childhood homes have since been demolished. Only grass lies in their place.

In an effort to preserve other Detroiters’ memories and neighborhoods, Dowdell returned to her hometown in 2015 after earning a B.Arch from Cornell; practicing at Ayers Saint Gross, HOK, and Levien & Co. in New York; and earning a master’s of public administration at

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Harvard. She is a partner at Century Partners, a Detroitbased real estate development firm that aims to revitalize city neighborhoods while connecting residents to investment opportunities. Previously, she worked as the executive manager of public-private partnerships for the City of Detroit’s Housing and Revitalization Department.

Century Partners purchases abandoned homes and revitalizes them by renovating the sites and finding new tenants. The firm gives neighbors the chance to invest in a real estate private equity fund, which is used to buy more properties and pay for rehabs and other fees. Once the properties are sold, the proceeds are used to pay back investors. In her role at Century Partners, Dowdell uses her design and architectural expertise to manage the rehab projects and collaborate with contractors. “What I appreciate in particular about Century Partners is they’re not solely focused on the downtown or Midtown area,” Dowdell says. “We’re looking at the neighborhoods because neighborhoods deserve a better future, as well.”

At Taubman College, Dowdell teaches a course about the architecture of development and a visual communication class for urban planners to help them better articulate their ideas. She also is serving as president of the National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA), an organization that she first joined as an undergrad and that represents more than 900 minority architects and students across the country. “I’ve had the most incredible mentors, as well as some really valuable leadership opportunities, through NOMA,” she says. “NOMA has had a huge impact on my career, and I directly attribute my success to the role models and advocates I’ve met and worked with through the organization.” For her 2019–2020 presidency, Dowdell’s platform includes ensuring that architects continue to have access to such mentoring and working to increase the number of minorities who enter and ascend in the profession. “As an African American woman, I am acutely aware that the affected neighborhoods throughout the United States are disproportionately black, while the profession tasked with envisioning their rebirth is disproportionately white,” she wrote in an Architect Magazine

(Opposite page) Kimberly Dowdell stands in front of a property she recently rehabbed with her Detroit-based housing development firm, Century Partners.

“The future of the profession and our cities will hinge on a truly diverse workforce with diverse leadership coming from all communities.”

— Lecturer Kimberly Dowdell op-ed in January. “As president of NOMA, I hope to help ensure the success of minority-owned architecture firms so that they will be at the forefront of this important work.” Dowdell adds that she believes it is equally important to promote heightened diversity within firms that are not minority owned: “The future of the profession and our cities will hinge on a truly diverse workforce with diverse leadership coming from all communities.”

Dowdell says she remembers the very moment that sparked her own journey into architecture. When she was around 11 years old, growing up in Detroit, she recalls a distinct day on Woodward Avenue in the heart of downtown. There she saw a group of beautiful buildings that were boarded up — ghosts of their former selves. Residents who were walking by looked sad, and the street wasn’t well populated — a far cry from what one might see in cities elsewhere or in the movies, she says. In art class, the young Dowdell had just learned about architects and decided that she could become one. That way, she reasoned, she could fix the buildings and people’s sadness would disappear.

“I was just really curious as to what happened in Detroit and why we have these issues,” she says.

Looking back on the childhood homes she’s lost, Dowdell says she prefers to focus on Detroit’s neighborhoods.

“How do we prevent more people’s memories from being bulldozed over? How do we create stronger neighborhoods where people feel safe and happy and build a good life for themselves?,” she asks.

“I think that by doing this neighborhood stabilization work, we’re actually adding to the longevity of neighborhoods.”

A version of this story first appeared in the University Record.

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HEL P US BU IL D TOMORR OW India Solomon, M.U.R.P. ’19, was a leader in many ways at Taubman College, which she sees as an important element of her Taubman College education. “These weren’t just opportunities; they were personal calls to action that transformed me from the timid smart girl who was doubted time and time again, to the confident, ambitious, dynamic young professional I am today,” says Solomon, a first-generation college student.

Her confidence also helped her translate relationships with professors into transformative professional experiences. Through a research project for the City of Detroit, she worked with Marc Norman to inform concrete policy changes. With guidance from Kimberly Dowdell, Solomon worked on the Fitzgerald Revitalization Project, Detroit’s first comprehensive neighborhood development initiative. Now, as a program officer at Enterprise Community Partners, Solomon will support and manage the organization’s grantmaking and programmatic work to advance equitable revitalization in Detroit’s neighborhoods.

She credits the scholarship that enabled her to attend Taubman College with helping her leverage all that it had to offer: “It allowed me take chances and be immersed in the professional and academic aspects of my program. When people like me — people who look like me and come from low-income backgrounds, singleparent households, places like Detroit — are given the level of trust and support that alumni have demonstrated on behalf of me and other emerging professionals, just look at what we can accomplish.”

A gift to Taubman College supports scholarships and experiential learning opportunities that develop the next generation of leaders in planning and architecture. Visit taubmancollege.umich.edu/give.

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Success behind the Scenes For crisis management expert and crime-story author Rhonda Barnat, M.U.P. ’76, fiction always should be stranger than truth IN TODAY’S CROWDED media landscape, everyone from multinational corporations to YouTube celebrities clamors for attention. But for Rhonda Barnat, M.U.P. ’76, success means her clients aren’t in the headlines.

Barnat is a managing director at Abernathy MacGregor, a strategic communications and crisis management firm that aids clients through times of transition, from catastrophic events to corporate restructuring. As head of the firm’s crisis management practice, Barnat has helped corporations and nonprofits, including multiple colleges and universities, through some of their most defining moments under a global spotlight. Barnat says that if her clients aren’t remembered as being part of breaking news, or if the attention fades over time, she and her team are doing 24

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their jobs: “Helping a client return to normal is what we do. And we’re very proud of our track record.”

Part of Abnernathy’s success is its discretion in handling its clients and their affairs. Barnat does not talk about clients individually — even to draw comparisons for other clients or to drum up business. “Our practice is built on word of mouth and relationships,” she says.

Her services include communications management and building a support team of forensics experts, security firms, grief counselors, lawyers who specialize in a related practice area, and others who can help fast-track a client’s return to normal. Barnat and her team liaise with those outside experts and clients’ internal teams, especially

“It’s a privilege to work shoulder to shoulder with people facing challenging situations. In the vast majority of cases, we see people at their best. Our clients rise to the occasion under tough circumstances and find a way forward.”

— Rhonda Barnat, M.U.P. ’76

board members, the C-suite, and communications staff. It can be challenging to merge those in-house, for whom the situation is personal, with external advisers, but Barnat says it’s important: “Employees feel vested and want to help to resolve the situation, but often it’s best to develop a small, empowered team to lead the organization through. Part of what I do is bring the right people together.”

Another component is managing her clients’ messaging.

Amid the cynicism and rapid fire of the Internet Age, her core tenet is to tell the truth. “There is no room for anything that is not 100-percent accurate,” Barnat says. “We may be limited or circumspect in what we say, but it must be the truth.” Furthermore, Barnat says, the truth must be delivered authentically, in language that is readily relatable for the community it’s supposed to reach: “It is a rare day when we put out a press release in a crisis situation.

We believe in speaking directly to those who are most impacted and answering the most important questions as best we can. That’s how we build authenticity in an individualized way.” Social media — which Barnat cites as the biggest change to her profession since she entered it more than four decades ago — only amplifies the need for authenticity. “It is a hindrance as much, or maybe more, than it is a help,” she says. “That’s why I often say that social media is an information tool, not a strategy.”

Barnat stresses that helping a client move past a crisis often means expanding the scope to question how the affected community will recover, both in terms of its physical structures and its inhabitants. “Those are issues where I certainly draw from my urban planning studies,” she says.

Barnat’s undergraduate major, English literature, seems well suited to her current line of work. But she says her graduate degree from Taubman College also has been integral to her approach. She recalls one urban planning professor explaining how people are drawn to places despite what happens to those places. Even if a place

is torn down, damaged, or otherwise changed, people will continue to return to and feel connected to it, she remembers him saying. “That idea has guided my crisis management practice, as I work with people who have gone through mass violence or natural disasters. No matter what happened there, we have to help them honor that place,” says Barnat.

She also says studying alongside architecture students solidified her collaborative approach at Abernathy MacGregor. “Much of what I do involves working with a team, so I often draw on what I learned from observing the architecture students’ teamwork, collaboration, and artistic practice.”

After earning her M.U.P. degree, Barnat worked for the U-M Health System, which then was building University Hospital. Being part of the communications team for the new hospital “bridged the gap between my interest in writing and my study of urban planning,” she says, “and formed a good foundation for the work that I’m doing now.”

A bridge back to her writing roots is Barnat’s secondary career as an author writing under the nom de plume Rona Bell. Her story “Prey of New York” was included as a Distinguished Mystery Story in The Best American Mystery Stories 2018, edited by Louise Penny, and it was published in Where Crime Never Sleeps: Murder New York Style 4.

Given the nature of her work at Abernathy MacGregor, perhaps it’s not a coincidence that crime fiction is her favorite genre; she says having another outlet is essential to longevity in her high-stakes career. At the same time, though, she continues to be invigorated by the work: “It’s a privilege to work shoulder to shoulder with people facing challenging situations. In the vast majority of cases, we see people at their best. Our clients rise to the occasion under tough circumstances and find a way forward.”

— Amy Spooner

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All in a Day’s Work From the Bay Area’s best-known startups to India, Randy Howder, B.S. ’99, is helping companies work better by making work better LIKE MANY OF US, Randy Howder, B.S. ’99, spends a lot of time thinking about work. But beyond to-do lists and upcoming meetings, he thinks about how work actually works — how workspace design can reflect an organization’s culture and help make its employees happy to be there.

Howder is managing director of the San Francisco office of Gensler, which is an industry leader in workplace design but also does an array of projects for clients worldwide. Howder’s clients are some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names — including Facebook and LinkedIn — as well as Hyatt Hotels Corp. and Indian developer Oberoi Realty.

Although he began his career practicing residential design, the work at Gensler feeds his love of having a personal connection with the end-user, but on a bigger scale.

“I gravitate toward projects where I’m trying to unlock the identity of a company and its people and influence the architecture of their space accordingly,” says Howder.

“I equate it to the commercial version of residential design because it’s very personal. People spend a lot of time at work, so helping transform a company through the design of their workplace is fascinating.”

With the Bay Area’s soaring rent and proximity to Silicon Valley, Gensler’s San Francisco office is uniquely posi-

tioned to think about the modern office. Amid cutthroat competition for top talent, workspace and corresponding perks can be difference makers for companies in the area.

Furthermore, since most tech companies don’t produce tangible goods, their space is central to their identity, Howder says. “The office is the physical manifestation of their brand.”

As the dot-com era surged, perks like in-office game rooms, fitness studios, and nap pods became legendary.

Today, even after the bubble burst, the industry’s exponential growth and the tight labor market have assured their ongoing prevalence. But Howder sees the tech industry and the Bay Area, more generally, as leading indicators of a trend that transcends sectors and geography: “It’s about more than foosball. There’s an increasing focus on employees’ sense of fulfillment and finding ways to show that we understand who they are. When you compare the cost of some of these perks to the cost of training new people to fill vacancies, it’s a non-issue.”

Howder thinks about these issues for his clients and for his own organization — day-to-day as managing director but also as he spearheaded Gensler’s recent move to new space in San Francisco’s burgeoning East Cut neighborhood. In the middle of one of the highest-cost real estate markets in the world, Gensler San Francisco competes against the deep pockets of multibillion-dollar companies for prime real estate, “so we had to be judicious with our amount of space,” Howder says. “People come to the office to do the work they can’t do somewhere else, like charrette with their teams, build a model, or use our virtual reality tools. So we’ve dedicated most of our space to that and to client meetings — big spaces that we can reconfigure and cover with pinups and mockups — as opposed to a traditional layout.”

Mirroring the trend in the spaces that Howder has designed for his clients, Gensler’s San Francisco office does not have dedicated desks for most employees, including him. With his heavy meeting schedule, “I shouldn’t be taking up space that’s going unused,” Howder says.

The configuration helps Gensler manage its resources and gives employees more flexibility, possibly the ultimate perk: “These design trends recognize that we’re here to get the best out of you, not to record how often you’re sitting at your desk. It’s about giving you the freedom to design your day while still delivering results.”

In 2012, Howder was lead designer for Facebook’s new Menlo Park, California, campus, and he has subsequently completed projects for Facebook all over the world. The

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challenge was to convert the nine-building, traditionally laid-out complex into a free-form, collaborative environment befitting of the world’s largest social connector.

Although Facebook tapped Frank Gehry to expand the campus last year, Howder still works with the company to address ongoing needs. “They’re solving challenges that most other companies aren’t in terms of competition for talent and how to grow from a dynamic startup to being a massive component of the economy,” Howder says. “Gensler’s consistent relationship with Facebook over the past decade has brought me a lot of satisfaction.”

But as client-ripe as Gensler’s San Francisco backyard is, Howder says one of the things he likes most about his work is its globality. He recently oversaw the design of LinkedIn’s new London office and is working with a prominent developer in Mumbai to expand across India.

“As India moves from developing country to global pow-

Howder’s work at Gensler includes (clockwise from top left) Hyatt Global Headquarters, Chicago; Facebook, Menlo Park, California; Facebook, Mexico City; Instagram, London.

erhouse, design expectations are aligning with established markets. It’s an exciting time to work there,” he says.

Howder credits his training at Michigan — from the campus’s diversity to his overseas studio experiences — with seeding his global perspective and ability to relate to clients across cultures. At the same time, the small-world nature of the U-M network has been powerful. As one example, his classmate Kristen Conry, B.S. ’99, a former vice president for Hyatt, asked him to design the company’s new headquarters in Chicago. Howder and his team designed the space, which was Interior Design’s 2017 Best of the Year Winner for Large Corporate Office, to reflect its industry: “I cannot tell if this is actually Hyatt’s global headquarters … because at this moment, I feel like I’ve stepped into a high-end hotel. And of course, that’s entirely the point,” a Fast Company story stated.

For Howder, the project was the latest reminder of why he loves what he does: “We helped their space reflect their core values and business goals, propel them into the future, and optimize the experience of their employees — their most valuable asset.” — Amy Spooner 27

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Poetry by Design John Ronan, B.S. ’85, adds a new stanza to Mies’s IIT campus and civic-minded projects nationwide IN 2018, JOHN RONAN, FAIA, wrote, “Like all great works of art, it endeavors not to be noticed, but to be remembered. And, to succeed in being memorable, something must make an emotional connection.” His essay was first published in Poetry magazine, and the “it” referenced not a building but one of his favorite poems, by Seamus Heaney.

Ronan, B.S. ’85, sees a fine line between poetry and architecture, between crafting art through the ordering of words and the ordering of physical materials. “Poets don’t invent words; they use common words that everyone understands. It’s the way they are selected and arranged that makes them poetry,” he says. “It should be the same with architecture — how ordinary materials like concrete, corrugated metal, and plywood are transformed and made special.”

It’s fitting that one of Ronan’s most acclaimed designs is the Poetry Foundation building in Chicago’s River North neighborhood. Completed in 2011, the home of Poetry magazine also features a 30,000-volume library, an exhibition gallery, and a performance space. Ronan’s firm, John Ronan Architects, bested nearly 50 firms from around the world in designing the building. He says the project was exciting not just because he loves poetry but also because he could explore a new architectural genre: “Unlike a school or house, there was no paradigm for a ‘poetry’ building, so it was a chance to invent a type, and it provided the opportunity to fully realize ideas I had been working on, in bits and pieces, previously.”

The foundation’s goal for the building aligned well with Ronan’s philosophy that a building should reveal itself slowly — “as a poem unfolds line by line,” he says — so that each visit presents new opportunities for discovery.

“The foundation’s president wanted something with subtlety and depth, rather than the ‘Look at me!’ icon-type building that is so prevalent these days,” says Ronan.

“As opposed to what he called ‘one-trick pony’ buildings, I wanted to convey unfolding spatial qualities, which is more in my wheelhouse.”

The result was architectural poetry. The building earned an AIA Institute National Honor Award, and Architectural Record said of the project, “In keeping with the art form it serves, the new Poetry Foundation is a respectful, restrained building that employs an economy of means and methods, just as a good poem employs an economy of language.” The magazine later named it as one of the 125 best buildings of the past 125 years.

John Ronan, B.S. ’85, and his firm, John Ronan Architects, earned an AIA Institute National Honor Award for the Poetry Foundation building (opposite page) in Chicago.

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His latest design, the Ed Kaplan Family Institute for Innovation and Tech Entrepreneurship at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), which opened in fall 2018, also required respectful restraint — it is the first academic building to be added to the iconic Mies van der Rohe– designed campus in 40 years. Yet the design also needed to be groundbreaking, as befitting the home of innovation and entrepreneurship programs. Looking beyond his lens as architect, Ronan viewed the IIT project with an additional layer: He has been teaching architecture at the school since 1992 and currently holds the John & Jeanne Rowe Endowed Chair in Architecture. “It was a loaded project in terms of the historical significance and my personal connection,” he says. “I had to design something that was forward looking yet respectful of the Miesian past, which was a fine line to toe.”

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ETFE is not a common material in the United States, and its usual use in the U.S. is for sports and transit facilities, so bringing it to a college campus was unique. By using a material that wasn’t known to Mies, Ronan says his innovation center honors Mies’s design in a futuristic yet complementary way: “Mies labeled his work ‘skin and bones’ construction, and it was very lightweight in appearance for its time. I wanted to update this notion and create something with a very lightweight, cloudlike appearance, almost as if it would float away if not held down.”

Ronan’s iterative approach to design means he and his team first spent time understanding the full history of the campus. They ultimately decided to continue Mies’s legacy of the 24-foot grid that underlies the campus, as well as the prevalence of steel, but deviated from the rest of the campus by adding courtyards to the innovation center. “I understood, firsthand, that there were no destination outdoor spaces on campus, merely residual space between the sliding-box classroom buildings,” he says.

“The project is a departure from that orthodoxy.”

Beyond the tension of looking to the future while embracing the past, cost made the IIT project even more complex. Within a limited budget, the school wanted a distinctive look and feel. “Innovation is never cheap,” Ronan says. “The reason something is cheap is because everyone knows how to do it and it’s been done a million times, which is the opposite of innovation.” Likening the process to threading a needle, Ronan designed a 72,000-square-foot, LEED Gold–certified, collaborative learning environment where innovative elements were not superfluous but rather were part of the building’s essential elements. For less than $400 per square foot, the innovation center includes a heating and cooling system powered by water-filled tubing in the building’s floor slabs and the dynamic ETFE façade, which adjusts to modulate incoming solar energy throughout the day.

The most obvious departures from Mies are the allwhite color of the building and Ronan’s use of ethylene tetrafluoroethylene (ETFE), a fluorine-based polymer that is about 1 percent the weight of glass, for the façade.

Ronan’s innovation center at the Illinois Institute of Technology is the first academic building added to the Mies van der Rohe– designed campus in 40 years.

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“Ronan wasn’t afraid to take risks from a technical point of view, and with respect to history, his just-opened building embodies the spirit of Mies while at the same time representing a complete break,” notes an October 2018 Architectural Record story.

Although he isn’t a native Chicagoan, Ronan, who wrote a paper in fifth grade about wanting to be an architect, felt a personal and professional connection to the city when he worked there after graduating from Michigan. So after leaving to earn an M.Arch at Harvard, he returned to the Windy City and opened his own practice. “I believe every place has its own DNA, and I felt that my values were in sync with Chicago’s,” says Ronan.

With a few exceptions, his firm’s portfolio is filled with projects for nonprofits and other community-focused clients in Chicago and throughout the country. The project that put Ronan on the national map was a two-stage international competition to design the 472,000-squarefoot Perth Amboy (New Jersey) High School in 2004. His winning entry topped Morphosis, Eisenman Architects, and Fox & Fowle. In 2006, the firm received an AIA Institute National Honor Award for the Gary Comer Youth Center on Chicago’s South Side, and in 2016, it was a finalist for the Obama Presidential Center. “I look for clients who seek to make the world a better place because I

want to feel good about what we’ve done at the end of the day, not just help someone line their pockets,” Ronan says.

Ronan’s prominence also includes inclusion in Architectural Record’s inaugural Design Vanguard issue and in the Architectural League of New York’s Emerging Voices, a monograph of his firm’s work published by Princeton Architectural Press, and exhibits in galleries worldwide.

In 2017, Ronan received the Architecture Award from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Despite the accolades, Ronan says his mission remains closely aligned with his clients’: “I tell my students, don’t go into architecture unless you can’t see yourself doing anything else, because architecture is more of a calling than a profession.”

He also remains true to the architectural past of the city he calls home, regardless of the location of his projects.

He wrote, “I am conscious of those who came before me, and whose legacy I extend. In my case, it’s skilled Chicago architects from a tough, no-nonsense town that values hard work, who managed nevertheless to transcend pragmatism and extract a certain poetry from it … I follow in their path … searching for the transcendent within the pragmatic. Occasionally I succeed, and the building becomes a poem.” — Amy Spooner

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Numbers Game Thanh Bui, M.U.P. ’97, managing director at Clarion Partners LLC, structures deals with a planner’s view of real estate markets

IN REAL ESTATE DEVELOPMENT, there are two sides to every story: the great idea and raising the capital to make it happen. As an urban planner who now is an executive at one of the world’s largest real estate investment firms, Thanh Bui has lived both sides.

Bui, M.U.P ’97, is an equity owner and managing director at Clarion Partners LLC, based in New York. The firm manages real estate assets through private equity-style funds for clients worldwide, including numerous pension funds. As portfolio manager of subordinate debt investments, Bui is responsible for the origination and structuring of complex real estate investments and also raises capital. So why has Bui — who didn’t major in business as an undergrad and doesn’t have an MBA — devoted her career to helping buyers acquire real estate and investors

Thanh Bui, M.U.P. ’97, saw opportunity in Brooklyn before property values soared.

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“Planners work with a lot of different constituents, so I got a good education in how to connect with people and boil down their situation to find the essence of what they want.”

— Thanh Bui, M.U.P. ’97 make money in the process? Because as an urban planner, she saw how challenging it could be for developers in under-the-radar places to access financing.

delivered: She was valedictorian. But at Michigan, her confidence was shaken by Economics, her first-ever C. “I thought that was a sign I couldn’t pursue business; I wasn’t smart enough,” Bui says. “I see now the huge difference in how male and female students approach learning and how part of my assumption that I wouldn’t succeed in business after that setback was my social conditioning as a girl. But the great thing about Michigan is I was able to find my path and gain confidence.” Deciding to play on her strengths in analytical thinking, and with a nudge from a mentor, Bui enrolled in the M.U.P. program.

Now she has a career that many who earned As in Economics can only dream of.

In her work at Clarion, Bui talks to a lot of clients and potential investors, and she credits her planning degree with giving her the skills to understand their needs: “Planners work with a lot of different constituents, so I got a good education in how to connect with people and boil

“I came into this work in an untraditional way. The entry point was not my study of financial modeling or financial analysis but rather understanding how to analyze markets,” Bui says.

As an urban planning student, Bui did community redevelopment work and design analysis for Detroit’s New Center Council, a nonprofit that later merged with Midtown Detroit Inc. She enjoyed the work and thought she would continue in a similar vein after graduation.

“I wanted to work with reinvestment in challenged communities,” she says. “What I learned, though, is that it can be difficult to get financing for the things we want to do for those communities.”

So after earning her M.U.P. degree, Bui moved to New York and joined Boston Financial, an investment bank whose clients included developers looking for financing in what Bui calls difficult-to-finance places. When she launched her career in the late 1990s, Brooklyn was at the top of the list. Although property values in the borough have risen almost 200 percent since 2000, it was a different story when Bui began. “On paper, Brooklyn didn’t look great. But if you dug deeper, there was a different story.”

Bui credits her urban planning education with helping her to see it: “At Michigan, I learned to roll up my sleeves and look at a situation, a place, and place-making, in general, in a different way than just the numbers.”

Ironically, as a psychology major at U-M, Bui thought numbers were a path-changer. She fled Vietnam with her family in 1975 and landed in Holland, Michigan. Her parents emphasized the importance of education, and Bui

down their situation to find the essence of what they want.

You can be the best trader in the world, but if you don’t have the skills to work with your clients to make them happy, you aren’t going to be successful.”

Through the Great Recession and amid recent market volatility, the opportunity to drill down to solve problems keeps her energized. “I love putting a deal together, meeting a client’s needs, and finding solutions to the problems that cross my desk. I didn’t understand what my path was when I was in school, but my advice is to just keep going and keep your options wide open.” — Amy Spooner

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Linear Thinker As project manager for urban design at AECOM Beijing, Wilson Qian, M.U.D. ’12, is drawing a straight line to the future of cities WILSON QIAN, M.U.D. ’12, doesn’t see lines; he sees lives.

As an undergraduate at Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture, Qian was compelled by how people think about their living environment and by the relationships within that environment, which led him to earn a Bachelor of Engineering in Urban Planning and Design, and then a Master of Urban Design at Taubman College. “Every line you draw is someone’s life. To think about how those lines come together to form a building, and then the relationships between buildings, people and buildings, people and parks, people and their city — that is why I was drawn to urban design,” he says.

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As project manager for urban design at AECOM’s Beijing office, Qian, who earned a Master of Landscape Architecture from Harvard after graduating from Taubman College, is at the forefront of helping his native country and hometown adapt to massive growth and urbanization.

His former professor, Roy Strickland, calls Qian “a rising urban designer who has emerged as a talented designer, sought-after lecturer, and inventor of urban-design methods emphasizing urban infrastructure.”

Strickland adds, “I foresee an exemplary career for him combining practice, teaching, and academic program development in China and around the world.”

At AECOM, Qian is working on major transportation hubs within Beijing and other “urban regeneration projects in Central Beijing that have strategic and political importance.” He also is part of the design team for the Xiong’an New Area in Hebei Province, about 60 miles outside of Beijing, which is the latest planned city to follow in the footsteps of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone and the Shanghai Pudong New Area. The government hopes that Xiong’an, by becoming a new commercial and industrial hub, will alleviate some of Beijing’s

congestion and pollution. Lauded by President Xi as “a project that will have lasting importance for the millennium to come and a significant national event,” Xiong’an will differ from its predecessors through its focus on sustainable development, including limits on population and development density, as well as an emphasis on ecological protection. According to China’s state-run news agency, Xinhua, “Xiong’an will be an answer to China’s growth conundrum: breakneck urban sprawl must give way to a balanced and inclusive development strategy.”

For Qian, working on the Xiong’an design, as well as the upgrades to Beijing’s transportation infrastructure, gets to the heart of that life-changing value that led him to be an urban designer: “Especially in the context of a rapidly changing place like China, my work can help to change people’s lives. It’s tangible now while also shaping the future.”

Qian also is shaping the future of urban design education in China. He worked with Strickland and Professor Niall Kirkwood at Harvard to establish the first urban design program in China and the urbanistic curriculum for the landscape program at his undergraduate alma mater, Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture (BUCEA). The idea first took root with the gaps he experienced in his own education and then was solidified by the quality of his training in the United States. “Once I left China, I could see more clearly the issues that my country was facing with regard to urban and natural environments and how it wasn’t preparing students to address them,”

China’s newest planned city, Xiong’an, will differ from its predecessors through its focus on sustainable development.

Qian says. “I realized that if you want to change the future, you have to begin by making changes now. So I decided to change the learning curve for Chinese students.” Today, Qian is a lecturer at BUCEA, in addition to practicing at AECOM. It’s an interesting time to be a student and practitioner in the city, Qian acknowledges. Equitable development is a hot topic after what Qian calls “a series of problematic decisions” to address Beijing’s growth, including longlasting issues with China’s hukou system, which limits services like health insurance to the city’s native-born population. Advocates say hukou regulates rural-to-urban migration; critics call it a form of segregation. “It has made Beijing unfriendly for new residents,” say Qian of hukou. At the same time, the city’s expansion has sparked debate on how to blend old and new. Rem Koolhaas towers mix with ancient temples in what Qian calls “an environmental paradox. We are struggling to figure out what these changes mean for architecture.”

Qian joined AECOM in 2016 after spending three years at Beijing Advanced Center of Urban Design for Future Cities, a think tank that grapples with issues facing the growth of the Beijing megaregion and how solutions could be applied to other megaregions in China and beyond.

As he helps one of the world’s most populous cities embrace the future, Qian sees parallels with work he did in Strickland’s New York City 2111 studio at Taubman College. “We don’t know what New York City can be in a hundred years, or if there will even be a New York City. It’s the same with Beijing. But to predict the future, we can notice the present, while getting as much information as possible from the past, to anticipate the curve forward.”

— Amy Spooner 35

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Burn Crew Reflections on building The Orb at Burning Man 2018

By Samantha Okolita, M.Arch ’17

WHEN MY COLLEAGUES Bjarke Ingels, Jakob Lange, and their friends announced they would build an installation at Burning Man, I eagerly signed on. My experience at Taubman College, and working for my professors at their firms Akoaki and T+E+A+M, sparked my love for fabrication and constructing installations. I was excited to build again.

Seven artists, engineers, and architects in all black, like stereotypical New York designers, arrived at the Burning Man gate at 3 a.m. “Where’s the funeral?” asked the gatekeepers. Our initiation, doing a “dust angel,” erased that New York look and began our transformation into burners. I had that coat of dust for the next three weeks.

Our 13-person crew was on a tight schedule to finish The Orb for the first day of the festival. The construction was a four-part process: build the base, zip up the fabric, erect the mast, inflate. The longest, most intense phase was the first; we had to hand-tighten around 5,000 bolts to assemble the 30-ton steel base. It felt like putting a full-scale Lego set together in extreme conditions.

We worked 12 to 18 hours each day in the desert heat and nightly sandstorms. We didn’t leave the base; we ate in a small tent while huddled around a dusty table covered in construction drawings and tools.

For an architect, it was interesting watching a city that supports 70,000 people grow from dust in the middle of nowhere. The crew had to establish systems for waste management, shade, water supply, and food storage, as well as fun things like a bar and sound system. There was no free ride; everyone worked together to make it happen.

For the first five days, we had no shower. After that, you could stand under a plastic bag dripping water. The dust in the desert is alkaline and can cause serious irritation to the skin. By day four I had swollen hands and feet, called “playa foot,” that did not go away until several days after returning to NYC. One night, I woke to someone screaming “Fire!” We ran from our tents to find that the compost toilet had spontaneously combusted. With no fire department to call, we worked together to extinguish the fire. Three hours later, we were back outside building.

After five days, we completed the base and lowered in the concrete weights. Next, we had to zip together eight pieces to form the 83-foot-diameter balloon. When we took it out of the shipping container, I repeatedly swept the balloon to minimize dust. We realized this was a Sisyphean task after the first dust storm covered the fabric in a dune.

Zipping eight pieces of fabric together sounds easy, but two tons of fabric in 30-mph dust storms was anything but that. Luckily, the 105-foot steel mast, which arrived almost completely assembled in three pieces, was easier.

After the balloon was assembled into two parts on either side of the steel mast, the whole camp crew helped us lift the fabric over the mast so we could zip it together. A dust storm hit during this, and it felt like we were all on a sinking ship that we were desperately trying to keep

Samantha Okolita, M.Arch ’17, was part of a 13-person crew that built a large installation at Burning Man 2018, an annual festival in a temporary city erected in the Black Rock Desert of northwest Nevada.

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37

afloat. We held the fabric up from underneath inside the mast while the fabric and zipper master slowly closed the balloon. That one zipper took almost an entire day.

Finally, we were ready to lift the mast, using the crane from Burning Man’s support services. But a wind storm snapped off the ties that were supposed to hold the balloon to the mast. We quickly tied a rope around the balloon, trying to secure the fabric that was like a sail in the wind. People on the playa saw us struggling to hold on, so many helped hold the rope for almost an hour until we secured it to a truck. As we then tried to resolve a problem with the hinge that connected the mast to the base, the crane operator realized that the crane was too small to fully erect the mast. After lowering the mast and much deliberation, we forged a plan that required two cranes: one would lift the mast and pass it to the other, slightly closer to the base, and then back to the first crane after moving closer.

After several hours, we secured the mast to the base and were in awe of how large this installation was. The next day, a fellow burner in a cherry picker hundreds of feet in

The Orb was a centerpiece for Burning Man and was the scene of numerous gatherings, including a DJ-hosted dance party on the night it was inflated.

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the air closed off the final zipper. After some patch work on various punctures, we inflated the balloon. We completed the installation a little late — halfway through the first day of the burn. In the end, I thought this was better because everyone had already arrived and there was so much talk about our build. The inflation felt like a communal event. We inflated at sunset while a DJ played music; a large crowd cheered and danced as we watched it grow together.

The Orb, the second-tallest structure on the playa, was a centerpiece for Burning Man. Over the next week, we watched people interact with The Orb. Art cars set up nearby and projected lights onto the surface while burners danced. During the day, people found refuge from the sun in its long shadow. At night, the installation looked like a weightless silver sphere. One morning an orchestra played underneath as the sun rose over the desert — an emotional experience. The Orb was our gift to the playa, but the Burning Man community brought it to life.

Samantha Okolita, M.Arch ’17, is a designer working on product development in the Design Innovation Studio at WeWork, based in New York. When she’s not erecting massive installations in the desert, she focuses her practice on imagining possible future architectural organizations in response to climate change, automation, and shifting cultural paradigms.

Class Notes Share your news with your fellow alumni in a future issue of Portico. Send your class note (along with a high-resolution photo, if you would like) to taubmancollegeportico@umich.edu or complete the online form at taubmancollege.umich.edu/alumni.

1970s

 Ilene Tyler, B.Arch ’70,

and Norman Tyler, B.Arch ’70, D.Arch. ’87, published the third edition of Historic Preservation: An Introduction to Its History, Principles, and Practice (Norton, 2018).

New subjects include global philosophical approaches to preservation, trends in increasing the diversity of heritage interpretation, and the concept of zero net carbon for building design and reuse. The book continues to be an essential reference and textbook for coursework in historic preservation programs across the United States and beyond. They are pictured (left to right) with their assistant, Sarah Marsom, and co-author, Ted Ligibel. Norm and Ilene also taught courses in historic preservation at Eastern Michigan University for 30 and 15 years, respectively, and Ilene was director of preservation for almost 30 years at Quinn Evans Architects.

Howard Hecht, M.U.P. ’72, retired after 40 years in the public and private affordable housing field. His career includes work for the New York City Department of Housing

Preservation and Development; the New York State Division of Housing; the New York City Housing Authority; Westhab Inc., a Westchester-based nonprofit housing developer and social service provider; and First Sterling Financial Inc., a national low-income housing tax-credit syndicator.

Steven Meyer, M.U.P./J.D. ’75, was honored by the Sacramento, California, chapter of the Federal Bar Association at its Ninth Annual Night to Honor Service for his pro bono contributions to the Voluntary Dispute Resolution Program Panel.

He is counsel in the Sacramento office of Downey Brand.

Michael LeFevre, FAIA Emeritus, B.S. ’76, M.Arch ’77, has published Managing Design: Conversations, Project Controls and Best Practices for Commercial Design and Construction Projects (Wiley, 2019).

Featuring candid interviews with more than 40 industry leaders, the book addresses a growing pain point in an industry where collaborative approaches to project delivery are outpacing the way professionals work. He is vice president for planning and design support at Holder Construction in Atlanta.

Mohammad Rahimian, M.U.P. ’76, retired in June 2018 after 33 years with Kajima Building & Design (KBD) Group. He most recently served as principal architect at the company’s New Jersey office, where he was responsible for the operation

of the design services in the New Jersey branch offices.

Robin Guenther, FAIA, M.Arch ’78, was one of 10 recipients nationwide of the 2018 Women In Design Award from Healthcare Design and Contract magazines. A principal at Perkins + Will and a senior adviser to Health Care Without Harm, she was recognized for her pioneering role in sustainable healthcare design, and for her tireless advocacy for material transparency and nontoxic building products. Some of Guenther’s most recent projects include Spaulding Rehabilitation Center in Boston, Memorial Sloan Kettering Monmouth in New Jersey, and Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital Stanford in California.

1980s

 Marc Spector, FAIA, B.S. ’87,

M.Arch ’88, was elected to the AIA College of Fellows in February in recognition of his significant contributions to architecture and society.

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GIVING: ROBERT FISHMAN

Fishman Fellowship in Urbanism Builds Bridges to Academia ROBERT FISHMAN, WHO HAS A PH.D. in history, never thought he would wind up teaching at an architecture and urban planning school. But Fishman, an internationally recognized expert in the areas of urban history and urban policy and planning, has done that and more since coming to Taubman College in 2000. In addition to his ongoing role as professor of architecture and urban and regional planning, Fishman served as interim chair of architecture in 2013 and interim dean from 2016 to 2017.

Growing up near New York City, Fishman says he was fascinated from a young age by the special energy of great cities and their power to enrich people’s lives. An influential work in Fishman’s own life, Lewis Mumford’s The City in History, is required reading in the classes he teaches: “I tell my students that there’s always a course requirement that’s not on the syllabus: They must love cities.”

Noting that his career as an urbanist has followed the urban crisis in New York, Detroit, and elsewhere, he says, “Our great cities are not assured. They have to be designed and worked for.”

Fishman says that when he started writing books about the histories of planning and architecture, “I soon realized

that most of my readers were in colleges of architecture and planning. My degree and teaching experience were in academic history, and although I kept thinking it would be great to move to a college of architecture and planning, I thought it would be too hard to switch tracks.”

Fishman credits the generosity of A. Alfred Taubman, with giving him the opportunity to do so. Taubman’s wish for his endowment to be used in ways that would transform the college made it possible to bring Fishman to Ann Arbor.

“I am very pleased that I was able to tell Mr. Taubman personally that I owed my job to his gift,” Fishman says.

Fishman also credits then-dean Douglas Kelbaugh with encouraging him to apply. “I’m not sure I would have taken the initiative if he hadn’t contacted me,” says Fishman.

Now Fishman is paying back the bridge he was given in his own career by giving others a bridge into academia.

In 2017, Fishman made a gift to establish the Fishman Fellowship in Urbanism so that promising early career practitioners and scholars can join the college he loves by teaching and researching the subject he loves. “It was striking to me how so much of the energy of the college comes from its fellows and how the fellowship program has become a major source for our tenure-track faculty,” Fishman says. “To me, one of the fundamental issues of our future is making cities sustainable long term.

So strengthening that part of the college by supporting new talent seemed like the best way I could give back.”

Fishman does not have a degree from U-M, and he taught at his previous institution a decade longer than he has spent at Taubman College so far, but his time in Ann Arbor has made him a dedicated Wolverine. “The great advantage of Michigan is that not only do we have a large faculty, but it’s a faculty where literally everyone is outstanding in different ways,” says Fishman, who notes that when he grapples with a research question, often all he has to do is walk a few doors down to colleagues who have done important work in that area.

“In some ways, it’s comparable to what happens in a great city where people with special skills are brought together.

It’s an environment that creates the kind of possibilities for research that are amazing to me.” — Amy Spooner Learn more about the Fishman Fellowship in Urbanism and other Taubman College fellowship opportunities at taubmancollege.umich.edu/fellowships.

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a Long Island and New York–based firm that his father founded in 1965 and in which his brother, Scott, serves as co-principal. Marc has been recognized in both design and business spheres by individual awards, including the 2018 Outstanding CEO Award from Long Island Business News. He will lead his design team and Spector Group’s participation in the 17th International Architecture Exhibition, la Biennale di Venezia, in 2020.

firm, and has completed several significant sports-related projects, among them most of the YMCA facilities in the area (including Mary Free Bed YMCA, a LEED-certified complex that is the first in the world to be certified for universal design by the Global Universal Design Commission), the Art Van Sports Complex, the Fifth Third Ballpark reconstruction and expansion, and a new Boys & Girls Club with athletic spaces.

1990s

Jill Bahm, M.U.P. ’95, has been promoted to partner at Giffels Webster, a southeast Michigan–based firm of civil engineers, landscape architects, planners, surveyors, and environmental specialists that assists public, private, and institutional clients throughout the United States with their infrastructure needs. Her areas of expertise include long-range planning, downtown development, and community engagement.

 James Horman, M.Arch ’93,

was elected the 2019 board chair of the West Michigan Sports Commission (WMSC), a Grand Rapids–based nonprofit that fosters economic development and healthy lifestyles by attracting youth and amateur sporting events to West Michigan.

He is a principal at Progressive AE, a national architecture/engineering

Steven Jacobs, M.Arch/M.B.A. ’95, has been with CBRE Inc., a global commercial real estate services and investment firm, since 2012. He recently was promoted to director of business intelligence, supporting a team of project managers and facility managers on the JPMorgan Chase account. His older son is a freshman in college, and his younger son is a junior in high school.

He resides in suburban Detroit.

Kristen Nyht, B.S. ’96, M.U.P./ M.Arch ’99, a senior architect at Quinn Evans Architects, was

appointed to be the 2019 president of AIA Michigan. She also is senior project manager for the Michigan Central Station rehabilitation project in Detroit. Ford announced it purchased the 640,000-square-foot iconic train station building in June 2018, and it plans to transform it into the centerpiece of a new 1.2 million-square-foot campus. The Corktown campus will be an innovation hub where Ford and its partners can work to define the future of mobility. She lives in Ann Arbor with her husband and two sons. 

2000s Linda Bailey, M.U.P. ’01, who previously was executive director of the National Association of City Transportation Officials, was named by Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser to lead the new Vision Zero Office — part of the city’s renewed commitment to eliminating traffic fatalities and serious injuries. With increases in the district’s population and tourism, as well as the rise in new types of transportation, the goal of the Vision Zero Office is to ensure

A Joyful Gathering Place, a short film about the revitalization of Karamu House, the oldest operating African American theater in the United States, won runner-up honors in the 2018 AIA National Film Challenge. The film follows the theater’s renovation by Robert P. Madison International, a Cleveland-​​based black female–owned architecture firm, and features Robert Klann, B.S. ’86, M.Arch ’88, who is a co-owner of the firm. Pictured with Klann (center) are Sarah Aquino Klann, B.S. ’86, M.Arch ’88, and Christopher Ford, M.Arch ’17, who were part of the renovation team.

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that no matter how people are moving around D.C., or where they are going, they are able to do so safely.

facing the city. The 2018–2019 fellows are exploring how design and policy can address the homelessness crisis as part of the New York Department of Homeless Services’s “Conscious Design Guidelines” initiative set to be released in the fall.

He is a project manager at the New York City Housing Authority, where he is advancing NYCHA 2.0, a 10-year, comprehensive plan to preserve public housing. 

 Jim Diego, B.S. ’06,

was featured in Runner’s World for accomplishing the feat of singing the National Anthem in and running a marathon in each state. He achieved his goal in November 2018 at the Route 66 Marathon in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

He has completed more than 100 marathons in the U.S. and abroad, including 28 in 2018, after joining a gym to lose weight in 2014. When he’s not indulging his love of running, travel, and singing, he is a senior project manager for the Greater Jamaica Development Corporation, a real estate development nonprofit just outside of New York City. He also sings with Broadway Barkada, a Filipino performance troupe. “The concept of being able to see a course and see a city through the eyes of a marathon has really grabbed my attention,” he told Runner’s World. “You could say I’ve become a little bit of a course snob.

I always make sure that I can see as much of a city as possible.”

Adam Hollier, M.U.P. ’09, was elected in November 2018 to the Michigan Senate. He represents District 2, which includes the Wayne County cities of Hamtramck, Harper Woods, Highland Park, parts of 42

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Detroit, and all five Grosse Pointe communities. Prior to joining the Senate, he was director of government affairs for the Michigan Fitness Foundation. He also serves in the U.S. Army Reserves. 

2010s  Bryan Robb, M.U.P. ’10,

married Sharayah Ludwig in February 2018 at the Grand Lodge in Forest Grove, Oregon. He worked for the Michigan State Housing Development Authority’s Office of Community Development for seven years before moving to Portland in 2015, and he now works as a long-range planner for Washington County, Oregon. The couple welcomed their first child, Paxton Alexander, in January.

Anand Amin, M.Arch ’12, is a Forefront Fellow at the Urban Design Forum in New York — an independent membership organization that gathers civic leaders across disciplines to debate the critical issues

Samantha Farr, M.U.P. ’15, was named to InStyle’s “The Badass 50: Meet the Women Who Are Changing the World” list in January for her work as the founder of Women Who Weld, a Detroit nonprofit. Others on the list include Michelle Obama, Christine Blasey Ford, Helen Mirren, Ariana Grande, and Rachel Maddow.

Chris Myefski, B.S. ’18, won a Best of Design Award in the Unbuilt – Public category from The Architect’s Newspaper for “The American Construct,” which began as his Wallenberg Studio project and won the 2018 Wallenberg Traveling Fellowship. It was designed to increase awareness of the physical and social impact that the military has had on the American West, and it creates architectural experiences that immerse visitors in the environment of each location. He currently is a graduate student at Princeton University’s School of Architecture.

GIVING: MARTIN WOODROW, B.S. ’89, M.ARCH ’91

“Now Is the Time to Reengage” AS CHAIR-ELECT OF THE Taubman College Alumni Council, Martin Woodrow, B.S. ’89, M.Arch ’91, is a firm believer that alumni should be connected to the college.

“There aren’t many, if any, professions that can impact humanity as profoundly as architecture — and planning is right there, too, in terms of the scale of its influence,” he says. “Alumni have a responsibility to help advance the study of those sciences and those arts.”

Woodrow admits, however, that he didn’t always take his own advice. His career progressed. His family got busier.

His social commitments and volunteer obligations kept him booked solid. He didn’t hear much from his alma mater, and he was too wrapped up in daily life to even notice. Then Woodrow, who is executive managing director of Cushman & Wakefield’s global occupier services business, based in the Denver office, had a chance

“I want alumni to see the newfound energy and the great trajectory of the college.”

Professionally, Woodrow says, architecture school also provided valuable lessons, even though he no longer practices architecture himself. For one thing, those late nights gave him the toughness to handle challenges throughout his career. In addition, talking with Al Taubman, a guest reviewer for the final crit in Professor Robert Beckley’s thesis studio, gave lasting perspective. “He impressed upon me the power that architecture has in business — how it can advance companies and retain talent, how it is more than building buildings,” says Woodrow, whose work at Cushman is focused on global real estate services.

“That segues directly to what I’m doing now.”

Regardless of whether you’re still a practicing architect or planner, and no matter how long it’s been since you were involved with Taubman College, you always have a place in the family, Woodrow says. “I want alumni to see the newfound energy and the great trajectory of the college.

If you’ve been out of touch with U-M since the day you graduated, that’s okay. Now is the time to reengage. And if you’ve left the profession, you still have great value to add to the conversation.” — Amy Spooner

— Martin Woodrow, B.S. ’89, M.Arch. ’91 encounter on a shuttle bus while attending a conference in Los Angeles. Through idle chitchat he discovered that his seatmate was a fellow Wolverine, Pankaj Duggal, M.U.P./ M.Arch ’95, the current chair of the Alumni Council.

“Our connection as we talked about our shared experience at U-M was instant, like we were long-lost brothers,” says Woodrow. “Once he gave me a sense of the exciting stuff happening at Taubman College, I saw it was something I really wanted to get involved with.”

Woodrow, who originally came to U-M as a pre-med major, got involved with architecture when he took an architectural design course as an elective. “It was all over once I took that class. I loved it,” he says. He calls architecture school “the best time I never want to do again” and relishes the personal connections from the experience — from piling into a station wagon to visit Fallingwater to late nights in the studio, where he recalls “the brothersin-arms camaraderie of spending all that time with people who were as passionate as I was.”

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Four themes (clockwise, from top left): Architectures of banality. Shaping knowledge formation. Geographies of territory. Emergent landscapes.

Paul McBride, M.Arch ’15, Reflects on Booth Fellowship Since 1924, the George G. Booth Traveling Fellowship has offered recent alumni of Taubman College funding to research some special aspect of architecture that requires international travel. The 2018 Booth Fellow, Paul McBride, M.Arch ’15, shares a snapshot of his travels with “In Extremis: Climate Science, Development, and Possible Futures in the Far North.”

Communities in the Canadian far north are facing unprecedented challenges to the continuity of environmental and seasonal conditions due to warming trends, along with uncertain forms of modernization and development.

Natural resource extraction, scientific expeditions, and continued attempts at modernizing all belong to a history of colonization and compromised autonomy for indigenous peoples in the Arctic. In light of this history, new possibilities are emerging for the production of indigenous and western knowledge and their manifestation in a decentralized network of architectural and urban form.

My project presents an exploration of science, technology, and possible futures for cross-disciplinary and crosscultural collaboration to advance architecture in the Arctic. From August through October 2018, I spent time in Yukon and Northwest Territories hypothesizing how climate science research and its physical infrastructures are influencing architecture and urban development. Taking northern research stations as a point of departure, I 44

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extended scientific methods and procedures into the built environment. Research stations offer a unique opportunity to conduct design research and contribute to more inclusive collaboration with Inuit and First Nations communities, ensuring traditional and contemporary cultural needs are met through community buildings, housing design, and building technology. My methodologies encompassed interviewing community members, scientists, and station managers about perceptions of climate science research and how research stations impact local community and economy. This social research is paired with direct observations of foundation system typologies, building system performance, infrastructure, and development patterns.

My findings are continually changing and adapting, as are the communities living within the warming socio-environmental milieu of the Canadian far north.

Paul McBride, M.Arch ’15, is a licensed architect with Michael Green Architecture in Vancouver, British Columbia, and registered in Washington State.

CONNEC T W I T H US Taubman College hosts alumni events around the country, as well as annual Homecoming and milestone reunion celebrations in Ann Arbor. Learn more at taubmancollege.umich.edu/alumni or call 734.764.4720. You also can view events online at taubmancollege.umich.edu/alumni and see photos from past events on our Flickr page.

Recent alumni events include (clockwise from top left) the spring Taubman College Alumni Council meeting in Ann Arbor, a reception at the National Organization of Minority Architects Conference in Chicago, celebrating the conclusion of the Victors for Michigan Campaign, a reception at the APA Conference in San Francisco, an alumni panel about the importance of mentoring on the eve of Career Fair, an MTalks event in London, and the Florida Seminars in Manalapan.

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CL AS S NO TES

In Memoriam Norm Barnett Norm Barnett, professor emeritus of architecture and a generous donor to the university, died on February 12. He was 96.

Born in Jamestown, New York, Barnett studied physics at U-M and played French horn in the marching and concert bands. He earned a bachelor’s degree in 1944, then supported the war effort by conducting engine aircraft research for the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. He returned to Michigan to work in the acoustical research lab of his mentor, Paul Geiger, and pursue a master’s degree, which he earned in 1947. He then worked at the Engineering Research Institute and the Institute of Science and Technology and was a lecturer in the Department of Electrical Engineering from 1961 to 1969. He conducted research for government and industry in applied optics, communication systems, applied acoustics, hologram interferometry applied to vibration problems, and soil dynamics.

In 1967, Barnett joined the College of Architecture and Design faculty, where he remained until retiring in 1993. He taught architectural acoustics and architectural photography and led development of environmental technology undergraduate courses still taught today. He co-​ authored a four-volume set for the U.S. Navy about submarine noise and later developed electronic instrumentation to support research in environmental technology and building energy. Even after retiring, he worked with Professor James Turner to develop software for teaching architectural acoustics. He also was an acoustical consultant for the renovation of U-M’s Hill Auditorium.

In 2002, Barnett received the Distin46

SPRING 2019 TAUBMAN COLLEGE

guished Service Award for his contributions and dedication to Taubman College and U-M. Identifiable by his small stature, erect bearing, and tweed cap, Barnett was a fixture at iconic Ann Arbor locations for more than seven decades.

He is immortalized in a mural hanging above the display case at Monahan’s Seafood, where he is depicted choosing his Friday supper. He was preceded in death by his wife, Mary, whom he met as an undergrad. They shared a love of U-M athletics (particularly hockey), music, and travel.

When the Barnetts began their estate planning, they considered places they felt had been good to them.

The result was three endowed funds: The Norman E. and Mary E. Barnett Graduate Fellowship in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts to support graduate student research in physics; The Norman E. and Mary E. Barnett Scholarship in Music for students studying French horn or voice performance, specifically opera; and The Norman E. and Mary E. Barnett Fund at Taubman College to support student research in environmental technology.

In addition to supporting these three endowments, Barnett also made annual gifts to endowments bearing the names of his former colleagues William Scott, Willard Oberdick, and Lester Fader, with whom he worked closely during his career at Taubman College.

Allan G. Feldt Allan Feldt, professor emeritus of urban planning, died on February 27.

Hailing from Tonawanda, New York, Feldt attended U-M on an NROTC scholarship, graduating in 1954 with just-passing grades to earn a bachelor’s degree in physics. He married his high school sweetheart, Barbara, that same year and was drafted into the U.S. Army, where he served as a radio operator and Jeep driver for the 3rd Infantry Division at Fort Benning, Georgia. He earned a Ph.D. in sociology from U-M in 1963 with specializations in human ecology and demography.

Feldt taught at Cornell University before returning to U-M in 1971 to teach urban and regional planning. He remained on the U-M faculty until his retirement in 1994. He is best known for developing one of the earliest simulation games on urban growth and development, Community Land Use Game (CLUG), which was widely used in universities and colleges worldwide from 1966 through 1990.

Paul Valliere, B.Arch ’49 September 22, 2018 Samuel Havis, B.Arch ’51 March 17, 2017 Artur Losse, B.Arch ’66 February 6, 2017 Richard Kerschbaum, B.Arch ’69 September 27, 2018 James Sewell, B.S./M.Arch ’73 August 20, 2018 Dale Volkening, B.Arch ’73 October 2, 2018 Randolph Grossman, Ph.D. ’84 January 2, 2019 Cyrus Yoakam, M.U.P. ’95 October 9, 2018 Todd Gattie, M.Arch ’07 December 30, 2018

While at Cornell, Feldt served on the Ithaca Planning Commission for two years and as the elected 7th Ward alderman for four years. He later served on the Ann Arbor Planning Commission for four years.

He received several awards for teaching excellence, including the 1995 Urban Planning Educator of the Year award from the American Collegiate Schools of Planning. He was proudest, however, of the students he helped train and place into responsible positions in society — especially the 135 doctoral students upon whose dissertation committees he served. Many have gone on to chair departments of urban planning at other universities and made significant contributions to society.

He is survived by daughters Linda and Laurie; three grandchildren; a great-​ grandson; and Kathryn West, with whom he lived in the years following his wife, Barbara’s, death. In addition to Barbara, he was predeceased by his son, David.

As old age and death gradually intruded on his life, he sat down and wrote his own obituary, which you are reading now. On the whole, he was satisfied with his life and ready to die. He had no expectations of heaven or any life after death and would be surprised and dismayed that such things actually exist beyond the imaginations of human beings. It is enough, he thought, to feel certain that the world is a slightly better place for your having spent a few decades on its surface, enjoying life, but also contributing to it.

Leave a Lasting Legacy Including Taubman College in your estate or financial plans is one of the easiest ways to make a lasting impact.

You can even generate income for yourself and your family while benefiting the college and generations of students.

Types of planned gifts include gifts from a will or trust, beneficiary designations, and property.

Making a planned gift is a rewarding way to support the causes you care most about while providing for yourself and your family. Contact the Taubman College Advancement Team at 734.764.4720 or taubmancollegeadvancement@umich.edu to learn more about leaving a planned gift for Taubman College or to let us know if you already have included the college in your will or estate plans.

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“Final is ending. Life is so beautiful after living day and night in the dark computer lab for the past week.” #amazingsky — Diwen “Wendy” Yang, M.Arch ’19, on Instagram, commenting on the same sunset captured here by Shane Donnelly, M.Arch/M.U.D. ’19 48

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P ORT ICO VOL . 19, NO. 1 SPR ING 2019 University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning 2000 Bonisteel Blvd.

Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2069 USA taubmancollege.umich.edu

We welcome alumni news, letters, and comments at taubmancollegeportico@umich.edu. You also can submit class notes online at: taubmancollege.umich.edu/alumni/portico Has your address or email address changed?

Submit your new contact information online at taubmancollege.umich.edu/alumni/alumni-contactupdate-form or call 734.764.4720.

Jonathan Massey Dean

Postage paid at Ann Arbor, Michigan. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Editor, Portico, University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, 2000 Bonisteel Blvd., Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2069 USA

Cynthia Radecki, A.B./B.S. ’87, M.Arch ’88 Assistant Dean, Advancement

© 2019 Regents of the University of Michigan

Amber LaCroix Senior Director, Marketing Communications Amy Spooner Editor Liz Momblanco Graphic Designer

Contributing Writers: Amy Crawford, Allan Feldt, Janice Harvey, Paul McBride, M.Arch ’15, Safiya Merchant, Samantha Okolita, M.Arch ’17, and Amy Spooner Photo Credits: Eric Bronson/Michigan Photography (pp. 3, top + 20), Drew Dempsey/Dempsey Creative (front cover + pp. 12-13), Shane Donnelly (p. 48), Nathanael Filbert (p. 28), James Florio (pp. 29, top + 31), Rafael Gamo (p. 27), Laurian Ghinitoiu (pp. 2 + 37-38), Steve Hall (pp. 3, middle + 29, below + 30), Nick Hagen (p. 17), Sam Hollenshead (p. 24), Ricky Iglesias (p. 19), Paul McBride (pp. 3 + 44), Jasper Sanidad (p. 27), John Smyth (p. 32), Scott Soderberg/Michigan Photography (inside front cover, below + p. 1), Richard Termine (p. 4), Leisa Thompson/Leisa Thompson Photography (pp. 16 + 22), and Connie Zhou (p. 27)

The Regents of the University of Michigan Jordan B. Acker, Huntington Woods Michael J. Behm, Grand Blanc Mark J. Bernstein, Ann Arbor Paul W. Brown, Ann Arbor Shauna Ryder Diggs, Grosse Pointe Denise Ilitch, Bingham Farms Ron Weiser, Ann Arbor Katherine E. White, Ann Arbor Mark S. Schlissel, ex officio Nondiscrimination Policy Statement The University of Michigan, as an equal opportunity/affirmative action employer, complies with all applicable federal and state laws regarding nondiscrimination and affirmative action. The University of Michigan is committed to a policy of equal opportunity for all persons and does not discriminate on the basis of race, color, national origin, age, marital status, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, disability, religion, height, weight, or veteran status in employment, educational programs and activities, and admissions. Inquiries or complaints may be addressed to the Senior Director for Institutional Equity, and Title IX/ Section 504/ADA Coordinator, Office for Institutional Equity, 2072 Administrative Services Building, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-1432, 734.763.0235, TTY 734-647-1388, institutionalequity@umich.edu.

For other University of Michigan information call 734.764.1817.

Portico is a semiannual publication for alumni and friends of Taubman College, produced by the Office of Advancement. This issue was printed by University Lithoprinters.

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University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning 2000 Bonisteel Boulevard, Ann Arbor, MI 48109-2069

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