University of Detroit Mercy’s next School of Architecture’s dean — the School’s fourth — will be inheriting a program current Dean Will Wittig and his faculty have been carefully building for years.
Wittig calls it “School of Architecture 4.0.” It’s a program that stresses hands-on themes in four areas: community engagement, co-op, technology and study abroad. It was developed with input of alumni and others with knowledge of the curriculum over several months. In recent years, five new faculty members have been brought on to build upon or strengthen the School’s programming.
“These five people really give us an opportunity to update the curriculum,” Wittig said. “Their skills and talents advance the program and get us to where we want to be.”
Here is a brief look at them and what they bring to the curriculum and the students.
James Leach and Kristen Nelson joined the School of Architecture in 2018. They bring with them experience in practice and teaching and each have their own expertise.
He focuses on the technical sequence of the Architecture curriculum, including construction and structures, and her areas of interest are construction and environmental systems.
“Schools of architecture tend to be siloed,” Leach said. Classes would be lecture-based or hands-on, some classes even taught not by architects, but by engineers.
“But you can’t separate the two, that’s why we incorporate lecture and a hands-on, design-based activity in our classes,” Nelson said.
“We both teach all of these things and are working to integrate them so students can see the connections and how they all link to design,” Leach added. “It’s a more active-learning style and it’s what the School of Architecture has committed itself to.”
The married couple say they came to Detroit Mercy because of the important way the SOA works with the city. They look forward to learning about the design issues that a city like Detroit presents.
Tadd Heidgerken is a 2001 graduate of Detroit Mercy’s Architecture program and taught on and off until 2015, when he took a tenure-track position with the School. He is the coordinator of the second-year foundational design studio and is focusing his curriculum on visual communication.
“People learn a great deal through drawing,” Heidgerken said, though new technologies have taken designers away from that hands-on aspect of their work. “We needed to restraighten the ship because the tools have changed, so we took a look again at how we could use drawing and physical modeling as design tools.”
Students now go back and forth between using technology to determine perspective and drafting a perspective by hand. The construction lab is also more integrated in projects as a tool to express an idea and to understand how it is, or could be, built.
“The goal of all this is really to have them understand the importance of how to communicate their ideas,” he said.
Heidgerken also teaches a class on private practice, helping students look at options and opportunities for their careers. Previously, the School focused on preparing students to work for others, he added.
“My research is practice,” he said, and his boutique practice, et al. collaborative, has offices in Detroit and Brooklyn, NY. His access to other experts working in the field is a great opportunity for students to learn from people doing the work.
Virginia Stanard has been teaching at the SOA since 2006, when she joined the Detroit Collaborative Design Center; she became a full-time faculty member in 2015. She is the director of the growing Master of Community Development (MCD) program.
The School’s goals for the MCD program include increasing the program’s profile locally and nationally and increasing multi-disciplinary opportunities for students both in the program and across the campuses to study issues unique to community development.
For instance, this semester, students will be able to take a cross-listed class on grant writing that was created in conjunction with the English department.
“We’re really excited about this class,” Stanard said. “And we’ve also expanded the University’s study abroad program in Cuba to better serve MCD students with a focus on community development issues in both Havana and Detroit.”
One of the most exciting aspects of the MCD program, she said, is the opportunity to use the city of Detroit as its classroom.
“We have some really strong partnerships with community organizations and these local leaders engage our classes,” she said. “Many of them are our alumni, who are tackling issues in their work that we discuss in the classroom, so the students benefit from this in many ways.”
She says the program is constantly working to improve the curriculum and strives to keep pace not just with where the field is, but where it is going.
“We must be a nimble and adaptive program, and I think we are,” Stanard said.
Erika Lindsay joined the faculty full time in 2015. Her interest is in historic preservation and conservation, something that is important to the city of Detroit. It’s an expertise that grew from her research into Socialist memorials and monuments in the Balkans.
That research began when she saw a story about so-called abandoned memorials to historic events of World War II in the former Yugoslavia. She discovered that the story being told — that people and the government had let memorials go to ruin because of the problematic things they represented — was not true.
“I found these monuments are still viable,” she said. “And I see that same thing in Detroit and draw a lot of parallels between the two because the narrative that is presented of Detroit is very limited.”
The way people interact with buildings is an important aspect of her teaching, she said.
“As someone with a specialty in conservation and heritage studies, I do my best to relate my teaching to my research through the notion of context,” she said. “I teach students to develop designs that respond to context and ask them to illuminate invisible forces at work. As I primarily teach in the foundation years, I find these practices to be helpful in developing th skills necessary for students to succeed as they continue their studies.”
“We can’t forget that buildings are in service of people, not the other way around,” Lindsay said.
