Community involvement has always been a theme in Professor Stephen Vogel’s life. It’s a trait, he says he inherited from his parents while growing up in rural southwest Indiana.
As a student, architect and dean of the School of Architecture, his community as grown. Not only has he impacted metro Detroit, but future architects and city developers who attend University of Detroit Mercy. Now, as he steps out of the classroom and into semi-retirement, Vogel is reflecting on his roots in the area and hopes to continue to educate through books.
As a farm boy, Vogel didn’t expect his life would be based in Detroit, but from his early days as a student, he immersed himself in the community and established strong roots. After graduating from the School of Architecture in 1970, he got married and they decided to stay in Michigan.
From architect to educator
“Shortly after I graduated, I began adjunct teaching at the school and that really intrigued me,” Vogel said. “I got my master’s degree and became a full-time faculty for four years.” But Vogel’s Detroit-based architecture firm grew rapidly and he was forced to make a decision — teach or practice. He decided to practice and left teaching until he was drawn back in 1993.
“Since a lot of architecture firms had left Detroit, we were getting a lot of business because our firm was in the city of Detroit,” said Vogel. The firm focused on apartments, landscape architecture, parks and other development for the Coleman Young administration.
Vogel’s firm was hit hard by the recession of the early 1990s, right at the time University of Detroit Mercy announced the School of Architecture was looking for a new dean.
“I hadn’t thought about it before that, but when I saw the information about the deanship, I knew I wanted to do it,” said Vogel. He wanted to teach and he wanted to help the school and students to become more involved with the surrounding area.
“We’re the only architecture school in the city of Detroit,” he said. “I really pushed early on for the school to become engaged in the community.”
Big Plans for the Program
As dean, Vogel had ambitious plans for the architecture program and the first was to establish a design center as Detroit Mercy was one of the few architecture schools without one. In 1994, the Detroit Collaborative Design Center began working with community-based development organizations to promote quality design in the area. The goal was to give students hands-on design opportunities while enhancing and investing in the community surrounding the campus.
“It became much more than I hoped,” he said. “The design center really took off. I never imagined it would be as successful as it is today. We get an amazing amount of grants, we’ve worked with over 100 organizations in Detroit and won more awards than I could count.”
With the DCDC integrated into the community, there were more opportunities for students to advance themselves outside of design and into larger scale planning.
“When you start doing affordable housing and that sort of thing, you start working with neighborhood organizations and the next thing you know you are doing community planning,” Vogel said. “As students, we were infiltrated with the idea that architecture could change and world and that’s not true. When I became dean, I wanted to create an opportunity for students to focus on more than design. They also need to focus on social issues and economic issues.”
With a grant from 3M, Vogel created the business plan for the Master of Community Development degree.
“The curriculum is quite unique in the country. It is a much more comprehensive view of the community and I think that’s one of the reasons the program has been so successful. It’s not necessarily geared toward architects. Most of the graduates have stayed in the city of Detroit. Combine that with the Design Center and you have a lot of community engagement from our students,” Vogel said.
Beyond the Borders of Detroit
In addition to immersing future architects in the community around them, Vogel understood the importance of a global education. During his time as dean, the city of Volterra, Italy, proposed leasing a building to the School of Architecture for its study abroad program for 30 years at no cost.
“Prior to that, I had cut the Volterra program in half,” he said. “The cost of the program to students was getting higher and higher and I didn’t think our students could afford to live there for half a year anymore.” With the donated building, the School of Architecture could offer the program to students at a much lower cost.
From that point, the School of Architecture laid the foundation to increase study abroad and exchange scholarships so more students could participate in the programs in Warsaw, Poland, or Volterra.
Continuing to Educate
While Vogel will spend less time in the classroom, he’s still committed to education. In addition to planning to teach a class in spring 2018 and fall 2018, Vogel is working on two books.
The first, with the working title “10 Women Teaching Design in Detroit,” tells the story of the 10 women from their points of view. Vogel will write the opening chapter of the book and edit the submitted chapters.
The second book is based on a course he taught about Detroit.
“I’ve been working on it for quite a few years. Draft five is completed and we’ve done the first layout of the book,” said Vogel, while he doesn’t have a publisher lined up, he’s also considering self-publishing it.
