August 22, 2023 Twelve Faculty Members, Fellows Join the College of Architecture and Design
The University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s College of Architecture and Design welcomed 5 new and 7 returning faculty members into tenure-track professor positions and fellowships this fall. They join the schools of architecture, design, and landscape architecture.
Architecture
Frances Hsu is an assistant professor at UT. She formerly taught at Marywood University School of Architecture, University of North Carolina, Charlotte, and Aalto University. She is a licensed architect, designer and scholar whose work, at multiple scales, explores architecture and urbanism from a territorial perspective. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Architectural Education, Clog, Footprint, Contemporary Architectural Education Journal, The Cambridge Architectural Journal, and others. She worked as a designer at OMA and UN Studio. She also has presented and published on hybrid research-design practice.
Julie Kress is the school’s next Tennessee Architecture Fellow. She has already made a mark at the school and college as a lecturer and curator. Her fellowship project will bring a curator’s instinct to index, catalog, and collect animate modes of production and match that with her experience as a prolific maker. While Kress’ work will see her in dialogue with a rich contemporary tradition of digital animate form, her pursuits demand an expansive field of architecture that includes experiences, materiality, tectonics, joinery and effect.
Jeremy Magner has been appointed assistant professor after serving as lecturer in the school and a Tennessee Architecture Fellow from 2020-2022. In his teaching, research, and practice, Magner challenges conventional boundaries between designer and builder with the aim of developing a deeper engagement with the means of production of architecture and its consequences—human, material, and ecological. In 2015, he was selected as an artist-in-residence and affiliated artist at AUTODESK Pier 9 Workshop and for many years managed project fabrication and design for notable firms including robotics-leader Machineous as well as Gensler, Morphosis and others.
Assistant Professor Micah Rutenberg previously served as a lecturer of architecture at UT, where he’s been teaching and conducting research on the infrastructural, technological, and ecological arrays that shape patterns of urbanization and territorial administration in the Tennessee Valley region. He was awarded the 2017-2018 Tennessee Architecture Fellowship, during which time he executed, Techno-Scientific Petting Zoo of the Anthropogenic Sublime, a speculative design-research project that seeks to re-frame the relationship between natural, cultural, and technological systems surrounding Great Smoky Mountains National Park. He is co-authoring, “The Logistics of Mechanized Landscapes: Mapping the TVA,” and is currently in development on a Regional Globalism book, in connection with the college’s two interdisciplinary symposia which was held under his co-leadership.
Mark Stanley has been promoted to assistant professor after serving as senior lecturer in the School of Architecture. He is the co-founder of StudioMARS, a speculative design-research practice. Stanley’s research and teaching studies architecture’s entanglements with larger systems of culture, technology, and ecology. His projects imagine the agency of architecture and the architect within these relationships and are often produced as speculative design conveyed through experimental representation where architecture is often one part of a larger critical project grappling with the present conditions of a collective existence in the 21st Century.
Associate Professor Catty Dan Zhang comes to UT from UNC Charlotte. She’s the founder of Temporary Office, a practice that explores architecture and digital technology through the production of exhibitions, objects, drawings, animations, installations and writings. Zhang’s recent solo exhibition “Bubble Bath / Interior Cities 0.5” was on display at the MetroLab at Florida Atlantic University. Her design work has also been featured in group exhibitions at the ‘T’ Space, London Design Festival, Carnegie Museum of Arts, A+D Museum, Harvard GSD, among other institutions. Her recent work has been supported by the National Science Foundation, as well as several institutional grants during 2017-2023. Zhang was a finalist of the Harvard GSD’s Wheelwright Prize in 2018 and 2021. She was awarded the first prize in the Pamphlet Architecture 37 competition and is the author of the forthcoming volume in the Pamphlet Architecture series.
Design
Timothy Arment transitions into a new role in the school as the Digital Futures Fellow overseeing the forthcoming Digital Futures Lab. Arment has served as a lecturer in the school since 2019. His fine art practice typically uses software and cutting-edge technology to investigate the boundaries of reality and perception.
Matthew Flores is the 2023–25 Fellow in the School of Design, interdisciplinary artist and designer. His studio practice is rooted in strategies of misdirection and appropriation, and orbits around an interest in how the art viewing experience can be analogized with the format of jokes, performance, and the theatrical. He was awarded the 2023 Idea Capital Atlanta Creative Grant, a Creative Residency Fellowship at Hambidge Center for Creative Arts, selected as one of Atlanta Celebrates Photography’s 2019 Ones to Watch, and attended a 2023 Residency at The Luminary in St. Louis, Missouri.
Landscape Architecture
Sarah Bolivar is an assistant professor of landscape architecture whose research explores how individual and collective actions can support migrating plants and wildlife, and by extension, the palpable and cultural meaning they hold in people’s lives. Bolivar has worked on drinking water resource management with the local government in Bellingham, Washington, landscape conservation and design with the Central Park Conservancy, and private and public planning and development with AECOM. Her process emphasizes multimedia storytelling as a tool for building participatory and inclusive environments whereby the public imagination can conceive more porous, hybrid, and resilient landscapes.
Farre “Faye” Nixon joins the college as an assistant professor after working as a landscape designer for the non-profit planning and design firm Kounkuey Design Initiative in Los Angeles and for the Oslo-based office of Snøhetta. Nixon believes that the transdisciplinary work required to address the challenges of the Anthropocene presents an opportunity to enrich and transform the design practice. As such, her research includes investigating speculative and critical design methodologies, using creative writing techniques such as worldbuilding as a design tool, interrogating the ways emerging technologies and design intersect, and co-designing with humans and their non-human counterparts within the context of uncertain climate futures.
Andrew Madl previously served as a lecturer and adjunct faculty member in the school since 2017 and has been appointed assistant professor. His work focuses on the exploration and registration of computation/advanced digital technologies in the landscape. Within his research, Madl seeks to expose landscape consequences through schemas at the confluence of, and in response to, monumental technological advancements ranging from the nuclear bomb to artificial intelligence. He is currently working on a graphic novel with AR+D publishing, presenting speculative landscape scenarios for nuclear test sites in the western United States. He has recently authored and published “Parametric Design for Landscape Architects: Computational Techniques and Workflows.”
Scottie McDaniel has been promoted to assistant professor after serving the school as a lecturer and adjunct faculty member since 2018. Her research is situated on land practices of the South with an emphasis on the southern highlands, a region she loves and understands is riddled with nuance, contradiction, and lingering trauma. Through her work, McDaniel aims to explore, unfold, and exhibit the complexity of the Southern landscape.