Last month, I got a chance to sit down and talk with Michael Speaks, Dean of College of Design, about some upcoming and exciting things that are happening at our school. From new professors, to new programs, and the (very possible) new building, it seems as though our College is getting a make-over—in AND out.

Everyone here seems to know you solely by who you are now. Will you give us a little bit of background, and talk about where you were and what you were doing before you came the The University of Kentucky?

I’ve been at Kentucky for about a year and a half now. I arrived in February, 2008. Before coming to Kentucky, I was at SCI-ARC (Southern California Institute for Architecture] for about ten years. I was hired there in 1998 by Neil Denari to become the head of the Graduate Program. While there, we hired most of the people who are now associated with SCI-ARC’s digital design and fabrication work, including Hernan Diaz Alonso and Marcelo Spina. Many of them were my students at Columbia in NYC. While at SCI-ARC, I also started a post-graduate program, MR+D (Metropolitan Research + Design), which was an urban research and design program. Drura Parrish is a graduate. We graduated a lot of interesting students who are now scattered all over the world. In LA I was also teaching at UCLA, especially the last couple of years. I was also traveling to Michigan and teaching there as well. I had visiting professorship there for about two years. It was exhausting because I flew from LA to Detroit every week for two years. It’s about a three and a half hour flight. Before I was at SCI-ARC, I was in New York. I was teaching some at Columbia and at Harvard, and traveling a lot, especially to Europe, mostly the Netherlands. I was a research fellow at the Technological University at Delft in the Netherlands for a couple of years and I spent a lot of time in Rotterdam. Before that I was working in New York for Peter Eisenman at a kind of architecture think tank—it was called ANY, Architecture New York and we ran conferences, published books and a magazine. I was the Senior Editor of ANY magazine and started the “Writing Architecture” book series for ANY at MIT. Before that, I was finishing a dissertation on Post-Modernism and Deconstructivism in Architecture at Duke University. While in LA I also started and ran a company called Big Soft Orange that promoted Dutch architecture in the US. We did an exhibit called Big Soft Orange that toured all over the east and west coast; it was in New York, New Haven, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Ohio State, and got quite a lot of publicity. I am currently a Contributing Editor for Architectural Record and was, for a number of years, a Contributing Editor for A+U, in Japan. When I have time, I still write, but it’s harder now; there is just too much on going on. Two days ago, well, actually over the weekend, I was in New York, to work on a book with SHoP Architects. I was meeting with them for two days about their new monograph. I am also working on a book with Neil Denari, and I just finished writing a piece for a book on the work of Julien De Smedt (JDS Architects); he was here last year teaching our Brown Forman Studio.

Will you talk a little bit about some new and exciting things that are happening with the College of Design?

As I said earlier, I have been here for a year and a half. There was a time when the College had a very good reputation as a design school, and we would like to have that kind of reputation again. We have a number of new agendas, new programs that are beginning or will soon be underway. Among them is the lecture series—it is now, I would say, among the best in the country. We want to bring in lecturers not only from outside of this region, but also from Europe and Asia. If you look at that poster, it’s a pretty diverse group of people, and many are international. And, their work ranges across many different design disciplines and approaches. We also have a couple of new initiatives that we are really excited about. One is the Design Energy Initiative, or DEI. We did a show, at LOT, last semester, where we featured many of the projects in the DEI portfolio. The show included Rives Rash’s fly ash furniture workshop. We also had work from a seminar devoted to recycled materials taught by Bureau V from NYC as well as photographs of a retired coal plant in Henderson, KY, by Frank Doring. And, we featured our Solar Decathlon model and project (of course the Solar Decathlon is one of the highlighted events of the year). The DEI portfolio focuses on the relationship between design and energy; not only energy policy, but also, and especially, product. Other projects related to the DEI are the three studios that we are doing right now in the Graduate Program in the School of Architecture. Mike Jacobs is teaching one, David Biagi is teaching one, and Gary Rohrbacher is teaching the other. Bruce Swetnam is also very involved in this project. Joe Tanney, our Kentucky Housing Corporation Professor, comes in from NYC every two weeks as an advisor. This is a set of three studios that we are doing with sponsorship from Kentucky Highlands, an investment group on Somerset, Kentucky. We are developing a design prototype for an energy efficient modular house; an energy efficient park or neighborhood for those houses; and, we’re developing a design for a factory where these can be manufactured. This is a real project. In Somerset, KY, there are a number of houseboat manufacturing companies that have had to close down because there isn’t a big demand for houseboats right now. Kentucky Highlands would like to purchase one of those factory spaces. In that factory space it is possible to put workers who had been working in the houseboat industry back to work making these energy efficient manufactured homes. What is really exciting about this project is that we are developing a new product that is consumed throughout Kentucky and, to make it even more exciting, we have an opportunity to bring back workers who had been sidelined because of the economy. This project will expand, and we will do a number of other things related to the pre-fabricated housing, and to mobile homes. We have multi-year project that we are working on with the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association to develop mobile homes and/or prefabricated housing that is energy efficient/high performance. So the DEI is very important for us. The other project we are running this semester is Rives fly ash workshop/seminar. This year they are going to be making planters out of fly ash. When you burn coal at power plant, one of the bi-products is ash. What you want to do is recycle materials that come as bi-products, so a lot of these materials are scrubbed from the plants, and they don’t know what to do with it. One possible use is to mix 25 per cent fly ash with cement to use as pavement. Another use is for commercial products; we are making furniture products that we think can even be commercially available. We are also designing and developing some awards that will be given to recipients of Clean Up operation by TVA (Tennessee Valley Authority).

We also launched the River Cities Project this year; it is a multi-year, urban research and design project. Each year we will work with a small to medium size city located on the Ohio River. In the fall, we will research the city, looking at economics, cultural issues, politics, while also looking at the city’s infrastructure; we are looking to see what are the trends in population, and economy, especially how they relate to the river. We will make large scale, strategic design proposals in the fall, with the intention of understanding how those cities might become economically more successful—we do this through the filter of design. This could mean designing new road systems, redeveloping a waterfront, or adapting old facilities and doing new things with them. In the fall, we will make design proposals, and in the spring, we make a design project that will be informed by these proposals. This year, we started with Henderson, KY, and Anne Filson is teaching that studio, along with Matthijs Bouw, the College of Design Southerland Visiting Professor of Landscape Design. He will visit from Amsterdam five or more times. We will also be looking at other cities on the river, including, Owensboro, Paducha, Covington etc. It is a ten-year project and each year we will focus on a different city each year.

Perhaps the biggest change, this year, however, is that we have a number of new faculty—about ten new in architecture. One of the most exciting is a professor who hasn’t arrived here yet, his name is Nick Puckett, and what’s exciting about his position is that it’s a new position that we’ve never had at the college before. It is a joint position with engineering, and more specifically, it’s a joint position with the Center for Manufacturing within the College of Engineering. The specific focus of this joint position is to help us develop a post-graduate program focused on sustainable processes of design and manufacturing. Nick comes from London; he was teaching at the Architectural Association and at the Bartlett. We also hired Gary Rohrbacher and Anne Filson, who came from Seattle. Anne worked for Rem Koolhaas and IDEO. Gary taught at Harvard and the University of Texas at Austin and has worked for SHoP and other offices. We also hired Andrew Manson, in a history theory position. He is completing his Ph.D. at Princeton right now, and is teaching a lot of the classes that Wallace Miller was teaching last year—she is on sabbatical this year. We also hired a number of new young designers. Angie Co, from NYC; she has worked for Asymptote and now has her own firm. Kyle Miller, who was working with UN Studio in Amsterdam, is also here with us. Ryan Johnson, who did his degree here and was working in Chicago for Paul Preissner, has also joined us this year. It is very exciting to have so many new faculty, especially since a lot of what we are focusing on right now is the interface between digital design / fabrication and new applications of those techniques and technologies.

We are also in the midst developing a new identity and focus for the Interior Design School. Over the last year, working with the ID School faculty, we have begun to develop a new focus for the School on workplace innovation. We are very excited about this new direction. We are now beginning to work more closely with another research collaborative on campus called the Institute for Workplace Innovation; they focus on the organizational culture of companies. Our interest will be to see how design can add value to those companies—for profit as well as non-profit, but also be cultural centers—any type of workplace. This year we will also have open houses for Interior Design and for Architecture. On the 21st of October, ID will have an open house; all students and parents who are interested in the School are encouraged to attend the day-long series of events, including lunches, meetings with faculty, and reviews. There will be a special lecturer on that evening of the 21st for ID, Kevin Knudsen. He specializes in workplace innovation at the Minneapolis office of Perkins and Will. The Architecture School Open House will be on the 11th of November, and our lecturer for that evening will be Monica Ponce de Leon, Dean of the Taubman School of Architecture at the University of Michigan, and principal of Office DA in Boston.

But there is another really, really exciting thing that we are engaged in right now, that’s evolving, and we hope to be finished with by the end of the semester. That’s our new website. It is being designed by a firm called Extra Medium (XM). You may not know the firm, but it is run by Paul Petrunia, founder of Archinect. So the Archinect guys are doing our site. We are in the middle of developing the beta version which we hope will be up in a few months. The really exciting thing about the new website is that it will not only provide information about our College, students and faculty, but will also be devoted to user generated content. As a student, you sign up on the website, you have a profile, and you can customize our college website to look and work however you want. But more importantly, you know that if a website is not updated constantly people don’t come back. So we are also focusing on different groups that will generate their own content. Students, faculty, alum, staff—all will have user profiles and will be able to post their own work and content. There are three big parts of the site: one for news and features; one for information about the college; and all of the social networking infrastructure.

Another quick thing. Right now, we don’t have as many international programs as we would like. Last year, every graduate studio took a trip, an international trip. Some students went to Oslo, Norway some went to Copenhagen, Denmark. We took two studios to Dubai. Those are great, but we are also developing more exchange programs so that students can attend other schools for a semester. We just signed an exchange with Anhalt University and the Dessau Institute of Architecture, home of the Bauhaus, in Dessau, Germany. It will be both graduate and undergraduate exchange. Both will start this academic year, so classes in Spring 2010 and Summer 2010. The undergraduate exchange will be in the summer, and the graduate exchange will be in the spring. We are also looking to set up some other exchanges with other schools. I am going to be visiting some schools in Taiwan and in China in October. And we are in discussion with the Berlage Institute in Rotterdam for exchanges. We are also in discussion with some schools in France—in Paris, and the south of France.

Among my most important jobs is to help transform ours into a real College of Design, and not three different programs organized under one institutional roof. Of course my job is to make sure that the college is financially stable and that things are organized and well run. But my most important job is to make sure that students get the kind of classes, the kind of studios, and the kind of educational programs they need to go out and compete in the world today. At the end of the day, I can help to create the conditions for success for our faculty, students and staff. It will depend on the faculty, students and staff to take advantage of those opportunities. I can’t do anything alone. It’s a total College effort. All I can do is help to create an infrastructure of possibility; then it is up to our faculty and students. I might add, however, even in the year that I have been here, everyone is performing remarkably well. I don’t think there is any doubt that what is happening here is already on the minds of people in other schools and other cities. It is important to say that in the newly emerging world of design, there won’t be one school that is the single best—that used to be the case, but that situation is now over. What there will be is a conversation among ten, fifteen schools, and we want to be in that conversation. I think we are already in the conversation. This means that we must create opportunities for our students to travel; and, we must create opportunities to bring in those from outside our College—design is a global practice despite the economy, despite all of the seemingly grim news.

Let me also add that I have been extremely impressed this year with AIAS. Those organizing AIAS this year are among the most exciting students with whom I have ever worked. I knew that this group was going to be very active even before the school year started; that’s because they had already asked me for money twice. That’s a good sign!

There are a lot of rumors going around about a renovation of Pence?

Renovation? Why not a whole new building?! I will tell you a little story. The College of Architecture was founded approximately 50 years ago, and almost since the day it was founded, there has been a discussion of a new building. Every dean (of architecture and later design) has talked about a new building, and in a couple of cases it seems that they came close to pulling it off. But, obviously, it didn’t happen. When I arrived here, Studio Gang, an architecture firm in Chicago, had been commissioned to do a space planning study to make an assessment of our building assets. I arrived here in the middle of their work, and soon completely rethought the direction and refocused all of their work on one new, stand-alone building behind Pence Hall. It was (and one day will be called) the Center for Design Innovation. The idea is for the College of Design to have three buildings. Miller Hall will house all of the studios for ID, HP, and Architecture; Pence Hall will house all of the administrative offices; and a new state of the art Center for Design Innovation will house all of our new programs and new technologies, including CNC machines, laser cutters, 3-D printers, all of those kinds of things, as well as new state of the art workshop. The CDI would house our new research and design agendas: sustainable manufacturing and design; urban research and design; and workplace innovation.

One of the nice things about the Studio Gang proposal is that the building would have a lot of public amenities— a café that could be used by the rest of the university, installation space for videos and new media and other content generated by students and faculty. The CDI would also be in a very heavily trafficked area and so the café and many other amenities and means of display would enable us to show the rest of the university what we are doing in the College of Design. Of course it’s a tough economy; but there is new interest in our building, and we are waiting to discuss that and see where that goes right now. We’ll put it this way, a lot of people are very excited about a building the size of ours being built behind Pence Hall. What’s different about our proposal is that in the past when the College asked for a new building it was because we needed more space. We aren’t making that argument. We are making the argument that we need a new, state of the art, innovation center to house our three leading edge design research agendas, and we need a new place to put our new technologies that are increasingly putting pressure on our old building. The difference in the argument that we are making now is that it is based on the new agenda of the College of Design to focus on a way to add economic value, and showcase new innovative design.

By Corey Jenkins, AIASuk Newsletter Editor