ARCH 672/692 + MUD 732 S/F 2025
PROPOSITIONS
GRADUATE STUDIO
ARCH 672/692 PROPOSITIONS + MUD 732 STUDIO III: CLIMATESUMMER/FALL 2025COORDINATOR
Perry Kulper
PROFESSORS
Ayaz Basrai + Ishan Pal Singh, Clément Blanchet, Jacob Comerci, Lars Gräbner, El Hadi Jazairy, Perry Kulper, Wes McGee, Julia McMorrough, Anya SirotaARCH 692 - PROPOSITIONS
SUMMER 2025Living Scaffolding
This studio investigates craft not simply as material or technique but as a model for worldmaking. Structured around an immersive research trip to India, the studio moves from cultural observation to site engagement, asking how acts of making, cooperation, and ecological wisdom can inform new spatial futures. The work unfolds across four phases: cultural and infrastructural observations in Delhi; intensive site fieldwork in Meghalaya; the development of a speculative design proposal; and a final exhibition in the TV Lab.
The studio begins by observing how craft operates in contemporary life. Rather than tracing a linear history, students examine the entanglements of craft with cultural memory, aesthetic labor, economic exchange, and political survival. Craft is understood as an evolving system of knowledge passed through bodies, objects, kinship networks, marketplaces, and migration. Through images, videos, sounds, textures, gestures, objects, structures, and environmental recordings, students assemble a personal index of materials that capture acts of making, improvisation, and material exchange in everyday environments.
The core research site of the studio is the living root bridge at Pynursla in Meghalaya. Grown over generations through acts of cooperation and ecological adaptation, the bridge functions as both infrastructure and living monument. Students operate as embedded observers and spatial researchers, documenting the bridge and its surrounding environment through scans, drawings, drone footage, and environmental recordings to construct a shared archive of spatial, tectonic, and ecological systems.
STUDENTS
Shillpa Kumar
PROFESSOR
Ayaz Basrai + Ishan Pal Singh
This project explores the paradigm of handcraft and abstraction as a form of resistance against the modern world of mass production, tourism, voyeuristic practices, and geographical exploitation.
“The more one is able to leave one’s cultural home, the more easily is one able to judge it, and the whole world as well, with the spiritual detachment and generosity necessary for true vision. The more easily, too, does one assess oneself and alien cultures with the same combination of intimacy and distance.”
― Edward W. Said, Orientalism
STUDENTS
Jacob Brookhouse
PROFESSOR
Ayaz Basrai + Ishan Pal Singh
“A system of relationships that fosters - that makes possible - any made thing.” Emily Hancock, The Ecology of Craft.
The ecology of craft as a whole is invisible. We can only shine a light on specific actors and materials to begin to understand the vastly complex network of making.
This project participates in this conversation by placing moments beside other moments. It starts with photos of people, places, and things that exist within a craft ecology. Their adjacency encourages questioning of their relationship. It ends with drawing, a speculative condition in which these relationships are made visible, tangible, and spatial.
ARCH 692 - PROPOSITIONS
SUMMER 2025CHRONO-SOILS: Risks, Frontiers, and Strategies for Territorial Futures
CHRONO-SOILS frames territory not as a fixed site but as a temporal condition—stratified, contingent, and in constant negotiation. Developed within the Beyond 2025 building festival, the studio brings together Michigan students and European practitioners for an intensive, two-month inquiry into resources, risk, and adaptation.
Operating between the Camargue delta and the retreating coastline of Pas-de-Calais, the work approaches soil as living matter: a medium shaped by salinization, erosion, hydrological politics, and biodiversity loss. Ground is understood as archive and agent simultaneously—material evidence of climate acceleration and a register of future possibility.
Architecture is positioned less as object production and more as strategic mediation. Projects test how design can recalibrate relationships between human and non-human systems across extended temporal horizons. Territorial frameworks and material experiments unfold in tandem, moving from systemic analysis to spatial proposition. Research, concept, development, and representation are treated as iterative phases—disciplining speculation while resisting reductive, crisis-driven responses.
Representation is central. Drawing, mapping, collage, and physical modeling operate as instruments of thought, situating tactile inquiry alongside digital techniques. The aim is the construction of legible, consequential arguments.
Led by Clément Blanchet with Eric Daniel-Lacombe and Matthieu Duperrex, and developed in partnership with ENSA Paris-La Villette, ENSA Marseille, and Leonard de Vinci, the studio establishes a comparative dialogue between American and French approaches to territorial transformation. As part of an experimental open-studio model, students work abroad while engaging global practices directly—positioning architectural education as both situated and transnational.
STUDENT
Cory Hoffmann
PROFESSOR
Clément Blanchet
Rising sea levels and salinity threaten the Camargue’s nature reserves, wildlife, farmland, and tourism. Instead of retreating, farmers exchange land for flooded marshes, adopting new agricultural methods while respecting the region’s ecological and cultural heritage. Inspired by Roma migrations and Greater Flamingos, this “migration architecture” enables seasonal movement across the Camargue: floating independently in summer and forming a collective mass in winter. Developed with Atelier LUMA in Arles, the settlements use local, sustainable materials, such as, reed-based wood, algae panels, sunflower and cork insulation and repurposed salt-industry barrels for flotation, blending innovation with environmental stewardship.
STUDENT
Erin Roberts
PROFESSOR
Clément Blanchet
In the Camargue, a 930-square-kilometer marshland in southern France, rising sea levels are increasing salinity, collapsing agricultural practice, and submerging land, which will be underneath a meter of water within fifty years. Rather than resist inevitable retreat, this proposition embraces surrender through deployable architectures built from locally harvested reeds. Thriving in brackish conditions, reed forms a biodegradable kit of parts assembled without nails or glue, enabling local farmers, fishers, and hunters to construct adaptable Objects of Subsistence. As waters rise, these objects transition from tools for human cultivation to environmental scaffolds, supporting the ecologies until they become the architecture itself.
ARCH 672 - PROPOSITIONS
FALL 2025How to Live Together: A Studio on Architecture, Aging, and the Commons
This studio positions our university campus as both site and subject for architectural speculation. We take the North Campus Innovation District, an emergent mixed-use zone in the University of Michigan’s Campus Plan 2050, as a testing ground for proposing radical models of collective life.
The brief: design an intergenerational co-living complex that redefines the relationship between domestic and civic space. Not a dorm with a few elder units tacked on, nor a senior housing facility with a student lounge. Rather, a rethinking of domestic and civic life - an architecture where housing, public programs, and institutional infrastructure are conceived together, operating as a single, interdependent whole.
Two frames anchor the inquiry. First, the demographic: by 2050, one in four Americans will be over 65, even as social isolation intensifies across all generations. Second, the institutional: universities function as self-contained cities, with housing, food systems, transit, healthcare, libraries, and governance: yet their role in civic society remains under-articulated, underappreciated, and under political attack. The studio asks how architectural form can make that civic role more tangible, reaffirming the university as an agent of shared public benefit.
We will interrogate co-living as both a political and an architectural project, resisting the privatization of care, dismantling the spatial separation of life stages, and designing for the friction, reciprocity, and difference inherent in collective life. Accessible design will be approached not as a question of code compliance, but as a core spatial ethic, embedded from the outset as a generative design principle. Universal design, understood as creating environments usable by the widest range of people, benefits everyone, not only those who are conventionally perceived to “need” it.
STUDENT
Steven Powers
PROFESSOR
Jacob Comerci
This project looked into the backgrounds of multigenerational living understanding the different backgrounds, ages, and daily rhythms people share througout the day. Each element of the site is shaped to acknowledge that though we all keep time differently, we continuously move through overlapping cycles of routine, transition, and encounter. Through these varied temporalities by designing spaces that slow movement, invite gathering, reveal seasonal and daylight changes, and frame routes through which people cross paths.
This project sees architecture as a living system where daily life and collective experiences intersect. Through clustered layout of buildings, shared plazas, and living conditions, it creates spaces where daily routines and generational rhythms overlap.
STUDENT
Yihan Yang
PROFESSOR
Jacob Comerci
This project is a campus integrated intergenerational living community located adjacent to one of the University of Michigan’s campus research complexes, serving senior residents from surrounding neighborhoods, university students, and research groups.
Responding to growing social isolation across age groups, the project uses food as a shared social infrastructure: a daily, accessible medium for connection, care, and cultural exchange.
Organized on a 25’×25’ grid, interior and exterior spaces prioritize human scale proportions, legibility, and accessibility.