Course descriptions, learning objectives, travel dates, and more.
Gabriel Cuéllar | gcuellar@umich.edu
Non-Extractive: Cooperative and Circular Architecture in Switzerland
Location(s): Switzerland – Zurich, Basel
Dates of Travel: May 9 – May 30, 2025
This course will focus on ‘non-extractive’ ways of building that center co-ownership, co-production, and material resourcefulness. We will visit and study built projects across Switzerland that showcase new forms of collective living and drive systemic change economically, socially, and environmentally. Along the way, we will meet architects, cooperatives, organizations, elected officials, and scholars all contributing to these emerging models
Angela Cho | angecho@umich.edu
Practice Models
Location(s): Mexico – Mexico City, Oaxaca
Dates of Travel: May 12 – June 1, 2025
This spring elective will take students to Mexico City and Oaxaca to explore different practices that move between disciplines of architecture and art, have a strong ethos in making and thinking through acts of material engagement, and integrate traditional and local craft within their work. Students will experience Mexico City through extensive site visits to various studios, offices, museums, and architectures, then they will travel to rural parts of Oaxaca to take part in local workshops, mainly in ceramics and textiles.
Tess Clancy | tesscl@umich.edu
A People’s Monument for Rome: Memories of Infrastructure and Self-built Urbanism in Italy’s Capital City
Location(s): Italy – Rome and surrounding towns and cities
Dates of Travel: May 6 – May 30, 2025
This course will be interested in the “anonymous periphery of Rome.” Though students will have the opportunity to visit sites in the historic center, we will primarily study the city from the outside in and the outside out, looking at the neighborhoods where the majority of Roman citizens live and studying the history of self-built neighborhoods in the peripheral zones of the city—in particular those neighborhoods on the urban fringes of Rome that intersect with the ancient infrastructure of the Felice aqueduct. Through site visits, walking tours, guest lectures, readings and film screenings, students will have the opportunity to discover Rome in all its layers and complexities and will be asked to respond by participating in an interdisciplinary workshop design process that asks: how can we imagine a “people’s monument” for Rome?
Francesca Mavaracchio | fmavarac@umich.edu
An Investigation Into Stone
Location(s): Switzerland and Italy – Zurich, Chur, Vals, Scuol, Ardez, Piz Bernina, Milano, Carrara
Dates of Travel: May 4 – 17, 2025
Stone is rock transformed—a piece of earth adapted for human use as building material. Every rock holds the history of a place, the geological cycles of formation, erosion and reformation. Similarly, every building material embodies a place: the site where it was originally sourced. Through site visits, explorations of stone quarries, and a stone-carving workshop, this course will explore the concept that every building has multiple sites—its origin in material sourcing, the place of its construction and all the intermediate places where materials are processed and transformed.
Jonathan Rule | jonrule@umich.edu
Microcli(+)MAS
Location(s): Spain – Galicia, Madrid, Lanzarote, Murcia / Cieza
Dates of Travel: May 12 – 31, 2025
Microcli(+)MAS invites students to travel across the various microclimates of Spain experiencing how they influence regional cultures, urban form and architectural design. Spain’s land area, only three times the size of Michigan, hosts a great geographical diversity, from volcanos to snowy mountains, great plains to forests, deserts to coastlines. Mirroring this vast diversity in such a small territory, Spain emerges as the most climate diverse country in Europe, hosting a total of twelve microclimates. Building on the urgent need to contest today’s environmental awareness, students will study and visit four selected locations of Spain’s climate zones with very distinct built architectures.
Łukasz Stanek | lustanek@umich.edu
Rotterdam Think Tank: The Past and Future of Welfare State Urbanism
Location(s): Netherlands, Belgium – Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Dordrecht, Hilversum, Utrecht, The Hague; Brussels, Antwerp
Dates of Travel: May 17 – 26, 2025
This course will examine state-led responses to contemporary challenges of urbanization, notably the climate emergency. Our primary focus will be the Netherlands and Belgium: countries where the planning systems emerged historically from challenges of water management. Key areas of exploration include allocating, pooling, and circulating resources to effectively address the climate emergency; developing cities in more collective, cooperative, sustainable, and equitable ways while doing more with less; and the roles of communities, municipalities, and the state in guiding future urban transformations. We will explore these issues by examining both the historical and contemporary aspects of the Dutch and Belgian welfare states, their architecture, and urbanism.