I teach at the College of Design, Archtiecture, Art, and Planning (DAAP) at the University of Cincinnati. I am a Professor of Architecture and Planning, currently serving as the Associate Dean for Research. Prior to arriving at DAAP, I taught for 19 years at The New School in New York.
The University of Cincinnati
The University of CIncinnati was the first municipally funded institution of higher education in the country. It is also the birthplace of co-operative education, and it continues to be one of the leading innovators of a college education that combines liberal learning with vocational experience.
Cincinnati College and the Medical College of Ohio were both established in 1819. After many iterations, several closings and reopenings, the two were merged in 1870 with the creation of the
University of Cincinnati (UC). The cooperative education experiment was launched in 1906, and remains a signature feature of the institution. UC operated as a municipal institution until 1977, when it was aborbed into the Ohio public system.
The university has four campuses, including the 'Uptown West campus, the Uptown Academic Health Campus, UC Blue Ash, and UC Clermont. Uptown West, the pirmary campus, is a mishmash of architectural styles, stretching from early 20th century Federalist and Colonial revival to Art Deco and Modernist buildings c 1920s through 1950s, Brutalist buildings of the1960s and 1970s, a few Postmodern additions from the 1980s and 1990s, and various strands of Contemporary Architecture.
College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning (DAAP)
My day to day work at the University of Cincinnati takes place in Arnoff Hall, designed by Peter Eisenman in 1988 and completed in 1996. Eisenman used a deconstructionist approach in order to unify three existing builidngs into one integrative geometry with significantly expanded space. Today Arnoff Hall houses the College's four constitutuent schools: the Ullman School of Design, the School of Architecture and Interior Design, the School of Art, and the School of Planning.
DAAP has its origins in the College of Engineering and Commerce, which launced an Architecture Department in 1922. The Department separated into a free-standing School of Applied Arts three years later, and in 1946 was reorganized into the College of Applied Arts . With the rapid expansion of the university in the postwar boom years, the entity became the College of Design, Architecture, and Art in 1961, finally adding Planning in 1982. The planning programs themselves date back to the 1920s, when the School of Applied Arts offered planning courses. The programs were eventually settled in the College of Community Service from 1969-1982, after which they were relocated to DAAP.