Ann Arbor: The Latest Architecture and News

You're invited to attend an interactive lecture on Friday, November 12, featuring designer, performer, and educator Tereza Ruller from The Rodina. Lunch will be provided for watch party attendees that register - and please plan to bring your laptop.

Material Responsibility discusses issues of contemporary material fabrication in context to social, environmental, and construction related challenges. Researchers, designers, and builders assume the mantle of responsibility to address inherited legacies in everyday practices. This event tries to unravel not only assumptions about what and how we build, but also looks to question why, to situate our motivations and impact. In moving away from practices that simply justifies the present moment, the discussion on Material Responsibility aims to identify where our responsibilities lie in the complex global systems and networks that make up our contemporary practice.

Xu Tiantian is the founding principal of DnA _Design and Architecture. She has received numerous awards such as the WA China Architecture Award in 2006 and 2008, the Architectural League New York’s Young Architects Award in 2008, the Design Vanguard Award in 2009 by Architecture Record and the Moira Gemmill Prize for Emerging Architect in 2019. She has built a number of projects, such as Songzhuang Art Center and Ordos Art Museum. In the past years she has been engaged extensively in the rural revitalising process in Songyang County, China. Her groundbreaking “architectural acupuncture” is a holistic approach to the social and economic revitalization of rural China and has been selected by UN Habitat as the case study of Inspiring Practice on Urban-Rural Linkages. Xu Tiantian received her masters in architecture and urban design from Harvard Graduate School of Design, and her baccalaureate in architecture from Tsinghua University in Beijing.

Deanna Van Buren is the Executive Director, Design Director, and Co-Founder of Designing Justice + Designing Spaces (DJDS), an architecture and real estate development non-profit building infrastructure to end mass incarceration. As one of only 500 licensed Black female architects in the U.S, Deanna is committed to racial equity in the built environment and is a national thought leader in advocating for alternative spaces for justice, including restorative justice centers and mobile resource villages. Van Buren’s most recent notable projects with her team include Restore Oakland, a campus for restorative justice and restorative economics in Oakland, California, and the reimagining of the Atlanta City Detention Center into a Center for Equity. Van Buren received her BS in architecture from the University of Virginia and her Masters of Architecture from Columbia University, and she is the only architect to have been awarded the Rauschenberg Artist as Activist fellowship.