January 22, 2025
‘The Best Course in Housing in the Country’: Second-Year Studio Earns National Recognition
One of the best architecture studios on housing in the United States is now taught at Illinois Tech’s College of Architecture.
The Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture presented the Housing Design Education Award to Assistant Professor Ryan Roark and Associate Teaching Professor Michael Glynn for their spring 2024 fourth-semester studio titled, “Repetition and Difference: Collective Living, Biophilia, and Mass Timber on the Campus of IIT in Chicago.”
The annual award is normally presented to graduate-level or advanced undergraduate courses, not a studio designed for relatively new architecture students.
“This award is telling every architecture school in the country that you can engage second-year undergraduates with a rigorously designed program to learn about housing, and they can be successful,” Glynn says. “We need to teach housing to students as early as possible. Our country has too many serious housing problems right now.” The award comes as Roark and Glynn (who won Illinois Tech’s 2024 Board of Trustees Outstanding Undergraduate Teacher Award) experience their second year as co-directors of the second-year curriculum. Students are asked to design a dormitory building that could fit onto Mies Campus, with a focus on sustainability through mass timber and biophilic materials. In the fall semester students designed small housing units meant to fit within a standard Chicago backyard, so the jump in scale allows for more expression and experimentation, Roark says.
“We focused on dorms because it allows students to explore a wide range of ideas that are realistic in the U.S. housing market,” Roark says. “We use precedents heavily. Students look at and analyze existing houses or dorms and start to create a new design by transforming those existing ideas.”
Roark has developed and honed the studio’s idea since her first teaching position at Rice University in 2019, ultimately leading to IIT’s award-winning housing studio. Glynn has taught housing studios in the College of Architecture for years.
About 120 students finished the spring 2024 studio, and Roark attributes the award to their standout projects.
“This award is saying that the very best course in housing in the country is taught here at IIT, in this studio,” Glynn says. “There are 7,000 architecture professors in the United States, and every single one wants this award.”