Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan offers three fellowships in the areas of architectural research and instruction. Each of the fellowships includes teaching related to the candidate's area of interest, resources for the development of work, possibilities to interface with scholars and researchers in the wider university context, and the opportunity to share the outcome of the fellowship with the College. Fellows spend one year in residence and teach three classes in addition to pursuing their fellowship interests.

William Muschenheim Fellowship: James Macgillivray
Film to Wit: A Menagerie

The slow death of the medium of film calls for a drawn-out moment of reflection. What was film? By the same token, what were its constituent spaces?

The generalist might see “filmic space” as the fruits of the kinship of Eisenstein and Le Corbusier, both of them walking in parallax around the precincts of the Acropolis. Le Corbusier moves with the smoothness of the architectural promenade, Eisenstein sees collision in the succession of architectural images. Other figures exist in the pantheon of film, but must be drawn out.

This work does not generalize but lays out a handful of these examples as in a cabinet of curiosities. Spheres, pyramids, tapestries, lattices and prisms among others, all are latent in what is now the “last machine,” the film.

Walter B. Sanders Fellow: Etienne Turpin
Stainlessness

Stainlessness recuperates the tradition of the architectural ”˜capriccio’ as a means to emphasize the history of labor movements in North America and to make legible the physical semblance of these movements in cities including Sudbury, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Detroit. While processes of urbanization have all but erased these struggles from our cities and left only ambivalent monuments to mark the past, the narrative of Stainlessness and its contemporary ”˜capriccios’ assert the centrality of labor as a force capable of transforming the nature of cities, the culture of America, and the geologic deep-time marked by the Anthropocene.

Willard A. Oberdick Fellow: Kyle Reynolds
Symptomatic: Indexical Techniques for a Revitalized Cincinnati

Stemming from an interest in the way in which architecture presents itself to the public, this project investigates a renewed potential of indexical techniques of design at three scales: the city, the building, and the detail. Previous uses of the index have focused on its ability to trace processes or historical contexts but almost exclusively produced work that looked backward and referred to existing conditions. Symptomatic posits that indexical techniques can be projective in their deployment. They can collapse time and space between a sign and its referent and in many cases can reverse that order entirely. The symptomatic index is not a return to a legibility of sign nor is it advocating for an autonomous formal agenda. Its potential is in its ability to produce new atmospheres and alter stagnant contexts with techniques that range from extensive ephemeral figuration to intensive building construction.