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| Li in front of his installation "Your Greenhouse Is Your Kitchen Is Your Living Room." (Photo by Jiaxun Xu.) |
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Assistant Professor Leyuan Li Receives Three National Architecture Education AwardsFor the third consecutive year, Assistant Professor Leyuan Li was recognized with prestigious architectural education awards, all of which underscore his innovation in teaching, design, and community-engaged scholarship. Highlighting both his pedagogical leadership and his creative impact on architectural education, Li received the American Institute of Architecture Students (AIAS) and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) New Faculty Teaching Award for excellence in architectural instruction, the ACSA Faculty Design Award for his project Your Greenhouse Is your Kitchen Is Your Living Room, and the ACSA Creative Achievement Award for Where is Denver’s Chinatown? |
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Architect Mark Lee presented his work to the CAP community and special guests from the Environmental Design Program at CU Boulder on February 5, 2026. (Photo by Carmen New.) |
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CAP's Spring Lecture Series continues, and we were honored to host architect Mark Lee, principal and founding partner of the Los Angeles-based architecture firm Johnston Marklee, for his presentation THAT WAS THEN THIS IS NOW on February 5. Mark presented to a full house, including special guests from the Environmental Design Program at CU Boulder.
- Assistant Professor Matt Shea and Weiling He (Texas A&M University) presented "The Ideological Cube: A Disciplinary Apparatus in Beginning Design."
- Assistant Professor Shirley Dongwei Chen and Assistant Teaching Professor Kurt Streich, together with Lecturers Nikolas Mäkelä, Seth Donnell, and Michelle Frankel, delivered the paper "Making a New Verblist: Building Collective Knowledge Through Dynamic Analog-Digital Workflows in Beginning Design Studio."
- Assistant Professor Shirley Dongwei Chen presented "Speculative Domesticities: Reimagining the Starter Home in Beginning Design Studio."
Planning in a Polycrisis: Equitable Urban Strategies for a Changing Climate, coauthored by PhD candidate Emilia Oscilowicz, Dr. Isabelle Anguelovski (Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona), and Dr. James Connolly (University of British Columbia), offers actionable strategies to help cities advance equitable policies that integrate climate-conscious planning with the interacting challenges of adapting to climate change, ensuring housing affordability and security, and prioritizing economic inclusion place competing demands on limited local resources.
Connor McKell Bingham, CAP alum (M.Arch) and founding partner of Pierre McKell Architects, received The Architect's Prize for Excellence in Architecture at the 2026 Awards for Emerging Excellence in Classical Architecture. The award, conferred by The Institute of Classical Architecture and Art, is given to an emerging architect whose work exhibits a holistic understanding of the principles of classical design, a vision of the role classical design can play in the creation or preservation of our current built environment, and whose projects show a demonstrable excellence in their design. Congratulations, Connor!
Todd Matuszewicz, CAP alum (MSHP) and co-president of Save the Signs was featured in "Keeping the Lights On: These Neon Lovers Won’t Let Save the Signs Go Dark" in Westword, and we applaud his efforts to preserve historical neon signs.
Floral architects and CAP alumni Kara Admire (M.Arch) and Connor Jordan (M.Arch) of KaraKara Blooms currently have work on display on level 6 of the Martin Building at the Denver Art Museum through mid-October 2026. Their floral creations are rooted in structure, material exploration, and spatial design, blending architectural design elements with organic form.
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| Robert Vibert's Unexpected Discovery of the Landscape Architecture Profession |
Bob Vibert considers his inspiration for pursing his master’s degree in landscape architecture a “lucky accident.” “My wife and I bought a house a few years ago with a detritus-filled backyard. I spent a few months turning our backyard into a little oasis within the city,” he said. “A friend of mine sent me a book about landscape architecture after he saw how much joy the project brought me and encouraged me to consider it as a career.” Thanks to the thoughtful recommendation from his friend, Bob is looking forward to sharing what he discovered in his own backyard with others. “What excites me most about landscape architecture is the opportunity to craft spaces that encourage people to slow down, notice, and re-engage with the nature that surrounds us all every day.” |
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| Assistant Teaching Professor Jenny Steffel Johnson Named Co-Director of the Affordable Housing Graduate Certificate Program |
Jenny Steffel Johnson, one of the College of Architecture and Planning's affordable housing experts, was recently named co-director of the Affordable Housing Graduate Certificate. Jenny’s affordable housing course has hosted affordable housing design charrettes since 2012, completing nearly 40 projects over the years. And with her extensive background in affordable housing, including previously working as the senior policy analyst for the Partnership for Working Families and serving as the assistant director of housing programs with a Washington D.C.-area non-profit organization before teaching at CU Denver, she is a natural fit for co-leading this new, focused area of study alongside School of Public Affairs Professor Tanya Heikkila. Housing affordability is a significant problem across the U.S., and it is driving communities to reconsider policy and regulations, zoning and design guidelines, and the implications of housing affordability for society. The Affordable Housing Graduate Certificate will enable students to grow their expertise and become specialists equipped to address housing challenges. Congratulations, Jenny! |
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| | Luke Valimaki's roof model. (Photos courtesy of Morgane Copp.) |
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| Undergraduate Architecture Design Studio II: Roofness Undergraduate Design Studio II, a foundational design studio course, introduces students to the formal and spatial vocabulary of architecture and its organizational principles. The second of four required studio courses, Studio II explores these principles through a series of micro-scale architectural design exercises, progressively building students' ability to design increasingly complex buildings with greater independence. Undergraduate students in this spring's Design Studio II course, coordinated by Assistant Teaching Professor Morgane Copp, have been introduced to the fundamental principles of types and classification and are learning to transform and manipulate conventional typologies, in an aim to disfigure them. This studio, taught by instructors Michelle Frankel, Erika Sweigert Nava, Raymond Shih, and Roman Gershkovic, takes on the disfiguring and transformation of a single typological building element: the roof. Traditionally, the roof is understood as a simple functional device—managing and protecting the interior from the exterior. Often, architects begin by designing a plan of rooms onto which a roof is later applied. In this studio, that process is inverted: students will begin by designing the roof first, allowing the organizational distribution of program to emerge as a consequence of it.
Moving between digital modeling and physical model-making, consistently questioning the difference in affect and agency between these forms of representation, students will produce three design projects: a one-story pavilion, conceived primarily as a roof and its supporting structure; a transformation of the initial roof achieved through stacking, scaling, or both into a three- to five-story massing; and the third project will tie the external organization (the roof) with the internal organization (program/circulation).
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Left: Jose Romero Bermudez's roof model. Right: Arielle Todd's model. (Photos courtesy of Morgane Copp.) |
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| Students in Undergraduate Design Studio II: Roofness display models of their initial roof designs. (Photo by Dania Morelli.) |
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Friday, March 6, 2026 | CU Denver Lawrence Street Center Join the CU Denver School of Public Affairs, in collaboration with the College of Architecture and Planning and New Directions in Politics and Public Policy, for a special First Friday event featuring a panel of experts on the front lines of housing policy, land use, and implementation. Unpacking the Complex Landscape of Affordable Housing: Where Policy, Planning, and Real Life Collide will be an honest conversation about tradeoffs, power, and the real-world impacts of housing decisions on people and neighborhoods. From 8:30-10:30 a.m. in the Terrace Room at Lawrence Street Center. RSVP requested.
Monday, March 9, 2026 | College of Architecture and Planning
Jason Hercules, Senior Partner at Ascent Cities and Principal at Herculean Feats will provide a lecture from noon - 1 p.m. in CAP's Second Floor Gallery.
Thursday, March 12, 2026 | College of Architecture and Planning
Please join us for our inaugural CAP Dean’s Featured Voices Lecture and Exhibition featuring Michael Winters, FAIA. Inspiration and Architectural Storytelling features projects from Winters' career and his use of the natural environment, history, and culture of place to define a creative design “story” to guide and give reason for his architectural design solutions. From noon - 1 p.m. in CAP's Second Floor Gallery. Thursday, March 19, 2026 | College of Architecture and Planning Anya Moryoussef, founder of the award-winning architecture and interiors practice Anya Moryoussef Architect (AMA) based in Toronto, Canada, will share her pursuit of deliberate and imaginative application of design to daily life, creating spaces that are deeply personal expressions of their inhabitants. From noon - 1 p.m. in CAP's Second Floor Gallery. |
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