Lindsey Krug (she/hers) is a designer and researcher based between Chicago and Milwaukee, and an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Architecture and Urban Planning (SARUP). She holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Pennsylvania and a Master of Architecture from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

Through the lens of the architectural user as a body in space, Krug studies how design solidifies and reinforces taboos, hierarchies, and inequities into built form, and positions architecture as a biopsying tool that unveils tensions between spatial foibles and cultural conventions of identity, politics, class, and sociality. Krug’s research interests are organized around relationships between people and contemporary institutions born of American democracy and capitalism and their corresponding architectural manifestations and myths. Two such institutions of focus are the U.S. Supreme Court and the topic of privacy as it’s defined legally and architecturally, and Dollar General Corporation with its small-box retail empire. These research threads are reflected in the courses Krug teaches as her design briefs and syllabi help students confront contemporary issues and current events as part of their design education in order to facilitate students imagining radical and optimistic architectural futures.

Krug’s design research titled “Corpus Comunis: Precedent, Privacy, and the United States Supreme Court, in Seven Architectural Case Studies” was awarded the 2023 Best Peer-Reviewed Research Project by the ACSA College of Distinguished Professors. Along with her frequent collaborator Sarah Aziz, Krug received the 2022 Course Development Prize in Architecture, Climate Change, and Society from the ACSA and the Columbia University Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture. Most recently, the pair was awarded the 2023 Architectural League Prize for Young Architects + Designers by the Architectural League of New York.

This multifaceted project incorporates the research, public discourse, exhibitions, and pedagogical initiatives that explore the legacies of the Japanese American designers, architects, and artists impacted by the Japanese American Incarceration in WWII. The research launched with Beauty in Enormous Bleakness: The Interned Generation of Japanese American Designers, a Divided Cities, Mellon-funded collaborative project between architectural designer Kelley Van Dyck Murphy, cultural historian Heidi Aronson Kolk, and architectural historian Lynnette Widder.  The project seeks to document the lives and works of Japanese American designers who survived internment, focusing on their vital contributions to the post-war cultural landscape while also acknowledging their lived experiences.

An exhibition, developed from the foundational research project and co-curated by Murphy and Kolk, placed personal artifacts, archival documents, and storytelling in conversation with architectural sites – evoking concepts of dislocation, erasure, and identity. The symposium, Moonscape of the Mind: Japanese American Design after Internment emerged from the Beauty in Enormous Bleakness research project and exhibition, and expanded the scope of the project to encompass a broader range of artists and designers. The cross-disciplinary symposium brought together scholars from a range of humanities and art/design fields to explore the legacies of the Japanese American WWII Incarceration through an exploration of the connection between material objects and their creators’ lived experiences.

Concurrent to the symposium and exhibition, Murphy began teaching an ongoing series of case-study courses about the work and lives of post-war Japanese American designers. As a designer and educator, Murphy is dedicated to advancing the conversations around diversity and cultural heritage in architecture and design. While the research projects and pedagogical work aspire to support a more diverse and inclusive architectural history, they also underscore the significance of how race, heritage, and context – cultural, historical, and material – impact the architectural landscape.

The Activated Atlas was a series of 3 advanced topic studios comprised of upper level graduate and undergraduate students at the University of Southern California School of Architecture. Born out of the pandemic and the first semester of studio taught entirely via screen in fall 2020, it sought to exploit these conditions and invited students to harness the immediacy of working with film, photography, and social media as a way to literally locate one’s self and one’s architectural project and story within the city.  Using the oft photographed and filmed Los Angeles as a case study and wary of the stereotypically superficial image it is often lazily assigned, we considered the contradictions and eccentricities of LA, the highs and lows. Together as a studio, using animation, filming on location throughout the city, direct interviews with community members and research we assembled a collection of drawn and animated mappings that created multi-layered images of various neighborhoods and enclaves in Los Angeles. We explored how the formal and the material can yield to the social, political, and cultural through critical design proposals that represented inclusive and original stories.  We actively sought out opportunities to debunk incorrect assumptions, reveal hidden histories, and make unusual connections through narrative and image.  Each semester focused on a different neighborhood or region of Los Angeles and culminated with wildly different design proposals generated from student’s individual responses to the prompt of a socially conscious space. Proposals were shared entirely via short films and animations and ranged from speculative futures to the currently implementable — landscape and urban infrastructure, adaptive reuse, guidelines for new service industry standards and street vendors, installations and community based events.

Video Links:
SM BLVD Then and Now
Reforming Refuse

In the Timberlands Region of Arkansas, nearly a quarter of the full-time essential workforce earns minimum wage, placing members of that population below the federal poverty threshold. Many more exist just above the poverty threshold. Over 40% of households are unable to afford basics, forcing impossible choices and risky trade-offs. Asset Limited, Income Constrained, and Employed – ALICE might be a cashier, waiter, childcare provider, or any productive contributor to the community. Where does ALICE live? Who is ALICE? What can be done to break the cycle limiting ALICE’s prosperity? How can ALICE be empowered?  These foundational considerations informed the development of a three-credit unit (3CU) undergraduate seminar at the Fay Jones School of Architecture + Design, A Just Home for The Arkansas Timberlands, that focused on the role designers can play in restoring dignity and justice through housing for rural communities in that region. A two-part pedagogical framework employed by the UDBS AR HOME LAB leveraged extensive data collection with the aspiration of reshaping dialogue related to financial hardship. The first component of work focused on ‘who’ and ‘where’, requiring students to explore human condition, asset mapping, collaboration opportunities, and context.  A subsequent and complementary component of work focused on ‘what’ and ‘how’, requiring analysis of extant housing typologies, labor force dynamics, logistics of regional residential construction, and culture. Sponsored by a grant from industry partner, Weyerhaeuser, research developed in the course supported grass-roots application findings through design. Students in the course were familiarized with local culture, community members, and vital stakeholders providing a platform for the development and construction of  a regionally specific, replicable housing prototype in the Arkansas Timberlands Region – Home for ALICE.

A mesocosm, or “medium world,”  is an infrastructure for long-term outdoor ecological experimentation. According to the systems ecologist Eugene P. Odum, mesocosms are situated between the microcosm of the laboratory and the macrocosm of the planet, enabling observations of real-world conditions. Filling the gap between these scalar extremes, mesocosms are critical research infrastructures for studying the effects of anthropogenic climate change. They are typically organized into arrays of self-similar environmental “patches” in which variables such as temperature or atmospheric composition are adjusted to simulate changes in an ecosystem. Alongside the technical labor of scientific research, they accommodate the intimate labor of tending and nurturing their interior worlds. This tending extends to the architecture itself as their envelopes are breathable, operable, and adjustable, suggesting new ways to reimagine architecture’s relationship to the land and its cycles. The open-endedness of the mesocosm offers a way to reorient environmental thinking toward a less controlled and increasingly entangled spatial practice.

MESO-COSM proposes four architectural prototypes that test this open-ended tectonic through calibrated enclosures and environmental systems. Typical architectural assemblies reject the exterior, hermetically enclosing the interior to remove any possibility of climatic mixing. Instead, is there an alternative way to design the envelope, to reclaim architecture as a planetary assemblage? Like mesocosms, we imagine that these prototypes are both lively machines and living experiments: full of inclement weathers, pollinated winds, and creaturely communities. Multi-layered roof filters, facade shading enclosures, as well as water and energy capture infrastructures encourage environmental adjustments at the scale of the building. These systems create thermal gradients and ventilation currents, enabling a more sensuous open-air interior. Situated in the uneasy space between technical mediation and environmental encounter, these “meso-types” suggest architectures that participate in the frictions and mediums of our changing climates.

Contributing Participants
Design/Exhibition Team: Anna Brancaccio, Nino Chen, Maximilien Chong Lee Shin, Harish Krishnamoorthy, Jane Van Velden Student Roles: The design and research team included graduate and undergraduate architecture students at Rice University. Students assisted with design research and fabrication of the exhibition and were paid hourly with university research grants.

Sponsors: MESO-COSM is sponsored by the Hines Scholar as Design/Design as Scholar (HdSd) Program of the Undergraduate Architecture Program at the Hines College of Architecture and Design, University of Houston. The exhibition is also funded by the Diluvial Houston Initiative, an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-supported project, and Rice Architecture.

Photographers: Sean Fleming and Jason Chen.

The Mizer’s Ruin is a 190 sq ft micro-dwelling that develops a low-carbon fabrication system through local forestry production. The project is based on harvesting, milling, fabricating and constructing processes, where over ninety percent of materials come from within a mile of the site. Of these materials a large majority are eastern red cedar (Juniperus Virginiana) which is conventionally regarded as unproductive lumber, incorrectly described as “invasive” and often destroyed and discarded to improve farmland.  We worked with state forestry agencies to develop a new forestry management plan that generated a new timber resource that mitigated the growing threat of wildfires from fuel build up. This resource provided constraints for student research that included field studies for material flows, round wood selection, in-situ milling (Wood Mizer), atypical dimensional lumber, charring techniques, and an analysis of “whole tree” usage. Our team applied this research to establish several dry assembly mass timber construction techniques that included the mechanically fastened wall, lap joined timber deck, and solid wood floors. While most building elements remained on site, the project also allowed for off-site research and fabrication of vacuum-bonded, cross laminated components that include exterior doors and built in furniture. Students were also engaged in on-the-fly documentation to include effort reporting, energy consumption and travel that was used in a comparative study of embodied energy consumption. The duration of this project from inception to completion lasted over 5 years and helped to reaffirm (during and post covid) important curricular structures for design-build pedagogy. The project was conducted through cohorts of graduate level students’, as well as undergraduate architecture students at third year level and landscape and interior design students in a collaborative 4th year studio. At all levels, students engaged directly with professional consultants, forestry specialists, academics, and project user groups.

Video Link:
MR Final Video

Teaching in a rural context within a rural state is not uncommon; however, this situation makes for an unusual educational circumstance. Just as an aspiring chef born and raised in desert country might struggle to understand the flavors of seafood in their cooking, a student of architecture in that same environment, will struggle to understand the notion of a lush landscape or wooden structure in their design thinking. Many students embark on their educational journey with extremely limited perspective. While libraries, media, and the internet have expanded access to information, they cannot fully replicate the lived experience of different places and spaces. Nor is it possible for any educational simulation to achieve true experiential high-fidelity as it relates to professional practice. These challenges, compounded by obstacles some student’s face due to their limited financial resources, race, ethnicity, or other limitation, are at the center of the initiative.

Professional Horizons is an ongoing, multi-platform educational initiative launched through a collaborative agreement between Mississippi State University (MSU) and the Design Leadership Foundation (DLF). The partnership was formed to generate models of engagement that counter, and work to shift, longstanding disparities of equity in the architecture, interior design, and landscape architecture professions. Mississippi State University has a strong record of promoting inclusion and equity, and the DLF, through professional association with members of the faculty, has invested in building new models for the preparation and encouragement of historically underrepresented students. The programs developed as part of this initiative are designed to bring awareness and provide opportunities to students who may not otherwise have had a clear view of achievable professional paths. From small materials and technology awards to semester long study away scholarships, our initiative targets the root causes behind the disparities seen in professional practice.

Video Link:
2021 Professional Horizons Design Leadership Foundation

Denver Low-Rise: New Domestic Forms of Collective Living is the second foundational design studio in the 3-Year M.Arch program at the University of Colorado Denver College of Architecture and Planning. The course focuses on a spatial investigation of shared domestic spaces, speculating on a new paradigm of collective housing driven by the studio’s collective research on “Missing Middle” housing typologies.

Today, mid-sized and large American cities, such as Denver, Seattle, Albuquerque, Minneapolis, and Richmond, all have in common problems with housing affordability, gentrification, and homelessness. Denver, for instance, has one of the nation’s worst housing shortages, with the city having a deficit of approximately 70,000 units. This housing problem is even exacerbated by the predominant single-family housing model. With less land for building houses and with soaring prices for rent and mortgages, low- and moderate-income households have been displaced, which has diminished housing equity by intensifying the existing social and racial segregation. Moreover, the insistence on the idealized single-family housing has championed the privatization of public spaces, such as swimming pools and gardens, attenuating the advantage of sharing spaces and resources among a more diverse constituency. With less flexible arrangements, the current housing model fails to engage a wider variety of living demands, creating more barriers to expand the measures of affordability and collectivity celebrated by the real dwellers of contemporary cities.

​Responding to these conditions, this studio asks: how could we update the existing framework of “Missing Middle” housing and create new typologies that engage the diverse constituents of growing American cities? Thinking through new technologies and cultural shifts that inspire contemporary dwelling changes, what domestic forms—such as shared living rooms, collective kitchens, and communal laundry facilities—could be updated, reinvented, and collectivized to enable a common ground?

Moving toward an anti-colonial future requires that justice be spatialized and “part of the process of making a place” (Gilmore 2002, p 15-16). Making place thus demands redrawing the United States landscape as literal ground for Indigenous sovereignty by mapping boundaries of dispossession in order to propose new boundaries for the return of lands to Indigenous peoples. In this way, drawing is a foundational tool to visualize the United States’ liability in the spatial power dynamics enacted against Indigenous peoples and to offer strategies towards an anticolonial, antiracist future. And thus, visualizing the past and present conditions as means toward imagining new future engagement with land unsettles what Robert Nichols calls “recursive dispossession,” a process in which historic dispossessions generate property, which in turn reinforces and generates further dispossession—these processes have continually constructed enduring cycles of social, cultural, political, economic, and environmental injustices that are experienced in uneven ways and therefore must be overturned (Nichols 2019, p 117). Through this article, I explore the potentials of reconceiving the tools of architecture and landscape architecture— drawing and mapping space—as methods for spatializing calls for land-based reparations in the hopes of demonstrating the very real ways that the design disciplines can contribute actionably to creating just futures that consider the intersections between history, place-making, and racial structures. I present two different sets of rematriation strategies for the A:shiwi (also known as Zuni) and Tongva peoples to (a) demonstrate that histories of land dispossessions were not a uniform process but varied according to political, economic, and geographic conditions; and (b) show how those differences inform which types of new spatial logics are necessary and effective in rematriating lands back to Indigenous peoples, communities, and nations.

The application of population-based optimization algorithms in design is heavily driven by the translation and analysis of various data sets that represent a design problem; in evolutionary-based algorithms, these data sets are illustrated through two primary data streams: genes and fitness functions. The latter is frequently examined when analyzing the algorithm’s output, and the former is comparatively less so. This paper examines the role of genomic analysis in applying multi–objective evolutionary algorithms (MOEA) in design. The results demonstrate the significance of utilizing the genetic analysis to understand better the relationships between parameters used in the design problem’s formulation and differentiate between morphological differences in the algorithmic output not commonly observed through fitness-based analyses..

Planting Imagination ran from 2021 to 2023 (during a pandemic recovery period) in Toronto’s Chinatown West neighbourhood. It brought together a group of local Chinatown community organizations and Toronto Metropolitan University researchers to recruit 60 diverse ‘Chinatown Activators’ (CAs) and six Community Facilitators (CFs) from across the community. CFs and CAs used virtual reality (VR) technology to co-design a local community garden and develop new visions for the future of Chinatown. Using cutting-edge VR visioning and the principles of the Collaborative Community Engagement Model (CCEM) co-design, the Chinatown community was provided with a platform to virtually envision the future of their own community and neighbourhood as a collaborative process. In doing so, they explored how we might transform the way we build and mobilize communities, (re)construct community identities, and strengthen the community’s resilience to promote social justice and equity. This process strengthened community solidarity to enable local residents to more readily steward the future of the built environment and respond collectively to challenging events like the pandemic. Bringing together diverse disciplines and practices (including architecture, cultural psychiatry, interior design, immersive technology, computer science and public health), Planting Imagination developed models of therapeutic VR co-creation delivered through a series of online and in-person multi-lingual community co-design and co-fabrication sessions that prioritized the communities and neighbourhoods disproportionately impacted by COVID-19.