Stephanie Pilat, professor of Architecture, was recently awarded an OU Arts and Humanities Faculty Fellowship. The AHFF provides a semester of support for faculty in the arts, humanities and interpretive social sciences. It is the most competitive and prestigious internal award offered in the arts and humanities at OU.
The fellowship will provide Pilat with time to work on her new book project, Cultivating Creativity. This book draws on the newly created American School Archive to explore how a small group of OU faculty developed a radical approach to teaching Architecture in the mid-twentieth century.
Through a narrative non-fiction account of the American School’s history, Cultivating Creativity details how the faculty built a culture and a curriculum to reflect their shared values. The book centers on Bruce Goff, chair of the school from 1947-1955, and highlights the dramatic, and at times tragic, human story at the heart of this history.
Goff led the faculty to design a remarkably successful curriculum that prized originality instead of imitation. Faculty rejected the common practice of harshly and publicly criticizing student work. Believing instead that young designers needed encouragement, they celebrated great student work by selecting exemplary student designs to be hung in the corridors as models.
Recent scholarship on teaching and learning is woven throughout to help explain why these methods are effective. “We now know, for example, that the harsh learning environments typical of Architecture schools negatively impact student learning,” Pilat said.
Examining the history and pedagogy of the American School, the book considers how creativity is taught and the learning environments, practices and assignments that best cultivate it. According to Pilat, Cultivating Creativity is a book about the history of the American School as well as a book for the future of design education.
Associate Professors Lee Fithian, Ph.D., and Elizabeth Pober have published a chapter in the recently released New Perspectives in Indoor Air Quality, published by Elsevier. Their contribution, titled “Chapter 16 – Architecture and the Challenges of Indoor Air Quality,” examines the relationship between architecture and indoor air quality.
Dr. Ladan Mozaffarian, Assistant Professor of Regional and City Planning, has been selected to serve as Co-Chair of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP) Planners of Color Interest Group (POCIG) for the 2025–2027 term.
The Gibbs College of Architecture is proud to recognize Tahsin Tabassum, a recent graduate of the college’s Master of Regional and City Planning program and current doctoral student at the University of California, Irvine, for receiving the prestigious 2024–2025 American Planning Association (APA) Outstanding Student Award.
