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.
Petya Stefanoff, Chair of the Educational Committee with the American Planning Association, Oklahoma Chapter (APA-OK) and Gibbs College PhD candidate, has developed a new training program for local government officials. The program, focused on land use, zoning principles, and land development, recently certified its first graduates with Certified Citizen Planner status.
Gibbs Construction Science and Architecture students recently traveled to Dublin, Ireland, to compete in the Associated Schools of Construction (ASC) Region 8 Student Competition. The team partnered with Czech Technical University and secured third place in the Design-Build category.
Gibbs College is pleased to present the exhibition Vollendorf in Oklahoma: The Architecture of Dean Bryant Vollendorf during the Spring 2026 semester. It will be on display in Gould Hall, on the OU-Norman Campus, from February 16, 2026 - March 13, 2026.
