Thought Leadership

Robert Miller AIA joined CAPLA in the spring of 2010 as director of the School of Architecture. In his 12 years at CAPLA, Miller has brought not only stability to the school after a long series of interim directors, but also a new era of student success, faculty creative scholarship and research, and industry partnership. He retires on January 1, 2023.

Though Emeritus Professor of Architecture R. Brooks Jeffery retired from UArizona in June 2022 as associate vice president for research, at CAPLA he will be long acclaimed for his dedicated work across many roles, including associate dean and Drachman Institute director—as well for his wide-reaching service and award-winning research on heritage conservation in arid environments.

A recent paper by Seth Asare Okyere, CAPLA visiting assistant professor of urban planning, and Stephen Kofie Diko, assistant professor at the University of Memphis, argues that the solutions residents in poor, marginalized, informal and crowded urban areas come up with to make everyday urban life livable are a form of social innovation.

Though the pandemic was a challenge for many, for CAPLA Senior Lecturer in Architecture and Urban Design Eduardo Guerrero it presented a new opportunity—connecting ideas from urbanism experts around the world through conversations, resulting in his urban podcast, Crossing City Limits. Learn more in this fascinating interview.

Damon Leverett, an architecture senior lecturer at CAPLA, takes readers along for a tour of the Health Sciences Innovation Building as part of the Arizona Daily Star's “Favorite Places” series, concluding that the HSIB exemplifies the types of public and educational buildings that should be "prideful places for our community and society."

Jesús Edmundo Robles Jr, an architecture assistant professor of practice at CAPLA, takes readers along for a ride in his trusty pickup truck as part of the Arizona Daily Star's “Favorite Places” series, narrating the spare beauty of the 80-mile drive between the Santa Rita and Whetstone Mountains, though Sonoita, and into the Patagonia Mountains.

World's fairs introduced us to Heinz ketchup, the Ferris wheel, the telephone and countless other now-ubiquitous innovations. Lisa Schrenk, a CAPLA associate professor who studies world's fairs, has helped establish a new institute to study how the events impact global society. Learn more in this interview.

In a paper published in December 2021 in the Journal of the American Planning Association, ASU's Sara Meerow and UArizona's Ladd Keith analyzed the results of their extreme heat survey of planners from diverse cities across the United States to establish baseline information for a growing area of planning practice and scholarship that future research can build on.

Assistant Professor of Architecture Courtney Crosson, Watershed Management Group's Catlow Shipek and Tucson Artisan Builders' Dante Archangeli pen editorial on local water sustainability for Arizona Daily Star.

Associate Professor of Architectural History Lisa Schrenk shares the preface to her new book, The Oak Park Studio of Frank Lloyd Wright, which explores the suburban Chicago studio that served as one of the most important sites in the development of modern archi­tecture in the United States.

In an op-ed in the June 11, 2021 edition of the Arizona Daily Star, Arlie Adkins calls out the ongoing discussion about regional coordination in the Regional Transportation Authority (RTA), an independent taxing district within Pima County that manages multimodal transportation projects.

Associate Professor of Architecture Clare Robinson has been a Berkeley Prize Committee member since 2013 and judged the esteemed competition this year. In this editorial, she speaks to the Prize’s importance in addressing social issues in architecture, as well as her own teaching and research.