Associate Professor Chris T. Cornelius

Associate Professor Chris T. Cornelius is one of five recipients of the 2017 J. Irwin & Xenia S. Miller Prize! His studio:indigenous entry, “Wiikiaami,” is a contemporary interpretation of the dwelling of the people that are indigenous to the Columbus area. “Wiikiaami” was built at the First Christian Church designed by Saarinen and Saarinen and is part of the Exhibit Columbus events that opened and runs August 26 and running until late November. CONGRATULATIONS Chris!

Through a juried competition, the Miller Prize was awarded to five designers and design teams. The winning proposals were constructed as five temporary installations at five sites, each of which is a Columbus icon. The other four winners are: Boston-based IKD’s “Conversation Plinth,” built in the plaza of the I. M. Pei-designed Cleo Rogers Memorial Library; Los Angeles-based Oyler Wu Collaborative’s “Untitled,” built outside of the Irwin Conference Center designed by Eero Saarinen; New Haven-based Plan B Architecture & Urbanism’s “Anything can happen in the woods,” built on the grounds of the Cummins Corporate Office Building designed by Kevin Roche John Dinkeloo Associates; and Tucson and New York-based Aranda-Lasch’s “Another Circle,” installed in the Michael Van Valkenburgh/Stanley Saitowitz-designed Mill Race Park. Read more here: https://archpaper.com/2017/01/2017-miller-prize-winners/

Chris is an enrolled member of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin and focuses his research and practice on the architectural translation of culture—in particular, American Indian culture. He is the founding principal of studio:indigenous, a design and consulting practice serving American Indian clients.

Chris is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including an Artist in Residence Fellowship from the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of the American Indian where he created a visual translation of the Oneida cosmology. His other honors include selection to the Milwaukee Business Journal’s 40 under 40 and a Graduate of the Last Decade (GOLD) award from the UWM Alumni Association. He also led a studio that won a National Council of Architectural Registration Board (NCARB) Prize in 2007 for the design of affordable, sustainable, modular housing. Chris teaches at the undergraduate and graduate levels. He also teaches a seminar course on visual thinking and mapping.

Recently Chris had an exhibit with a lecture at the University of New Mexico and spoke at UMass-Amherst.

And the Wiikiaami rendering won an Award of Excellence for Rendering from the American Society of Architectural Illustrators (ASAI)!

DAR faculty awarded RACAS awards: Assistant Professor Nikole Bouchard was awarded a RACAS grant to transform the work from the 2017 Urban Edge Seminar—From Waste to Wonder: Working with What Remains—into a publication while Assistant Professor Filip Tejchman and Associate Professor Mike Utzinger’s RACAS will further refine a low-cost sensor system for their Architecture for the Birds project.

Associate Professor Shields recently received a national design award at the April 2017 Interface Student Housing Conference in Austin, Texas. He received the award for the top renovation of a building into student housing. Locally, the same project received a “Mayor’s Design Award” and a “Cream of the Cream City” award for best historic preservation project in Milwaukee. This renovation converted the historic Pabst Bottling House into student housing.

Associate Professor Enrique Figueroa received several honors this year. He was named “Hispanic Man of the Year” by United Migrant Opportunities, Inc. [UMOS], Milwaukee; “Roberto Hernandez Center Hispanic of the Year,” by the Roberto Hernandez Center [RHC], University of Wisconsin‒Milwaukee; and “Corporate Citizen of the Year” from United Migrant Opportunities, Inc. [UMOS], Milwaukee.