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.
Telesis, a journal produced by students in the University of Oklahoma Christopher C. Gibbs College of Architecture, has earned first place in the 2026 Douglas Haskell Award for Student Journals for its seventh volume, “Unfold.” This marks the fourth time the publication has earned recognition for excellence in student architectural journalism. It shares the honor with student journals from Columbia University, University of Michigan, and Cal Poly.
Christopher C. Gibbs College of Architecture congratulates Thinh "Henry" Duong, a master's student in the Division of Interior Design, for earning first place in the 2026 Robert Bruce Thompson Annual Student Light Fixture Design Competition.
Gibbs College of Architecture Institute for Quality Communities (IQC) Director and Division of Planning, Landscape Architecture, and Design (PLAD) faculty member Amber N. Wiley, Ph.D., recently published a new book, Collective Yearning: Black Women Artists from the Zimmerli Art Museum.
