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.
The University of Oklahoma College of Architecture is proud to announce that Model Schools in the Model City, authored by Director of the Institute for Quality Communities, Amber N. Wiley, Ph.D., has been named one of ten finalists for the 2026 ASALH Book Prize for Best New Book in African American History and Culture.
This semester, students in the LA 5535 Studio: Ecological Planning and Design, led by Prof. Afsana Sharmin, took on an ambitious hypothetical project to redesign key parts of the OU campus. Their mission: to tackle the critical real-world challenge of stormwater management through innovative green design.
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.
