Gibbs College welcomes new assistant professors Terry Clinefelter in the Haskell & Irene Lemon Construction Science Division and Dr. Wei Liu in the Division of Planning, Landscape Architecture, and Design.
The Division of Planning, Landscape Architecture, and Design at the University of Oklahoma’s Gibbs College is pleased to announce the appointment of incoming Assistant Professor, Dr. Wei Liu, beginning in Fall 2025.
The University of Oklahoma’s Division of Planning, Landscape Architecture & Design (PLAD) is proud to announce Dez Harris as the inaugural recipient of the Ralph Ochsner Fellowship, a prestigious award created to support students who demonstrate exceptional academic achievement, character, and a commitment to community-focused planning.
Regional and City Planning students worked with Tulakes Neighborhood Ministries in Oklahoma City to offer recommendations for their site needs and possible paths for expanded services.
A message from Dr. Amber N. Wiley, director of the OU Institute for Quality Communities.
Following a national search, the Christopher C. Gibbs College of Architecture at the University of Oklahoma has named Dr. Amber Wiley as the new director of the Institute for Quality Communities. An award-winning scholar, Wiley brings more than 15 years of experience in teaching, research and professional practice in historic preservation, architecture and community engagement.
On April 11, 2024, The Christopher C. Gibbs College of Architecture Institute for Quality Communities (IQC) hosted Clyde Higgs, President and CEO of the Atlanta BeltLine, to share lessons learned from the iconic project. The fully booked event drew dozens of students, members of the Taft community, event sponsors, and friends from the broader metro community.
The OU Institute for Quality Communities recently hosted a Route 66 Placemaking Retreat in collaboration with the OU Arts and Humanities Forum. The retreat was funded by an Oklahoma Humanities “Community Discussions” grant that an interdisciplinary OU team received in November. This retreat built upon the team’s site visits and community discussions in several historic towns along Route 66.
The Christopher C. Gibbs College of Architecture Institute for Quality Communities is proud to announce the visit of Clyde Higgs, President and CEO of Atlanta BeltLine Inc, on Thursday, April 11th to share stories and lessons learned from the iconic Atlanta BeltLine project. The event will take place at Gould Hall’s Buskuhl Gallery from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM. RSVP is required to attend.
In collaboration with the Institute for Quality Communities, OU Interior Design and Environmental Design students are working on an adaptive reuse project in Taft, Oklahoma. Taft is a small town located in Muskogee County and is one of Oklahoma’s thirteen remaining Black townships. In 2023, the community reached out to the IQC for assistance in revitalizing the town’s community spaces.
In November, the Yukon City Council approved an agreement with the IQC to develop a tree canopy plan for Garth Brooks Boulevard. Yukon planning staff will work closely with a group of OU Environmental Design students, led by Professor Sarah Little, to create unique design concepts for this corridor.
The community of Westville, Oklahoma was recently awarded a Built Environment Grant from the Tobacco Settlement Endowment Trust to continue implementing a plan developed by OU’s Institute for Quality Communities. With the designs provided by the OU team, Westville city officials hope to enhance the town’s streetscapes and improve overall community connectivity.
An interdisciplinary team from the University of Oklahoma recently received funding from Oklahoma Humanities, a non-profit organization in Oklahoma City. The funding will support a humanities-informed design experience in preparation for the Route 66 centennial in 2026. The project, Route 66 Placemaking Communities Retreat, will explore placemaking efforts for communities along the historic Mother Road.
Vanessa Morrison, an award-winning urban planner, has agreed to serve as the new interim director of the Institute for Quality Communities. The appointment was announced by Gibbs College Dean Hans Butzer and made effective on Sept. 1, 2023.
In collaboration with design and engineering firm Kimley-Horn, the town of Westville, Oklahoma, recently began developing a project created by a team of students from the Institute for Quality Communities. The team’s design concepts have been incorporated into the final plan for a downtown lot and will soon become a reality.
Gibbs College, in partnership with its OU Institute for Quality Communities, is announcing a leadership transition. Shane Hampton has stepped down from the role of executive director of the Institute for Quality Communities, effective Aug. 25. The IQC team will continue to lead programs and projects in the 2023 – 2024 academic year.
During the spring 2023 semester, OU Environmental Design students created reuse design concepts for the historic Jewel Theater in northeast Oklahoma City. Led by Vanessa Morrison, assistant director of OU’s Institute for Quality Communities, students conducted research, listened to local stakeholders and visited historic sites to gain a deeper understanding of the spatial and social challenges facing the Black community in Oklahoma City.
On March 20th, hundreds of planning and design professionals, civic leaders, and students gathered at the University of Oklahoma for the 5th biennial Institute for Quality Communities’ Placemaking Conference. The all-day event featured speakers working in a variety of fields, all of which contribute to community placemaking.
On March 29, 2023, Regional + City Planning faculty Dr. John C. Harris and Dr. C Aujean Lee joined doctoral student and Institute for Quality Communities Research Fellow Rebecca Blaine to present to MetaFund about community engagement practices.
Vanessa Morrison, Associate Director of the Institute for Quality Communities, was recently selected for the 2023 cohort of the Place Based Justice Network’s BIPOC Leadership Collective. The Leadership Collective uplifts Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) leaders who work with place-based community engagement efforts on their campuses and in their communities.
As part of a collaboration with the Association of Central Oklahoma Governments, the Institute for Quality Communities, the City of El Reno, Michael Höffner, and Emily Fitzsimmons formed a team to research and provide recommendations concerning Sunset Drive, a stretch of Route 66 west of downtown El Reno, Oklahoma.
A project team of University of Oklahoma researchers and Oklahoma City civic partners are collaborating to create the Legacy Building Toolset, a digital platform that will allow community members to collectively explore identity, the meaning of place, and create and engage with community assets and more easily allow community members to participate in community collaboration projects.
The Open Design Collective, a nonprofit design and planning firm founded by Vanessa Morrison and Deborah Richards, was recently featured in Architect magazine. Vanessa Morrison, the Associate Director of the University of Oklahoma’s Institute of Quality Communities, is a social-impact planner who lives and works in northeastern Oklahoma City. Deborah Richards, AIA, is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at Gibbs College and a licensed architect in New York, Oklahoma and Massachusetts.
The National Brownfields Training Conference was held in Oklahoma City from August 16th through the 19th. The local and national planning committees for the annual conference began work on the meeting in March of 2020. Ron Frantz, Director of the Environmental Design Program, served on the Local Planning Committee’s Mobile Workshops, Socials, and Evening Receptions Committee.
The Institute for Quality Communities (IQC) recently completed a year-long project sponsored by the Association for Central Oklahoma Governments (ACOG). ACOG's Community Economic Resiliency Initiative allowed the IQC to launch a new Community Engagement Fellowship, in which four Gibbs faculty members and a dozen Gibbs students provided planning services in the cities of El Reno, Guthrie, and Harrah.
Please join us in congratulating the 2022 Gibbs College Faculty & Staff Awards recipients. Recipients were honored by Dean Butzer during the Gibbs College Back to School Meeting on Thursday, August 18. They were nominated by their colleagues via an open nomination process.
A small but dedicated group of OU faculty and students in the Christopher C. Gibbs College of Architecture are living out one of the university’s highest aspirations in a very concrete way: to positively impact the state of Oklahoma and its communities through improvements to a main thoroughfare for one under-resourced city while offering students priceless experience in urban design and planning.
The University of Oklahoma’s Institute for Quality Communities (IQC) is partnering with the Kay County Healthy Living Program to host the Oklahoma Towns: Walkability and Placemaking Summit. The summit will feature workshops and speakers from Kay County and other parts of Oklahoma to highlight real-world examples of changing an environment to promote walkability and placemaking.
The Institute for Quality Communities (IQC) project partners recently won nearly $150,000 in funding from the Oklahoma Tobacco Settlement Endowment Trust (TSET) to enhance public spaces and walkability. The City of Pryor Creek and Town of Luther both received funding, which will go to streetscape and park improvements identified in IQC workshops in 2019 and 2020.
The Gibbs Design Activism Awards is a new grant initiative that was created to support student-led design and research projects that critically engage topics of community, social, and economic concern within the built environment – at Gibbs College, on the OU Campus, and across Oklahoma.
The University of Oklahoma Institute for Quality Communities (IQC) was recently mentioned in an article in The Washington Post about Tullahassee, Oklahoma. The article, titled “A historic all-Black town wants reparations to rebuild as a ‘safe haven,’” explores the history of the historic Black town Tullahassee and their community’s journey to rebuild after years of decline due to government policies.
Regional + City Planning students from “Community Development and Revitalization” with Dr. John Harris and “Planning with Diverse Communities” with Dr. C. Aujean Lee recently presented to the Tulsa Planning Office and Riverwood Neighborhood stakeholders about community engagement techniques.
Urban Design students, Roshita Taylor, Soujanya Malla, and Jeremy Banes, shared their designs for Sweeney Switch in downtown Harrah, Oklahoma during the town’s St. Patrick Day celebration.
Outstanding faculty members are critical to support the academic mission and research activity that takes place at the University of Oklahoma. Endowed faculty appointments are recognized as positions of respect held by teachers, scholars and researchers of exceptional achievement and promise.
Since 2019, the OU Institute for Quality Communities (IQC), part of Gibbs College, has been helping to bring a very special event to Oklahoma City. All of this work is paying off, as the 2022 Congress on New Urbanism will take place in OKC from March 23-26, 2022.
Vanessa Morrison, the Associate Director of the OU Institute for Quality Communities and co-founder of Open Design Collective, recently authored a column in The Oklahoman titled “Let’s celebrate everyday, unseen roles Black women play in Oklahoma communities.”
Communities are so much more than just places in which people live. The term “sense of place” is commonly used to describe the emotive bonds and attachments people develop or experience in particular locations and environments, or to describe the distinctiveness or unique character of localities and regions. This understanding inspires the origins of many community-based organizations seeking to help support communities with various needs. These organizations typically attract passionate go-getters who wish to help improve the spaces they and others like them came from. Count the Institute of Quality Communities at the Gibbs College of Architecture and its associate director, Vanessa Morrison, among those go-getters.
GCA Communications intern Kali Curtis (K) spoke with Shawn Schaefer (S), the director of the Urban Design Studio here at Gibbs! We sat down with Schaefer to learn about how the use of technology and design methods has evolved throughout his career.
GCA Communications intern Kali Curtis spoke with Ron Frantz the director of the Environmental Design program here at Gibbs! We sat down with Frantz to learn about how the use of technology and design methods have changed since he was an architecture student.
Nine Gibbs College faculty and staff were recently recognized during the awards segment of the Fall 2021 Back-to-School Meeting. Honorees were nominated by their colleagues in Gibbs College through an open nomination process.
In 2020, the Association of Central Oklahoma Governments (ACOG) reached out to the University of Oklahoma’s Institute for Quality Communities (IQC) to ask for assistance with their Community Economic Resiliency Initiative (CERI). The Initiative was developed to help local governments respond to the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Three Oklahoma communities were selected to receive urban planning services from the IQC. These services would emphasize community identity and placemaking.
In the spring of 2020, the town of Okemah, Oklahoma requested design assistance from the Institute for Quality Communities (IQC) through the Oklahoma Municipal League. In fall of 2020, twenty-five undergraduate students and nine graduate students enrolled in three sections of the OU College of Architecture’s Historic Preservation Planning course completed a downtown historic building survey for Okemah.
In the Fall of 2020, the Institute for Quality Communities (IQC) hosted their first Quality Communities Retreat, sponsored by Mayors’ Institute on City Design and Oklahoma Municipal League.
In Spring of 2020, leaders of Afton, Oklahoma, reached out to the University of Oklahoma’s Institute for Quality Communities (IQC) for assistance for a project to turn the former Afton City Hall building into a Farmer’s Market and community space. The IQC collaborated with the Christopher C. Gibbs College of Architecture’s Division of Interior Design to complete this project.
This past spring the University of Oklahoma’s Institute for Quality Communities (IQC) worked with twenty-one students in the Environmental Design Practicum class in order to collaborate with community leaders of Tullahassee, Oklahoma and develop a plan for revitalization and growth.
This spring the University of Oklahoma’s Institute for Quality Communities (IQC) held a community parks workshop for the communities of Hollis, Lone Wolf, and Stroud. All three communities had existing park space they sought to improve both through physical development as well as increased programming.
Since February, höffnerdesignstudio has been host to OU Gibbs College of Architecture students Reilly Tuer and Kyler Smith. Tuer and Smith are fulfilling their internship semester by doing a project with the City of Edmond that carries forward an Institute for Quality Communities (IQC) initial report. Thanks to funding from IQC, the students are able to have paid internships while working in a professional setting, on a project with real stakes, and for a real client.
OU architecture students Alexander Downum and Ricardo Silva completed a 10-week conceptual streetscape project for the Institute for Quality Communities in Oklahoma City’s Asian District. Guided by alumni mentors Lisa Chronister and Victor Trautmann, the team developed proposals to revitalize underused spaces along Classen Boulevard and inspire future community-led improvements.
OU Institute for Quality Communities interns Kayarash Karami and James Nemeth developed conceptual layouts for a combined police and fire public safety center to support the City of Langston’s plans for a new facility. The project explored shared, community-focused design options to better serve the town and encourage collaboration between departments.
Institute for Quality Communities (IQC) interns, Kyler Smith and Reilly Tuer spent their semester rethinking pedestrian spaces in downtown Edmond, Oklahoma. Kyler and Reilly both recently completed their third year in the Gibbs College Architecture program. Throughout the project, they were mentored by Michael Hoffner (OU B.ARCH ‘90) of höffnerdesignstudio in Oklahoma City.
OU Institute for Quality Communities interns Brandon White and Jackson Ware developed a redesign proposal for a busy Midwest City intersection focused on improving placemaking and pedestrian use. The project provided real-world training and is now under review by the city.
