In November 2022, we connected with the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's School of Architecture & Urban Planning (SARUP) to unpack its Mellows Graduate Research Positions (formerly called the Mellowes Master’s Research Assistantships).
For the 2024-2025 school year, SARUP is accepting applications for its latest round of M.Arch graduate researchers in the field of architecture and is offering two additional research positions exploring preservation, conservation and restoration, and material investigations.
To further investigate what options graduate students have, we've reconnected with the school to learn more about its series of paid graduate research openings and why they should apply.
Each year, SARUP provides paid research opportunities for incoming M.Arch students seeking to explore and develop "proficiency in researching and communicating advanced topics in architecture." The school explained, that alongside expert faculty, "Research will have broader implications for the field of architecture while reinforcing SARUP’s reputation as a leading research institution."
Open to newly accepted M.Arch students for the Fall 2024 semester, Mellowes Graduate Researchers will receive a stipend totaling $11,000 (nearly equivalent to in-state tuition) that is applied toward their tuition and distributed over the semesters worked. The school makes a note that Summer work is paid hourly.
In preparation for the program's incoming 2024 cohort, we connected with the 2024-2025 Mellowes Graduate Research Faculty members – Palmyra Geraki, Sergio Lopez-Pineiro, Sam Schuermann, and Brian Schermer. Together, we discuss their backgrounds, what their research project focus will be, what makes the Mellowes research opportunity so unique, and what they look for in an ideal candidate.
Please tell us about yourself and your academic background.
Palmyra Geraki (PG): I grew up in Thessaloniki, Greece, and moved to the US for college. I received my undergraduate degree (B.A.) in Architecture and Ethics, Politics and Economics from Yale University and my graduate degree (M.Arch.) from the Yale School of Architecture. While the entirety of my architecture education took place in the US, being Greek has deeply influenced who I am and how I approach my work as both an educator and a practitioner, not least by making me aware of the complex and layered histories of place, which have led to a long-standing interest in different fields of study—political philosophy, sociology, literature, law, mathematics, the arts—and inter-, trans-, and multidisciplinary approaches to knowledge.
Architecture was a natural fit. As a syncretic body of knowledge and a profession deeply embedded in the flows of capitalism, it is naturally placed at such a disciplinary crossroads.
Sergio Lopez-Pineiro (SLP): I’m a Spanish-American interdisciplinary architect working in between architecture and landscape. I’m the director of the design studio Holes of Matter and a recently appointed assistant professor in architecture at UWM. I’m the author of A Glossary of Urban Voids and Typologies for Big Words.
I work with emptiness and allied spatial concepts (such as voids, nothingness, or limbo) to imagine a public realm where groups of free, diverse, and spontaneous strangers become a public body. Currently, I’m focusing on the spatial needs and expressions of democratic acts that generate trust between strangers, such as voting or conversing face-to-face with citizens of opposing political views.
I was trained as an architect in Spain at the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid (ETSAM) and received a post-professional Master of Architecture degree at Princeton University. I have taught design studios and theory seminars in architecture and landscape architecture departments, focusing on the public nature of the built environment. Previously, I held the 2006-07 Reyner Banham Fellowship at the University at Buffalo’s Department of Architecture and the 2014-15 Daniel Urban Kiley Fellowship at Harvard University’s Department of Landscape Architecture.
Samantha Schuermann (SS): I received my undergraduate degree (B.S. Arch) from the University of Cincinnati and my graduate degree (M. Arch) from Rice University. At the University of Cincinnati, the School of Architecture and Interior Design is housed within the larger College of Design, Architecture, Art, and Planning, which heavily influences my approach to architecture as simply one of many disciplines that shape our built and aesthetic environment. At Rice University, I was a research assistant, working closely with faculty on material research, fabrication, and architectural installations throughout my education.
My approach is heavily influenced by these educational models and my peers in other design disciplines, with an understanding of architecture as a material instantiation of cultural, social, economic, and political forces. My work explores the aesthetics, objects, conventions, and material implications of domesticity through both scholarly research and fabrication projects focused on textile manipulation. I was the 2022-23 Architectural Activism Fellow at UWM, researching the intersection of domestic labor, gender, and architecture. By leveraging the aesthetics of domesticity, my research and material practice exploits and subverts gender constructs through textile manipulation, color and material play, and joyful form-making.
Brian Schermer (BS): Now in my 24th year at UWM, I teach in the Department of Architecture's undergraduate, master's, and Ph.D. programs. I also serve as a principal and director of design research at Workshop Architects, a nationally known firm specializing in research, planning, and design for higher education. My responsibilities span social research, architectural programming, and concept development for pivotal student life buildings at leading universities nationwide, including the University of Michigan, Georgia Institute of Technology, Purdue University, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
My research explores the relationship between campus environments and students' well-being, academic success, and a sense of belonging. The synergy between my teaching and Workshop garnered a National Architectural Registration Board Award for Creative Integration in Practice and the Academy and a Certificate of Research Excellence from the Environmental Design Research Association. Beyond numerous papers and conference presentations, I have co-authored Law and Practice for Architects and Building Bridges, Blurring Boundaries: The Milwaukee School of Environment-Behavior Studies. Before my academic career, I worked with client types, including nonprofits, Fortune 500 companies, public housing, federal agencies, and urban infrastructure.
Can you share with us what research you will be focusing on and how your research interests engage prospective graduate students?
BS: My research focuses on the “architecture of belonging” for underrepresented student populations on university campuses. Sense of belonging affects student persistence, grades, engagement, and well-being. It is especially critical for first-generation, lower-income, LGBTQ+, international, and students of color. At a time when most students’ life-worlds are expanding, underrepresented students all too often experience their campus as a place that feels unwelcoming, alienating, and unsafe. It is crucial to ensure that students from marginalized and underrepresented groups find places to bond, study, relax, and develop a sense of institutional connection. The more we understand how campus places foster a sense of belonging, the better we can plan interventions to support students of all identities.
Campus Capital Mapping is a research strategy I developed to assess sense of belonging from a place perspective. Students identify places important to their college experience using an online mapping tool. They map four types of campus capital: social, intellectual, restorative, and symbolic. The number and variety of places identified by students indicate the extent to which the physical campus affords opportunities for belonging. Nearly 5,000 students have completed mapping surveys at ten institutions nationwide.
A prospective graduate student will partner with me to interpret results, develop papers and presentations, and organize a Summit on Campus Belonging for student life professionals, campus planners, architects, and designers.
PG: My Mellowes research is about rendering visible the complexities and contingencies of the design process, expanding our understanding of what constitutes the built environment by exposing not only its underlying organizations but also the power structures that underlie the processes by which it comes to be (zoning, building codes, bureaucracies, relationships, hierarchies, structures of group work and collaboration, technological innovation etc).
Though it might appear introspective, the project aims to leverage research, writing, power mapping, and other modes of representation to communicate these complex and often unseen aspects of the architectural design process to a broader audience.
SLP: Contemporary democracies exhibiting polarized political beliefs require specific assembly spaces for citizens to engage with opposing views, such as one-on-one conversation spaces. However, since the establishment of modern democracies and the associated emergence of the public sphere in the 18th century, political spaces continue to be imagined as august places to assemble multitudes (e.g., houses of representatives or public squares). Today, no political spaces are explicitly designed for face-to-face meetings, and these crucial conversations for American democracy typically occur in ordinary multipurpose rooms. The old spatial imagination deployed at the dawn of modern democracies must be renewed to meet the challenges of contemporary democracies.
Listening to each other requires a space different from speaking or listening to a multitude. Despite this inadequacy, most democratic spaces continue to be conceived and designed to accommodate crowds rather than individual face-to-face meetings. The presently diminished ability to engage in productive civil discourse is connected to the lack of spaces conceived for this purpose. A poor architectural and landscape imagination contributes to a weakened political system. Most guidelines for conversations between citizens do not include architectural needs for civic conversations or their symbolic impact on the public imagination. Design creativity must make room for political innovation. Citizens of differing political opinions need places to assemble with the same dignity and aura as parliaments or protests.
This project documents the everyday spaces where Americans of opposing political views hold transformative face-to-face conversations and redesigns them as new assembly spaces to generate and symbolize trust between strangers.
SS: Currently, the focus of my research is the relationship between the history of Home Economics departments and contemporaneous architectural form, revealing how gendered ideals became cemented into our built environment, particularly in domestic spaces. Specifically, the Mellowes project is focused on a fascinating typology: model homes built on college campuses in the early to mid-20th century by home economics departments.
Throughout the early 1900s, following funding allocation from the Smith-Hughes Act, many colleges across the United States built a variety of model homes in which students would practice their home management skills in a kind of 1:1 laboratory. These buildings ranged from standalone single-family homes to apartments to single interior rooms installed in existing campus buildings. Although few remain, there is documentation of this typology across the country, from Cornell to Iowa State to UIUC to the University of Washington—there was even a practice home, Sims Cottage, at Stevens Point Normal School (now UWStevens Point). The proposed research project, supported by the Mellowes, aims to create a comprehensive survey of these model homes via architectural drawings and models, explicitly relating to gender, labor, Taylorism, and architectural form. Who designed these spaces? How was square footage, layout, and decor decided? This research will look to governmental documents such as the Morrill Act of 1862, the Smith-Lever Act of 1914, and the Hughes Act of 1917, among others, to understand the influence and funding of the Department of the Interior on these model homes. Students would be engaged in every step of this research—seeking out archival documents, close readings of archival texts, architectural drawings (plan, section, elevation, interior elevations, and RCPs) of specific model homes from American college campuses, and physical, analytical model building to create a comprehensive survey.
In many scientific disciplines, paid graduate research positions are expected at the doctoral level. However, within the disciplines of the built environment, they are uncommon at the doctoral level and pretty much inexistent at the master level. The Mellowes Graduate Researcher position connects faculty research with graduate students in a rare manner amongst the fields of the built environment at the master level. – Sergio Lopez-Pineiro
Paid graduate research positions aren’t always common. What makes UWM’s SARUP’s Mellowes Graduate Research opportunity unique, and why should candidates apply?
SLP: In many scientific disciplines, paid graduate research positions are expected at the doctoral level. However, within the disciplines of the built environment, they are uncommon at the doctoral level and pretty much inexistent at the master level. The Mellowes Graduate Researcher position connects faculty research with graduate students in a rare manner amongst the fields of the built environment at the master level. It is a unique opportunity for architecture students.
The Mellowes Researcher working with me will contribute toward the two planned outcomes for this design research project: an exhibition and a publication. The show is intended for the general public, while the publication is anticipated for experts engaged in this type of democratic assembly (activists, designers, religious leaders, social scientists, etc.). After the design research has been completed, activist and political organizations will be contacted to explore the possibility of constructing one of these assembly spaces. This is a unique opportunity for a graduate student to contribute to a faculty’s research and its public dissemination while learning how to strengthen architecture’s role in the building of democratic societies at this moment in time.
This ongoing project has already received MacDowell’s support with a 2023 summer residency, for which I’m immensely thankful the accompanying images were produced during this time.
As someone who benefitted from a similar program in graduate school, I can attest to the unparalleled impact this opportunity has on a graduate student [...] As one of the largest architecture schools in the country and the only accredited school of architecture in Wisconsin, SARUP also has great resources and influence at the school, university, and city levels. – Samantha Schuermann
SS: As someone who benefitted from a similar program in graduate school, I can attest to the unparalleled impact this opportunity has on a graduate student. The ability to work with one faculty member on one focused area of research over multiple semesters, allows the time and space to conduct rigorous, thorough research that other opportunities aren’t able to provide. Engaging, rigorous work with faculty mentors is often one of the most impactful and productive elements of an architectural education, exposing students to the many paths one can take within the field and allowing students to begin to set their own agendas and discover their own passions. Candidates who are interested in truly being an active, engaged collaborator with a stake in the work as a driving element of their graduate education should apply.
As one of the largest architecture schools in the country and the only accredited school of architecture in Wisconsin, SARUP also has great resources and influence at the school, university, and city levels. We have excellent relationships with the arts and design community in the city of Milwaukee and are always looking to connect students to local opportunities. The Mellowes is one of many ways that SARUP engages both students and the Milwaukee community with supported research.
BS: The Mellowes Graduate Research program offers an ideal platform for aspiring architecture students who are dedicated to creating spaces that go beyond aesthetic craftsmanship, emphasizing experiential richness and cultural inclusivity. Architectural education is remarkable for its integration of knowledge about organizing the physical, social, and experiential worlds to enhance the human condition. While the field is expansive, architecture students benefit from reflective time to not only acquire skills and knowledge but also to grasp the deeper meaning of their studies.
The Mellowes Graduate Research program offers an ideal platform for aspiring architecture students who are dedicated to creating spaces that go beyond aesthetic craftsmanship, emphasizing experiential richness and cultural inclusivity. – Brian Schermer
For those architecture students particularly interested in the social impact of their work, the program provides an opportunity to engage in social research, offering valuable insights and experiences that satiate their curiosity and prepare them for career opportunities with firms emphasizing social research. The growing demand for research-oriented architects in firms highlights the industry trend towards better work and demonstrable outcomes for clients. Regardless of the specific research focus within the Mellowes program, students who seize this opportunity gain a significant advantage, setting them apart in their future careers or potentially in teaching roles.
PG: The Mellowes Graduate Research position is unique because it gives graduate students the opportunity to work closely with a faculty member on a long-term directed research project. With the topics made public prior to the admissions application deadline, students have the opportunity to look closely at the different research agendas that the faculty have put forth and apply to those that intersect with their own research interests.
With [The Mellowes Graduate Research Position] the topics made public prior to the admissions application deadline, students have the opportunity to look closely at the different research agendas that the faculty have put forth and apply to those that intersect with their own research interests. – Palmyra Geraki
For those interested in applying to become a Mellowes Graduate Researcher, what are you looking for in a researcher/graduate student collaborator?
PG: I am looking for someone who can engage with the topic both critically and creatively, moving seamlessly between analysis and design, while remaining empathetic, attentive to detail, and demanding of precision. Perhaps most importantly, I am looking for a true collaborator—an interlocutor, who will invest themselves fully in the project and bring their unique voice and point of view to the table.
SLP: The selected student should exhibit great patience and meticulous research skills as they will help build a list of representative socially impactful conversations that have occurred in the last 50 years around essential topics of American democracy (such as race, ecology, or healthcare). Furthermore, the student will help document the ordinary spaces where these meaningful conversations occurred (by retrieving photographs from archives, making detailed drawings of rooms, and interviewing participants).
Finally, the selected student will help draw and render new alternative spaces for this kind of public encounter: new democratic assembly spaces for reimagining “the people” in the face of a stranger with opposing political views.
Faculty members are looking for true collaborators – students who take agency and responsibility over the project, put their own voice in the work, and view the research as a foundational element of their graduate education. – Samantha Schuermann
BS: The ideal graduate student for collaboration on the "architecture of belonging" research should have a genuine interest in the social impact of architecture. This could be demonstrated through a combination of elective courses, research papers, and special projects that center on community, safety, security, inclusion, and other factors influencing how people engage with and respond to physical environments. A prospective applicant with an undergraduate major in psychology, sociology, human ecology, or a related field that complements architecture would bring a valuable perspective to the research.
Furthermore, an ideal candidate would be familiar with different research methods, including interpretive approaches, surveys, and geographic information systems. Additionally, proficiency in writing and graphic presentation, including the creation of infographics, would be highly beneficial. In short, I am looking for a graduate student who can partner with me to effectively analyze, communicate, and visually represent the intricate relationships between architecture and social outcomes.
SS: First and foremost, we are looking for students who are truly engaged and interested in the topic. Students should carefully review the proposed projects and select a route that they are most invested in. Faculty members are looking for true collaborators – students who take agency and responsibility over the project, put their own voice in the work, and view the research as a foundational element of their graduate education.
I am looking for a nimble, curious student who can deftly move between a wide variety of tasks and formats—from archival research, close readings of dense texts including legislation, precision digital drawing, and physical model building. I’m also looking for a student who is interested in curation and dissemination of aesthetic work, as a major task of the project is to package and present our findings and speculations in a variety of formats.
Adding to SARUP's Mellowes Graduate Research opportunities, the School offers two more research-specific positions for graduate students seeking to supplement their studies. Graduate researchers can receive a stipend totaling up to $11,000.
If you're interested in exploring the realm of architecture and conservation, SARUP faculty member William Krueger's work will focus on adaptive reuse topics with the opportunity for occasional travel. Krueger explains the work will consist of "compiling and disseminating data using the latest LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) and photogrammetry documentation and software to explore applications within the realm of Architecture, Preservation, Conservation and Restoration."
For students interested in material science and exploring material uses within the built environment, SARUP Faculty member Alex Timmer seeks a graduate student researcher in his Design + Construction Institute at the school. According to Trimmer, "This research will focus on pervious concrete and waste wood/cement composites."
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Learn more about the Mellowes Master’s Research program and other graduate research opportunities by clicking here. The application deadline is January 1, 2024.
Interested in applying to a graduate and undergraduate program at the UW-Milwaukee SARUP, click here to learn more and apply!
Katherine is an LA-based writer and editor. She was Archinect's former Editorial Manager and Advertising Manager from 2018 – January 2024. During her time at Archinect, she's conducted and written 100+ interviews and specialty features with architects, designers, academics, and industry ...
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