Archinect - News

Michael Maltzan, Maurice Cox, and Merrill Elam elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters

2023-02-22T12:47:00-05:00

Three architects and planners — Michael Maltzan, Maurice Cox, and Merrill Elam — have been announced as part of this year’s class of newly-elected members to the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

They were joined by Oscar-winning actor Frances McDormand and Ukrainian author Andrey Kurkov in the nineteen-member group of inductees which will be honored in a special ceremony to be held on May 24th in New York City. (Kurkov, who is being inducted into Foreign Honorary membership, will also deliver a keynote address.)

The 300-member Academy was founded there in 1898 and has included luminaries such as Mark Twain and Cass Gilbert and currently features 30 member architects including Billie Tsien, Steven Holl, Elizabeth Diller, Meejin Yoon, Walter Hood, and last year’s inductees Mabel O. Wilson, Deborah Berke, Michael Van Valkenburgh, and Thomas Phifer.

Michael Maltzan of Michael Maltzan Architecture

Michael Maltzan. Photo credit: Monica Nouwens.

A contemporary mainstay in his adopted h...

Detroit's Maurice Cox to lead Chicago's planning department

2019-07-19T13:12:00-04:00

New York native Maurice Cox is stepping down from his role this fall as Detroit's planning director. He's expected to take on a role as the top planning executive for the City of Chicago, a city official confirmed.

After four years at the helm of Detroit's planning department, Maurice Cox is headed to Chicago to serve as the city's top planning executive under the Windy City's new mayor, Lori Lightfoot.

A Brooklyn native, Cox is an architectural designer, educator, and former mayor of Charlottesville, Virginia. Prior to arriving in Detroit, Cox directed the Tulane University City Center, a community outreach and design-build institute housed within the Tulane School of Architecture. Prior to that role, Cox served as the design director for the National Endowment for the Arts in Washington, D.C.

Cox told The Detroit News, "I feel strongly that Detroit's neighborhoods are receiving the attention that they deserve and people feel strongly that they have a road map for the quality of life for neighborhoods, whether it's streets, parks or greenways. Cox added that those efforts are "driven by the residents who stayed."

Activating vacant land: a conversation about Detroit's potential and challenges

2018-07-13T15:34:00-04:00

Maurice Cox grew up in Brooklyn, a borough whose name has since become a global shorthand for gentrification. An urban designer, architectural educator, and former mayor of the City of Charlottesville, VA, in 2015 Cox became head of the planning department of Detroit, where he hopes to prevent the forces that have reshaped his childhood home from taking over the Motor City. [...] Cox is using design to catalyze growth that’s incremental and closely in line with the city’s strong sense of self.

Urban Omnibus presents an insightful conversation between Maurice Cox, Director of Planning and Development for the City of Detroit, and Marc Norman, founder of the consulting firm “Ideas and Action” and Associate Professor of Practice at UMich's Taubman School of Architecture and Urban Planning. Discussed issues range from tactical preservation, vacant land as asset, smooth growth, gentrification, and preserving Black spaces:

Detroit still has capacity for a population of 1.8 million, and we’re at less than 700,000. So part of our challenge is, how to prevent buildings turning into blight, to the point of having to demolish them?

On the other hand, if it does make sense to tear some things down, what do we put in their place? The architect’s mindset is often that the only thing that can replace a structure is another structure. But in Detroit, that makes no sense financially; it makes no sense in terms of the population. So we have to turn to other disciplines for an answer.

That’s...