Max Underwood

1. TEACHING: COLLABORATIVE INVESTIGATION

By shifting away from the established school-internship-practice model, Max empowered three generations of students to envision and test-drive new architectural education paradigms that include daily engagement in real world professional practice. His community-embedded architectural design studios – a teaching hospital for future architects – allow students to work on real-world projects in real time with leading practitioners. These studios have completed over 60 co-designed projects for upcoming buildings, and provided opportunities for stakeholders and students to collaborate and visualize the potentials of future buildings, while addressing social, economic, and cultural issues. For 25 years Max taught Construction and Building Development to future architects utilizing his collaborative speculative working drawing field detailing exercise, which has connected students with more than 30 award-winning architects—including multiple Pritzker Prize laureates—and their construction teams on active job sites, fostering understanding of materials, tectonics, digital fabrication, and construction delivery systems. In his Great Practice seminar, future architects gain in-depth understanding of the vision, organization, and day-to-day operations of one exemplary professional practice, and the personal, cultural, political, economic and technical forces that influence its evolution. In all his classes, Max takes a hands-on, personalized approach, mentoring and co-teaching with his teaching assistants, a methodology he has taught in his Teaching the Teachers seminar that empowers teaching assistants on their own pedagogical path. More than fifty of his former students have gone on to tenured, tenure-track, or adjunct positions at universities around the U.S. 

2.   SCHOLARSHIP and RESEARCH 

To inform his teaching and guide interactions with students, Max’s research and scholarship investigate the engines of innovation as well as the history of design and practice to make grounded connections to the evolution of the profession. Collaborating with forward thinking practitioners, he has helped advance internally developed architectural research—including the development of materials and construction technologies and fabrication — that have since become mainstream. He brought together academics and leading professionals from a variety of industries at the National ACSA Technology Conference to discuss connections between the human body, technology, and design, applying these investigations and others to his teaching.  Max was the 2006 Alvar Aalto Foundation lecturer and shared the legacy of the Office of Charles and Ray Eames and stories from his time working there, to illuminate their legacy for a new generation, and build on his Great Practices seminar teaching. He co-organized an international exhibition and symposium on the emotional and spiritual architecture of Luis Barragán, gathering vital oral histories of individuals who had worked with Barragán, which ultimately informed his Smithsonian Journey Tours of Mexico City, where participants experience his powerful work and legacy.

3. ADVOCACY: EMPOWERING A BROADER AUDIENCE

Max engages non-architects and community members on the importance of design and the built environment in supporting environmental justice, social equity, and physical and mental well-being.  He created the popular Introduction to Architecture and Environmental Design course for non-architecture majors, utilizing his “Inside the Designer’s Studio” sessions, which bring students and designers together in a range of design practices ranging from video games to architecture to share their experiences with over 500 freshmen each semester. The course inspires students to develop a deeper understanding of the major ideas, conditions and forces that influence design and their lives. Similarly, in his Great Cities course, students go into their own communities, conduct interviews and explorations into the ideas of public space, and then collaborate on the creation of a City Boardgame for kids. An early adopter of online teaching, Max teaches his Great Cities and Introduction to Architecture and Environmental Design courses to students from around the globe via ASU Online. These two course experiences have inspired over 18,000 students to get involved in their local communities with a new sense of urgency and design stewardship. Max has also led more than 40 public tours in Portugal, Japan, Turkey, Mexico and the US sponsored by Smithsonian Journeys and other cultural institutions and co-taught a Neuroscience + Architecture master class to mid-career architects and neuroscientists on the impact of architecture on human health and well-being.