Publications

Mike Christenson, AIA, NCARB, Professor of Architecture, School of Architecture, University of Minnesota

Registered architect (North Dakota, Minnesota)

Director, Digital Design Center, University of Minnesota

Driven by the desire to acknowledge and celebrate the diverse, legitimate, and conflicting constituencies capable of bearing upon architecture as a discipline, I am persistently curious about architectural epistemology: how knowledge about architecture is structured, organized, and disseminated. Who controls architectural knowledge? Who determines its various forms of legitimacy? How can it be fundamentally open while remaining specific to disciplinary matter?

Questions about epistemology for me are grounded in the assumption that a tactical identity exists between architectural analysis and architectural design. Despite their strategic aims being different, the tactics of architectural analysis and design are identical, consisting of the persistent, iterative production of mediating artifacts such as drawings, text, photographs, and models. My research is thus aimed at developing media-based strategies and tools suited for both analytic and design-generative purposes.