Tracing / Traces: Architecture and the Archive 2021

Maya Bird-Murphy is a designer, educator, and the founder and Executive Director of Chicago Mobile Makers, an award-winning nonprofit organization bringing design-focused skill-building workshops to underrepresented communities.

Gregory Delaney is a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture at the University at Buffalo, where he teaches courses in architecture history, building and urban analysis, and studios in architecture and urban design. As someone who straddles many domains, his work operates in the liminal, intra-disciplinary spaces between design and history/theory/criticism; architecture and urban design; and speculative provocation and historic preservation. He is guided—both in thought and teaching—by an interest in lateral-thinking, advancing a middle space to work across disciplinary domains and better engage and promote public discourse around architecture and design. As core research and teaching methodology, he is dedicated to advancing student knowledge and engagement through site visits, community engagement, travel, and other forms of experiential learning. He is a graduate of The Ohio State University's Knowlton School, where he received both his bachelor's and master's degrees and taught courses in architecture and landscape architecture before moving to Buffalo in 2011.

Antonio Petrov is currently Associate Professor at the University of Texas San Antonio and founder of the Urban Future Lab, a think tank and teaching lab housed within UTSA’s College of Engineering and Integrated Design. The focus of the Urban Future Lab is to think outside the box and come up with creative solutions for immanent urban issues like water, housing, infrastructure, and transportation. His research emphasizes on capturing the emergent nature of urban futures while recognizing cities as collective cultural artifacts. Within these frameworks he explores the rapidly changing dynamics of urban futures and how they relate to local currencies, citizen agency, and public interest design.

Fred Scharmen teaches architecture and urban design at Morgan State University’s School of Architecture and Planning. He is the co-founder of the Working Group on Adaptive Systems, an art and design consultancy based in Baltimore, Maryland. His work as a designer and researcher is about how we imagine new spaces for future worlds, and about who is invited into them. He received his master’s degree in architecture from Yale University. His writing has been published in the Journal of Architectural Education, Atlantic CityLab, Slate, Log, CLOG, Volume, and Domus. His architectural criticism has appeared in the Architect’s Newspaper, and in the local alt-weekly Baltimore City Paper. He is the author of Space Settlements (2019) and Space Forces: A Critical History of Life in Outer Space (2021)

Rula Zuhour is a Palestinian American architectural designer based in Chicago. She holds a M.Arch from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a B.Eng in Architecture from Birzeit University in Palestine. As a graduate student, she was awarded the Pritzker Graduate Fellowship and the first prize of the national Gensler Diversity Scholarship. Her graduate thesis, Present Futures, won the Chicago-based Schiff Foundation Fellowship for Architecture, was awarded the AIA Henry Adams Medal, published in MAS Context, and featured in The Funambulist. Rula’s practice lies at the intersection of architecture, landscape, and urbanism. Her work leverages investigative and narrative tools to engage wider political and socio-economic contexts in the built environment. From the scale of the building to the territory, she is interested in using design as a tool to study the spatial manifestation of existing power structures.