Brook Muller

Born in Canada, Brook grew up in Burlington, VT (and considers Northern New England home). He cherishes walking, reading, reading while walking, writing, drawing landscapes, and imagining and designing ecologically responsive places.

Before COA

Brook worked at Behnisch & Partner Architects of Stuttgart, Germany from 1993 to 1996, where he served as co-project leader for the design of the National Institute for Forestry and Nature Research (IBN) in Wageningen, the Netherlands, a European Union pilot project for environmentally friendly building. With colleagues from Germany, he helped establish Blackbird Architects, an award winning, Santa-Barbara based firm (still going strong). Having always dreamed of a future in teaching, Brook entered the academy as professor of architecture at California Polytechnic State University San Luis Obispo (2000-2004) before moving on to the University of Oregon (2004-2019). At Oregon, he also served as core faculty member of the Environmental Studies program and director of the graduate certificate in Ecological Design. Prior to coming to CoA, Brook served as Dean of the College of Arts + Architecture at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (2019-2023).

Course Areas

Architecture, Ecological Design, Water, Urban Studies, Environmental Studies

• Master of Architecture, University of Oregon
• Bachelor of Arts in Environmental Studies, Brown University

Brook’s research and practice focus on urban ecological design strategies that foreground water as connective medium between landscapes and buildings. He has worked on systems-based, sustainability-focused projects in the US, Tanzania, Egypt and the Madeira Islands. His current book project, Regrowth Architecture: Living Systems for Urban Placemaking, speaks to the tremendous potencies of ecological design as it transitions from household or community-scale interventions in places of affluence and relatively high environmental quality to significantly altered, densely populated settings of poverty, pollution, and possibility.

Brook is part of the core team of Tahayyuz, a Cairo-based, cross-disciplinary para-academic platform focused on community development and conservation of heritage assets in medieval Islamic Cairo’s al-Khalifa neighborhood (part of a UNESCO world heritage site). Al-Khalifa and neighboring communities confront food insecurity, failing infrastructure, climate change impacts, and other challenges. The platform engages these communities through the power of the arts, urban and ecological design, conservation, and the social sciences.

Brook serves on the board of Salmon-Safe, a Portland, Oregon based nonprofit that works to keep urban and agricultural watersheds in the Pacific Northwest clean enough for native salmon to spawn and thrive. He helped develop Salmon-Safe’s Urban Development certification standards.

Brook is author of two books: Blue Architecture: Water, Design, and Environmental Futures (University of Texas Press, 2022), American Association of Publishers PROSE award finalist for architecture and urban planning, and Ecology and the Architectural Imagination (Routledge, 2014)

Additional and select writings include:

“al-Khalifa Environment and Heritage Park: Redesigning Flows, Refurnishing Community Infrastructures,”Society of Architectural Historians 76^th Annual International Conference Proceedings, Montreal, Quebec, 2023

“New Horizons for Sustainable Architecture: Hydro-Logical Design for the Ecologically Responsive City,” Nature + Culture (Hemholz Centre for Environmental Research), Volume 13, No. 2, 2018

“Blue Architecture (The City and the Wild in Concentrate),” Environmental Philosophy Special Issue in Memory of W.S.K. “Scott” Cameron, Volume 15, No. 1, 2018, 59-75

“Thinking in Building/Environment Systems,” Opening plenary presentation for the Architectural Research Centers Consortium Conference “Architecture of Complexity: Design, Systems, Society and Environment,” Salt Lake City, June 2017

“A Machine is a Watershed for Living In (Reconstituting Architectural Horizons),” The Pluralist: Official Journal of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, Volume 2, No. 1, 2016

“Metaphor, Environmental Receptivity and Architectural Design,” in Gary Backhaus and John Murungi, eds., Symbolic Landscapes. New York: Springer Science+Business Media, 2009

Book review of Paul Memmott’s “Gunyah, Goondie + Wurley: The Aboriginal Architecture of Australia,” for Buildings and Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum, Volume 15/2008

“Continuity of Singularities: Architecture, Ecology and the Aesthetics of Restorative Orders,” Environmental Philosophy: Special Double Issue: Environmental Aesthetics and Ecological Restoration, Volume IV, Issues I, II, Fall, Spring 2007

Presentations

Blue Architecture: Living Imaginaries for Urban Placemaking, University of Arizona School of Architecture 2023-24 Lecture Series, November 6, 2023

Invited Keynote Lecturer, Blue Architecture, PG&E Water Conservation Showcase, San Ramon, CA, June 15, 2023

Invited Keynote Lecturer, Hydro-Logical Architecture: Unprecedented Crisis = Unparalleled Design Opportunity, American Institute of Architecture Students (AIAS) National Forum, Seattle, WA, December 29, 2018

Architecture as Ecological Infrastructure: Hydro-Logical Design for the 21^st Century City, Lineage Lecture Series hosted by the American Institute of Architects Southern Arizona Chapter and the University of Arizona College of Architecture, Planning, and Landscape Architecture, Tucson, AZ, March 19, 2018

Watershed Architectures and Opportunistic Ecologies, University of Texas School of Architecture Fall Lecture Series, Austin, TX, November 16, 2016

Reconstituting Architectural Horizons, Invited Coss Dialogues Keynote Speaker, Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy (SAAP) Annual Meeting, Grand Valley State University, Grand Rapids, MI, March 6, 2015

A Machine is a Watershed for Living In, Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste (Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design) “Jour-Fixe” Lecture Series, Stuttgart, Germany, January 20, 2015