Job Description:

Assistant Professor of Architecture, Fall 2025



Location:

University of Tennessee Knoxville

Open Date:

Aug 15, 2024

Description:

The School of Architecture at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK) invites applications and nominations for a tenure-track faculty member at the Assistant Professor rank, to begin August 1, 2025. This position is for a full-time 9-month appointment. Appointments at Associate Professor rank will be considered. 

We are seeking an energetic, collaborative candidate with an emergent or established research agenda and a commitment to the development of innovative ways of teaching forward-thinking architectural design with respect to energy. We define "energy" in relationship to building systems, performance and strategies that materials, culture, policy, territory and economies that constitute our world. The successful candidate will have the opportunity to participate in developing new research trajectories and curricular advancement through teaching core and elective design studios, seminars, and workshops in undergraduate and graduate settings. An interest and ability in teaching design studio is critical. Areas of interest that are desired and valued in the school as it continues to evolve include energy economies, climate and environmental design and technology, and environmental justice. Funding is available to kick-start research in the candidate's area of expertise or exploration.

 

Areas of Expertise

Architecture is entangled with enormous systems of energy production and consumption, along with their associated environmental ramifications, and it is incumbent upon the discipline to more carefully craft this relationship, especially in the context of the Anthropocene, anthropogenic climate change, and other accompanying planetary crises and metabolic rifts of the 21st Century. We seek inventive, energy-conscious, eco-socially attuned leaders who can help navigate the complex intersection of architecture, technology, climate, and energy in local and global contexts. Subtopics of concern include, but are not limited to:

• Energy and materials: performance characteristics, material assemblies, building systems, embodied and operating energies, environmental controls, sensing and measurement, simulation, and testing, etc. 


• Energy and culture: energy policy, human energy consumption patterns, socializing concepts of comfort, overlaps between environmental and social justice, questions of human and non-human labor, etc. 


• Energy and territory: energy economies, system boundaries, energy landscapes, resource extraction and infrastructure, regional material ecologies, regional and local effects of climate change, 21st Century environmentalism, etc.

Candidates should describe a proposed research agenda comprised of creative work, scholarly publication, engaged research, technical analysis, and/or other forms of intellectual investigation.

Candidates should also describe specific contributions to required undergraduate and graduate courses in design studio, building technology, or elective seminars. Use of simulation, computation, fabrication, prototyping, and visualization to design, analyze, speculate, and pursue the knowledge, histories, literacies, and agility needed to respond to complex global and local conditions are encouraged. Processes, tools, and methods that position architecture as citizenship, evolve design traditions and curricula, and engage in design/build, advocacy, and participatory pedagogies are valued. 

The Knoxville campus of the University of Tennessee is seeking candidates who have the ability to contribute in meaningful ways to the diversity and intercultural goals of the University.

About the School of Architecture

The College of Architecture and Design promotes imagination, curiosity, and empathy as we advocate for the power of design and the importance of the built world.

The School of Architecture is committed to excellence in design education, creative activity, research, and outreach missions. Our school benefits from its location in the College of Architecture and Design which offers degrees in Architecture, Interior Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Graphic Design, and in the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, a Research-1, land-grant university that houses 11 colleges and 900 programs of study. Degrees in the School of Architecture include NAAB accredited B.Arch and M.Arch and a dual degree with the School of Landscape Architecture.

Around thirty full-time faculty members with a breadth of experiences and expertise enjoy educating and working with over 400 architecture students. Generous state scholarship programs make education accessible to students from a broad range of backgrounds and income levels. Over 30% of our students are from out-of-state or are international. 

The school is committed to justice, equity, and inclusion and to addressing the family needs of faculty members including dual-career couples, sole-provider or single-parent families, and faculty with family caretaking responsibilities.

Faculty deliver curriculum in three main facilities: the 160,000-square-foot Art Architecture Building in the center of UT Knoxville's campus, the 20,000-square-foot Fab Lab, an advanced maker space in downtown Knoxville, and a new downtown satellite location that will house design studios, faculty, and staff in the urban context.

The "A A" is an award-winning building which features open studios, a four-story atrium, the Ewing Gallery, a woodshop, review spaces, and lecture halls. Our Fab Lab, with over one-million dollars of equipment, including advanced machinery for digital and robotic fabrication, allows our faculty and students to integrate state-of-the-art fabrication technology into design education and research.

 

About the Area

East Tennessee presents unmatched opportunity for collaboration and engagement in design scholarship centered upon energy. The region embodies a rich and diverse history, vividly connecting concerns of energy to innovation and conflict in its landscapes and institutions. Appalachia has been transformed by the regionally cooperative energy production of the Tennessee Valley Authority as a regime of rural electrification and force of modernization. As a result, the region has become home to major concentrations of industrial production serving the construction industry including timber, hemp, composites, aluminum, mineral mining, and ceramics.  

These processes bear significantly upon the future of natural and built environments offering urgent confrontations of environmental impact as well as opportunities for reckoning with a conflicted history and a future of mounting pressures of extraction and development. The region has responded to these challenges with a history of conservation initiatives (including the Great Smoky Mountain National Park) and contemporary non-profit institutions pursuing synergies between environmental and social justice - an urgent context for engaged scholarship in conflicts between nature and culture through the energy of labor and activism. 

The region is also hub for research pertaining to energy production and utilization. The Oak Ridge National Lab is home to diverse pursuits of clean energy and materials science including building performance (Building Technology Research and Integration Center) and has a long-standing history of collaboration with the college. Presence of the ORNL has sponsored the region as an emergent hub for companies innovating in cutting-edge materials and manufacturing. 

Known as 'The Maker City,' Knoxville is the third largest city in Tennessee with a metropolitan statistical area population of over 900,000 people. Downtown Knoxville supports an urban culture with theater, film, art, music, and well-recognized events and festivals like Big Ears, a vibrant live music scene across all genres, excellent restaurants, minority-heritage celebration events, farmers' markets, and community gardens. Unique and walkable residential and business districts include Knoxville's historic Market Square and Old City, North and South Waterfronts, and the Urban Wilderness recreational area. Knoxville and the surrounding region also benefit from the energy and advocacy of civic, business, maker, cultural, religious, neighborhood, minority communities, and organizations invested in local quality of life. 

Within a fifteen-minute commute from campus, Knoxville offers a diverse range of housing from downtown lofts to homes in historic tree-lined neighborhoods. The city and county offer strong public and private K-12 educational options including public international baccalaureate, art and science magnet programs, as well as private, religious, and Montessori schools.

Qualifications:

Required Qualifications

• Candidates must hold at least one of the following: a professional graduate degree in architecture; an undergraduate degree in architecture and a graduate or doctoral degree in a related field; or an international equivalent of any of these. 

Desired Qualifications (address those applicable in application)

On Teaching

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  • Teaching experience in the university setting
  
  
  • Experience or capacity for integrating emerging technologies with studio, seminar and/or lecture teaching
  
  
  • Experience with or ability to implement experimental teaching in terms of modality, methodology, and/or format
  
  
  • Experience with or aptitude for teaching collaborative and/or interdisciplinary courses
  
  
  
  

On Research, Scholarship, Creative Activity, and Engaged Scholarship Research

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  • A portfolio of architectural design that strives for impact on culture, society, communities, region(s), and the planet
  
  
  • A creative practice that participates in the discipline of architecture through critique, experimentation or other means
  
  
  • Scholarship, creative activities, and/or engagement that exhibits an emergent or established research agenda with originality and significance
  
  
  • Experience with or promise of disseminating creative accomplishments via scholarship and/or awards
  
  
  • Experience or capacity for successful grant-writing
  
  
  • Experience with or potential contribution to collaborative and/or interdisciplinary research
  
  
  • Architectural license and/or experience that exhibits exceptional professional practice integrating beauty, equity, resilience, and environmental performance
  
  
  
  

On Access and Engagement 

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  • A record of or proposals for centering student success, student empowerment, and the development of inclusive cultures within studio and classroom settings 
  
  
  • Experience with facilitating or teaching others about identifying and addressing hurdles to access endemic to the built environment and/or the profession of architecture
  
  
  • A creative practice or scholarship that engages and makes accessible content, cultures, and bodies of knowledge from historically underrepresented communities, geographies, and local cultures  
  
  
  • A record of or aptitude for tackling issues that advance environmental justice and the many intersecting issues in architecture. 
  
  
  
  

 

Application Instructions:

To apply, submit the following materials on Interfolio. Please note that all files must be uploaded completely into the system to be properly reviewed. Links to live documents shared on a cloud server are not acceptable. Please email Hansjoerg Goeritz (goeritz@utk.edu), chair of the architecture faculty search committee for design and energy, with any questions, using the subject line Assistant Professor Design Energy.

Submission Materials

• A Statement of Interest, not exceeding 3 pages, that identifies specific alignments with required and applicable desired qualifications. It should clearly identify an area of expertise above, contextualize the candidate's accomplishments, and articulate a proposed research agenda and related teaching philosophy. 


• Curriculum Vitae


• Portfolio of research, scholarship, creative activity and/or engagement activity not to exceed 10 pages 


• An optional teaching portfolio that includes student work and/or excerpts from syllabi, not to exceed 10 pages


• Contact information for three references; contacted only upon approval from candidate

Initial review of applications will begin on October 15, 2024, targeting campus interviews for late January/early February. Applications will be accepted and will continue to be considered until the position is filled. 

Equal Employment Opportunity Statement:

All qualified applicants will receive equal consideration for employment and admission without regard to race, color, national origin, religion, sex, pregnancy, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, physical or mental disability, genetic information, veteran status, and parental status, or any other characteristic protected by federal or state law. In accordance with the requirements of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, the University of Tennessee affirmatively states that it does not discriminate on the basis of race, sex, or disability in its education programs and activities, and this policy extends to employment by the university. Requests for accommodations of a disability should be directed to the Office of Equal Opportunity and Accessibility, 1840 Melrose Avenue Knoxville, Tennessee 37996-3560 or eoa@utk.edu or (865)974-2498. Inquiries and charges of violation of Title VI (race, color and national origin), Title IX (sex), Section 504 (disability), the ADA (disability), the Age Discrimination in Employment Act (age), sexual orientation, or veteran status should be directed to the Office of Investigation & Resolution 216 Business Incubator Building 2450 EJ. Chapman Drive Knoxville, Tennessee 37996 or (865)974-0717 or investigations@utk.edu.

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