Associate Professor Julie Johnson teaches in the BLA and MLA Programs, focusing on the design, use and participatory design processes of civic landscapes, including children’s outdoor learning environments, urban parks, and neighborhoods. She views childhood experiences as key to fostering a more ecologically literate society and more sustainable future. Her research and teaching explore how design processes can engage children in the shaping and stewarding of innovative and enriching places. Similarly, she is interested in how the design of neighborhoods and urban open space can support community life and ecological processes, where transit and mixed uses enable greater choice and walkability. She is co-author of Greening Cities, Growing Communities: Learning from Urban Community Gardens in Seattle (2009). She has traveled around the world and lived in different parts of the US, but loves calling Seattle (and Gould Hall) home.
Julie is an adjunct associate professor in the Department of Architecture and a faculty member of the College’s Urban Design Certificate Program. She has a Bachelor of Landscape Architecture from Utah State University and a Master of City Planning from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Julie is a registered Landscape Architect in Washington. Her professional experience includes urban and landscape design in firms, a public agency, and a university-based center.
Andy Dannenberg holds joint appointments in the Department of Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences and in the Department of Urban Design and Planning where he teaches courses on healthy community design and on health impact assessment. He has a particular interest in the use of health impact assessments as tools to inform community planners about the health consequences of their decisions. For the past decade, Dannenberg’s research and teaching have focused on examining the health aspects of community design, including land use, transportation, urban planning, and other issues related to the built environment.
Before coming to Seattle, Dannenberg served as Team Leader of the Healthy Community Design Initiative in the National Center for Environmental Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta. He has served as Director of CDC’s Division of Applied Public Health Training, as Preventive Medicine Residency Director and as an injury prevention epidemiologist on the faculty at the Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health in Baltimore, and as a cardiovascular epidemiologist at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland.
Dannenberg completed a residency in family practice at the Medical University of South Carolina and was board certified in Family Practice (1982-1989). He is board certified in Preventive Medicine (1986-present).
Richard E. (Rick) Mohler, AIA, NCARB, is a licensed architect and Professor of Architecture at the University of Washington where he teaches graduate level design studios and professional practice. Professor Mohler will assume the role of Chair of the Department of Architecture beginning in June 2023. He received his B.A. and Master of Architecture degrees from the University of Pennsylvania where he received top awards for design and master’s thesis. Following graduation he worked for firms in Philadelphia including Mitchell Giurgola and Venturi, Rauch and Scott Brown where he was a member of the winning competition team for the extension to the National Gallery in London.
In 1986 he joined the University of Washington architecture faculty and Olson Sundberg Architects (now Olson Kundig). In 1991, he co-founded Adams/Mohler Architects (now Mohler + Ghillino Architects), a firm engaged in residential, commercial adaptive re-use, and commercial interior design projects that has been recognized through numerous design awards and publications. With his own firm, other firms and individuals he has been recognized in urban design and housing competitions in Philadelphia, Seattle and Montreal. His own house and accessory dwelling unit, the Flip/Flop House(s), was recognized with multiple Seattle AIA awards and named one of the top ten innovative houses of 2010 by Builder magazine.
Professor Mohler maintains that the nexus of land use, affordable housing, transportation and the public realm is key to a sustainable future. He has explored urban issues through multiple UW interdisciplinary design studios focused on land use legislation, transit oriented development and the future of urban form in Seattle and surrounding communities. His current research focuses on housing affordability at three scales – the urban parcel, the city and the region. In pursuing this research Rick strives to be a bridge between the city, profession and academy. He is a member of the Seattle Planning Commission and Seattle’s ADU working group, co-chairs the AIA Seattle Public Policy Board and was a 2015 Affiliate Fellow of the UW Runstad Center for Real Estate Studies.
Rick is an enthusiastic and effective design studio instructor whose students have been recognized in regional, national and international design awards programs and competitions eighteen times and a dozen times in the past decade. He is active in professional, civic and community organizations including serving as founding co-chair of the AIA Seattle Future Shack program, which recognizes innovative housing solutions, and has served as a juror, moderator and co-chair of AIA Honor Awards programs throughout the country. He is a UW representative to the City/University Community Advisory Committee, was vice president and land use chair of the Madrona Community Council, a founding member of the housing advocacy group Welcoming Wallingford, a design committee member of the Friends of McDonald School Playground and received a mayoral appointment to the Downtown Project Review Panel for Seattle’s CAP Initiative.
Kimo Griggs’ teaching is centered on the development of individual design strategies informed by a deep knowledge of materials and hands-on experience with processes of making, from hand-work to advanced digitally-enabled fabrication. Core teaching includes Design Studios as well as a required, workshop-based introductory Materials & Making course. Courses in Digital Craft and Materials are also offered, developed with the goal of advancing knowledge about, and incorporating the use of Digital-Design-and-Manufacturing in design practices.
Kimo’s current research is based on understanding how existing and proposed manufacturing technologies – particularly those which are digitally-enabled – can be absorbed into the well-established delivery systems that produce our buildings and infrastructure. These interests include looking at how alternative design practices can operate as well as how contracting and management of construction processes might change as digital technologies mature. Kimo is also keenly interested in specific processes and products with craft-based histories that have altered or widely affected how we build today, and in how craft and material concerns register culturally, particularly in our built environment.