Ken Yocom is Department Chair and Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture. He also has an adjunct appointment in the Department of Urban Design and Planning, serves on the steering committee of the PhD in the Built Environments Program, and is core faculty for the Interdisciplinary PhD Program in Urban Design and Planning within the College of Built Environments. He primarily teaches seminar and studio courses in theory, ecology, and urban design.
Trained as an ecologist and landscape architect with professional experience in the environmental consulting and construction industries, he is a graduate of our MLA program (2002). Ken also earned his PhD from the Program in the Built Environments (2007), where he researched nature and society relations through the contemporary context of urban ecological restoration practices.
Ken’s current research, teaching, and practice explore the convergence of urban infrastructure and ecological systems through adaptive design approaches that serve to demystify emerging strategies and technologies for sustainable and resilient development. More specifically, he investigates how water –in all its forms- shapes the past to future functions and patterns of our built environments. He has written extensively on the themes developed from his work including two books, Ecological Design (with Nancy Rottle, Bloomsbury, 2012) and NOW Urbanism: The Future City is Here (with Jeff Hou, Ben Spencer, and Thaisa Way (editors), Routledge, 2014). He has also written for professional practice and scholarly publications on issues of global biodiversity, urban environmental governance, ecological design, and contemporary nature and society relations in the urban context.
In his teaching, Ken emphasizes the development of a holistic and integrated approach that embraces the complexity of our built environments, yet discreetly explores the intersections and overlaps that frame our understanding and appreciation of particular places. He has a strong belief that collaboratively, the allied design professions can act as catalysts in recognizing, utilizing, and transforming the inherent potential of our built environments into places that are socially equitable, environmentally just, and economically sustainable.
Professor Nancy Rottle brings over two decades of landscape architecture professional experience to her role at the UW, where she has been teaching since 2001. Her work centers upon design as a means to create places that are ecologically healthy, culturally meaningful, and educationally and experientially resonant. Her recent scholarship, including the co-authored book Ecological Design, has focused on the application of theory and new practices to regenerate the health of urban and urbanizing environments.
Professor Rottle currently directs the UW’s Green Futures Research and Design Lab, which addresses questions and projects related to urban green infrastructure, topics on which Nancy publishes and lectures (www.greenfutures.washington.edu). Collaborative projects and publications include the use of waterfronts to treat and re-use stormwater; urban green infrastructure for city streets and college campuses; public space planning and design; pedestrian and active transport environments; green roofs and walls; metrics to evaluate sustainable design projects; public engagement to envision positive futures; and the role of green infrastructure in mitigating and adapting to climate change. She co-edited the 2007 special journal edition of Places on Climate Change and Place, and researched this topic in New Zealand supported by a Senior Scholar Fulbright Fellowship.
Professor Rottle teaches design studio, theory and technical courses and advises on theses that examine the potential of design to positively affect our urban ecological futures, taking a special focus on public space design, water in the landscape and design for environmental literacy. Professor Rottle regularly teaches courses that integrate water into the planning and design process, from watershed to site scales, integrating knowledge of urban water-based projects from around the world. With support from the ScanlDesign Foundation, she leads urban design study tours to Denmark and Sweden, and collaborates with Gehl Architects of Copenhagen to teach interdisciplinary studios at the UW that merge considerations for ecological, economic, social and physical health. As the UW’s ScanlDesign Endowed Chair in Built Environments she also facilitates internships and exchanges between the UW and Denmark.
A registered landscape architect, Nancy’s professional and academic planning and design projects have won local and national awards, including the acclaimed Cedar River Watershed Education Center, and Open Space Seattle 2100, a multidisciplinary planning process to develop a 100-year vision for Seattle’s green infrastructure. Her studios, thesis students and work of the Green Futures Lab have also won prestigious college, local, national and international awards. Passionate about sharing ecological design approaches and models, Nancy has lectured in the US, New Zealand, China, Canada, Russia and Europe.
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.
Bob Freitag is a Senior Instructor and Director of the Institute for Hazards Mitigation Planning and Research (IHMP). The University of Washington Institute for Hazards Mitigation is an interdisciplinary academic Institute housed in the Department of Urban Design and Planning within the College of Built Environments at the University of Washington. He is the past Executive Director of the Cascadia Region Earthquake Workgroup and past member of the Association of State Floodplain Managers’ Board of Directors. Bob is also a Certified Floodplain Manager. He has published many articles and written courses for FEMA and others concerning hazards mitigation and floodplain management, and was lead author of “Floodplain Management: a new approach for a new era” (Island Press 2009). Before coming to the University, he had a 25-year career with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) serving as Federal Coordinating Officer (FCO); Public Assistance, Mitigation and Education Officer. Prior to FEMA he was employed by several private architectural and engineering consultant firms in Hawaii and Australia, and taught science as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Philippines. Freitag received his Master of Urban Planning degree from the University of Washington.