Matt 4-upI teach courses that introduce students to passive environmental design, building systems, and design studio work. I’m a licensed architect and have been working for over a decade on projects that involve both solar powered mobile dwellings as well as alternatives to low-income housing. A re-occurring theme in my work involves exploiting design constraints to reveal new opportunities.

I received a B.F.A. in Historic Preservation from the Savannah College of Art and Design and have a keen interest in historic material culture and industrial design. I am a graduate of the Masters of Architecture Program from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and am a former Assistant Professor in the College of Architecture and Urban Studies there.

My projects with students have included solar powered dwellings for the U.S. Department of Energy’s Solar Decathlon as well as portable research stations, garden follies, and movie theatres.

As well as teaching, designing, and building, I’m an aspiring farmer and beekeeper. A typical spring day might include helping birth a calf in the morning, giving a presentation about computer rendering in the afternoon, and participating in a campus master planning session in the evening. For me, being an architect means being invested in the landscape and keeping my hands on the soil.

Philosophy

“ In all societies there are off-casts. This impure part serves as our precursors or pioneers.”

J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur

When I read Letters from an American Farmer by J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur I learn, in part, what our nation might have been like to the new immigrant in the 1700’s; how these immigrants ventured into a very radical and very new American world. It’s an inspiring thing for me to think of these pioneers and it influences my work as an architect. I believe that architecture is a discipline only sustained by pioneering spirits. As Goethe said “There is no Past that we can bring back by the longing for it, there is only an eternally new Now, that builds and creates itself out of elements of the past as the past withdraws”.

mlutz@norwich.edu