Teaching Areas

  • Architectural and Urban Theory and Criticism
  • Architectural Design
  • Health Infrastructure

CONNECT
Office: 2368

jknoblau@umich.edu
Curriculum Vitae

/ Associate Professor,

Joy Knoblauch

Associate Professor of Architecture

Joy Knoblauch is an Associate Professor of Architecture teaching history and theory of architecture as an exploration of architecture’s engagement with politics and science. She is a member of the Design Health faculty research group at Taubman College. She is on the steering committee of the University of Michigan’s Science, Technology & Society Program and the steering committee for the Graduate Certificate in Healthy Cities. Her first book on The Architecture of Good Behavior: Psychology and Modern Institutional Design in Postwar America connects psyche and form to examine a growing tendency to govern behavior through the environment. Her current research is a history of ergonomics that expands this critique of functional theories of psyche to include military and capitalist sites of engagement including open office plans and digital interfaces. She is a Co-Chair of the Society of Architecture Historians Affiliate Group on Climate Change promoting a discussion of architecture’s role in the current politics of comfort.

Knoblauch earned a Fulbright Award as The Visiting Research Chair in Philosophy and Public Health from Fulbright Canada and The Institute for Health and Social Policy at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec in 2015. Her research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Centre Canadien d’Architecture, and the Fellowship of Woodrow Wilson Scholars. She earned her Ph.D. in the History and Theory of Architecture at the Princeton University School of Architecture. She holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Cornell University, a Master of Environmental Design from the Yale University School of Architecture and has worked in architecture offices in Ithaca, New York and San Francisco, California. Previously, she taught History and Theory of Urban Design as Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.

Her work has been published in Architecture Theory Review, Manifest, covering American Architecture and Urbanism, Pidgin, and Aggregate.

The upcoming issue of the Journal of Architectural Education (JAE), will address the theme of Health shaped by theme editors Knoblauch and Sara Stevens.