Geoffrey Thün
Professor of Architecture, Associate Vice President for Research: Social Sciences, Humanities and the Arts, U-M Office of Research
Geoffrey Thün is professor of architecture at Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, and a founding partner in the research-based practice RVTR. His research and creative practice ranges in scale from the regional territory and the city to high-performance buildings, to full-scale prototype-based work exploring responsive and kinetic envelopes that mediate energy, atmosphere, and social space. These operational scales are tied together through a complex systems approach; one that articulates the multiplicity of actors, forces, and contexts surrounding a given situation and leverages these multivalent and sometimes contradictory agents toward integrated and synthetic design work. His academic research has attracted external funding from the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Transportation, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the National Research Council of Canada, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Ontario Power Authority, Guardian Industries, and Ford Motor Company.
Projects
Publications
BOOK CHAPTERS
Velikov, K., & Thun, G. (2022). Infrastructural Hybrids. In M. el Khafif & S. McDowell (eds.), Next Cities Series: Next New York. [118-139]. New York: ORO Publishers.
Velikov, K., & Thun, G. (2022). CH 3.5 Environment-Aware Behavioral Envelopes: Design Ecologies, Adaptive Geometries, and Technologies for Interaction. In Mitra Kanaani (ed.), Routledge Companion to Ecological Design Thinking in Architecture & Urbanism. (263-275) London: Routledge
Velikov, K., & Thun, G. (2022). Redistributing Sense-able Atmospheres. In J.S. Nesbitt (ed.), Nature of Enclosure (144-161). Barcelona and New York: Actar.
Thün, G., Sanyal, T., Velikov, K. (2021) Mapping the Food Energy Water Nexus Across Cascading Scales: Contexts for Detroit from Region to City. In R. Roggema (ed.), TransFEWmation: Towards design-led food- energy-water systems for future urbanization. [171-207]. London: Springer.
PEER REVIEWED ACADEMIC JOURNAL ARTICLES
ten Caat, P. N., Tenpierik, M. J., Sanyal, T., Tilie, N., van den Dobbelsteen, A. A. J. F., Thün, G., Cullen, S., Nakayama, S., Karanisa, T., & Monti, S. (2022). Towards fossil free cities–Emission assessment of food and resources consumption with the FEWprint carbon accounting platform. Cleaner Environmental Systems, 4. (100074), 1-26
Velikov, K., & Thün, G. (2020). Fluid Territories: Cultivating common practices through the design of water redistribution. Journal of Architectural Education (JAE), Special Issue: Water, 74 (1), 92-100.
Courses
ARCH 662 – Thesis Studio