Brook Muller, professor of ecological design
Photo credit Will Draxler ’26.
WATER, URBAN ECOLOGY, AND SYSTEMS THINKING
By Jeremy Powers ’24
As a designer with a cross-disciplinary approach to architecture, ecological systems thinking, and teaching, Brook Muller is excited to step into College of the Atlantic’s Charles Eliot Chair in Ecological Planning, Policy, and Design. He will be teaching classes on sustainable architecture, urban planning, and a systems approach to design, and will use his ongoing projects to involve students in real, tangible examples of how principles of design and thinking outside the box can and do apply to the real world.
“I like the pedagogical model of COA, because I’ve been working for decades to try to place sticks of dynamite in the walls of the silos between disciplines at the institutions I’ve been in. And at some point, it’s not that rewarding,” Muller said. “You have to be in a place where you’re encouraged to think that way.”
After graduating from Brown with an environmental science degree, Muller turned his attention to the University of Oregon, where he received a master’s in architecture. He worked in Germany for several years, where he served as co-project leader for the design of the National Institute for Forestry and Nature Research in Wageningen, The Netherlands, a European Union pilot project for environmentally friendly buildings. He has since collaborated with designers and changemakers in Egypt, and most recently served as dean of the Charlotte College of Arts + Architecture at the University of North Carolina.
Muller is now collaborating with Megawra Built Environment Collective in Cairo, Egypt, which is a twinship between Megawra, an architectural office specializing in conservation and heritage management, and the Built Environment Collective, an NGO specializing in place-based cultural and urban development. He previously served on the collective’s design team and managed an international field school that led to the recently completed al-Khalifa Heritage and Environment Park, a much-needed green space primarily intended for women and children in the heart of medieval Islamic Cairo.
“The approach involves intercepting water from leaky pipes damaging 13th century shrines that my colleagues are working to restore, treating it, and directing it to vegetation in the park. In other words, the medium causing harm becomes the very resource to make a new system go; such is the logic of systems-based ecological design.”
He is looking forward to incorporating this project, now in its second stage, into his classroom teaching. “I am so excited about engaging COA students in this work, not only in Cairo, but more broadly in applying ecological design principles to urban contexts in the cause of environmental quality and environmental justice,” he said.
While deriving a lot of satisfaction from his professional design work, Muller has long been aware of his desire to teach the next generation of ecological thinkers. “I knew from my time in graduate school that teaching had to be central to my future, teaching that embraces a systems-based approach to design with a strong focus on water,” he said.
Muller’s pedagogical approach, he said, rests on “presuming the intelligence of the people you work with. Setting up a framework which is fairly rigorous. Creating a studio environment, where individuals and teams are given this framework and resources that I provide. It functions to help us all understand different ways of thinking through these challenges that we’re confronting.”
“As students or teams start to take on ownership over these things, they evolve in certain kinds of ways, and as the term progresses, it turns from my framework to our framework to your framework. So, it’s this combination of a rigorous framework that meets a certain open-endedness.”
In his free time, Muller likes to “read and walk at the same time. And I will die that way. But you know, if it’s a good excerpt, it’s a good passage, then that’s a good way to go,” he said lightheartedly.
Muller’s recent book, Blue Architecture: Water, Design, and Environmental Futures (University of Texas Press, 2022) is an essential read for anybody interested in water-focused and ecologically minded architecture and urban design. It was a finalist for the 2023 PROSE Award in Architecture and Urban Design.
