Architecture

Dr. Stathis G. Yeros completed his Ph.D. in Architectural History, Theory and Society at the University of California, Berkeley, focusing on how space affects and is affected by struggles for social justice, focusing on queer and transgender cultures and politics. His recent article, “AIDS and the City: Bathhouses, Emplaced Empathy, and the Desexualization of San Francisco” (Urban History) examines how the iconographies of domesticity and death during the AIDS devastation changed contemporary urban homosexual politics. Dr. Yeros has published on queer and trans-of color spatial activism and on the subject of queer ecologies (with Chandra Laborde, UC Berkeley). He is currently working on his book manuscript, Queering Urbanism: Architecture, Embodiment, and Queer Citizenship. The book analyzes intersectional politics and cultural representations of gender, race, bodily ability and sexuality in queer and trans spaces. It uses the lens of queer insurgent citizenship to rework the meaning of diversity and inclusion in the built environment as a set of rights rather than accommodations. Yeros is also co-organizer of the ongoing Queer Ecological Imaginations working group, a collaborative platform seeking to address pernicious environmental injustices at a time of ecological collapse, which is supported by the Townsend Center for the Humanities, and Cal’s Center for Race and Gender. Prior to his Ph.D. Yeros earned a master’s of architecture from Berkeley, where he was the recipient of a yearlong Branner Traveling Fellowship. He also earned a master’s in Art History and Theater from the University of Glasgow, and practiced architecture in San Francisco.

David Rifkind joined the UF faculty July 1, 2021, as Director of the School of Architecture after 14 years at Florida International University. Trained as an architect and as an architectural historian, Rifkind studies urbanism and architecture in Ethiopia from the late nineteenth century to the present. His current book project, Modern Ethiopia: Architecture, Urbanism, and the Building of a Nation, incorporates field research in Ethiopia, Eritrea, and Djibouti with archival research in Ethiopia, Europe and the United States. His work in Ethiopia has been supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation and a residency at the American Academy in Rome as the inaugural Wolfsonian-FIU Affiliated Fellow.

Rifkind’s doctoral dissertation, Quadrante and the Politicization of Architectural Discourse in Fascist Italy, examined the complex interrelationships of modern architecture and state politics in Fascist Italy. The dissertation won the 2011 James Ackerman Prize for Architectural History from the Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio in Vicenza, and was subsequently published as The Battle for Modernism in 2012 by the CISA Palladio and Marsilio Editori.

He has also won best article awards for essays published in the two flagship journals in architectural education and history, the Journal of Architectural Education (“Misprision of Precedent: Design as Creative Misreading”) and the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians (“Gondar. Architecture and Urbanism for Italy’s Fascist Empire”). He curated the 2012 exhibition, Metropole/Colony: Africa and Italy, in the Wolfsonian-FIU Teaching Gallery at the Frost Art Museum, and in 2016 developed an exhibition with Professor Dawit Benti (EiABC), Contemporary Architecture in Ethiopia, which opened in Addis Ababa, Miami, and in the gallery of the architecture building at UF. In 2014, Ashgate published A Critical History of Contemporary Architecture, which he co-edited with Elie G. Haddad.

A practicing designer, Rifkind has worked to make environmental stewardship and community development the central focus of architectural practice in South Florida. In 2012 he completed a house in South Miami which served as a model of sustainable construction and environmental stewardship. He is currently working on two net-zero energy projects.

Michael Montoya is a lecturer at the University of Florida School of Architecture where he primarily teaches design as well as lecture courses. He also taught as a Visiting Assistant Professor at UF in 2000 and returned in 2015 – 2018 as an Adjunct Assistant Professor, teaching in the Undergraduate and graduate programs. During his tenure since beginning as a lecturer in August 2019 he has taught design in all four levels of the undergraduate program as well as Architecture History 1 and Materials and Methods 2.

He has initiated the beginnings of research in the areas of pedagogy, suburban popular culture, picturesque and the highway. His professional work spans a career of over 30 years in the profession working for various firms in Florida. Some projects he served as lead designer for are the Winston YMCA in Jacksonville, Florida, The Industry West Showroom in Jacksonville, Florida and The Florida Blue Stores throughout the state. Michael Montoya received his Bachelor of Design from The University of Florida and his Master of architecture from The University of Florida awarded with the Alpha Rho Chi Medal.

Steven Grant, AIA is the Program Director of the Master of Science in Architectural Studies Concentration in Themed Environments Integration, and a Professor of Practice, at the University of Florida’s, CityLab-Orlando. He received a Bachelor of Science in Environmental Design degree, and a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Ball State University, and a Master of Liberal Studies degree from Rollins College.

Professor Grant has been a registered architect for 36 years, practicing in Chicago and New York before moving to Los Angeles in 1991 to be an Architect and Design Manager at Walt Disney Imagineering, where he spent 28 years design managing theme park projects at Disneyland and Walt Disney World.

Professor Grant has merged his extensive knowledge and experience obtained from working with teams in the design and construction of over one-hundred themed environments at Walt Disney World, with his liberal arts studies, to direct the Themed Environments Integration MSAS graduate program at UF’s Orlando CityLab.