SMART people

What inspires me about SMART:

SMART provides a meaningful and effective platform for strategic interdisciplinary thinking and action regarding the interlaced issues surrounding mobility and urbanization against the backdrop of shifting demographic and resource based futures.

Biography:

Thün is an Associate Professor at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Michigan, and a partner in the Toronto-based architecture firm RVTR.

Thün’s academic research focuses on the application of systems-based ecological thinking to the design of the built environment across a range of scales: from the urban design integration of regional mobility and energy networks, to mass-customized housing prototypes. Of particular interest, is the visualization of complex interdependent data sets to render legible the complex conditions of urbanization in flux. He is currently working on a 3 year project entitled The Post-Carbon Highway that examines the potential futures for emergent forms of urbanism propagated and linked by high speed rail within the available field of renewable energy resources of the Great Lakes Megaregion.

His action-based research has received funding from a variety of sources including the US Department of Energy (DOE) / National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Canada Council for the Arts, National Research Council of Canada (NRC), Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the Ontario Power Authority (OPA), and has been disseminated widely.

RVTR’s S.W.A.M.P house received a Canadian Architect Award of Excellence in 2005. Thun was a recipient of a 2008 Young Architect Award from the Architectural League of New York. RVTR was the only North American entrant selected to participate in the 2008 Living Steel 3rd Annual Competition in Sustainable Housing held in Helsinki, where their Latitude Housing System received a special honorable mention. RVTR was awarded the 2009 Canadian Professional Prix de Rome in Architecture to advance their research and dissemination program of high performance building design to an international audience. Thün was Primary Investigator and Faculty Lead for North House, a prefabricated energy-positive housing prototype incorporating embedded sensors and custom controls which was awarded a 2010 Architecture Magazine R&D Award.

previous profile | next profile