Brian Holland

Professor photographed at her desk

Brian Holland , assistant professor, architecture, Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design. Holland coordinates the architecture department's third-year core housing design studio, for which he was awarded an AIA/ACSA Housing Design Education Award in 2022. In addition to design, he also teaches courses on urban theory, social and environmental advocacy in the design disciplines, and research methods for architects, landscape architects, and interior designers. Holland has coordinated the Fay Jones School's public lecture series since 2018 and has served with University Housing as faculty-in-residence since 2019. With his research and creative practice, Holland explores alternative frameworks for conceptualizing the architect's agency in society, while also seeking to expand the discipline's repertoire of theories, tactics, and strategies for working on the world in a relevant and impactful way.

For four of the past five years, Holland has co-taught the Honors Methods of Design Inquiry course in the Fay Jones School. In that course, he works with interior design and landscape architecture faculty to help shepherd students through the process of developing a prospectus for their honors capstone inquiries. As an extension of this work, he has served as a committee member on nearly a dozen capstone projects, including investigations of the social dynamics of cohousing communities (Kayla Ho, 2022 winner of the ARCC King Student Medal for Excellence in Architectural + Environmental Design Research); neighborhood identity in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles (Isaí Castañeda, 2022 runner-up for the ARCC King Medal); inclusivity in design practice (Gabe De Souza Silva); and community-engaged design in rural Arkansas (Gracie Musgrove). One of Holland's advisees—landscape architecture student Max Frank—received national recognition for a peer-reviewed conference paper he co-wrote with Holland based on Frank's capstone, "Post-Public: Contextualizing the Privatization of Public Space." Holland has also worked with several honors students on his own ongoing research into "piggybacking practices"—urban-design responses to inequality and resource scarcity in the built environment—efforts that have resulted in a symposium and an exhibition of drawings currently on view at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale.