What is your name, current location, and current occupation?
Dalia Munenzon, Houston TX,
Presidential Frontier Assistant Professor of Urban Design in Sustainable Communities and Infrastructure,
The University of Houston, Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design
What was your affiliation with MIT?
SMArchs Urbanism program 2014-2016
What was your thesis title?
Continental islands: Ceuta and Gibraltar: A typological research into transactional and partially autonomous territories
What are you doing today?
This Fall, I started a new position as A Presidential Frontier Assistant Professor of Urban Design in Sustainable Communities and Infrastructure at The University of Houston, Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design. Part of my new role is to develop research on climate adaptation and equitable resilience, and I am starting a new lab with the same focus in the Hines CoAD. My current research explores climate adaptation as a means for transformative actions in the urban realm. This includes studying infrastructure systems, codesigning visions, and analyzing regulations and policies required for implementation. My goal is to further the discourse on design as a multidisciplinary exchange between communities, cultural practices, regulatory complexity, economy, landscape, and the built environment.
Do you think your career path has been unorthodox or nontraditional?
The general trajectory was relatively traditional, but perhaps the focus of the practice was less common when I graduated. After MIT, I started working at an architecture and urbanism firm focused on urban resilience. My position at One Architecture and Urbanism allowed me to work on diverse long-term planning projects with municipalities and community organizations in the Boston area. Much of our work required research and exploration, as many of these urban adaptation projects required new approaches to urban design and systems thinking. I started teaching when a friend at RISD suggested I develop a studio focused on sea level rise. After several years, I realized that my work in practice had a unique space in education and research, and I applied for a full-time faculty position.
How did your time at MIT affect your career path?
It is challenging to pinpoint one specific way my time at MIT impacted me, as it allowed me to build a network of exceptional friends and colleagues, changed my perspective on design, and expanded my understanding of what is relevant to the built environment.
What are you excited about in your career field today?
I’m excited about trying and share my takeaways from MIT with my students and hopefully inspire their career paths as designers. To enhance the capacity of next-gen designers to narrate and create the tools to share thoughtful, contextual, and time-bound stories that construct social and environmental awareness and can help build sustainable and equitable design.
How can fellow alums reach you if they want to speak further?