Hillier College Welcomes New Director to the School of Architecture
Kelly Hutzell, an urban designer and licensed architect, brings fifteen years of teaching and academic program development experience to her role as director of the School of Architecture at NJIT. Her academic career has been bolstered by more than a decade of practice, including at Machado and Silvetti Associates and OverUnder in Boston focused on public buildings and spaces. Having worked at Carnegie Mellon (formerly Carnegie Tech) and Wentworth Institute of Technology, she is aligned with the lineage of all three of these polytechnic institutions. “Carnegie Mellon, Wentworth and NJIT were all started by industrialists who aimed to change the way that students approached both education and their careers,” said Hutzell.
In her role at Hillier College, the new director is keen to be a part of further strengthening the school's reputation as a place of design excellence. “I look forward to advocating for NJIT’s continued focus on digital design/computation, urbanism and sustainability. Providing an education that addresses complex contemporary issues through hands-on applied research, should be both conceptually rigorous and rooted in technical competence. It is an approach that has students ready to hit the ground running when they graduate.”
"We interviewed several outstanding candidates and found that Kelly is a great match, said Gernot Riether, who headed the search committee. “She is a highly experienced educator and administrator who also has significant professional experience."
When it comes to the future of architecture education Hutzell identified three key areas that an architecture education must address in the coming years: design in the context of climate change, engaging the community as partners in design, and diversity in the practice of architecture. “As an architect and urban designer, I feel that our collective work has never been more significant. Climate change and environmental justice are finally being recognized as pressing issues,” said Hutzell.
Being able to engage with the community as partners is critical to addressing the challenges of climate resiliency and livability faced by inhabitants of dense urban areas like Newark. As Hutzell puts it, “The academy has an opportunity—and a responsibility—to interact with the world around it. Architecture has always been an applied education, so in a sense, our project- and service-based learning approach to education can lead the way, with respect to both local and global engagement.”
Hutzell has some significant connections to one of the founding architects at the New Jersey School of Architecture, Troy West, who worked extensively in Pittsburgh and was an early exemplar of the architect as advocate. His work at CMU was an early precursor to the Urban Laboratory, a series of studios focused on underserved Pittsburgh neighborhoods that Hutzell taught and coordinated while at Carnegie Mellon. “I’m excited by the transformation taking shape in Newark in recent years, and NJIT’s role in it, most notably with the Newark Design Collaborative.”
For Hutzell, engagement can also occur at the global scale. Her teaching and research at Carnegie Mellon’s branch campus in Doha, where she taught every spring semester for eight years, was a transformative experience. Among other aspects, it confirmed a desire to re-focus architectural education to include the non-western world. As director of graduate programs at Wentworth, she oversaw a Global Research Studio program that had students engage with communities in places as diverse as Bali, Benin, and Shanghai.
On diversity, the new director notes that our institutions of higher learning ought to better reflect the diversity of the country and the world, with greater representation and parity in terms of gender, race, and ethnicity. “Architecture has been particularly slow in dealing with this issue, though NJIT seems to have a better track record than most. I’m looking forward to engaging the Hillier College community to discuss ways to further increase our diversity in the coming years. Focusing on diversity, inclusivity and especially upward mobility ties back to the original mandate of the polytechnic school.”
Hutzell recognizes that NJIT and Hillier College are strategically focused in all three of these areas. “Architectural design education is invaluable, providing unique training in iterative and innovative creative problem solving. It is important now to rethink how we are training our students to work with others, to take agency, and to claim a seat at the table.”
