Micheal Desmond
BArch 1979
Architecture
Michael Desmond, professor of architecture at LSU, received a Bachelor of Architecture from Louisiana State University, a Master of Architecture and Urban Design from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and a PhD in History, Theory, and Criticism in Architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research interests focus on the role of architecture in society and include American architecture and urban history, as well as cultural mythology and belief systems as frames for evaluation of architectural forms. His doctoral research explored the community-scale work of Frank Lloyd Wright in the context of Emersonian themes in American history and the modernist interest in subject/object perception. He published several chapters in Frank Lloyd Wright: The Living City, the catalog for the first significant traveling exhibition of Wright’s work in Europe and was a curator of the Frank Lloyd Wright: Unpacking the Archives exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. He has served on the Board of Trustees for the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation located at Taliesin West in Arizona, and on the Board of Directors for the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy in Chicago. Desmond received a Campus Heritage Grant from the Getty Foundation in Los Angeles to conduct an inventory and analysis of the historic LSU campus. This effort produced The Architecture of LSU, published by LSU Press in 2013. As a practicing architect he was awarded a Gulf States Region Merit Honor Citation for Excellence in Design from the American Institute of Architects for the Bluebonnet Swamp Interpretive Center Education Building. He has an extensive record of taking LSU students on architectural tours of Europe.
Professor Desmond served as the founding Director of the Doctor of Design program at LSU.