Jeana Ripple
Education
The University of Michigan, Master of Architecture with high distinction;
The University of Notre Dame, Bachelor of Science in Computer Science Engineering
Biography
Jeana Ripple is a registered architect, principal and co-founder of the collaborative architecture firm, Mir Collective. Her practice and scholarship focus on the extensive civic and environmental implications of architectural design, particularly in relation to building materials. Ripple’s work is recognized through international awards, competitions, and exhibitions featuring spatial, temporal, social, and environmental explorations of building material assemblies.
Ripple's forthcoming book, The Type V City: Codifying Material Inequity in Urban America (The University of Texas Press, 2025), provides the first comprehensive social and spatial examination of building codes and urban material patterns across American cities. The Type V City reveals previously overlooked connections between building material regulations and factors such as economic disinvestment patterns, human and ecological health, job accessibility, spatial dynamics, adaptive capacity, and lifetime embodied energy.
Ripple’s collaborative practice, Mir Collective, emphasizes the transformation of existing buildings, exploring design strategies that anticipate future needs while promoting positive civic and environmental impacts. Notable recent work includes the renovation of Zaha Hadid’s Rosenthal Center for Contemporary Art in 2023, a shortlisted design proposal for the 2021 international C40 Chicago competition, presenting a net-zero community kitchen, permanent supportive housing, and health services for those experiencing homelessness in Chicago, and a community kitchen building rehabilitation utilizing local manufacturing called ArtHouse Gary, recognized with a SEED (Social Economic Environmental Design) Awards for Community Engagement in 2017.
Ripple is an affiliated faculty member of the UVA Environmental Institute (EI) where she leads efforts to model the carbon impact of building materials and trends in building longevity. She was one of six founding editors for the ACSA / Taylor and Francis journal, TAD: Technology | Architecture + Design, and was the issue editor for TAD’s second issue, “Simulations: Modeling, Measuring, and Disrupting Design.” Prior to joining UVA, Ripple practiced at Studio Gang Architects in Chicago, where she led numerous building and landscape projects.
Ripple’s teaching combines design, research, and advanced technology. Her courses include graduate and undergraduate foundation design studios, design research methods courses, and advanced design computation courses. Ripple has been recognized by two national awards, the ACSA/AIAS New Faculty Teaching Award and the BTES Emerging Faculty Award, for innovative approaches to teaching building technology through design and performance-simulation. Ripple’s practice, scholarship, and teaching draw upon her combined background as a computer science engineer and architect to frame material resilience through a systems framework with varying scales, inputs, and objectives.
