Michael Petrus

LECTURER, ARCHITECTURE AND URBAN + ENVIRONMENTAL PLANNING; REAL ESTATE PROGRAM

Education

Harvard University, Graduate School of Design, Master of Architecture in Urban Design
Carnegie Mellon University, Bachelor of Architecture


Biography

Michael Petrus, an architect, urban designer and photographer, began teaching studio at the UVA School of Architecture in 2007 and continues to teach as an instructor in the graduate technology sequence.  He has also taught architecture, sustainability and photography courses aboard the ISE Semester at Sea program. As an architect in practice and in research, Petrus’ work with Crisman+Petrus architects has been recognized with awards and fellowships from Harvard University, the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, the American Institute of Architects, the American Society of Landscape Architects, the US National Endowment for the Arts and the US Environmental Protection Agency.  Petrus’ urban landscape photographic work has also been widely published and exhibited.

An architect and urban designer for over thirty-five years, Petrus practiced with firms in Cambridge, Hong Kong, Chicago, Pittsburgh and Charlottesville, before starting his own office, Crisman+Petrus architects in 2004. Numerous Crisman+Petrus architects projects have received awards and been widely published, as has his work with campus planning with William McDonough + Partners, the Santiago Calatrava-designed Milwaukee Art Museum, and with Chan Krieger Architects.


 

In his teaching and practice, Petrus fosters relationships between seemingly oppositional topics: natural ecology and heavy industry, regional watersheds and roofing details, and global climate change and individual education. Working with environmental nonprofit NGOs as well as industrial corporations, Crisman+Petrus architects employ and design for strategies that allow the coexistence and growth of healthy ecosystems and thriving urban, economic opportunity. The complex relationships between human inhabitation and the natural environment that depend on sustainable strategies between specific cultures and their built environment are central to Petrus’ work.

Petrus’ architectural projects include those in overlooked and underserved communities, and although tiny in scale, have an enormous impact. The Wetland Learning Lab and Beazley Learning Academy at the Paradise Creek Park constructed wetland, as well as the Elizabeth River Project Learning Barge are all small projects that support outreach and education for children from all Portsmouth, Chesapeake and Norfolk area neighborhoods. Children who have never gotten their hands muddy are encouraged to directly engage with the plants, animals, water and dirt that are in their own backyards but are rarely directly engaged. Crisman+Petrus’ projects are designed to didactically support the mission of educating K-12 children about their impact on the environment getting them to consider and discuss the relationship of chemicals and wastes that they might keep out of the land, water and sky.

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