Hanna Tulis
Lecturer
Department of Architecture
College of Architecture, Art and Planning
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Einhorn Center Activities
Engaged Faculty Fellowship Program, 2024-25 Faculty Fellow in Engaged Learning
Fellows come from all over the university, bringing their particular passions and living out the public purpose of their discipline through teaching and researching in, with and for community.
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In 2022, Cornell’s Architecture faculty voted to amend a core studio course description to include a focus on social justice and community engagement for undergraduate architecture students. In Fall 2023, Lecturer Hanna Tulis led the pilot version of this studio, coordinating a teaching team of four additional faculty and 60 students in partnership with the Enfield Food Distribution Center (EFDC), an existing food pantry in Enfield, NY, which serves 600 families in need per week across multiple counties.
EFDC is in the exploratory phase for a new facility to improve distribution capacity and shopper experience. The semester culminated in the speculative design of a community hub with a food pantry anchor program on a 4.5 acre site in Enfield. The second incarnation of this studio runs in Spring 2025, again led by Tulis, in which the project team is expanding across the university to include students from the College of Architecture, Art and Planning; the Brooks School of Public Policy; the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering and College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, emulating the large team of architects, engineers and consultants that real institutional building projects require. The hope is that the student work can serve as the groundwork for a real building project for EFDC.
In this particular community partner relationship and in future instantiations of the engaged core studio, Tulis is eager to better understand methodologies of engagement: how to balance pedagogical responsibilities with community partner give-back; how to teach students to interface with community clients; how lessons from a community-engaged course can stay with the students in future design work; how to evaluate a project’s “fitness” for an engagement studio; and how to structure and maintain relationships with community partners.
