Celebrated Professor Elizabeth Danze Honored in Alcalde’s Texas 10

Each year, the Texas Exes magazine Alcalde asks students and alumni to submit nominations for The Texas 10 teaching awards, commemorating the 10 most excellent professors at The University of Texas. It should come as no surprise that our very own Professor Elizabeth Danze has been recognized in the 2025 cohort, acknowledging her pivotal role as a brilliant and generous educator in the School of Architecture since 1991.  

Ask anyone about Elizabeth Danze, and their first answer is a smile—all are delighted to reflect on her impact. After over 30 years of teaching, her presence remains a breath of fresh air for her peers and students. Her research in architecture spans many disciplines, most prolifically through the lens of psychology. Resilient and resonant design is a frequent topic of Danze’s research, drawing connections between the dynamic and ever-changing built environment and the adaptive nature of the human psyche. 

A beloved fixture at the School of Architecture, Danze is the Architecture Program Director and Bartlett Cocke Regents Professor in Architecture, a University Distinguished Teaching Professor, a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects (FAIA), and the Principal of Danze Blood Architects. Danze received her Bachelor of Architecture from UTSOA in 1981, the same degree her father, Leopold Danze, earned in 1955.  

Growing up in Austin, Danze's childhood was idyllic: she walked just two blocks from her house to the school and church her father designed, spending Saturdays in his architecture studio. He taught her much about the joy and meaning of creating spaces for the everyday person. His belief that everyone deserves access to a lovely place to live instilled in Elizabeth the value that actively working with others to create better lives is a fundamental truth of the profession. In the 2010 Center for American Architecture and Design publication “Traces & Trajectories: The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture at 100,” Danze reflects, “We, as architects, touch each person who occupies our buildings in some way. Even if it’s only a small thing, it can have a powerful and meaningful effect. These guiding principles I learned from my father, and they profoundly inform and guide my own work as an architect and educator."  

Danze’s first job after graduating from UT Austin was at Bell, Klein & Hoffman, a firm with a well-respected legacy in preservation in Austin. A year later, in 1983, she received a life-changing call: an architecture internship opportunity assisting the U.S. State Department in designing a new embassy in Burkina Faso (then the Republic of Upper Volta) in West Africa. She spent eight months there, living in embassy housing in Ouagadougou. The experience opened her world, sparking an ever-expanding interest in travel and the meaning of place.  

Upon her return to the States, Danze worked for Larry Speck’s firm in Austin for several years, then proceeded to New Haven, Connecticut to design for Cesar Pelli Architects (Pelli Clarke & Partners). There, she lived with her husband and lifelong collaborator, John Blood, whom she had met in 1979 at the UT School of Architecture. Both earned master's of architecture degrees at the Yale School of Architecture, having their first baby in the summer before her first semester of graduate school. She had her second baby right after graduating, spinning an impressive number of plates as she juggled family and work. After six years in New Haven, they moved back to Austin in 1991 to begin their own collaborative practice: Danze Blood Architects. At the same time, she also returned to the UT School of Architecture, teaching a Design II studio as an adjunct. She had thoroughly enjoyed running an undergraduate design studio at Yale and working as a teaching assistant for architect and professor Alan Plattus, whose balance of intellectual expectation and enthusiasm profoundly inspired her. Blood was also invited to lecture at the time, and they juggled their professional practice, teaching, and family lives simultaneously.   

Over three decades of teaching, Danze has been integral to the development of the UT School of Architecture as the field has grown and expanded into a more nuanced practice beyond “architecture as artifact.” Serving as Interim Dean in 2016, Danze is a trusted leader and steward of design pedagogy, actively taking critical steps to move the discipline forward with key texts on the future of teaching. She edited the 2022–2023 issue of Platform, “Teaching for Next,” which delves into the rapidly changing landscape of architectural education through a collection of essays and interviews with faculty, students, and alumni. “Together, I think this issue reveals the deeply humanistic ways in which we work and teach here at the school, and how, overall, our goal is to create a better world for one another.” Currently working on a book for the Center for American Architecture and Design’s Centerline series on teaching and pedagogy, Danze is exploring what we might learn from a comparative study of the relationship between a psychoanalyst and a patient in conversation with the studio relationship between a teacher and student. Her interest in these parallels speaks to her human-centered approach to education, embracing the interpersonal complexities of design work and the conscious and unconscious role of the architect. She explores the conceptual parallels between buildings and the human mind, reading both as palimpsests—adaptive, resilient, and layered with experience—a topic that she poetically explored in her talk “Resilience in Architecture and the Human Psyche” for the 2024 Architecture, Culture and Spirituality Forum in Istanbul. 

Matter and spirit are of equal importance to Danze’s work. She encourages her students to embrace their intuition, emphasizing the importance of both creativity and self-reflection to nourish their passion for design. Teaching a range of approaches, she wants her students to participate in the world, insisting that they figure out what intrigues them and pursue their interests.   

“Ever since our time together as students in the School of Architecture, Elizabeth Danze has possessed a rare combination of kindness, curiosity, compassion and remarkable talent. She has always been a learner and, fueled by that passion, has become an exceptional teacher. Elizabeth loves her students, is deeply committed to their success, and brings intellectual rigor as well as practical experience to their education. She enriches their lives and equips them for a future that demonstrably makes a difference in the world. We co-taught a studio addressing the issues of the unhoused and I watched first-hand as she gently led her class through a technically and emotionally challenging project. Graduates who have studied under Elizabeth are among the best I’ve ever worked with and they credit the extraordinary investment she made in them. It is a privilege and a joy to have Elizabeth as a colleague and a friend. She makes the world a more true, beautiful and just place for all.” 

—Rick Archer, Overland Partners 

She advocates for a well-rounded life—“it makes for better architecture.” In her own time between teaching and design work, she enjoys drawing, a good psychological thriller mystery book, and singing in a community choral group.  

An outstanding leader, architect, teacher, and a radiant positive force in our field, Elizabeth Danze has created an open-hearted environment for learning at the School of Architecture. Thank you, Professor Danze, and congratulations on the 2025 Texas 10 teaching award!