Congratulations to our Newly Promoted Faculty Members
Join us in congratulating two faculty members on their recent promotions. Effective this fall, Kory Bieg is now a Full Professor of Architecture. Maggie Hansen was promoted to Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture with tenure.
Learn more about these incredible teachers and scholars below. We'll be sharing more in-depth profiles on each of them throughout the fall semester.
Kory Bieg's research is dedicated to advancing digital technologies in architectural design and fabrication. Through his writing and built work, he advocates for leveraging emerging technologies to develop innovation solutions to new and unconventional architectural challenges. He received his Master of Architecture from Columbia University and is NCARB certified and a registered architect in the State of Texas.
Since 2013, he has served as Chair of the TxA Emerging Design + Technology conference, and co-Director of TEX-FAB Digital Fabrication Alliance. He has served on the Board of SXSW Eco Place by Design and the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA). In 2019, Bieg co-chaired the annual ACADIA conference titled “Ubiquity and Autonomy." He has served as the School of Architecture's Associate Dean for Academic Affairs since 2024.
In 2005, Kory Bieg founded OTA+, an architecture, design, and research office that specializes in the development and use of current, new, and emerging digital technologies for the design and fabrication of buildings, building components, and experimental installations. OTA+ uses current design software and CNC machine tools to both generate and construct conceptually rigorous and formally unique design proposals. Recently, Bieg co-founded Plume Design Lab, LLC with Associate Professor Clay Odom as a collaborative platform to facilitate experimentation across more diverse project types and networks.
Bieg co-edited Center 21: The Secret Life of Buildings, a book that explores the significance of Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) to Architecture, featuring original essays by leading philosophers and architects. The book received the Independent Publisher Book Award Gold Medal in the Architecture category.
Maggie Hansen is a landscape designer and artist who brings multidisciplinary training to the design of public spaces. She earned a BA from the University of Chicago and worked in contemporary art and theater before turning to design. She holds a Master of Architecture and a Master of Landscape Architecture from the University of Virginia.
Her design experience includes professional practice and community-based design. As a designer at Nelson Byrd Woltz Landscape Architects, she contributed to design on award-winning projects at a range of scales, including the Brooklyn Naval Cemetery, the Overlook Farm Masterplan, and Olana State Historic Site. As director of Tulane’s Small Center for Collaborative Design, she led community-based design projects in support of a more equitable New Orleans, as illustrated in her co-authored book, SMALLx20: Twenty Years of Community Engaged Design in New Orleans.
Professor Hansen’s research, teaching, and creative work draw influence from theater, gardening, participatory art, and activist methods to reimagine the boundaries of design as a relational practice. Her book, Transgressive Practices to Transformative Policies: Landscape Change Fast and Slow, presents models of place-based design work that challenges the rules of landscape practice.
Maggie is a co-lead on the research initiative, Frontline Community Partnerships for Climate Action, which began with support from Planet Texas 2050, and focuses on promoting youth-identified environmental improvements in the Rio Grande Valley. The project, Voices of Las Milpas, developed through the Monument Lab 2026 Re:Generation cohort, documents the recent history of environmental change and civic engagement in South Pharr, TX. With Miriam Solis, her work on eco-connectivity in the RGV received the SOM Foundation’s 2025 Research Award.