Michael Christopher Duda Center for Preservation, Resilience, and Sustainability
The Michael Christopher Duda Center for Preservation, Resilience, and Sustainability offers students expanded opportunities to learn and contribute to historic preservation, community resilience, and environmental sustainability with a focus on architecture and urban environments.
Established in 2021 by former Notre Dame Trustee Fritz Duda and his wife, Mary Lee, together with the family’s foundation, the Center is dedicated to Historic Preservation, Resilience, and Sustainability in memory of the couple’s late son, a Notre Dame architecture alumnus who dedicated his too-brief career to Historic Preservation in Texas. With a focus on Pope Francis' call to protect, conserve, and sustain "our common home" as he wrote in his encyclical Laudato Si', the Center strives to teach and conduct research to realize this mission.
A Focus on Teaching
The Center is housed in the School of Architecture but serves as a hub for campus-wide learning related to the Center’s objectives. Its mission is to expand a leading-edge curriculum in traditional architecture and urbanism. Students enrolled in the Master of Science in Historic Preservation degree program are completely supported by the Center that includes full-tuition fellowships to attract and support a talented and diverse class of students, in addition to a semester in Rome at the Notre Dame Rome Studies campus.
A Hub for Research
The Center sponsors essential research to articulate and propagate ways in which conservation of cultural heritage (both tangible and intangible) informs and inspires new sustainable development at the architectural and urban scales. With a particular emphasis on community regeneration, the Center fulfills a critical need to demonstrate that historic preservation can contribute actively to a new, green future.
Multidisciplinary faculty and student research promotes the recovery of historic building cultures, renewable and nonpolluting materials and methods, revival of historic trades and crafts, traditional urban planning and land use practices, and encourages the use of clean energy and renewable resources.
Recent partnerships include historic preservation initiatives with Indiana Landmarks, the development of a network directory for training traditional building crafts and trades with the Smithsonian Institution, and the Church Properties Initiative in collaboration with the Fitzgerald Institute for Real Estate. In all of these ways, and possibly in others yet to be discovered, the Duda Center is a vital resource for the School in furthering its mission of service to the University and the world.
Associated Faculty
Among the faculty for the Center are Paul Kapp, director, and professors Selena Anders, Stephen Hartley, Krupali Krusche, Paolo Vitti, and Todd Zeiger.
Duda Center News
The Michael Christopher Duda Center for Preservation, Resilience, and Sustainability has a growing audience of friends, alumni, collaborators, and supporters, both in the United States and abroad. To keep the community informed about the Duda Center and the students, faculty, advisors, and visitors that carry out its work, the Duda Center Newsletter is published twice a year during the fall and spring semesters.