Faculty

Teaching and Research Interests

As a practicing architect and scholar, Dr. Marie Alice L'Heureux has focused her research on the relationship between the built environment from the point of view of the community and residents in contrast to the intentions of political ideologues and designers.  As a researcher, she concentrated on ideology and the built environment in Estonia and Russia and the former Soviet Union in the long 20th Century.  Her current project is the elaboration and expansion of her dissertation “Appropriating Space: Ideology and Identity in the Cultural Landscape of Estonia.”

In shifting from pure research to teaching in a professional school, Professor L’Heureux has undertaken a study of the public realm comparing the relative effectiveness of community-generated design and top-down development in creating urban environments that satisfy the end users.  Professor L’Heureux is currently working on a Feasibility Study and Historic Structure’s Report for the Mutual Musician’s Foundation in the historic 18th and Vine District in Kansas City with the AIA of Kansas City.  She is also working with the New Bethel AME Church in Kansas City, KS to develop a parcel of land into a community including housing, elderly housing and a community center.  Additional areas of interest include international urban history and sustainable urban design.

• Architecture

Social and Cultural Aspects of Architecture and Urban Design; Baltic, Eastern European and Russian Architecture and Culture; Politics of Urban Design; and the Built Environment and Affordable Housing

• Ph.D. Arch., California (Berkeley), 2002
  
• M. Arch., McGill University (Montreal), 1993 
  
• B. Arch., McGill University