Manuel Garza
Garza is Principal of the New York studio and Co-founded Et al. Collaborative of New York in 2009. Born in Brownsville, Texas, earned his Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Detroit Mercy.
Garza is an Adjunct Professor at the New York Institute of Technology. For the past 14 years his focus has been introducing students to the architecture of Latin America through immersive travel. He has taught design studios at University of Detroit Mercy and has participated as a visiting critic at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Yale University, The New School, City College of New York, Cranbrook Academy of Art, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Pratt Institute, Philadelphia University, Marywood University.
Prior to Et al. his work experience included positions at Albert Kahn Associates in Detroit and Morris Adjmi Architects (formerly Aldo Rossi studio di architettura) in New York. He has exhibited work at the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Art Gallery of Windsor, and for Archilab in France.
Tadd Heidgerken, RA
Heidgerken is Principal of the Detroit studio and Co-founded Et al. Collaborative of Detroit in 2012. Born in Davenport, Iowa, earned his Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Detroit Mercy and a Master of Architecture from Cranbrook Academy of Art. A registered architect,.Additionally, he is President of Block Party, a small development group in the Fitzgerald Neighborhood. As part of Et al. he has won numerous awards, most recently a 2022 Stewardson Keefe LeBrun Travel Grant from the Center of Architecture and the 2019 AIA/HUD Secretary Community-Informed Design Award and the 2019 AIA Detroit Small Project Honor Award for his work on 8869 Avis Project.
Heidgerken is an Associate Professor of Architecture at University of Detroit Mercy. In the 2011 and 2018 he led the Detroit Mercy exchange groups to the Politechnika Warszawska and is currently participating in the Tecnológico de Monterrey’s Global Classroom Program where he helped to design and implement a virtual-international learning lab in which his students gained multicultural experience with international peers.
He lectures and serves as visiting critic at universities nationally and internationally including SUNY-Buffalo, University of Michigan, Tecnológico de Monterrey, the Architectural Association School of Architecture (UK) and The Bartlett School of Architecture (UK). In addition, he has sat on the board of several Detroit-area cultural non-profit organizations including Corridors Alliance, Cranbrook Academy of Art Alumni Board, and Red Bull House of Art. In 2014 Heidgerken was named an Associate Researcher with the Cultural Constructions Laboratory at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Grenoble, a community of world-wide scholars who share and develop research together.