Assistant Professor
Architecture

2118 Seaton Hall
920 N Martin Luther King Jr. Drive
Manhattan, KS 66506
(785) 532-5953
reeseg@k-state.edu

Curriculum Vitae (pdf)

Reese Greenlee is co-principal of PROOFS and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture at Kansas State University, where he teaches design studios, research seminars, and the advanced structures lecture course.

Reese's research and creative practice examine architecture's entanglement with the rural, asserting it as central to architecture's material, environmental, and infrastructural futures. He pursues this agenda through a set of critical interfaces: the farm as a site of spatial innovation; agricultural technologies as catalysts for the mechanization of construction; county fairgrounds as a national network of civic infrastructure; and manufactured home communities as significant American housing landscapes. Across this work, architectural and structural design operate together as a mode of practice, testing material and construction systems under conditions of environmental and regulatory risk and repositioning the rural as a domain of architectural intelligence.

A central strand of his current work develops Graded Protection, a framework in which force, deformation, yielding, and failure become the medium of design. Protection is treated not as a binary attribute of a building but as a spatial, structural, and civic resource distributed across space and time. Supported by a Big 12 Faculty Fellowship, this research includes the design and testing of modular, 3D-printed concrete storm shelters that address the absence of FEMA-compliant protection in rural manufactured home communities, alongside writing that repositions manufactured housing within architectural discourse and education.

PROOFS, founded in 2024 with Nitzan Farfel, operates as a laboratory for the same questions animating Reese's research and teaching. The studio's work spans deployable civic infrastructure, cultural landscape surveys, speculative building systems, and field-based research, including Supersites, a national framework for mobile architecture responsive to shifting civic needs; the Flint Hills Event Center, a multi-use civic and agricultural facility developed through place-based and vernacular systems research; a Historic Preservation Fund–supported survey establishing the first comprehensive record of Kansas county fairgrounds as cohesive cultural landscapes; and ongoing investigations into modular storm shelter prototypes for manufactured home communities.

Reese received a Master of Architecture from Princeton University, a Master of Science in Structural Engineering, Mechanics and Materials from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from The Ohio State University. He has practiced with MOS Architects, Besler & Sons, and Endrestudio, where he led research and development for novel and unusual structural systems and material assemblies.

Research interests

Manufactured housing and manufactured home communities; storm shelters and graded protection; environmental risk and building performance; county fairgrounds and civic infrastructure; agricultural technologies and construction history; structural behavior in architectural education; off-site construction and 3D-printed concrete; lightweight structures and material experimentation.

Selected publications

“Observations on Permanence.” Log 65: House & Home, 2026. Coauthored with Emma Silverblatt.

"County Fairgrounds as Vernacular Cultural Landscapes." Vernacular Architecture Forum Conference, 2026. Peer-reviewed poster. Coauthored with Nitzan Farfel.

“Gray-boxing: Integrating Structural Behavior into Architectural Education.” Building Technology Educators’ Society Conference, 2025. Peer-reviewed paper.

“Cut Fold Span Connect.” Building Technology Educators’ Society Conference, 2025. Peer-reviewed poster. Coauthored with Brian Lee.

“Appreciating Value: Reassessing the Potential of Manufactured Housing.” ACSA/AIA Intersections Research Conference: New Housing Paradigms, 2025. Peer-reviewed paper. Coauthored with Emma Silverblatt.

Editor, Pidgin, Princeton University School of Architecture Journal, Issues 29–31, 2021–2023.

 

Honors & awards

Big 12 Faculty Fellowship, Big 12 Conference / Kansas State University and Iowa State University, Off-Site Construction and 3D-Printed Concrete: Developing Modular Storm Shelters for Manufactured Home Communities, 2025–2026.

Researcher in Residence, Centre for Architectural Structures and Technology (CAST), University of Manitoba, Loose-Fits: Prototyping Excess for Sartorial Building Envelopes, 2025–2026.

Visiting Artist, University of Colorado Boulder and M12 Studio, Scanning Topographies, 2025.

Historic Preservation Fund Grant, Kansas Historical Society–State Historic Preservation Office, Principal Investigator, Cultural Resources in Kansas County Fairgrounds Survey, 2025.

New York State Council on the Arts Capital Projects Grant, structural engineering and design consultant, Barn as Studio: Rebuilding a Flood Damaged Barn, 2025.

Susan Kolarik Underwood Thesis Prize, Princeton University School of Architecture, Supersites, 2023.

Howard Crosby Butler Traveling Fellowship in Architecture, Princeton University School of Architecture, Manufactured Insecurity, 2022.

Courses taught

Studio

ARCH304 Architectural Design Studio II

ARCH403 Architectural Design Studio III

ARCH404 Architectural Design Studio IV

ARCH817 Architectural Design Studio VII | Building Shelter

Lecture     

ARCH 448 Structural Systems II

Seminar

ARCH715 Construction Culture

ARCH715 Beyond Real Property: Manufactured Home Parks as Significant American Landscapes

ARCH715 Loose-Fits: Prototyping Excess