Lydia M. Soo, Ph.D., associate professor of architecture in the A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, will retire from active faculty status on May 31, 2017.

Professor Soo received her B.S. (1976) and M.Arch. (1978) degrees from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She received her M.A. (1983) and Ph.D. (1989) degrees from Princeton University. She joined the University of Michigan faculty as an assistant professor in 1994, and was promoted to associate professor in 2001.

Professor Soo is a historian of architecture and architectural theory with special expertise in the Early Modern period. She authored a number of scholarly articles that examined specific problems of seventeenth-century culture, theory, architecture, urbanism, and maps. Professor Soo is internationally recognized for her work entitled Wren's "Tracts" on Architecture and Other Writings (1998) on the English architect Sir Christopher Wren (1632-1723). Her later work explored a number of topics, including architectural knowledge production in London after the Great Fire, English architecture in relationship to pre-Orientalist knowledge of buildings in the Levant, and geometrical procedures in Italian Baroque design. An inspiring teacher, Professor Soo's courses focused on Renaissance and Baroque buildings and cities, mathematics in architecture, the history of theory, and the history of architecture and urbanism many involved on-site, experiential learning in Italian cities as well as in Ann Arbor. Professor Soo has been awarded fellowships from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art.

The Regents now salute this distinguished faculty member by naming Lydia M. Soo, associate professor emerita of architecture.