Education

Princeton University | Master of Architecture, 2024
Georgia Institute of Technology | B.S. in Architecture, 2019

Biography

 Motuma Tulu is an architect practicing at Houser Walker Architecture in Atlanta. His experience covers residential, civic, higher education, K-12, office, government, and religious projects. Before moving to Atlanta, he worked as an editor at the Anyone Corporation, during which time he was involved in editing Log Journal issues 59-62 and the Writing Architecture Series book “Rewriting Alberti,” by Peter Eisenman et al. During graduate school, he took three trips to Ethiopia, totaling four months, to document disappearing, historical ways of building along an 800-kilometer stretch of roadway from central Ethiopia to the southern border. At the same time, he worked as a research assistant documenting the informal architecture and economy of the capital of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa. Along with two other students, he also secured funding for an independent research project investigating the viability of giving form to minimal surfaces through tensile structures. 

Research Interests

 His research involves a form of investigative photojournalism that builds on work he has been developing since his master’s thesis at Princeton, “Relearning Home.” For his thesis, he produced an exhibition showing the value of Ethiopian vernacular architecture. In his continuing research, drawing on childhood memories of Ethiopia alongside photos, drawings, mappings, and videos taken during research trips, he reveals the modest yet highly functional logic of the traditional architecture that fosters the informal economy and vibrant social life. He published part of the research in the journal Log, focusing on an eight-day, 800-kilometer journey, during which he documented craft-based traditional architecture that is rapidly disappearing in the push to modernize.

Teaching Interests

 Motuma believes that architecture as a field has long been defined by a narrow perspective from the Global North. For him, architecture is most rich when it accepts a plurality of perspectives. To that end, during his graduate studies, he created an independent study course in which he spent a semester researching and compiling reference materials for a future course on learning from architectural perspectives from the Global South. These references, along with his research in Ethiopia, also provide precedents for his broader teaching.