ORIGINS

Michael grew up in the small town of Sherman, north of Dallas. Founded in 1848, three years after the Republic of Texas joined the United Sates, Sherman was the county seat and a market center for the area.

The plan was a grid, similar to most Hispanic towns,
with a square in the middle. Sherman's main streets were named after heroes of the Texas Revolution: Travis, Houston, Crockett, and Lamar—significant streets for a town on the frontier.

The family house was built in 1939 on the edge of the city, providing for endless exploration of fields, creeks, and woods. The cotton fields beyond gradually extended the suburban area.

Michael's maternal grandfather was always a merchant,
but the family moved often, beginning in the rural North Texas of Sadler before finally settling in Corpus Christi
where his Granddad owned a pharmacy and later
a waterfront bar.

One family branch lived in San Antonio, and the powerful
imagery of the frequently visited Spanish missions provided
a link to the state's Hispanic roots.

1955–1962

Beginning an architecture career in 1955 at the
University of Texas was serendipitous for Michael.
The young faculty, later to be known as the Texas Rangers—including Colin Rowe (faculty photo, lower left) and Bernard Hoesli (faculty photo, upper right)—was exceptional, and the campus one of the finest in America. The landscape is magnificent, and the buildings by Cass Gilbert and Paul Cret, who also designed the original campus plan, exemplify campus architecture at its best.

After a faculty purge at Texas, the University of Oregon offered Michael the freedom to explore architecture independently. Lee Hodgden and Alvin Boyarsky were inspirational.

1962–1968

After Oregon, Michael moved to Florence, Italy, where he spent several months living and studying on a travel grant. An architecture degree cannot possibly prepare for the humbling experience of arriving in Florence—the beginning of a new education. Discovering urban space changes ideas about architecture and its relationship to the city.

Michael lived for two years in the seaside Tuscan town of Punta Ala, working for local architect Walter Di Salvo, and in 1965 he began working for The Architects Collaborative (TAC), first in Rome and later in Athens.

In fall 1965 Michael attended the Palladio Institute in Vicenza, Italy. Palladio was a revelation: the dry academicism conveyed by drawings and photos pales against the visceral reality of Palladio's work.

Though he moved back to the States in 1968, Michael would return often to Europe and particularly to Italy for teaching, research, and inspiration.

1968–1981

By the time Michael returned to the U.S. in 1968, the
 Urban Design Studio founded by Colin Rowe at Cornell University was a locus for the exploration of ideas regarding architecture and the city and was already home to many names from Michael's past, including Rowe, Lee Hodgden, and Michael's high school friend Jerry Wells as well as his old Oregon roommate Fred Koetter.

Michael began working for Werner Seligmann and joined the architecture faculty at Cornell, where he would teach
for the next thirteen years. No doubt due to its relative isolation from the outer world,  the quality of academic discourse and intellectual community in Ithaca was remarkable, despite the turbulent and pervasive social upheaval of the '60s and early '70s.

Fellow Cornell faculty Fred Koetter and Jerry Wells
had won the Brighton Beach Housing competition in 1968
and were working on a manufactured housing system
when Michael joined them in 1971. Many young architects launched their careers through Governor Rockefeller's New York State Urban Development Corporation, and Wells, Koetter, Dennis completed a number of housing projects between 1971 and 1977.

Michael's teaching extended to the University of Kentucky, where he was a visiting professor in 1975, and to Princeton, where he was a visiting professor from 1979–80.

1981–1989

Michael accepted a teaching position at Harvard's Graduate School of Design in 1981. Together with his former student Jeffrey Clark, he founded a practice in Boston and began a series of small projects and competition entries. Their scheme for an art museum at the University of California at Santa Barbara—conceived as a villa with a forecourt, a large garden, and a variety of exhibition spaces—won first prize and was developed through schematic design.

During this time Michael also continued to develop his study of the French hôtel as an urban spatial type—an investigation begun with his students at Cornell—and in 1986 his book on the subject, Court and Garden: From the French Hôtel to the City of Modern Architecture, was published by MIT Press. The same year Michael was invited to deliver the Preston Thomas Memorial Lectures at Cornell, a series of five lectures based on the book.

In 1987 Dennis and Clark won first prize for their design for a new University Center and the transformation of the Carnegie Mellon University campus—a project that was developed and built in a series of phases between 1987 and 2000 by Michael Dennis & Associates.

Michael continued to lecture and teach throughout the '80s, serving as a visiting Professor at Rice University, as the Thomas Jefferson Professor of Architecture at the University of Virginia, and as the Eero Saarinen Professor at Yale.

1989–PRESENT

Michael Dennis & Associates would continue its work at Carnegie Mellon throughout the 1990s. The success of the plan for that campus led to a series of planning initiatives for the office—leading the late Perry Chapman to describe Michael as "arguably the most important campus designer working in America."

Meanwhile the firm expanded its expertise in higher education buildings, designing a series of arts facilities, student centers, residence halls, and alumni centers—always with a focus on integrating new construction into the existing campus, using built form to shape public space. By design, the office has remained small enough for its principals to retain oversight over each project. Erik Thorkildsen has been a collaborator since 1984, and is central to the design of every project.

In 1992 Michael was appointed as Professor of Architecture at MIT, where he continues to teach urban design and theory. In 2011, he was awarded the CNU Athena Medal. Just as his study of the French hôtel while at Cornell led directly to design strategies for Carnegie Mellon and UC Santa Barbara, Michael's teaching and research at MIT continues to inform the office's approach to urban form, and ideas about the American campus. He is currently completing a second book, Temples and Towns: A Study of the Form, Elements, and Principles of Planned Towns, intended not only as a history and theory of urban form but as a polemic for how to build sustainable cities in an age of ominous environmental change.