Tolya Stonorov is an Associate Professor at the School of Architecture + Art, Norwich University. Stonorov’s primary duties include teaching a core second year studio, a design build, an upper level studio and a professional course that studies ethical issues of project delivery and technical construction drawings.
Stonorov published the book, The Design Build Studio | Crafting Meaningful Work in Architecture Education, for which she was the primary author and editor. The Design-Build Studio examines sixteen international community driven design-build case studies through process and product, with preceding chapters on community involvement, digital and handcraft methodologies and a graphic Time Map. Together these projects serve as a field guide to the current trends in academic design-build studios, a window into the different processes and methodologies being taught and realized today. Design-build supports the idea that building, making and designing are intrinsic to each other: knowledge of one strengthens and informs the expression of the other. Hands-on learning through the act of building what you design translates theories and ideas into real world experience. The work chronicled in this book reveals how this type of applied knowledge grounds us in the physicality of the world in which we live.
As a member of the A+A Design Build Committee, Stonorov teaches a design build studio every other year. Stonorov’s design build studio projects have won multiple AIA Vermont design awards and have been widely published.
With 20 years of experience in the professional field, her courses marry the theoretical and poetic, with concrete grounding in technical and professional realities. Stonorov’s classes explore the nature of fabrication, examining the relationship between digital and traditional methods of making, with a focus on materiality, process and craft.
In addition to committees and normal undergraduate and graduate advising, Stonorov has advised multiple students for the Norwich Summer Research Fellowship, aiding student research across Europe. Concurrently, as the Lecture Committee Co-Chair, she contributes to the enrichment of the intellectual life of the School of A+A by bringing internationally recognized architects and artists to speak about their work, approximately seven per year.