Marc Norman has been the director of UPSTATE: A Center for Design, Research, and Real Estate at the Syracuse University School of Architecture since 2012. The program was created by former dean Mark Robbins to, in Norman’s words, “tie faculty and students to real-world projects in the city and the region.” Norman studied political economics at Berkeley and urban planning at UCLA and spent four years as a project manager for Skid Row Housing Trust, a community development corporation in Los Angeles, before moving to New York. There, he worked for Lehman Brothers, financing affordable housing, and for Deutsche Bank, providing loans to organizations serving low-income populations, before heading to Syracuse. Norman was recently chosen to be a 2014–15 Loeb Fellow at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

What’s UPSTATE’s biggest project right now?