Professor Michael Martin’s home is quiet tonight.

Upstairs, his wife, Cathy, and two teenage daughters have already gone to bed. Except for the constant humming of the cold wind and rhythmic cracks, the Martin residence is quiet. That is, until one takes a trip to the basement.

Down the steps, Martin is playing a song on his guitar while singing into a microphone in a make-shift studio. He’s recording a new song on his Fastex 8-track recorder, although it can only record two tracks at a time. Just him and his cats.

Martin is a tall man — 6-foot-4-inches to be exact. With hair reminiscent of David Cassidy’s, he is mum about his age only to say he was born during the Eisenhower administration. He is thin from running and legally blind in his left eye from a cataract and a softball pitch-gone-wrong 25 years ago. He reluctantly and only just recently wears a pair of thick-framed Armani glasses.

A southerner at heart, he went to Catholic school until he graduated and went to the University of Georgia.

As an art major who seemed to be missing something, he ‘blundered’ into the world of landscape architecture. He has taught  landscape architecture at Iowa State since 1995 and is getting tenure. Martin was also the recipient of the National Graduate Research Award from the American Society of Landscape Architects in 1995 for his University of Oregon MLA thesis on back-alleys as neighborhood-scale social landscapes. He was also made a partner in his former landscape architecture firm in Atlanta.

Every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, Martin teaches Design Studies 183: An Introduction to Design Culture in an auditorium in the Design building. Martin sets up an amplifier and microphone stand at the front of the class. Miniature spotlights attached to the ceiling cast shadows against the stark, metal walls and make Martin look as though he is on stage, about to perform.

Before he begins, he introduces a former student to his class, Minna Quint. With blond hair on the verge of snowy-white, over-sized sunglasses atop her head, a scarf wrapped around her neck and a flowing dress Quint stands behind the mic and begins to sing a song she and Martin had only months ago.

Students sit up in their chairs.

Quint and Martin met over three years ago, but it wasn’t until May that they started playing together.

“Him and his band were playing in the College of Design, and I decided to ask him if I could show him some stuff that I had worked on,” Quint said. “We have been playing together ever since.”

A double-major in art and design and international studies, Quint knows firsthand what it’s like to be in one of Martin’s classes.

“Michael is very ‘down to earth’. He is overly generous in the way he teaches and always wants students to ask questions. He makes you feel very comfortable in the learning environment,” Quint said. “He wants to know more about you and figure out the way that is best to teach every single student.”

This past summer, Quint and Martin formed a duo called Tea for Two or “T42”. The two write and record whenever they have free time, mostly folk music or anything that suits Quint’s voice. Referring to him as Michael, Quint thinks of Martin as one of her best friends.

“When we play together, it is like everything disappears and we are just sitting in a world filled with music. Making music with Michael is the most pleasurable experience I have had at Iowa State,” Quint said.

Five years ago, Martin could hardly play his acoustic guitar. Recently he began to focus on songwriting and improving his guitar playing and singing.

“I used to play open mic. nights at the late, lamented Boheme — now Mother’s  — in Ames. I met like-minded people there and started jamming with them,” Martin said. “It was a whole new world compared to the stay-at-home-and-play-to-the-cats-in-your-basement mode. Then I found students in my landscape architecture department who shared my interests, and we began playing ‘guerrilla gigs’ last fall in the atrium of the Design building. Eventually, Cup of Tea was formed, which is me and three [landscape architecture] students. I’m the old man of the band by far.”

Mike McCullough, senior in landscape architecture, was one of the three students who began playing with Martin in the atrium. Playing mandolin, guitar and harmonica, Martin said McCullough is a more experienced musician than he. Greg Leichty and Eric Doll, both juniors in landscape architecture, round out Cup of Tea. Leichty, who plays the wooden box drum known as the “cajon,” is by far the best singer, Martin said.

Encouraging students to play music and sing is one of his unique teaching qualities.

“I think it’s important because it gives everyone a chance to do something they wouldn’t normally be able to do in other places. It gives them a place to express themselves. When Boheme closed, I had to find somewhere else to do that,” Martin said.

Martin said he never gets bored with his everyday life.

“With teaching, things never get old. There are new projects and new people all of the time. With music, it’s constantly changing and growing and getting developed further, too,” Martin said.

Despite having a busy work schedule, Martin never forgets about his ultimate passion: songwriting and playing music.

“I love music whole-heartedly and also really love the design of things,” Martin said. “I just get lost in it. But it’s a more solitary endeavor, like songwriting. There’s really no parallel in the act of designing with that synergy that sometimes occurs while playing or singing with others. When that synergy makes something happen that never existed before … it’s the greatest thing in the universe.”