Associate Professor Adam Drisin has been promoted to Associate Dean of Academic Affairs for the College of Architecture + The Arts. Drisin joined FIU in 2004 as Associate Professor and Director of the Architecture program in the School of Architecture following a national search. While his duties remained unchanged, Adam’s title changed to Chair as part of a 2005 reorganization that placed the School of Architecture within the new FIU College of Architecture + The Arts.  Under his leadership, the Architecture Program flourished, seeing a 184% increase in applications with over 730 applications this year for only 100 entering seats.  The department has also witnessed a dramatic increase in grant productivity going from $66,000 the year of his arrival to $703,000 in 2010. Since 2004, the department has also seen a 240% increase in graduate FTE’s and a fourfold increase in support and funding for graduate students.  Professor Drisin’s new position in the Office of the Dean will focus on issues of academic affairs for all departments and schools in the College including Architecture, Interior Architecture, Landscape Architecture, Art & Art History, Music, Theater and Communication Arts.  Drisin recently concluded his second term on the Editorial Board of the Journal of Architectural Education. In recognition of his service to the JAE over the past seven years he received the ACSA Service Award.

Professor John Stuart, AIA, has been named Chair of the FIU Department of Architecture. He has taught at FIU for seventeen years and was promoted to full professor in 2008. Stuart begins this position following his service as Faculty Fellow in the Office of the Provost, where he collaborated with university administrators to advance initiatives related to faculty retention, workload, mentoring, promotion, and to the work environment for department chairs. He has received university-wide awards for his research and teaching, served as the Founding Director of the Graduate Program in Architecture, and for the past six years has chaired the Faculty Senate Building and Environment Committee, which was instrumental in the creation of FIU’s new Office of University Sustainability. Stuart has been a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Architectural Education, participated in design review panels for National Endowment for the Arts and United States Artists, and worked with the Association of Climate Change Officers in Washington, DC. As principal of John Stuart Architecture, he has collaborated on award-winning architectural designs for public projects and monuments, curated installations, developed video/sound pieces, and recently created video environments for an experimental opera. His work has been funded by fellowships and grants from Van Alen Institute, Graham Foundation, The Wolfsonian-FIU, National Endowment for the Arts, The National Endowment for the Humanities, and National Science Foundation, among others. Professor Stuart’s books include: The Gray Cloth and Ten Percent White: Paul Scheerbart’s Novel on Glass Architecture (MIT 2001); Ely Jacques Kahn, Architect: From Beaux-Arts to Modernism in New York (W. W. Norton, 2006 with Jewel Stern)—winner of the New York Book Award; and The New Deal in South Florida: Design, Policy and Citizenship Building 1933–1940 (University Press of Florida, 2008 with John F. Stack, Jr.)—winner of the Silver Medal from the Florida Book Awards. 

This fall the FIU Department of Architecture is also thrilled to welcome two new full-time faculty members, Associate Professor Winifred Elysse Newman and Visiting Instructor Nikolay Nedev. 

Associate Professor Winifred E. Newman focuses on the philosophy of aesthetics and science, and the history of science and technology. She has worked in architectural practice in Austin, Chicago, Washington DC, London, and St. Louis, and has taught at the University of Tennessee, Harvard, and Washington University in St. Louis. She was formerly a research fellow at the Max-Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin and has a PhD from Harvard. She is a partner in Architect of Record.

Visiting Instructor Nikolay Nedev is a founding partner of NC-office, an award-winning international design practice based in Miami. The work of NC-office has been exhibited in Miami, New York, Boston, and Stockholm. Several projects have also been published in various architectural journals and newspapers including Archivos de Arquitectura Antillana, Azure, Florida InsideOut and the Boston Globe. Most recently NC-office received an award for ‘Excellence in Interior Design’ from the Miami Chapter of the American Institute of Architects for the Cafe Bustelo project in Miami Beach. Other awards include a citation for “Innovation and Technology” from the Boston Society of Architects for the short film featuring the ‘Third Avenue Commons” residential project in Miami. Nedev received a Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Miami and a Master of Architecture in Urban Design from the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Assistant Professor David Rifkind has been awarded the 2011 Premio James Ackerman by the Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio in Vicenza. The Premio Ackerman is an annual international competition for first monographs in architectural history. The award is made possible by a donation to the CISA Andrea Palladio by James S. Ackerman through the BALZAN Prize he was conferred in 2001. Rifkind’s book, The Battle for Modernism: Quadrante and the Politicization of Architectural Discourse in Fascist Italy, is based on the dissertation he completed under Mary McLeod at Columbia University in 2007, and will be published in May 2012.

Associate Professor Alfredo Andia has been a consultant to the head of the Office of Coastal Reconstruction for the  Master Plan of sixteen towns devastated by the 2010 earthquake and tsunami in Chile’s Bio Bio Region. The Design 7 studio led by Professor Alfredo Andia that proposed the reconstruction of the town of Llico in Chile was selected as a winner in the ACSA/ARCHIVE Competition: I Am a Second Responder.