Rene Peralta, Director Master of Science in Architecture, Landscape and Urbanism, will be speaking in Denver’s Start Up Week, in Denver Colorado; the event will showcase Denver’s entrepreneurial community with an emphasis on technology, design, social entrepreneurship and business. Peralta is now the president of the board of Fundación Esperanza de Mexico, a non-profit organization in Tijuana, Mexico that promotes self-built housing and community building for low income families.

Ingalill Wahlroos-Ritter (Graduate Chair) and Dr. Amit Wolf (graduate faculty) received a Graham Foundation Grant.  Since this is a Grant for Organizations, WUHO (Woodbury Hollywood Gallery) / Woodbury University is listed as the grantee.  The project, Beyond Environment, is a proposal for an exhibition and a publication and explores the potent interchange between architecture, Land Art, and Performance Art that emerged through Italian architect Gianni Pettena’s collaboration with American artists Allan Kaprow and Robert Smithson in the 1970s. Ingalill will be presenting a paper at the Fall ACSA Conference titled “Fieldwork Tahiti: Houses of Flux.” She will be on sabbatical during Fall 2013.

Co-Chair of Master of Real Estate and Development Ted Smith and his firm McCormick Smith and Others prepared  models and renderings for the “Making Room” exhibition in the  Museum of the City of New York  which opened in January and will show until September 15th.  The exhibit, sponsored by Citizens Housing and Planning Council and the Architectural League of New York, examines the impact of shared housing in the effort to provide affordable housing for young professionals, artists, and entrepreneurs that make such a vital contribution to the city economy and culture. The design presented, the New York GoHome, examines the advantages shared housing brings to micro unit designs in a high rise configuration.

Assistant Professor Maxi Spina’s “Three’s a crowd,” a simultaneous exploration on the slippages existing between form, color and geometry was exhibited this summer in “On the Road,” a series of Pop-up exhibitions that highlight the work of emerging contemporary architecture practices in Los Angeles. In addition, Spina’s recently finished “Jujuy Redux Apartment Building” appeared in the Book Innovative Residences published by Hong Kong Architecture Science Press, and was featured in the Council for Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat Database. In March, Maxi presented at the annual ACSA conference the paper “Heterotopic Speciation,” which discusses his latest research on alternative parametric modeling and drawing techniques. This Fall, Maxi will be presenting at the TxA Interactive conference in Dallas the paper “Bursting Margins: Involute Assemblies and Emergent Silhouettes,” which discusses the research carried out over the last year on flexible envelopes and modular assemblies for the Woodbury Canopy Project.

The Arid Lands Institute (ALI), launched this summer a 2-year watershed-based planning process in rural New Mexico, led by ALI’s Co-Director Peter Arnold with B.Arch student Ethan Dingwell; The project is funded by the EPA. In July, ALI hosted the Sixth Annual “Celebrando las Acequias,” a community-based conference on climate adaptation in the rural west.  The event was funded by Metabolic Studio, a program of the Annenberg Foundation.

ALI research was featured in the fall 2013 issue of BOOM: A Journal of California (University of California Press); in “Pivot: Water Scarcity as Design Opportunity”, with funding by the World Water Forum; in a special issue of ARID: A journal of Art, Design and Ecology, edited by ALI’s Co-Director Hadley Arnold and Kim Stringfellow and funded by Metabolic Studio; In August, Hadley Arnold was a panelist on TakePartLive Television premiere of “Last Call at the Oasis: On why the global water crisis will be the central issue facing our world this century.”, hosted by Participant Media. Finally, ALI was chosen for the Fall 2013 prestigious AIA/LA Presidential Honor Award for Public Service.