CCA Adjunct Professor Matt Hutchinson has been selected to participate in the DesCours 2011 art and architecture event in New Orleans. The project, Bayou-Luminescence fuses material surface, structural volume and lighting effects into an immersive spatial experience. It is a collaborative effort, developed and fabricated with Igor Siddiqui, Assistant Professor at University of Texas at Austin.


CCA Adjunct Professor Katherine Rinne’s book, The Waters of Rome: Aqueducts, Fountains, and the Birth of The Baroque City (Yale University Press) won the 2011 John Brinkerhoff Jackson Award for Landscape History from the Foundation for Landscape Studies. Most recently she has lectured about her Roman water research at the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Colorado at Denver, the University of Washington, Drury University, and at Pratt Institute in Rome. Her web-based cartographic research project, Aquae Urbis Romae: the Waters of the City of Rome, <www3.iath.virginia.edu/waters> has been chosen by the Italian Consiglio Nazionale delle Richerche, as one of five international water research projects to be featured at the “World Heritage and Water Strategy” conference to be held in Rome in March 2012.


Museums of the City, an experimental history project by David Gissen, CCA Associate Professor, and commissioned by Geoff Manaugh, appears in the exhibition Landscape Futures,  Center for Art and Environment, Nevada Museum of Art. A catalog of the exhibition is forthcoming from Actar. David recently spoke about Museums of the City at the Event “What is to be Written: A new generation of scholar/critics speaks out”, held at the Graduate School of Design Harvard.

Dr. Mona El Khafif, Assoc. Prof of Architecture at CCA, gave a lecture at the ART CITY BERLIN 2020 conference, organized by Heinrich Boell Stiftung, on July 21st. El Khafif’s presentation introduced a panel discussion and workshop dedicated to operational strategies, defined as cultural impulses, for public space. The session was attended by the artist Harry Sachs from Kunstrepublik, architect Matthias Rick from Raumlabor, curator Ute Vorkoeper, and Mona El Khafif. Returning to San Francisco, El Khafif participated in a panel discussion, titled WHAT IS LANDSCAPE URBANISM? at the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR) on July 27th. Her input introduced a range of urban design and research projects developed by students and faculty at the CCA URBANlab that deal with new approaches to ecological urbanism. A selection of this work was also presented on October 15th at the ACSA conference in Houston, titled Local Identities Global Challenges, where El Khafif and CCA colleague Antje Steinmuller presented the paper MADE FOR CHINA: Transcoding Local Patterns into Ecologically High-Performing Urban Prototypes.

CCA Assistant Professor Jason Kelly Johnson and Associate Professor Nataly Gattegno were awarded the 2011 Architectural League Prize for Young Architects. Future Cities Lab, their experimental research practice has also recently won several design awards and commissions including the Trilux Pavilion in San Francisco; Thermaespheres in Athens, Greece; and they were finalists for the Henry Art Gallery Facade project in Seattle. Jason will also serve as co-chair of the upcoming ACADIA 2012 Conference to be hosted at CCA in October 2012. The conference is titled “CRAFTING DIGITAL ECOLOGIES” and is being organized with partners from UC Berkeley and UC Cal Poly.         

CCA Lecturer Liz Ogbu was made a Senior Fellow of the Design Futures Council (http://www.di.net/about/senior_fellows/). She was also selected as part of the inaugural class of “Innovators in Residence” by IDEO.Org (http://ideo.org/fellows), a new nonprofit dedicated to reducing poverty through design and innovation.

CCA Adjunct Professor Liz Ranieri and her partner Byron Kuth’s award winning entry for the 2009 Rising Tides competition, Folding Water, is on view now at the Aquarium of the Pacific’s permanent new exhibit, “Rising Seas.” Their work on elder-care housing was highlighted in a recent interview, “Mixing it up with Elders,” for the online publication ArchNewsNow. In October, Liz and Byron lectured at University of Texas at Austin. The accompanying exhibit “Reflections on Process and Recent Work” is on view at UTSoA’s Membane gallery.