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University of Southern California

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Scott Uriu along with his business partner Herwig Baumgartner have been chosen as one of the 2014-2015 COLA Master Artist Fellowship – Cultural Grant Artists for the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.  The prestigious City of Los Angeles (C.O.L.A.) Fellowships honor a selection of the best of Los Angeles contemporary arts. These awards allow very accomplished artists to focus on creating a new work to be exhibited at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery in May of 2015. Uriu and Baumgartner have been chosen as one of the 2014-2015 COLA Master Artist Fellowship – Cultural Grant Artists for the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.  The prestigious City of Los Angeles (C.O.L.A.) Fellowships honor a selection of the best of Los Angeles contemporary arts. These awards allow very accomplished artists to focus on creating a new work to be exhibited at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery in May of 2015. Uriu has been selected to be one of the speakers at the TxA Emerging Design + Technology Conference where Baumgartner+Uriu will make a presentation on Responsive Architectural Environments in Houston TEXAS.  Baumgartner+Uriu’s installation Apertures uses sensors and sound feedback loops to immerse the visitor in his or her own biorhythms. The TxA Emerging Design + Technology conference Nov7th-8th brings experimental research and exploration among academics and practitioners to a broad audience of designers, practicing architects, construction industry executives, building products manufacturers, students, and other researchers.

USC faculty member Laurel Consuelo Broughton (WELCOMEPROJECTS) presented work and participated in a symposium at Princeton SOA on November 15, 2014, titled “F_i_r_m_n_e_s_s_,_ _C_o_m_m_o_d_i_t_y_,_  & Delight,” along with Mark Foster Gage (Mark Foster Gage + Associates), Andrew Kovacs (Archive of Affinities), Jimenez Lai (Bureau Spectacular), and Michael Loverich (Bittertang).  On November 1st, 2014 Broughton’s project in collaboration with Andrew Kovacs, Gallery Attachment (www.galleryattachment.com) opened in Chinatown in Los Angeles with a corresponding show of drawings, As Builts at Jai and Jai Gallery. In October she released The Miranda, a collaboration with writer, director, and artist Miranda July with a short film that launched on Vogue.com.  As well throughout the fall, Laurel was also featured in the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design’s Out There Doing It which invites young architects to present their work in a series of events and discussions. 

The University of Southern California School of Architecture announces the appointment of Kelly Shannon as Director of the Master of Landscape Architecture Program and Landscape Architecture Discipline Head, effective January 1, 2015. She joins the USC faculty as Professor of Architecture. Dr. Shannon is currently Professor of Landscape Architecture in the Institute of Urbanism and Landscape of the Oslo School of Architecture. She also holds a part-time appointment as Professor of Urbanism, Faculty of Engineering, Department of Architecture at KU Leuven. “The landscape program at the USC School of Architecture has grown steadily, and with a new director as accomplished as Kelly Shannon, the program is poised for global impact in cross-disciplinary research and cross-territorial practice,” said Dean Qingyun Ma. The USC landscape architecture program has a longstanding commitment to urban and environmental discourse. Its impact has expanded with the leadership of retired director Robert Harris and through cross_-disciplinary connections with the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy and the Spatial Sciences Institute of the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. The Master of Landscape Architecture First Professional Curriculum and Advanced Standing Curriculum are accredited by the Landscape Architectural Accreditation Board.

USC Landscape Architecture student work proposing new uses for the Santa Monica Airport will be exhibited at the Writers Boot Camp Gallery, Bergamot Station, on Thursday, October 23, 6-9 pm. “Reimagining Santa Monica Airport – Part 1” features work from Christopher Sison, Chen Liu, Zeek Magallanes, and Yongdan Chunyu, all students from a USC graduate landscape architecture studio taught by Aroussiak Gabrielian. The exhibit is sponsored by Airport2Park, a coalition supporting the creation of a park on the land that is currently the Santa Monica Airport. First used informally as a landing strip by pilots flying WWI biplanes, the 227-acre site was the home of the Douglas Aircraft Company, and in the 1970s, it became a general aviation airport, currently serving about 300 people daily who fly privately. As the airport is surrounded on all sides by residential areas, noise and air pollution have long been local community issues. ‘’What is amazing about getting students involved in projects that address sites currently in transition, like the airport site, is the capacity of their visions to affect policy change, as well as provide advocacy of worthwhile community efforts through design speculation,” said Gabrielian.

Making the Most of Large In-Person ÒOne-ShotÓ Instruction Sessions

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Article submitted by Jesse Vestermark, Architecture and Environmental Design Librarian, California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo

Barbara Opar and Barret Havens, column editors

Editor’s note: The article which follows discusses a challenging situation for faculty in the design disciplines and librarians alike: how to gear students in large introductory classes up for doing college-level research during a brief, one-time library instruction session. Our colleague Jesse Vestermark shares some strategies for maximizing the impact of these “one-shot” scenarios.  

Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have received a lot of attention in the last few years, but what about large, in-person “one-shot” sessions?  These are instructional scenarios where a professional–in our case, librarian–is given the one-time opportunity to address a large introductory course.  Obviously, the larger the course, the more students a librarian can reach in one fell swoop, so there is much to be gained by carefully planning for the greatest impact.

As the librarian for the College of Architecture and Environmental Design at California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo, I have become something of a trial-by-fire veteran of this scenario, co-designing the course’s research assignments for our pass/fail Introduction to Environmental Design (EDES 101) course, which has ballooned from 300 students in 2011 to over 400 last fall.  Each year a different professor has taught the course and driven the assignment’s primary content, while I steered it in a direction that would provide a foundation for research fundamentals.

The first year, we devised what was easily the most complicated assignment, yet ironically towards the simplest end: to find a single book in the library on the topic of their interest.  However, for fear of bottlenecking on certain topics, authors, architects or books, the professor suggested a clever matrix puzzle for groups of 5 to solve by limiting their topic to a combination of discipline and first initial.

Example of a completed matrix puzzle using randomly chosen initials. Concept by Thomas Jones.

Once they identified a book on their topic, they weren’t required to check it out–simply photograph it sitting in the stacks. This made for an easy deliverable, but explaining the concept behind the matrix and shepherding 300 students into groups of five required a lot of work for the simple outcome of familiarizing them with the library’s organization.

In 2012, we went interactive, focused more on critical thinking, and expanded my participation to two class meetings, giving us the opportunity to expand in depth.  The first time I addressed the students, we covered the nuts and bolts of our discovery system–the recent makeover of our catalog that allowed them to find books and articles.  They were again allowed to pick their topic, but instead of a photo of a single book in the stacks, the professor had them find and cite nine sources:  three books, three articles, and three websites.

The instructor had also required the students to purchase remote voting devices commonly called “clickers” to allow the students to weigh in, multiple-choice-style, on class topics.  For the second session, students were asked use the clickers to rate various types of sources or source characteristics on a “spectrum of reliability” both in their own experience and along with a librarian/professor “live” discussion of academic resources such as trade articles, peer-reviewed articles and architecture firm websites.  This was a crucial step towards imparting the lifelong skill of critically evaluating information sources.

 

Visual representation of the results of the “spectrum of reliability” interactive exercise.

Last year, with a third completely different assignment, we were able to ramp up the depth of real-world source evaluation even as I was again limited to one class visit.  This time, students were asked to role-play and engage as a team in local mock-planning projects, representing either the city, the public, expert consultants or the design team.  I took the opportunity to focus most of the hour on explaining the clues, characteristics of and differences between the range of reliable sources their role-playing might lead them to encounter, including academic, professional, government documents as well as free information found via search engines. For example, the city might look at the general plans of other, similar cities, consultants may study more of the peer-reviewed literature, the public might start with free, web-based information and the design team may look at a little of everything.   I incorporated diagrams and images to illustrate universal concepts such as “stakes” and “biases” as they relate to the professions.  To illustrate stakes, I compiled the images on an “information timeline” using photos to illustrate that immediate Google results are adequate for settling pop culture debates but as the responsibilities and consequences of one’s professional life increase, so should the quality of the resources one consults.  For biases, I used the classic blind men and the elephant story.

 

Digitized version of original woodcut print “Blind Monks Examining an Elephant” by Hanabusa Itch_ available from the Library of Congress with “no known restrictions on publication in the U.S.”

We even examined the fine print of Wikipedia’s “Identifying reliable sources” page, which generalizes that the higher the degree of scrutiny, the more reliable a source is likely to be.

Instead of having the students use clickers to vote on the relative reliability of potential sources, I used mobile polling software, PollEverywhere, for which our library subscribes to a single higher-ed account that allows up to 400 respondents and instructor moderation.  Using PollEverywhere, I essentially gave them a three-question pretest and posttest assessment on appropriate source choices for different research scenarios.  I gave the students one of ten source choices, and the scenarios varied from seeking an at-a-glance overview on a topic to needing information that had been reviewed by experts.  The results suggest they listened and took my professional advice to heart.  For example, when asked the “best place to get detailed information that has been subject to expert editorial review” and given ten options, only about 35% of the 243 respondents chose “peer-reviewed publications” the first time around.  When asked the same question at the end of the class, exactly two-thirds of the 159 respondents chose “peer-reviewed publications.”

PRE-LECTURE:

POST-LECTURE:

 

Note from the reduced number of respondents that I found that when you request voluntary participation, their interest in voting wanes over the course of an early-morning hour.

Some of the keys to success in the evolution of these collaborative lessons were pretty straightforward, but not necessarily easy to execute with little face-to-face time and lots of students.  My primary advice is to plan ahead, collaborate, simplify, be flexible, interact with the audience, visualize, and practicalize.  I would also encourage a combination of humor, passion and variety while maintaining your professionality.  We all have strengths and weaknesses on those fronts, but above all, I’ve found that if I treat the material with earnestness, the students respond in kind.

 

Overwhelmed by Open Access: A Plea to Art and Architecture Librarians and Architecture Faculty

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Barbara Opar and Barret Havens, Column Editors

The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) is one of the organizations promoting Open Access Week, which takes place from October 20th through October 26th this year. They want us to be excited about having free and unfettered access to articles from thousands of scholarly periodicals. And I am! Who, among architecture librarians and architecture faculty wouldn’t be? But I’m also overwhelmed, because as librarians and faculty, it is our job to make sure that we’re guiding students to quality information (and using quality information ourselves!). And, though by most definitions, open access means online access to scholarly research, it isn’t always easy to determine whether a free online periodical is scholarly. This problem is compounded by the sheer volume of free periodicals out there, some of which would like to be perceived as scholarly, yet are not scholarly at all.

You may have encountered that sheer volume of periodicals, including some unfamiliar or questionable titles, as you have navigated the online resources of your academic library (or even mine). Even though we have the best of intentions, librarians are partly to blame for this. In order to provide access to as many periodicals as possible, some of us have added packages of hundreds or even thousands of freely accessible online journals to our holdings so that they will show up in our indexes, our library catalogs, and even our databases via a link resolver when full text articles aren’t available through the native interface of the database itself (the latter case includes The Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals, which doesn’t include full text–though, according to the Avery Library website, they are investigating the possibility of doing so in the future).

Among those massive packages of freely accessible journals that many academic libraries have incorporated into their holdings is the Directory of Open Access journals, which has its own criteria for vetting journals for reliability and making the somewhat subjective judgment of what is “scholarly.” However, some of the packages of journals that libraries have incorporated into their holdings aren’t associated with any organization that exercises strict oversight over quality control. They are simply packages that Serials Solutions or other companies that a library contracts with in order to manage access to online periodicals have made available.

Take, for instance, the package, Freely Accessible Arts & Humanities Journals, which is comprised of 1,262 periodicals currently. Included in that package are the titles Conservation Perspectives, which is published by The Getty, and Metropolis (which, though it is not a scholarly journal, is one that many of us would recommend for use by our students). But if a library adds the complete package Freely Accessible Arts & Humanities Journals to its holdings, along with quality publications like Conservation Perspectives and Metropolis, they will have added some publications that many of us might think twice about recommending to our students. For instance, Art Bin.

Unlike the websites of most scholarly publications, the Art Bin website offers no information assuring readers that it is affiliated with a university or a scholarly or professional organization. Nor is there any reference to a peer-review process or editorial criteria. Some articles in Art Bin do discuss art, but many cover random topics unrelated to fine arts such as the use of fluoride and mercury in dentistry or the history of distance learning (with no mention of its ramifications for the arts or architecture-related disciplines). Many librarians use Ulrich’s International Serials Directory to verify whether a publication is scholarly and/or peer-reviewed. However, Ulrich’s designates Art Bin as an “academic/scholarly” publication even though it seems to fall quite short of deserving that designation. Furthermore, Ulrich’s lists The Journal of Natural Pharmaceuticals as both “refereed” and “academic/scholarly.” Yet, that publication was one of many journals identified by a sting operation (“Who’s Afraid of Peer Review?”) for agreeing to publish the results of a bogus and quite far-fetched cancer study. So I have to take Ulrich’s recommendations with a grain of salt.

So, though all we intended to do is provide access to lots of high quality free and/or open access publications such as Metropolis and Conservation Perspectives, some libraries, mine included, have opened a Pandora’s box. In many fields, there are additional tools, beyond Ulrich’s, for judging the quality of publications. The Social Sciences Citation Index, for example, identifies high impact social science publications. There is no such resource in our subject discipline to help us to determine which among the hundreds of free online periodicals are scholarly and which are just free junk.

One solution to this problem would be simply to not enable access to these packages of journals. But since many of the journals in these packages are truly open access (scholarly and perpetually free), and even some of those that don’t qualify as open access are still high-quality, that would be like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Another solution would be to enable access to only those individual titles that the architecture librarian has determined to be reliable (Serials Solutions provides the option to choose journals from these packages title-by-title). But given the sheer volume of periodicals to investigate, this would be a full time job and many of us are spread too thin to accomplish this. Furthermore, new titles are being added to packages like Freely Accessible Arts & Humanities Journals on a monthly basis so the process of vetting the titles included in these packages would be ongoing.

Yet, if we don’t do the work of hand selecting titles from these freely available packages, it seems like the responsible thing to do would be to give our own students a “buyer beware” warning about the periodicals that their academic libraries have made accessible.  That just doesn’t seem right, does it? If we do decide to take on the task of vetting these titles, a lot of work must be done. This job is too big for a librarian. It is probably too big for any single group of librarians. It is likely to require collaboration between AASL and other relevant groups including the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS). Are there other solutions I haven’t considered? Has your school developed a way to deal with this challenge? Please let us know.

Barret Havens, Outreach and architecture subject specialist librarian, Woodbury University

University at Buffalo

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Banham Fellow Jordan Carver’s review of the September 11 museum, “Selfie of a Nation,” was published in the Avery Review: http://www.averyreview.com/issues/2/selfie-of-a-nation. He also had an exhibition opening at the Istanbul Design Biennial as part of Who Builds Your Architecture? The exhibit highlights migrant labor issues in the architecture profession by connecting architects and construction workers through the design process. http://2tb.iksv.org/proje.asp?id=51

In August, Associate Professor Despina Stratigakos presented a paper, “Architectural Propaganda and the Nazis as Colonial Builders in Norway” at the Art in Battle conference held at the KODE Art Museum in Bergen, Norway.  She also participated in the Feminist Futures symposium organized by the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. In October, Stratigakos and Kelly Hayes McAlonie presented “Architect Barbie: The Debate and Discussion 3 Years Later” at the American Institute of Architects in Washington, D.C.

Jin Young Song in partnership with MINIMAX Architects, the partner firm in South Korea, has been awarded a research grant for the master plan/housing innovation research from the government of Yangpyeong, S. Korea. Prof. Song will conduct an intensive research/design studio in Spring 2015. This studio is funded by the city, including a 5 day studio research trip to Korea.

In October, Nicholas B. Rajkovich presented a paper entitled “A Bicycle-Based Field Measurement System for the Study of the Urban Canopy Layer in Cuyahoga County, Ohio” at the 20th International Congress of Biometeorology in Cleveland, Ohio. The conference was sponsored by the International Society of Biometeorology, a forum for interdisciplinary collaboration among meteorologists, health professionals, biologists, climatologists, ecologists, and other scientists.

Clinical Assistant Professor Dennis Maher was an invited speaker at the 2014 Preston Thomas Memorial Symposium at Cornell University. The symposium explored the ancient phenomenon of spolia and its relevance to our present need for more sustainable and resilient human patterns of habitation. http://aap.cornell.edu/news-events/spolia-histories-spaces-and-processes-adaptive-reuse

The Albright-Knox Art Gallery has also acquired the first edition of his “House Anamnesis,” a suite of seven graphic works on canvas. Works in the suite propose the walls, floors, and ceilings of Maher’s ever-evolving Fargo House as agents of hallucinatory self-reflection.

Paul Battaglia has been appointed to the Underwriters Laboratories Standards Technical Panel for review of UL 1479 “Fire Tests of Penetration Firestops.” He also presented a paper, “Achieving acoustical comfort in restaurants,” to the Acoustical Society of America at their fall conference in Indianapolis on October 29. The data for the study was derived from student projects in the Aural Architecture seminar from spring term 2014.

Stephanie Davidson co-wrote an article with her sister, Tonya Davidson, a sociology professor at Ryerson University, entitled “Building by Design: A Critique of DIY Architecture.” The article is published in the current issue (volume 5, issue 2) of curb magazine, published by the University of Alberta (http://crsc.ualberta.ca/CurbMagazine.aspx).

University of Southern California

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Dr. David Gerber, Alvin Huang and Jose Sanchez, all Assistant Professors of Architecture at the USC School of Architecture recently co-chaired ACADIA 2014 | Design Agency, ACADIA’s annual conference at USC. 

Dr. Gerber published and co-edited a book Titled “Paradigms in Computing | Making Machines and Models for Design Agency in Architecture” with eVolo and ACTAR-D. He was also the first multiple recipient of Autodesk’s competitive IDEA studio research grant. Dr. Gerber is a current editor of two leading design and computing research journals Simulation and the International Journal of Architecture and Computing. Dr. Gerber was the chair of this years’ Simulation in Architecture and Urban design Symposium. Dr. Gerber has published his research this year in eCAADe, CAADRIA, ACADIA, SimAUD and numerous journals including Energy and Buildings, Automation and Construction, and Design Studies as well as been the editor of the proceedings for SimAUD and ACADIA. Dr. Gerber’s Parametric Design course at USC has won research and teaching support from Dassault Systems (3DS).

AIA Los Angeles (AIA|LA) announced the 2014 Design Awards winners on Wednesday evening, October 29, 2014.  The annual AIA Los Angeles Design Awards honor excellence in work built by Los Angeles architects (Design Awards) as well as work by Los Angeles designers as yet unbuilt (Next LA Awards). In both the Design and Next LA categories.  among the USC Architecture faculty winning awards for built work were Lawrence Scarpa, Lorcan O’Herlihy, Warren Techentin and Alvin Huang:  

Lawrence Scarpa (Brooks+Scarpa) for PICO PLACE, a 36-unit affordable housing project in Santa Monica for very low income tenants. The jury appreciated the idea of a certain responsiveness of the overall mass. “The project is cohesive but it has a lot of complexity. There’s an impression of openness from the street-side. Trade of tightness to achieve spaciousness within the public was a challenge.”

Lorcan O’Herlihy for the Edison Language Academy.  “The moves of this project are the right moves – said the jury. It’s a simple diagram, it could have been boring, but it adhered to its own principals and articulated in those pieces. It’s hard to do. The designers have created value within limited resources. Very clear ideas organize the whole and make it really easy to understand.” 

Warren Techentin for his project “La Cage aux Folles.” Located in the Materials & Applications courtyard exhibition gallery La Cage aux Folles explored the craft of pipe bending and joined form, computational procedures, and fabrication processes in the making of a 17 foot high structure which encouraged informal use and programming throughout its exhibition. This project is in collaboration with USC professor and structural engineer, Anders Carlson.  “It’s very original, sophisticated, and elegant project,” said the jury. “It’s very clever. It’s a wonderful folly. It’s magic.”

Alvin Huang of Synthesis Design+ Architecture won an award for unbuilt work for theDaegu Gosan Pulic Library. “The jury applauded this design for challenging the conventions of library typology. It is a very comprehensive and  resolute idea, both formally and spatially. The plasticity of the project allows it to reconfigure itself into a terrain for books. The projects articulates a library in the 21st century to accommodate books, data and a variety of elements – and figures out a way to make it seamless and useful.” 

In October, the Italian state television network RAI’s documentary on Lucrezia Borgia was televised, for which Prof. Diane Ghirardo was the historian of record. The documentary in part based upon  Prof. Ghirardo’s research, addresses Borgia’s entrepreneurial and reclamation activities in 16th century Italy, among other topics.  The Portuguese architectural publication, Arqa, published an article by Prof. Ghirardo on the restoration of Modern Movement architecture in the June 2014 issue, and also in 2014, the Polish architectural journal RecyklingIdee. Pismo spotecznie zaangazowane translated and published her essay on Manfredo Tafuri, which originally appeared in Perspecta in 2001. Her edited volume, Aldo Rossi’s Municipio a Borgoricco was published in November 2014 by the town of Borgoricco. 

Professors Goetz Schierle, Karen Kensek and Douglas Noble are preparing a book on tensile fabric structures co-edited with other USC faculty.

Hraztan Zeitlian received the  AIA California Council Presidential Citation Award on 10/23/2014, for having helped “ . . . confirm the architects’ role and responsibility to society on a larger scale. Your dedication on behalf of the architectural profession, and the future of design is deeply appreciated and recognized.”

Lecturer Andy Ku and his Los Angeles-based firm, OCDC have recently been commissioned to design a 3D printed housing prototype for a Hong Kong-based, consumer goods design and development company. In August, OCDC opened its first satellite office in Hong Kong. 

Lecturer Geoffrey von Oeyen is organizing a major event titled “Performative Composites: Sailing Architecture” at the USC School of Architecture on November 3 + 4. Through workshops, panel discussions, and an exhibition that includes the design of Greg Lynn’s new trimaran and the hydrofoil from an America’s Cup catamaran, this event explores how new materials and techniques in sailing, particularly carbon fiber composites, allow for designers to reconsider the multiplicity of spatial, formal, and environmental forces in architecture in important new ways. Presenters and panelists include Greg Lynn, Bill Kreysler, Bill Pearson, Kurt Jordan, Fred Courouble, Lynn Bowser, Bruno Belmont, Neil Smith, and Rick Pauer.

Assistant Professor Alvin Huang and his firm Synthesis Design + Architecture were awarded an AIA|LA NextLA Design Award for their Daegu Public Library Proposal at the annual AIA Los Angles Design Awards on October 29, 2014. Additionally, a 1/2 scale prototype of their Durotaxis Chair, a multi-material 3D printed chair that gradiates from soft to rigid was exhibited at the recent ACADIA Design Agency Conference at USC and has been featured in numerous publications including Dezeen, 3D Printing Industry, Inside 3D Printing, TCT Magazine, and others. Three additional projects (Chelsea Workspace, Daegu Public Library, and Pure Tension Pavilion) were also included in the peer-reviewed ACADIA exhibition, as well as the publication and presentation of a peer-reviewed paper entitled “Nearly Minimal: Intuition, Analysis, and Information.”

Eric Haas, Adjunct Associate Professor, presented his paper “Do We Have to Stick to the Script? : Cities, Surveying and Descripting” at the Mediated City Conference held at Woodbury University in October. Haas’s firm DSH was recently named a finalist in the Spark > Spaces 2014 Design Awards for the Larchmont Charter Lafayette Park school. The firm is beginning work on renovating a 1953 Neutra & Alexander building for use as a preschool.

Jose Sanchez has recently co-chaired Acadia 2014 Conference ‘Design Agency’, with speakers including Zaha Hadid, Will Wright and Casey Reas. In the event, he exhibited ‘Polyomino’, a 3d printed piece sponsored by Stratasys as part of the ‘From gaming to making’ research, connecting gaming technology with the maker movement.  Jose will be speaking in Autodesk University in Vegas in a panel dedicated to the future of technology and the integration of gaming in the world of design.

Christopher Warren, and his office, WORD, received an AIA|LA 2014 Design Merit Award for A.P.C. Melrose Place, an adaptive re-use project built for the French fashion label’s Los Angeles flagship store – in collaboration with A.P.C. New York and Laurent Deroo Architecte, Paris.

Douglas Noble and Karen Kensek received the AEP Educator Award from the California Council of the AIA. 

Assistant Professor Alison Hirsch will be lecturing on her recent book, City Choreographer: Lawrence Halprin in Urban Renewal America (University of Minnesota, 2014), at the Graham Foundation in Chicago on December 4th (6pm). The event will also serve as a book launch and signing.  

Ken Breisch has been named as Co-chair of a Task Force to Develop Guidelines for Evaluating Digital Art and Architectural History Scholarship for Promotion and Tenure.  This study is co-sponsored by the Society of Architectural Historians and the College Art Association and has been funded with a grant from the Mellon Foundation.

University of Southern California

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The USC School of Architecture faculty Alvin Huang, Jose Sanchez, and David Gerber hosted and chaired this years’ ACADIA annual conference entitled Design Agency. The event was the most widely attended in history with 545 participants including, students, professionals, and academics from every continent. The conference peer review accepted 74 papers and 50 projects from a very competitive pool. The event had keynote and awardee lectures including Zaha Hadid, Casey Reas (UCLA), Will Wright (of SimCity fame), Neil Gershenfeld (MIT) Nancy Cheng (UofO), Jenny Sabin (Cornell), and Marc Fornes. During the week of events 10 workshops were supported by NBBJ, SOM, Zaha Hadid Architects, Woods Baggot, Autodesk, Formlabs, Marc Fornes, Roland Snooks,and Robots in Architecture. The conference included an exhibition in part sponsored by Stratasys with an amazing collection of 3D prints on display including works from Alvin Huang, Jose Sanchez, and David Gerber. The event culminated with a day long Hackathon lead by Jose Sanchez.

Montana State University

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The School of Architecture is pleased to announce that Assistant Professor Dr. Susanne Cowan has joined the faculty at Montana State University. She received her B.A. in Landscape Architecture, and her Ph.D. in the History of Architecture and Urbanism, both from the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on the relationship between urban design and the social conditions of cities, particularly regarding participatory democracy as a method for making city planning and policy decisions.

In her dissertation, “Democracy, Technocracy and Publicity: Public Consultation and British Planning, 1939-1951”, Susanne explores how architects and town planners created a forum for democratic debate about new planning policies. She recently completed an oral history documentary film, “Design as a Social Act,” which examines how architects have approached the social needs of users in the design process. In her most recent work, she has been tracing the ways that planning policies in de-industrializing cities have shaped the process of urban decay and gentrification, and what positive or negative impacts urban design interventions have had on social and economic conditions of residents.

Susanne’s interest in participatory design grows from her commitment to professional activism in the design of the built environment, demonstrated in her work as an environmental educator for Americorps, and her training as a facilitator for collaborative policy-making.

Teaching Professor John R. (Jack) Smith, ARCH.D., FAIA, NCARB, received a 2014 Citation Award from the AIA Montana Design Awards Program for his House III project in Hulen Meadows, Idaho and a 2014 AIA Idaho Honor Award.

Associate Teaching Professor Chere LeClair, AIA, NCARB, LEED AP was elected as the Northwest and Pacific AIA Regional Director.

Graduate student, Kluane Weibel, received a Merit Award for her project titled “Artic Dwelling” at the AIA Regional Student Leadership Institute Meeting.  Kluane’s advisors were Associate Professors Maire O’Neill and Chris Livingston and Professor Ralph Johnson.

Assistant Professor Bradford Watson, Associate Professor Mike Everts, and Professor John C Brittingham presented at the ACSA International Conference in Seoul Korea.  Assistant Professor Watson presented “Displaced Territories with Sean Burkholder from UBC, Associate Professor Everts presented “Creating Hybrid Programs and Predicting Their Evolution Through 4D Parametric Analysis” and Professor Brittingham presented “Unlikely Partnerships.”

Professor Fatih Rifki presented “Genesis and Epicenter of Renaissance: Florence versus Istanbul” at the 4th Annual International Conference on Architecture in Athens, Greece.

University of Arkansas

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Peter Mackeith  Begins Tenure As Dean Of The Fay Jones School Of Architecture

 

Peter MacKeith began his appointment July 1, 2014, as the new dean of the Fay Jones School of Architecture at the University of Arkansas. He arrives in the school after a distinguished 15-year career at the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, where he rose to tenured full professor and associate dean. He is an internationally recognized design educator whose work encompasses architectural design, design research and publication, and exhibition curation and design. He has spent 25 years as a liaison between the design cultures of the United States and the Nordic nations, particularly Finland.

Links to interviews and announcements about Peter may be found here:

Marlon Blackwell, Distinguished Professor and head of the Department of Architecture in the Fay Jones School of Architecture, has received a $50,000 fellowship grant from United States Artists, a national grant-making and advocacy organization. United States Artists awards several fellowships each year, under names such as Ford, Rockefeller and Knight. Blackwell, who was awarded a Ford Fellowship, is one of 34 artists to receive a 2014 United States Artists fellowship. The Fellows were selected from 116 nominated artists living in the United States and Puerto Rico and were chosen by a panel of expert peers in each artistic discipline. Blackwell, honored in the Architecture and Design category, is a nationally and internationally recognized teacher and one of the nation’s most respected regional modernist architects. He is founder and principal at Marlon Blackwell Architects, based in Fayetteville. Blackwell is the second faculty member from the Fay Jones School to receive this prestigious honor from United States Artists. Steve Luoni, director of the University of Arkansas Community Design Center and a Distinguished Professor, was named a Ford Fellow in 2012. The Fay Jones School joins the ranks of Columbia University, the University of California, Los Angeles and Southern California Institute of Architecture for having multiple members of their faculty selected in the USA Fellows program since it began in 2006.

For additional information, see: http://newswire.uark.edu/articles/25586/blackwell-named-ford-fellow-in-united-states-artists-fellowship-program

 

Vol Walker Hall Project Short-Listed for 2014 World Architecture Festival Awards

The home of the Fay Jones School of Architecture – the renovated Vol Walker Hall with its new addition, the Steven L. Anderson Design Center – has been chosen as a finalist in the 2014 World Architecture Festival Awards, the world’s largest architecture design awards program serving the global community.

More than 400 projects from more than 40 countries were short-listed across 31 individual award categories for the festival, to be held this week in Singapore. The Vol Walker Hall project is one of 16 short-listed projects in the Higher Education and Research category. This project is the only one in its category to represent the United States.

For additional information, see: http://newswire.uark.edu/articles/25335/vol-walker-hall-project-short-listed-for-2014-world-architecture-festival-awards


Fay Jones School Architecture Program Receives Eight-Year Reaccreditation from National Board

The professional Bachelor of Architecture program in the Fay Jones School of Architecture recently was granted an eight-year term of reaccreditation by the National Architectural Accrediting Board.

“The team believes that the Fay Jones School of Architecture provides an active learning environment that emphasizes knowledge through drawing, modeling, and experiential design,” stated the visiting team in its summary. “Administration, faculty, and students are committed to design for a new decade that engages community, new technologies, and environmental awareness. The team was impressed with the vitality of the student body, their dedication to community engagement and sustainability, and their passion for architecture.”

In July, the National Architectural Accrediting Board met to review the Visiting Team Report, the product of a three-member team’s visit to the Fay Jones School in February. The directors of the National Architectural Accrediting Board voted to continue full accreditation for the new maximum term of eight years. The Fay Jones School architecture program is scheduled for its next accreditation visit in 2022

For additional information, see: http://newswire.uark.edu/articles/25087/fay-jones-school-architecture-program-receives-eight-year-reaccreditation-from-national-board 

Marc Manack and Frank Jacobus, both assistant professors of architecture in the Fay Jones School of Architecture and co-principals of the architecture firm SILO AR+D, have won an award for their project, the Super Sukkah.

Their project was one of the 10 cutting-edge sukkahs selected in the competition, “Sukkah City STL 2014: Between Absence and Presence.” The 10 winning projects, chosen from a field of 33 entries, were created both by individuals and teams of architects and designers from around the country. The winning projects of the competition will be on display from Oct. 7 to 12 at Washington University in St. Louis. Each winning entry receives a $1,000 honorarium to defray construction costs.

For additional information, see: http://newswire.uark.edu/articles/25417/fay-jones-school-professors-design-among-winners-at-sukkah-city-stl-2014 


Creative Corridor Project in Little Rock Honored by American Society of Landscape Architects

A plan to transform four neglected blocks of Main Street in downtown Little Rock into an arts district has won a 2014 Honor Award from the American Society of Landscape Architects. Faculty and staff members of the Fay Jones School of Architecture at the University of Arkansas designed this award-winning work.

The Creative Corridor, designed by the University of Arkansas Community Design Center and Marlon Blackwell Architect won an Honor Award for Analysis and Planning, one of five awarded. This is the design center’s sixth ASLA award and the fifth that they have received in this category. The ASLA award represents the highest recognition in landscape architecture design and planning open to North American organizations for work underway worldwide. Thirty-four award-winning projects were selected from more than 600 entries.

For additional information, see: http://newswire.uark.edu/articles/25463/creative-corridor-project-in-little-rock-honored-by-american-society-of-landscape-architects


Fay Jones School Partners With Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art

Fay Jones School of Architecture students and faculty have a unique opportunity to be involved with the public display of a 60-year-old house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville acquired the Bachman Wilson House, built in 1954 near the Millstone River in New Jersey. It has been disassembled and transported to the museum’s 120-acre grounds, where it is being reconstructed. This home is one of Wright’s “Usonian Houses,” a group of 60 middle-income family homes that were typically small, single-story structures with no garage and minimal storage. They used native materials, flat roofs and cantilevered overhangs, and emphasized a strong visual connection between interior and exterior spaces.

In collaboration with Crystal Bridges, Fay Jones School students, led by Santiago R. Pérez, Assistant Professor and 21st Century Chair in Integrated Practice, are in the final “prefabrication phase” of a three-semester effort to design, develop and fabricate a small architectural interpretation pavilion for the Bachman Wilson House reconstruction on the museum grounds.

This initiative is a confluence of “Design-Build” and “Digital-Fabrication” cultures and practices, informed by Usonian principles, into a hybrid DESIGNFAB practice model, championed by Pérez. In conjunction with the Pavilion project, Pérez delivered a lecture at Crystal Bridges titled “Rethinking Wright: Adapting Usonian Principles in 21st Century Architecture.”

In addition, during the fall 2014 semester, Fay Jones School students will analyze and document the reconstruction of the house for inclusion in the Historic American Buildings Survey, under the leadership of professor Greg Herman.

For additional information, see: http://newswire.uark.edu/articles/23407/fay-jones-school-partners-with-crystal-bridges-museum-of-american-art 

http://newswire.uark.edu/articles/24337/perez-to-present-rethinking-wright-lecture-at-crystal-bridges-on-may-21

 

University of Southern California

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Aroussiak Gabrielian presented her research, Mediated Visions: The City Re-Imag(in)ed, at the Mediated City Conference which took place in Los Angeles in early October.  Her paper from the conference was selected for publication in the peer reviewed Journal of Architecture, Media, Politics and Society.  Student work from Aroussiak’s Spring semester landscape studio, Transient Topographies, was exhibited at the Writers Bootcamp Gallery at Bergamont Station in Santa Monica in mid-October.  Aroussiak also served as a facilitator at the 5D Worldbuilding Institute’s, Spaces of Fiction Conference, which took place at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, where she is currently an Annenberg Fellow and Ph.D candidate. 

Jennifer Siegal, Adjunct Associate Professor, gave a GoogleTechTalk and exhibited the AERO-Mobile (a moveable retail environment made of up-cycled parts discarded by the aerospace industry) at Google Los Angeles. Commissioned by the Kaneko museum in Omaha, NE as part of the Truck-A-Tecture exhibition, the project was exhibited at Theatrum Mundi “Designing for Free Speech” in NYC and “To Be Destroyed” at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Toronto.

Vittoria Di Palma has been invited to give a talk on the subject of her new book, Wasteland, A History (Yale: 2014) at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design, as part of the Cambridge Talks IX conference, “Inscriptions of Power: Spaces, Institutions, and Crisis,” which will be held from April 2-3, 2015.  http://cambridgetalks2015.wordpress.com/ 

Drawings and models by Lorcan O’Herlihy have been added to the Carnegie Museum of Art’s permanent collection.  They will be exhibited in early 2015 as part of Sketch to Structure.  This exhibit unfolds the architectural design process to show how buildings take shape. With sketches, plans, blueprints, renderings, and models from the Heinz Architectural Center collection, this exhibition reveals that architectural design, from initial concept to client presentation, isn’t straightforward. Beautiful hand-drawn sketches by Lorcan O’Herlihy show an architect quickly capturing ideas about shapes and color. Pencil drawings of the Los Angeles County Hall of Records by Richard Neutra show a master draftsman at work. And watercolors by Steven Holl of a client’s home render in beautiful detail, on a single sheet of paper, the planned building’s exterior, floor plan, and elevation.

Erik Mar has been designing the new 15,000 sf South Whittier Library since April; it’s targeting LEED Platinum and is now in Plan Check. He will start on the new 7,000 sf Los Nietos Library in November. Both are for the LA County Public Library, and are 2 out of the 3 all new libraries funded by Supervisor Knabe’s $45 million project: Operation Libraries. http://knabe.com/issues/operation-libraries/#.VE0heoeBndk 

On October 9, Ted Bosley moderated a workshop entitled “Authenticity in the Age of Sustainability” at the annual international historic house museum conference (DEMHIST), held this year in Compiegne, France. Attending were colleagues from the National Trust (UK), the European Association of Royal Residences (ARRE), and numerous historic sites around the world.

Neil Leach has recently published an issue of Architectural Design on Space Architecture, together with two papers for the 2014 Acadia conference. He is currently on leave from USC as a Visiting Professor at Harvard GSD.

Texas A&M University

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Professor Shelley Holliday has been appointed by the Department Head, Professor Ward Wells, as the Associate Department Head for Undergraduate Programs in the Department of Architecture, Texas A&M University. Professor Holliday is currently a senior lecturer and has been on faculty since spring 2000.  Her areas of interest include structural steel, structural and material detailing, bridging the architecture/engineering gap, and interdisciplinary design. Professor Holliday has been honored to receive many teaching awards, the latest most distinguished award being the Distinguished Achievement Award for excellent teaching Spring 2013.

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