Auburn University

David Hill, assistant professor of landscape architecture in the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture and principal at D.I.R.T. studio, was a Resource Team member in the 59th National Session of the Mayor’s Institute on City Design (MICD), June 4-6, 2014, in Louisville, KY. MICD, a National Endowment for the Arts Leadership Initiative in partnership with the American Architectural Foundation and the United State Conference of Mayors, organizes two-and-a-half-day sessions in which mayors engage leading design experts in case-study problems to find solutions to the most critical design challenges facing their cities. For more, click here. 

David Hill’s award-winning repurposing and renovation of a warehouse into his stunning home on Bragg Avenue is profiled in the July/August 2014 issue of Dwell. Read “Family-Friendly Renovation of a Brick Warehouse in Alabama by clicking here.

Cheryl Morgan, Auburn architecture alumna, professor and director of the Urban Studio, was inducted into the American Institute of Architects College of Fellows at an Investiture Ceremony at the 2014 National AIA Convention in Chicago on June 27.    Prof. Morgan was nominated for the College of Fellows by the Birmingham Chapter of the AIA, in recognition of her innovative approaches to instruction and outreach and the impact of her work in these arenas on the careers of her students and in the lives of small towns and communities across the state, region and nation. Morgan’s non-traditional approach to teaching has evolved through her thirty years of studio teaching and through her work with under-served people and places in Alabama. For more, read here.

Professor and Chair of Architecture Behzad Nakhjavan recently participated in the Washington University architecture alumni exhibition titled ”Drawing.”   The intent of the exhibit was to show a range of interpretations of what drawing means today from sketches and conceptual drawings to construction and fabrication drawings.

The School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture’s summer edition of the newsletter has been released. To catch up on our amazing alumni, diverse faculty, and hard-working students, please visit StudioAPLA.

Rural Studio projects and alumni have been featured  in different publications recently: The Lions Park Scout Hut in Architectural Record: the 20K House project is featured in GreenBuildingAdvisor: and Rural Studio Alum Daniel Splaingard reflects on his time at the Rural Studio.

University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Associate Professor Mohamed Boubekri was selected as a 2014-15 Fulbright Scholar.  He will be working in building technology at Arel University in Turkey.   

Assistant Professor Kenny Cupers has authored/edited two new publications: Use Matters: An Alternative History of Architecture (Routledge, 2013, ed.); and The Social Project: Housing Postwar France (University of Minnesota Press, 2014, author).  

Assistant Professor Kenny Cupers also received full funding from the Campus Research Board for six-weeks of summer travel for his continued research on “Architectural Modernism and Environmental Science in Imperial Germany.”

 

Associate Professor Lynne Dearborn has received the 2013-2014 Campus Award for Excellence in Public Engagement in recognition for her work of many years with public and community organizations in the Midwest and internationally, including the Land of Lincoln Legal Assistance in St. Clair County, the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians, and the Olivette Park Neighborhood Association.  In addition, she has been invited by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture to be the lead instructor in the ACSA Haiti Design Challenge International Service-Learning Studio in the summer of 2014.  

Assistant Professor Kevin Erickson was recently invited by actress Bette Midler and her non-profit organization the New York Restoration Project (NYRP) to participate in a design competition for a boat storage facility and outdoor classroom in Sherman Creek Park along the Harlem River in Upper Manhattan, along with eight other emerging New York based architects. In addition, Kevin was also invited by Winnipeg-based 5468796 Architecture to collaborate in their Canadian Prix de Rome Prize Project “Table for Twelve,” a traveling research project that invited prominent voices in eight international cities to discuss the factors that create a strong commitment to architecture in these places. Kevin hosted the NYC dinner along with Kyle May, editor of CLOG Journal.  

The urban design work of Associate Professor Erik Hemingway was a Selected Featured Project for the 2013 Lisbon Architecture Triennial, Open Professional Category International Competition.  Hemingway’s residential design work was 1 of 54 International projects selected for the publication Global Architecture Houses Project 2014 A.D.A. Edita, Tokyo.  His project was also featured in the exhibition at Global Architecture Gallery, Tokyo, Japan.

Associate Professor Paul Kapp was selected as a 2013-14 Fulbright scholar.  He is currently completing his resident research at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom.    Associate Professor Paul Kapp was also the keynote speaker at the Sixth International Conference on Industrial Heritage at the University of Rijeka in Rijeka, Croatia on April 25, 2014.

 

Associate Professor Joy Malnar’s co-authored book New Architecture on Indigenous Lands (University of Minnesota Press, 2013) was reviewed by Choice and the Art Libraries Society of North America. It was also listed on A Daily Dose of Architecture as one of John Hill’s select group of recommendations for the 2013 year. During the 2014 summer she will be giving presentations on her book at the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA) Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas and at the AIA 2014 National Convention in Chicago. Her article, “Architectural Design for Living Artifacts,” was published in Multi-sensory Museum: A Cross-disciplinary Perspective on Multiple Modalities of a Museum Experience edited by Dr. Pascual-Leone and Dr. Nina v. K. Levent (AltaMira, Press, 2014). She will be presenting material from this chapter at the The Inclusive Museum Conference in Los Angeles. Her book, Sensory Design (University of Minnesota Press, 2004) was the topic of Cyrus Stuart Kerr’s paper, “A review of the evidence on the importance of sensory design for intelligent buildings,” in the journal Intelligent Buildings International, 2013 Vol. 5, No. 4, 204–212. She will be a keynote speaker at the ScentWorld conference in New York.

 

Associate Professor Heather Minor has been awarded full funding from the Research Board for summer research for her project entitled “The Art of Winckelmann: Preliminary Research.”  

Professor and dF Chair Jeffery Poss, received a Mies Van Der Rohe Special Recognition Award for his project Meditation Hut III “Victor” in the 2014 AIA Honor Awards. The design award recognizes innovation in overall concept design or detail.

 

The Nathan Clifford Ricker Award recognized Assistant Professor Mark Taylor, Associate AIA, of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, for his dedication and talent as an AIA Associate member architecture educator in Illinois. A large component of Taylor’s humanitarian work in Haiti and in the agricultural U.S. has an educational component, and he often brings his research into the classroom where he hopes to inspire the next generation of architects to work with underserved communities. His students at the University of Illinois welcome the opportunities he provides to use their skills in real-world situations, such as an assessment of a hospital partially destroyed by the 2010 Haitian Earthquake and the development of a new master plan. Taylor also aims to reach a wider audience through online open source resources and informative videos.  

Assistant Professor Mark Taylor was recognized at the 2014 AIA Illinois Honor Awards and received the Nathan Clifford Ricker Honor Award for his dedication and talent as an AIA Associate member architecture educator. He consistently brings his humanitarian work in Haiti and in the agricultural U.S into the classroom, to inspire the next generation of architects to work with underserved communities.  Taylor also aims to reach a wider audience through online open source resources and informative videos.

 

Assistant Professor Therese Tierney has received Honorable Mention award from the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH) Prizes for her research entitled “Reappropriating Social Media: Internet Activism, Counterpublics & Implications”, April 8, 2014.  

 Assistant Professor Thérèse Tierney also had an Invited Interview: “Is Paris a Smarter City than New York?” PRIME HubTech, August 23, 2013

Assistant Professor Tierney recently authored, “Will 3D Printing RevolutionizeArchitecture?,” Illinois MakerLab, BIF Design Education, February 6, 2014. In addition, she was an Invited Lecturer and Panel Moderator: “How Can Big Data Boost Urban Resilience?” The conference was organized by California France Forum on Energy Efficiency Technologies (CaFEET), Stanford University, CA, November 22, 2013.    

Assistant Professor Marci Uihlein has received full funding from the Campus Research Board for her research on “The Structural Engineer as Designer: Architecture’s Creative Partner.”   

Assistant Professor Marci Uihlein received the 2013 Building Technology Educators’ Society (BTES) Emerging Faculty Award.  This national award recognizes a “rising educator in building technology education who has demonstrated particular excellence in teaching and innovation during the formative years of their architectural teaching career.” 

 

On the Urbana campus, Lorado Taft’s Alma Mater bronze sculpture has been restored and re-dedicated. For the school’s contribution to the dedication time capsule, Visiting Instructor Brian Vesely designed a  “Primitive Hut” artifact of hydraulic cement cast into a 3D printed mold. The surface articulation on the sides of the artifact is binary code – a protruding sphere indicating 1, and a subtracted sphere indicating 0. The binary code describes the School’s Spring 2014 Lecture Series.  

Heritage Architecture, China’s first ever multi-disciplinary journal on historic preservation, has named ACSA Distinguished Professor James Warfield as featured columnist for the quarterly publication.  “Value in the Vernacular” will begin “The Warfield Column” in the premier issue of the journal in Summer 2014.          

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

University of Southern California

Dr. Joon-Ho Choi was recently selected for the ARCC New Investigator Award in 2014. His research, entitled “Human-Building Integration for Assessment of Indoor Environmental Quality for Human Health and Environmental Sustainability:  Pupil-Size Based Visual Environment Control in the Workplace” was submitted and reviewed as an emerging and innovative research topic. This experimental research provides unique knowledge concerning how an individual’s physiological signals can be translated to estimate his/her visual sensation and comfort level, as a function of pupil sizes, their fluctuations, and time frequencies. Therefore, the research outcome will be potentially applicable as a control and diagnostic tool for designing a workplace environment, where the occupants’ environmental health, work productivity, and energy performance are critical.

Professor Kyle Konis, Ph.D, AIA was invited by the Illuminating Engineering Society (IES) to speak at its annual conference, Nov. 2-4 in Pittsburgh on the topic of daylighting design impacts on health.

Jose Sanchez is coordination a session and presenting at Smart Geometry in Hong Kong. He is also presenting in the ‘Serious Games’ conference at USC cinema school.

Anders Carlson recently presented his concepts for an interactive seismic map at the national workshop, “New Audiences, New Products for the National Seismic Hazard Maps” sponsored by the Science Application for Risk Reduction Project. Researchers in 18 fields were gathered to discuss opportunities and he proposed a map or app that would allow users to see the strongest shaking a building has felt, what it is expected to feel, and an estimate of what level of shaking it was designed to resist.

Adjunct Associate Professor of Architecture, Yo-ichiro Hakomori, and landscape architecture professor Takako Tajima conducted a joint 2 week urban design workshop with USC graduate landscape students and graduate architecture students from Meiji University School of International Architecture and Urban Design in June of this year.  Participants examined a development project by Forest City Enterprises in downtown San Francisco at the epicenter of urban transformation south of Market Street.  During the visit to San Francisco, students received a tour of the site and presentation of the project by the developer, as well as visits to Gensler, SOM, and AECOM.  The design workshop was later conducted on the campus of USC with a final presentation to the developer of the work produced by the students via Skype.  “I was so impressed with the level of detail and creativity the students were able to produce in such a short period of time.” says the Project Manager from Forest City. 

This spring, Chris Warren taught a studio in Como, Italy for the USC MXP Study Abroad in Italy program.  Also, in June, the construction was completed on A.P.C. Melrose Place, a new 2,500sf flagship store for the French clothier.  He is in now in the process of completing new stores in Downtown LA and Silverlake for the retailer, as well as moving into construction on a new home in Venice.

Patrick Tighe Architecture was shortlisted for the 2014 World Architecture / Inside Award. The shortlisted projects and the winners to be lauded at the World Architecture Festival in Singapore in the Fall. Patrick Tighe Architecture also recently completed 2 stores for fashion designer Rick Owens, a flagship store in Milan and another shop in London.

Mic Patterson is on the scientific review committee for Glasscon Global, which just completed its inaugural three-day conference in Philadelphia in July, and where he presented a paper entitled: The Millennium IGU: “Regenerative Concept for a 1000-Year Insulated Glass Unit,” and chaired a session “energy performance of buildings influenced by glass.” Mic is also in the Advisory Group for the Council for Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, and will attend their world congress in Shanghai in September, where he will present another paper: “Curtainwall Lifecycles: Evaluating Durability and Embodied Energy.” 

Mario Cipresso AIA was recently a juror for the 2014 AIA Orange County Student Design Competition.

Rob Ley and his firm, Urbana, recently completed a 13,000 s.f. interactive facade for Eskenazi Hospital in Indianapolis, IN.  The project and design methodologies behind its inception and fabrication will be presented at this years’s ACADIA Conference, held at USC, October 23-25, 2014 

Professor G. Goetz Schierle is preparing a research grant and book on Fabric Structures

Gail Peter Borden won three grants [USC-URAP and two USC-URSPs] to support his work in material age and surface and was named one of 100 Notable Professors at Top Research Universities, [the only architect on the list] by onlinephd.org. He has been selected to participate in the prestigious Dallas based Architect vs. Artist Exhibition and will serve as a juror for the ongoing Marfa Housing competition.

Susanna Seierup has begun design on a new residential project in Santa Cruz, California. 

Eric Nulman recently presented his paper “Pedagogy at Full-Scale” at the 2014 ACSA International Conference in Seoul, Korea. The paper considers the value of full-scale prototyping in architectural education, and outlines an alternative model of pedagogy that utilizes prototyping exercises to cultivate material agency in studio projects. The presentation highlighted recent undergraduate coursework completed at USC, and how full-scale exercises were employed as an instructional tool towards achieving a desired learned outcome. 

Alexander Robinson recently negotiated and arranged for the signing of a joint research agreement between the USC School of Architecture and the Los Angeles branch of the Army Corps of Engineers, with the intention of strengthening and supporting a collaborative research program on the future revitalization of the Los Angeles River.  Also, following a successful studio review about the sourcing the water for the Los Angeles River with the attendance of nearly a dozen Los Angeles City officials Alexander was invited to become a stakeholder in the One Water LA planning effort and attend and comment on a landmark planning effort about the future integration of water in Los Angeles. 

Vinayak Bharne spoke on his recent book Zen Spaces and Neon Places: Reflections on Japanese Architecture and Urbanism at the USC Pacific Asia Museum on July 20. He is also one of the invited contributors to the forthcoming 50th Issue of the DOCOMOMO Journal. Bharne’s article titled “Rereading Our Recent Past: Notes on Chandigarh and New Gourna” examines the ongoing dilemmas surrounding the future of two contemporaneous iconic modern places, Le Corbusier’s largest urban project in India, and Hassan Fathy’s groundbreaking adobe village in Egypt.

Scott Uriu’s firm Baumgartner+Uriu has been feature at the Morphos “Sustainable Empires” exhibition at the Palazzo Albrizzi in Venice, Italy in collaboration with the International ArtExpo which opened June 6th, 2014.   

Douglas Noble and Karen Kensek coordinated a four-day architecture licensing workshop in Los Angeles in May.  Twenty-eight classes were taught to more than 800 attendees.  Kensek and Noble have been organizing licensing programs for just over seven years, with more than 325 class taught and over 12,500 participants.  There are 2000 members of the “Not Licensed Yet” group, known as NotLY.  Whenever a member becomes licensed, they are ceremoniously thrown out of the group.  NotLY received an ACSA award in March, and was the subject of a presentation at the AIA National Convention in Chicago in June.

Assistant Professor Alvin Huang has been featured as a “Next Progressive” by ARCHITECT Magazine in a 5-page profile & interview entitled “The Synthesis of Digital Craft” in the June 2014 issue of the magazine. Additionally, his firm Synthesis Design + Architecture has recently won a public art commission for the Silver Line Metro in Los Angeles.  He is currently co-chairing the 2014 ACADIA Conference with David Gerber and Jose Sanchez (October 23-26 in Los Angeles).

 

University at Buffalo

Robert G. Shibley, dean of the University at Buffalo’s School of Architecture and Planning, has received the American Institute of Architects’ Thomas Jefferson Award for Public Architecture in recognition of his contributions to design excellence in public architecture over 40 years of teaching, scholarship and critical practice. The prestigious lifetime achievement award was bestowed at the 2014 AIA National Convention in Chicago on Thursday, June 26, 2014. The jury cited Shibley’s leadership and broad-based community collaboration to produce award-winning plans for Buffalo that have spurred new investment and elevated public expectations for design and planning. As UB’s campus architect, Shibley led the development of an ambitious campus master plan that sets new standards for campus architecture. An internationally noted scholar, Shibley has translated this work into models, best practices and case studies for application across the disciplines of architecture and planning. Read more at http://ap.buffalo.edu/news/shibley_thomas-jefferson-award.html

Shibley was also recently recognized by the American Institute of Architects New York State for his design influence on public architecture across the state. He is the first recipient of the AIANYS’s Nelson Aldrich Rockefeller Award, which honors architects employed in the public sector in New York State for their contributions to design excellence in public architecture. The award is part of the inaugural Excelsior Awards for Public Architecture, established by the AIANYS and state contracting agencies to provide models for future state-funded building design and professional practice and advocacy. Among other things, the jury cited Shibley’s contributions over the past 32 years as a public architect in service to UB and the region and state that hosts it. In particular, Shibley’s leadership of the UB campus master plan and his innovative use of design competitions was highlighted for elevating expectations for quality architecture at UB and in the Buffalo region. Read more at http://ap.buffalo.edu/news/shibley_nelsonrockefeller.html

Two UB architecture faculty members have won internationally-prominent lifetime achievement awards for their “significant and lasting” contributions to environmental design research, practice and teaching. Lynda Schneekloth, professor emerita of architecture, and Sue Weidemann, PhD, visiting professor of architecture, have each been honored with a 2014 Career Award from the Environmental Design Research Association, a worldwide interdisciplinary organization concerned with the inter-relationships of people with their built and natural surroundings. Schneekloth, who joined UB’s architecture department in 1982, is widely regarded for advancing the dynamics of professional and citizen engagement in placemaking through reflective practice, scholarship, and teaching. She has made significant contributions to environmental design research and practice through the reconceptualization of knowledge and the role of the imaginal in making and unmaking places. For the past 35 years, Weidemann, an environmental psychologist, has focused her practice, research and teaching on the relationships between people and the places and spaces they use. Her contributions to the field include pioneering research on housing satisfaction and workplace design and the development of widely cited social science- and survey-based design methodologies. Read more at http://ap.buffalo.edu/news/edra_careerawards.html

Jordan Geiger published his essay and in-progress project, “Niagora,” for the inaugural issue of the Applied Research Practices in Architecture Journal. ARPA journal is an online resource organized by the Columbia University GSAPP. “Niagora” explores  US/Canadian border crossings as sites of opportunity for redevelopment, with the introduction of electronic toll collection and pass control services. http://arpajournal.gsapp.org/niagora/

Georg Rafailidis presented a paper on the project ‘Free Zoning’ at the annual Atmospheres symposium at the University of Manitoba earlier this year. He also presented a paper documenting the first year design studios he coordinated at the 30th annual National Conference on the Beginning Design Student at the Illinois Institute of Technology and will also present the work at the ACSA Fall conference later this year in Halifax, Canada at Dalhousie University. Rafailidis also presented his research on corbelled structures at the fifth annual Sustainable Structures Conference at Portland State University. He received a McDowell Colony fellowship and was a resident from March to April of this year for his research on corbelled structures and the integration of Phase Change Material into ceramic building blocks. In addition, the project MirrorMirror designed by Davidson Rafailidis is the winner of two 2014 AZ Design Excellence Awards, earning both the “People’s Choice Award” and an “Award of Merit” in the Temporary Architecture category sponsored by the design magazine Azure. The project is in the July/August issue of the magazine. MirrorMirror was set-up at the Albright Knox Art Gallery in June and is currently installed at Canalside in downtown Buffalo. It will return to the New Museum in New York for the 2015 IDEAS City Festival. Georg Rafailidis was selected as a participant in the 24th Biennial of Design at the Museum of Architecture and Design (MAO) in Ljubljana, Slovenia in September this year.

Jin Young Song’s project Slanted memorial is selected for Bracket 4 Take Action. https://www.brkt.org/issue/contents/all/169/slanted-memorial/13/bracket-takes-action. His project Qube1 is featured in the Architizer article. http://architizer.com/blog/this-ten-hottest-products-trending-this-summer/

University of Southern California

Vittoria Di Palma’s new book, Wasteland, A History, has just been published by Yale University Press. 

Dr. David Gerber of the USC School of Architecture chaired SimAUD 2014 an international conference on topics of simulation in architecture and urban design. Dr. Gerber is co-chairing this years’ ACADIA 2014 Design Agency conference hosted at the Unviersity of Southern California School of Architecture. Dr. Gerber is the first multiple recipient of the IDEA studio research grant from Autodesk Inc. and also received a second National Science Foundation grant award to support undergraduate student involvement in research. 

The study “Evidence-based model of building facade features using data mining for assessment of building performance” by Ph.D. Candidate Andrea Martinez and Assistant Professor Joon-Ho Choi is being presented (by Professor Choi) at the Indoor Air 2014 – ISIAQ Conference in Hong Kong. 

Neil Leach recently contributed to the new PhD program in Digital Design at the European Graduate School in Switzerland as a Professor of Digital Design, and is currently on a 3 week lecture tour of India and China. His latest publication, an issue of Architectural Design, Space Architecture: The New Frontier for Design Research, will be published in the Fall, along with Swarm Intelligence: Architectures of Multi-Agent Systems, a volume that he has co-edited with Roland Snooks.

Professor James Steele is leading the first Foreign Studies Program which is based in Sao Paulo Brazil, with study trips to Ouro Preto, Belo Horizonte and Rio de Janerio. It also includes travel to Buenos Aires, Lima, Peru, Cuzco, Machu Picchu, Iberoamericana University in Mexico City (doing an urban planning project with Mexican students there) Merida and Yucatan, studying Mayan ruins.

Joon-Ho Choi, Assistant Professor of Building Science attend the International Society of Indoor Air Quality held in Hong Kong in July 2014, and presented two of his researches, “Evidence-based model of building façade features using data mining for assessment of building performance”, and “Visual environmental quality control using human physiological signal in an office workplace.” He was also selected as a recipient of the New Investigator Award in 2014-2015 by the Architectural Research Centers Consortium, based on his “Human-Building Integration” research.

Dr. Travis Longcore (Associate Professor (Research) of Spatial Sciences and Lecturer in Landscape Architecture) is overhauling and offering the undergraduate course Ecological Factors in Design for the first time in over a decade.  The course is required in the newly re-launched undergraduate minor in Landscape Architecture and is an elective in the undergraduate B.S. degree in GeoDesign, a new major that is a collaborative venture between the School of Architecture, Sol Price School of Public Policy, and Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences.

Karen M. Kensek collaborated with students to have four papers presented in San Francisco at ASES/ Solar 2014 in July and new alumni Alejandro Gamas and Elham Motevalian received travel scholarships to attend: 

  • Gamas, Alejandro, Kyle Konis, and Karen Kensek. “A Parametric Fenestration Design Approach for Optimizing Thermal and Daylighting Performance in Complex Urban Settings.”
  • Motevalian, Elham, Douglas Noble, Marc Schiler, and Karen Kensek. “Performance of Double Skin Façades: Effects on Daylight and Visual Comfort in Office Spaces.”
  • Tucker, Tyler, Karen Kensek, and Kyle Konis. “Performative Shading Design: Parametric Based Study of Shading System Configuration Effectiveness and Trends.”
  • Qian, Chenchuan (Trent), Karen Kensek, and Paul Ronney. “Thermal Mass and Time Lag: Calculating Heating and Cooling Energy from a Building Roof/wall.”

 

Kensek also had two papers chosen for presentation at 2014 ASHRAE/IBPSA-USA, Building Simulation Conference:

  • Sehrawat, Praveen and Karen Kensek. “Urban Energy Modeling: GIS as an Alternative to BIM.” 
  • Singh, Sukreet and Karen Kensek. “Early Design Analysis Using Optimization Techniques in Design/Practice.”  

University of Toronto

Blanche Lemco van Ginkel, FRAIC, retired architect, educator and urban planner,  received an honorary doctorate in science  from McGill University on May 29.

Among many accomplishments, Ms. Van Ginkel, 90, was the first woman elected as an officer of the RAIC in 1972 and became its first female Fellow in 1973. She was the first woman to head a Canadian architecture school – at the University of Toronto – and is acclaimed for achievements in safeguarding Montreal’s cultural heritage.

Annmarie Adams, MRAIC, who represents the Canadian Council of University Schools of Architecture on the board of the RAIC, read the citation, calling van Ginkel “a visionary, a mentor extraordinaire and a true citizen of the world.”

University at Buffalo

Joyce Hwang‘s practice, Ants of the Prairie, was featured in the Architect’s Newspaper: http://archpaper.com/news/articles.asp?id=7224. She was also featured in Architect Magazine, as part of its ‘Next Progressive’ series: http://www.architectmagazine.com/architects/ants-of-the-prairie-into-the-wild_o.aspx. This article will be printed in the May 2014 issue. “Bat Tower,” completed in 2010, was published in Rough Guide to Sustainability – A Design Primer, 4th Edition, by Brian Edwards, published by RIBA (Royal Institute of British Architects). On March 13, Professor Hwang delivered a lecture in New York City as part of the 2014 Emerging Voices Award, organized by the Architectural League of New York (http://archleague.org/2014/03/emerging-voices-ants-of-the-prairie-and-rael-san-fratello/). She also gave invited lectures at Hobart and William Smith Colleges on March 6, and at Syracuse University on April 1 as part of a symposium, “Transections: an interdisciplinary exploration of design between the sciences and the humanities” (http://soa.syr.edu/email/2014/transections.html).

Jin Young Song and his research team, Brian Ravinsky (March/MUP) and Yan Duan (MUP) has won the Nila T. Gnamm Junior Faculty Research Fund from UB APEC Study Center. The research titled, Prefabricating the Vernacular, is exploring the vernacular architecture focusing on Façade in order to find an alternative way of designing urban housing in the Southeast Asia region under the critique of the distorted modernization in already developed Asian cities. Song will lead the research team for the next two semesters. Jin Young Song’s project Qube also won the Architizer A+ Jury Award in the Products +Living category.

Christopher Romano and Nicholas Bruscia‘s “project 2XmT” has been selected as the winner of three Architizer A+ Awards. Architecture and Fabrication Category: Popular Choice Winner and Jury Winner, Architecture + Fabrication Category: Jury Winner.  Info can be found at: https://awards.architizer.com/winners/list/?id=2#cat-44-special and http://www.buffalo.edu/news/releases/2014/04/012.html.  More recent news regarding “project 3xLP” can be found on Bustler, http://www.bustler.net/index.php/article/winning_skin_installation_3xlp_to_begin_tour_this_fall_in_texas and Archinect, http://archinect.com/news/article/97192468/winning-skin-installation-3xlp-to-begin-tour-this-fall-in-texas.

Online Paging: Delivering Interdisciplinary Print Resources to a Diverse Scholarly Community

Barbara Opar and Barret Havens, column editors
Column Written by David Eifler, Librarian, Environmental Design Library, University of California, Berkeley

 

Librarians are committed to improving the user experience and often this involves behind the scenes work to improve public services.  A recent initiative at the University of California Berkeley demonstrates this.

The interdisciplinarity of research in all fields is growing (biomorphology in architecture, river restoration in landscape architecture, and planners who research an ever-increasing number of disciplines from public health to transportation to business). At the University of California, Berkeley it has been increasingly apparent that students and other scholars frequently do without print material, or elect electronic resources, rather than transverse our 23 large and subject-specific libraries to obtain the wide variety of materials they want. Actual and perceived barriers to accessing print material may make electronic resources seem more attractive.

One solution to eliminate the spatial barriers to access was to institute a paging service where a book from any library could be requested and sent to any other library to be picked up. Similar to public libraries with branches, books and other circulating items within Berkeley’s libraries can be requested online (through our library catalog), pulled from the stacks by library staff, and delivered to one of 23 circulation points around campus. In order for it to succeed in one location, it had to be implemented campus-wide. Such was born “online paging,” which we expect patrons will eventually refer to by the label of the button used to initiate a transfer: “request”.

At Berkeley, a Paging Task Force with librarians and staff members was formed in October 2013 with a clear mandate from library administration to explore effective ways to implement a paging system. We first solicited input from colleagues who had already implemented similar services at Ball State, Ohio State, Stanford, University of Oregon, and UT Austin, (many of whom were contacted via the Association of Architecture School Librarians listserv.)  After exploring paging implementations at these and other public and academic libraries, as well as past policies and practices at Berkeley, the task force’s report was issued in mid-December and our implementation timeline, which called for an intersession “soft rollout,” was subsequently approved.

The implementation team that met throughout the spring addressed a number of issues prior to making this service available, including whether to fine patrons who requested but didn’t pick up books (no), which libraries to involve (all using our integrated library catalog), and what to do if another patron pulled a requested book off the shelf before it could be retrieved by staff (give it to the patron with the item in hand), and whether patrons would be able to request books from the same library where they were intended to be picked up (yes). At Berkeley, implementing “online paging” happened in tandem with library-wide standardization of loan periods across disparate campus libraries. This made testing of the new online paging service more complex, but greater standardization of loan periods will ultimately lead to a more cohesive library experience (common loan periods) for patrons.

The result: any book that circulates for longer than 7 days can be requested online from any campus library and will be delivered to any campus library within three days. Scholars will no longer need to navigate the Library of Congress call number system in 23 different locations to obtain the wide variety of intellectual content needed to support their interdisciplinary research. Undergrads who may have succumbed to the tendency to rely solely on electronic sources will now have the option to request print. Faculty who bemoaned the amount of time they spent traveling among libraries will now be able to engage in more fruitful research.

As of this writing, UC Berkeley’s online paging has been available for just over a week and already 300 items have been requested. Since we have just begun publicizing the service and summer classes begin in a week, it is too soon to report about online paging’s success. However, initial conversations with faculty and students indicate that it will be a popular service and one that has long been anticipated by our patrons. By removing the impediment to accessing our collection caused by having to navigate 23 libraries, we are facilitating the enhanced flow of information embodied in physical texts across the campus. We now have a delivery system in place that will allow us to more accurately assess the ongoing importance of print in an increasingly electronic world.

 

University of Oregon

Professor Alison Kwok has been named Director of Graduate Studies in the Architecture Department.

Associate Professor Brook Muller is the author of Ecology and the Architectural Imagination (Routledge, 2014), on the architectural possibilities of ecology embedded from conceptual phases onward, how notions of function and structure of ecosystems can inspire ideas of architectural space making and order, and how the architect’s role and contribution can shift through this engagement. 

The 3rd edition of Sun, Wind, and Light by Mark KeKay and University of Oregon Professor G.Z. (Charlie) Brown is now available (Wiley, 2014). This fully updated edition covers principles of designing buildings that use the sun for heating, wind for cooling, and daylight for natural lighting. Using hundreds of illustrations, this book offers practical strategies that give the designer the tools they need to make energy efficient buildings. 

Associate Professor Nico Larco, Kristen Kelsey, and Amanda West just published Site Design for Multifamily Housing: Creating Livable, Connected Neighborhoods (Island Press, 2014). The book focuses on overlooked opportunities for walkability and is meant to be a guide for designers, planners, and developers.

Professor Kingston Heath, director of the Historic Preservation Program, has been awarded the 2014 Excellence Award for Directors of Graduate Studies by the University of Oregon Graduate School.

University of Oregon architecture student Cameron Huber received first place for the design of a green single-family house in the perFORM 2014: A House Design Competition. Huber won the $2,000 first place award for his entry, entitled HO[MIN]ID that the judges said showed restraint, purity of form, friendliness to neighborhood context and understanding of energy performance within a holistic approach to sustainability. 

University of Oregon interior architecture student Madeline Gorman won first place in the inaugural International Interior Design Association Oregon chapter design charrette in March at the Eastside Exchange Building in Portland, Oregon.

University of Oregon architecture student Grace Aaraj was an invited student speaker at the TEDx UOregon: Intersections: Diversity is Critical to Creativity. Her presentation was on the crossroads of language and creativity.

Associate Professor and SCI Co-Director Nico Larco presented a lecture at the National Conference of the American Planning Association in Atlanta and led a one day workshop at the University of Connecticut.  Both events focused on the SCYP model and how it can be adapted to different campuses throughout the country.

Associate Professor and SCI Co-Director Nico Larco lectured in Libreville, Gabon on the work of the Sustainable Cities Initiative and met with university faculty and officials from the Gabonese national government.  SCI is currently pursuing both research and educational partnerships with the University of Omar Bongo and with l’Agence Nationale des Grands Travaux (ANGT) through the Gabon Oregon Center.

Career Instructor Megan Haight gave a presentation entitled, “An Exercise in Public Engagement: Eugene YMCA Renewal,” at the 2014 Oregon Design Conference, May 1-3, 2014. Megan was joined by two UO students, Leslie Walker and Bob Nicholls; Dave Perez, the Executive Director of the Eugene Family YMCA; and Eric Gunderson, a partner at PIVOT design.

 Students from the University of Oregon are participating the Vicenza Architecture Program led by Professors Don Corner and Jenny Young.  After field studies in Roma and Firenze, they pursue a studio course in Vicenza for the spring term. This year’s trip includes a cross-cultural workshop with students from the Hochschule Darmstadt.

The Sustainable Cities Initiative (SCI) hosted its third annual Sustainable City Year Conference in April.  The conference included faculty, administrators, and staff from colleges and universities around the globe that were interested in learning how to implement the SCYP model of broad-based collaborative engagement with local municipalities. It also included representatives from many of the thirteen programs

around the country that have adopted and adapted this model.  The model pairs as many as 35 courses from multiple disciplines within a single university with real-world projects from a single partner city. Associate Professor in Architecture and SCI Co-Director Nico Larco and Associate Professor in Planning and SCI Co-Director Marc Schlossberg helped organize and lead this year’s conference. 

Associate Professor and SCI-China Program Head Yizhao Yang and Associate Professor and SCI Co-Director Nico Larco will be leading a three day training workshop in Chengdu, China this summer.  This workshop will focus on Sustainable Urban Design and is run by the Sustainable Cities Initiative’s SCI-China Program.

 

 

 

University of Southern California

The Platform is a collaborative design/build project by Assistant Professor Victor Jones for the Watts House Project (WHP), a non-profit neighborhood redevelopment organization located in South Central Los Angeles.  The Platform is part of a grassroots effort to transform three dilapidated shotgun houses on 107th Street to establish a cultural destination accommodating administrative offices, a community-run coffee shop, gardens, exhibition spaces and a meeting hall.  Assistant Professor Victor Jones united members from the community, an artist, two grant agencies, and five students from USC’s School of Architecture to realize the project.  Students worked alongside local residents to envision the insertion of a multi-purpose surface that redefines the entire site.  One continuous wall sheathes the front elevations of two existing structures and encloses the open space between them to create two new public spaces: a pocket park along the sidewalk and an internalized courtyard space.  The collaborative team identified existing forms of fence enclosure in the surrounding neighborhood to imagine how a ubiquitous residential element could be adopted to serve institutional and commercial needs.  The subtle manipulation of property enclosure allows the Platform to fit comfortably within its residential setting while adapting to specific performative needs.