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Tulane University

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Tulane School of Architecture welcomes the following new non-tenure track faculty for the 2011-12 academic year.  The following adjunct faculty has been appointed as part of the school’s new Master of Sustainable Real Estate Development program. 

M. Tatiana Eck, most recently Vice President of Architecture and Development at AIG Global Real Estate Investment Corp. and a registered architect and LEED AP at William McDonough + Partners before that. Her BA in Architecture, cum laude, is from Princeton University and she holds two master’s degrees, in Architecture and in Urban and Environmental Planning, from the University of Virginia. 

Kelly Longwell, Director in the New Orleans office of Coats Rose, where she concentrates in the areas of real estate, affordable housing and taxation. She holds a LL.M degree in Taxation from New York University, a JD from Louisiana State University and a Bachelor’s degree from Tulane University.

Casius Pealer, is Principal of Oyster Tree Consulting L3C, a mission-driven limited liability corporation that provides affordable housing and community development advising services. He served as the first Director of Affordable Housing at the U.S. Green Building Council and is a Senior Sustainable Building Advisor for the Affordable Housing Institute in Boston, MA, and he is 2011 Chair of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Housing Committee.  He holds a Masters in Architecture degree from Tulane University’s School of Architecture and a J.D. from the University of Michigan Law School.

Ommeed Sathe, has served as Director of Real Estate Development for the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority (“NORA”) since June 2007. He received his JD from Harvard University Law School, a Master in City Planning from MIT and a Bachelor’s degree from Columbia University in Urban Planning and Neuroscience.

Z Smith, AIA received his bachelor’s degree in Physics from MIT, master of architecture degree from UC Berkley, his doctorate in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Princeton University.  He is director of Sustainable Design at Eskew+Dumez+Ripple Architects.

Reuben Teague, is co-founder and principal of Green Coast Enterprises. He has been named an Echoing Green fellow for 2008-10, one of Gambit Magazine’s “40 under 40” for 2009, one of Fast Company’s “10 Coolest Innovators Rebuilding New Orleans,” and one of “America’s Most Promising Social Entrepreneurs” by Business Week. He holds a JD from New York University School of Law and an AB in Economics from Princeton University.

Seth Welty, LEED AP received his Master of Architecture degree from Tulane University and won a prestigious Enterprise Rose Architectural Fellowship under whose support he worked for the last three years on rebuilding efforts in Biloxi, Mississippi with the Gulf Coast Community Design Studio. Welty’s primary area of interest is finding venues and methods of practicing a socially responsible architecture that takes a more inclusive, active role in shaping equitable and sustainable environments. 

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

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The UWM School of Architecture and Urban Planning has recently published James W. Shields, FAIA:  Built Work with HGA Architects, Forward by Robert Greenstreet and Essay by Sebastian Schmaling, SARUP, 2012.  The 90 page book documents ten built award-winning buildings by Associate Professor Jim Shields with plans, sections, photos and text.  Shields also won an AIA Wisconsin Merit Design Award this year for the design of the Cambridge Commons Residence Hall, which has received LEED Gold certification.  Shields was also invited this summer to present his planned renovations and additions to the Milwaukee Art Museum at Taliesen, the home and studio of Frank Lloyd Wright in Spring Green, Wisconsin.  The presentation and subsequent discussion of the project was video taped, and will be available online as the first in a series of the “Taliesen Tapes”, sponsored by AIA Wisconsin.

LA DALLMAN, the architecture practice of Associate Professor Grace La and Adjunct Faculty James Dallman, was featured in Architect magazine (June 2012).  The article included LA DALLMAN’s unique practice environment and design process with detailed images of drawings, models, and studio space.  The National Endowment for the Arts has recognized the Harmony Project, designed by LA DALLMAN, with a $100,000 Our Town grant.  The Harmony Project is a collaborative building of the Milwaukee Ballet, the UWM Peck School of the Arts, and the Medical College of Wisconsin.  The work of Grace La and James Dallman’s UWM-KI studio, Learning Landscapes, is exhibited at Discovery World science and technology museum (August-December 2012).  The exhibition, entitled “DRIFT Seating” includes design process, models, prototypes, drawings, and research.  The studio is funded by the international furniture manufacture, KI.  Videos of the project can be viewed at http://www4.uwm.edu/sarup/news/kistudio-videos.cfm.  Grace La will deliver several guest lectures this fall including at North Carolina State University College of Art & Design (Sept 2012), and the Louisiana State University College of Art & Design (Nov 2012).

Professor Mark Keane, UWM, President of the non-profit design education website NEXT.cc, and Prof. Linda Keane, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Director of NEXT.cc, will be coordinating the K-12 Design Education Session at the March 2013 National ACSA conference in San Francisco. Streams of discussion will include project-based learning, environmental design in K-12, trans-disciplinary instruction, the state of architectural presence in high schools, and on-line options.  For more information, please contact Prof. Keane <keane@uwm.edu> In the meantime, please visit the current 2.0 version of NEXT <www.NEXT.cc>

Professor Don Hanlon has been recognized by the University of Wisconsin System for Excellence in Teaching. The UW Regents award is given to two teachers from among all the instructors in the 13 universities and 13 colleges that comprise the UW System, in recognition of outstanding career achievement in teaching.  This is just the most recent accomplishment for Professor Hanlon, who received the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Alumni Association Award for Teaching Excellence in 2001, which is given to just one instructor every year, and who continues, on a daily basis, to inspire, encourage and motivate students to aspire to greater heights.

Sustaining Cities: Urban Policies, Practices, and Perceptions, edited by Associate Professor Linda Krause is a collection of lively and intriguing essays examining cities in the aftermath of global development and recession.  The volume includes chapters by noted architects, landscape architects, urban and regional planners, geographers, and film and literary critics.  Included are essays by Associate Professor Mo Zell and former SARUP Professor Sherry Ahrentzen. The book will be available in December 2012 from Rutgers University Press. 

Associate Professor Mo Zell and Assistant Professor Jasmine Benyamin have been invited to participate on a panel entitled  “Educating Architects – The Next Generation,” as part of a two day reunion and celebration of Yale Women in Architecture to be held in New Haven, Nov 30–Dec 1.

“Empty Pavilion,” a project by Assistant Professor Kyle Reynolds and McLain Clutter with Ariel Poliner, Mike Sanderson and Nate Van Wylen, is a meditation on Detroit’s evacuated urban context and an experiment in the ability of architecture to make visible a latent public in the city. The project aspires to create an architecture that is physically and semantically empty, while solicitous of public interaction and imaginative projection. The creators of the “Empty Pavilion” have no specific use or meaning in mind – hoping instead that the project will invite unplanned occupancies and creative associations. This project was funded by a Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning Research Through Making grant. 

Adjunct Professor Ash Lettow has an article forthcoming in Iowa Architect featuring a project in Cedar Falls Iowa by the firm Invision Architects. A series of Lettow’s drawings and mixed media works will be on view at the Studio Lounge Gallery in Milwaukee Wisconsin in January 2013.

Associate Professor Arijit Sen received a UWM Research Growth Initiative Award for 2012-2013, for his work on “Intertwined Geographies of Transcultural Contact: Cultural Landscapes of Muslim Immigrants in Milwaukee and Chicago.”

Dean Bob Greenstreet has been granted the Freedom of the City of London. The Freedom is believed to date back to the Thirteenth Century. In Bob’s words, “privileges accorded to recipients have included the right to walk around London with an unsheathed sword (it used to be a lot rougher in my old neighborhood than it is now), the right to be hung with a silk, rather than hemp, noose should the occasion demand it (notably treason or murder) and, my personal favorite, the right to herd sheep over London Bridge. These days, the Freedom is seen as largely symbolic and tends to be more of a charitable and educational nature.” Former awardees of the honorary freedom include Franklin D Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Luciano Pavarotti, Bill Gates, Nelson Mandela, Pitt the Elder (and Younger) and J. K. Rowling. The summer of 2012 was a busy one for the Dean, who found himself running from twelve angry bulls in Pamplona, Spain. This year Dean Greenstreet also became an American citizen.

The Necessity of Ambiguity

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This following is the presentation given by Leslie Van Duzer, University of British Columbia at the 2011 ACSA Administrators Conference in Los Angeles. The session, Integrated Practice Symposium: Accreditation, Research, and Alternative Professional Tracts, sponsored by Autodesk, considered the impact of the broad conceptual underpinnings of “integrative practice” on curriculum, accreditation, research, and alternative professional tracts for architects. How can faculties respond today and in the future?

 

Moderator:  Michael Jemtrud, McGill University
Participants:  Leslie Van Duzer, University of British Columbia
Ramtin Attar, Autodesk Research

 

 

Leslie Van Duzer, University of British Columbia

 

Today I will speak briefly about the importance of cultivating ambiguity as part of an integrated design practice. I will intentionally veer away from the AIA definition of integrated design and rather define it as an exchange with any other in the design process. Whether we are spotlighting the integration of the academy and professional practice, or the integration of the design studio and new technologies, or the integration of multiple disciplines or professions . . . ambiguity and its attendant destabilizing uncertainty (not-knowing) play a critical role in any productive exchange.

I would like to suggest that integrating anything effectively requires a high degree of comfort with what Lohti Zadeh called “fuzzy sets.”  A fuzzy set (like art, for example) is defined as one without fixed boundaries. It is distinguished from a classic or crisp set whose membership is precisely defined. “Lovable people in this room” is a fuzzy set; “those over 50” is not.

We learn from cognitive psychology that we organize the world in three levels of categories/sets. At the highest and most general level, there are superordinate categories (for example, furniture or transportation) and at the lowest level, there are subordinate categories that are highly specific (grandma’s oak rocking chair). But far more interesting and productive for us are the basic-level categories (such as chair), categories characterized by their fuzziness.

This basic-level category is the highest level at which a single mental image can represent the entire category, the highest level at which category members have a similar Gestalt, and the highest level in which a person uses similar motor actions for interacting with category members. It is the first to be named and understood by children and most importantly, it is the level at which most knowledge is organized.

So I assume we can all agree it would be productive to have greater exchange between the university and the profession, between disciplines within the university, between studio and those pesky “other courses,” and between those other courses themselves. To this end, it would be helpful to conceive of each of these as fuzzy rather than crisp and siloed. And as participants in these exchanges, it would be helpful to focus not on our expertise, but rather on our ignorance.

In his beautiful little book Sea Shells, Paul Valéry wrote: “Ignorance is a treasure of infinite price that most men squander, when they should cherish its least fragments; some ruin it by educating themselves, others, unable so much as to conceive of making use of it, let it waste away. Quite on the contrary, we should search for it assiduously in what we think we know best.”

If indeed a stronger embrace of ignorance and ambiguity fosters integration, one must ask: why stubbornly maintain old categories of knowledge and skills in our curricula? We have long been fond of telling our students “seeing is forgetting the name of the thing one sees,” of asking them to think in fuzzy sets in order to create the space of uncertainty that allows for invention, but we as faculty stubbornly, or perhaps lazily, cling to classic, crispy sets that inhibit the free flow of collaboration and integration.

As we redesign our curricula, what if we took all the course names off the table, and all the associated individuals out of the mix, and had a discussion that was fuzzy enough to not be threatening? What if instead of course names, we described only desired learning outcomes, not as NAAB defines them but as we define them; outcomes such as increased emotional intelligence and visual literacy, passion for both technology and the craft of writing, a heightened empathy for both the animate and inanimate, masterful systemic and synthetic thinking, an ability to jump with ease across scales and categories . . . If we had a discussion about desirable outcomes, there would surely be precious little disagreement between us. So why not structure an architecture curriculum in this way, around ways of thinking instead of subject areas? Would that not better prepare all our students to play significant roles, whether as architects or game designers or politicians? Wouldn’t that better prepare our students for a world that is a moving target we as faculty cannot really keep up with?

 

Frankly, the real impediment to achieving more fluid and responsive curricula is not NAAB requirements or shrinking university budgets or clearly any shortage of good leadership, but rather resistance to change from within. This, I believe, is the elephant in the room.

2013 ARC: Leaner!

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As we prepare for the 2013 NAAB Accreditation Review Conference, the ACSA Board of Directors would like to hear your thoughts on some of the most pressing issues regarding conditions and procedures. Every week leading up to the Administrators Conference in Austin, we will ask one question for your feedback. Please share these with your colleagues and keep the conversation going. Please comment below.


What can we ditch?

Can we eliminate all criteria beyond the descriptions of the realms? Why do we need that faculty matrix?

Lawrence Technological University

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The College of Architecture and Design is pleased to announce the appointment of Amy Deines as the Chair of the Art and Design Department. Professor Deines has an undergraduate degree in Fine Arts in Design from Wayne State University and a Master of Architecture from Cranbrook Academy of Art, along with NCIDQ certification in interior design and associate membership in the AIA. She has taught at the School of Architecture at the University of Detroit Mercy since 2000. In the past, she has also taught at Warsaw Polytechnic University and the Cleveland Urban Design Center at Kent State University. Professor Deines has a wealth of professional experience with Green + Deines Studio, Awake by Design, Rossetti Architects, Swanson Meads Architects, and JPRA Associates.

Associate Professor Dale Allen Gyure, Ph.D., published his second book, The Chicago Schoolhouse,1856-2006: High School Architecture and Educational Reform (Center for American Places at Columbia College and University of Chicago Press, 2011), and presented a lecture on the book in June at the Chicago Architecture Foundation. Dr. Gyure also was named a member of the Board of Directors of the Frank Lloyd Wright Building Conservancy.

Two of the college’s adjunct professors where rewarded for their continuing education in the past months. Jennifer L. Malia, IIDA, LEED AP, received her Evidence-based Design Accreditation and Certification (EDAC), while Jane McBride received a Master of Arts in Teaching from Wayne State University in Detroit.

Lawrence Technological University

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Lawrence Technological University; new  faculty appointments.

Scott Shall, AIA, has been appointed Chair and Associate Professor. Scott earned his MArch from Tulane University and his BArch at the University of Cincinnati. He is the Founder, Director, and President of the International Design Clinic (http://internationaldesignclinic.org/), a not-for-profit organization dedicated to realizing much-needed creative work with communities in need around the world.  Scott joins us from Temple University.

Doug Skidmore, AIA, LEED, has recently been named College Professor. Doug received his MArch from Cranbrook and his BArch from the University of Oregon. He is a Principal at Beebe Skidmore Architects and has won many awards for his design work (http://beebeskidmore.com/).

University at Buffalo

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This year’s John and Magda McHale Fellow is Swiss architect Philippe Rahm. He will be conducting research on “meteorological architecture” through a graduate studio, multiple presentations and a public lecture. This year’s Peter Reyner Banham Fellow is Curt Gambetta, who will be conducting research on the public life of sanitation infrastructure through seminars, a public lecture and exhibition.  He will also be teaching design studio in the Junior year. 
Professor Edward Steinfeld presented at the U.S. Launch and Symposium for the World Report on Disability on September 12-13 in Arlington, VA. The World report on disability summarizes the best available scientific evidence on disability and makes recommendations for action in support of the implementation of the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Development of the Report was sponsored by the World Health Organization and the World Bank. Professor Steinfeld was the primary contributor to the built environment section.  
Dennis Maher has been selected by the John R. Oishei Foundation to be a member of the Oishei 20 Leaders Group. The distinction recognizes emerging leaders of the city of Buffalo who are under the age of 40. He has also been named a winner of the 2011 Real Art Ways STEP UP Competition.  The award recognizes emerging artists residing in New York and New England with a solo exhibition at Real Art Ways in Hartford, CT, one of the oldest alternative spaces in the U.S. http://www.realartways.org/visualarts.htm#stepup11 
Jordan Geiger presented a commissioned research and design installation at "Les Modernes," international biennial arts festival in Normandy, July-August 2011. "Emission," was produced with grad students Daniel Barry and Adam Laskowitz of the Situated Technologies Research Group at the University at Buffalo's Architecture Department. Geiger will also be presenting "The ABCs of VLOs," on the architecture and interaction design of Very Large Organizations, at the international workshop, "Territoriality of the Commons," Erkner, Germany, September 2011. 
Christopher Romano, Shadi Nazarian, and Nicholas Bruscia presented a paper titled, "The Living Wall: A Microcosm of Design/Build Practice" at this year's Building Technology Educator's Society Conference in Toronto.   
Joyce Hwang served on the jury for the Animal Architecture Awards Competition (http://www.animalarchitecture.org/animal-architecture-awards/). 
Martha Bohm and Chris Romano led the Sustainable Futures interdisciplinary service learning abroad program from May 24 to August 2 in Monteverde, Costa Rica. Students from four US universities participated, and faculty from UB, University of Maryland, University of Wisconsin, and University of Costa Rica taught coursework. The students’ design for renovation of the Monteverde Institute is scheduled to break ground this fall. Concurrently, the program brought practitioners down to Costa Rica for the first of an annual two-week AIA CEU program focused on sustainable design in the tropics. http://www.sustainablefutures2011.org

University of Oregon

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John Wiley & Sons published the 3rd edition of Fundamentals of Residential Construction by Associate Professor Rob Thallon and Edward Allen, FAIA.

Professor G.Z. “Charlie” Brown won a $25,000 research grant, with matching funds from the University of Oregon, the University of Tennessee, and John Wiley & Sons. Associate Professor Ihab Elzeyadi won a $25,000 grant in addition to matching funds from the Van Evera Bailey Foundation, Oregon BEST, and Glumac Engineering. The UO projects are expected to provide funding for graduate and undergraduate student researchers and expand ongoing work in labs. 

Brown’s project, “New Knowledge Structure for Designing Net-Zero Energy Buildings,” aims to provide more sophisticated tools for energy-efficient architecture “by organizing much of the knowledge of net-zero energy building design.” He and co-investigator Mark DeKay of the University of Tennessee hypothesize “that we can generate, test and publish an integrated knowledge structure for net zero energy design that will help designers choose families of design strategies and, thereby, broaden the number of net-zero designers, improving the sophistication of their designs.”

Elzeyadi’s longtime pursuit of energy-efficient classroom retrofitting technology was the focus of his proposal. His submission, “Green Classroom Toolbox: Evidence-Based Integrated Design Tools to Guide Architects in Retrofitting K-12 School Facilities for Climate Change,” outlined his research objective of “developing evidence-based design guidelines for retrofitting existing educational spaces through the Green Classroom Toolbox (GCT) project in five US Climate Zones.” 

Associate Professor Mark L. Gillem, PhD, AIA, AICP lectured at the North China University of Technology in Beijing on the topic of sustainable urbanism in October. Using case studies from across the U.S., Dr. Gillem discussed the role of walkable streets, downtown parks, and public transit in making density livable and sustainable. On November 4, he lectured at Ho Chi Minh City University of Architecture in Vietnam. In his lecture, “Urban Design: Sustainable Principles and Practices,” Dr. Gillem discussed ways in which urban design could address key challenges facing Ho Chi Minh City including integrating land use patterns and public transportation, adding parks and open spaces to the heart or urban areas, and regulating sustainable development through the use of form-based codes.  On November 9 and 10, he chaired the first-ever Regional Workshop hosted by the American Planning Association’s Federal Planning Division. The event, held in downtown Denver, brought together over 200 planners from a variety of federal agencies including the National Park Service, the U.S. Forest Service, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the Federal Transit Authority, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Participants addressed the conference theme, “Interagency Collaboration for Sustainable Landscapes,” in paper presentations, panel sessions, and roundtable discussions.  

The University of Oregon hosted the Fall 2011 International PUARL Conference in Portland, October 28-31: “Generative Process, Patterns, and the Urban Challenge.” The keynote address was delivered by Professor Donald Corner. 

 

 

City College of New York

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Sara Caples of Caples Jefferson Architects has returned as Distinguished Visiting Professor this semester. Her firm just received a 2011 MASterworks Award for Best Restoration for the Queens Theater in the Park. Also joining us for the first time as Distinguished Visiting Professor is Ann Beha, whose eponymous firm, based in Boston, has built an impressive, highly awarded body of work of additions to historic buildings and settings.

Associate Professor Jacob Alspector’s most recent appearance on the internet radio program “Burning Down the House” covered the topics of the education of architects and their path toward licensure.

 Professor Hillary Brown, FAIA, has been named an executive committee member of the Education for Sustainability (EfS) Working Group. EfS is being convened for New York State institutions of higher education, in alignment with the goals set by the national Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE).

 ACSA Distinguished Professor Lance Jay Brown has been busy, serving as: a juror for the AIA NYS Honor Awards; advisor to the ENYA 2012 Competition “The Harlem Edge”; organizer of an AIANY panel discussion on “Freedom of Assembly: Public Space Today, reviewed in Curbed; and a panel for the NYC Department of Design and Construction on climate change and sea level rise. He will deliver the 2012 Charles H. Atherton Memorial Lecture at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC, in May.

 A drawing by Adjunct Professor Caleb Crawford was included in the exhibition “C I T Y” at the Bridge Gallery on Orchard Street.

 Adjunct Associate Professor Antonio Di Oronzo was awarded his first project in China, a 120,000 sq. ft., 5-star hotel in Shenzhen. His firm bluarch was also just awarded the design of a rehabilitation complex on a 40-acre site in Cleveland County, North Carolina. 

 Associate Professor Jeremy Edmiston lectured at Sydney University School of Architecture, Design and Planning as part of their 2011 speaker series. His project Urban Space Station was included in the show “A Civic Action: A Vision for Long Island City” at the Noguchi Museum. 

Associate Professor Edward Eigen participated in a panel discussion on the “Formless” hosted by The Storefront for Architecture. His presentation examined Louis Braille’s “relief writing” and the medico-religious history of spit (saliva). His biblio-geographical study “Where Time Never Stands Still: On the Losses of Mont-Saint-Michel,” appears in the most recent issue of Thresholds, the journal of the MIT School of Architecture. Interviewed by the architect Iñaki Ábalos, his views on “Ideal Beauty” can be found in the volume Jardin y Paisaje. At a Yale conference he presented the challengingly titled paper “Some Preliminary Notes on Historical Seismicity and Cognate Developments in Time Series Analysis with Specific, though Intermittent, Reference to the Antillean Island of La Española (Ayiti) and Cities and Towns of the Former Saint-Domingue: April 20, 1564–January 12, 2010 ( 21:53 GMT).” 

Professor Peter Gisolfi, Department Chair, has published a series of recent articles: “Collaboration and Compromise, A Misunderstood Aspect of the Design Process” and “Small-Scale Solution to Alternative Energy Resistance” in ArchNewsNow.com; “Sites Unseen” in American School & University (August 2011); “Effective Additions” in American School Board Journal (Sept 2011); and “The Architectural Jumble” in American School Board Journal (Oct 2011). His firm, Peter Gisolfi Associates, received two 2011 design awards from the AIA Westchester/Hudson Valley: a Citation for the Peekskill Middle School, and an Honor Award for Goodhue Memorial Hall at the Hackley School in Tarrytown. Goodhue Memorial Hall also received a 2011 Citation of Excellence from Learning by Design. 

Adjunct Lecturer Domingo Gonzalez delivered the keynote presentation “Historic Lighting: An Evolutionary Overview” at the 2012 annual meeting and symposium of the Association of Preservation Technology Northeast Chapter (APTNE). His firm’s award-winning Old DC City Hall / Courthouse restoration project was profiled in International New Landscape (Sept 2011).

Professor Toni Griffin delivered the lecture “Design and the Just City” at the University of Notre Dame. She contributed the opinion “Seizing an Opportunity” to a discussion on the New York Times Room for Debate blog, and participated in the Zoning the City conference sponsored by the New York City Department of City Planning, Harvard’s GSD and Baruch College. 

An article about the ambitious painted artwork project at Bronx Community College Library by Adjunct Lecturer Daniel Hauben was published in the Bronx Times (Febrary 3, 2012).

MArch Program Director and Assistant Professor Brad Horn authored a chapter in The Story of Design Education (Peking University Press, 2011). Berman Horn Studio’s Wooster Street Social Club project was published in New York Magazine.

A proposal for the Busan Opera House in South Korea by Adjunct Assistant Professor Vanessa Keith’s firm Studioteka was published in Mark magazine (Dec 2011/Jan 2012). Her firm’s project Nurse Bettie Bar is featured, with an interview, in Design Bureau (Mar/Apr 2012).

Assistant Professor Fran Leadon was profiled in CityLand, the monthly journal of the Center for New York City Law.

Model Shop Director Jorge Plazas and his firm MRK Lab, working with Illi.SITE.Studio, completed construction on the Franklyn Avenue Bar in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

Dean George Ranalli’s Saratoga Community Center is featured in John Hill’s Guide To Contemporary New York City Architecture (W. W. Norton Publishers, 2011). Dean Ranalli is also profiled in two online video segments: “Pratt Eye on Alumni: George Ranalli” features an interview about the Valentine Chair #2 and “Building Cities, Revisited,” by CUNY Media. Dean Ranalli’s fourth monograph In Situ is scheduled for release this summer. 

Recess, a restaurant project by Associate Professor Julio Salcedo-Fernandez’s firm scalar Architecture, appeared in the book Gusto: a Journey Through Culinary Design by Bridget Vranckx. Salcedo and scalar Architecture’s inflatable proposal for the Farnsworth Residence is included in the invited group exhibition “The Homestead Project” at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine, running through Sept 2012.

Associate Professor Catherine Seavitt Nordenson presented the paper “De-domestication and the Wild: The Carnivorous Wolf and the Feral Herbivore,” at the March 2012 Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture (CELA) Annual Meeting and spoke on “Soft Infrastructure for Climate Change Mitigation” in the City College Interdisciplinary Climate Change Seminar, organized by Prof. Marco Tedesco of the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. She presented her work at the conference RISK at the University of Michigan and served as a juror for the 2012 AIA Honor Awards for Regional and Urban Design.

The design by Professor Achva Benzinberg Stein, FASLA, for the Moroccan courtyard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was prominently featured in an article in Landscape Architecture Magazine (Feb 2012). 

Associate Professor Elisabetta Terragni was invited to enter the competition “Minna-no-Ié / Home-for-All,” to design concepts for communal gathering places to benefit and encourage those affected by the Japan earthquake. The project was included in the exhibition “A see-worthy vessel” at the Toyo Ito Museum of Architecture in Imabari, Japan. Her Trento Tunnel Project is included in the “Re-Cycle” exhibit at the new MAXXI museum in Rome, where she also participated in the “Re-cycling Italy” design workshop and served as advisor to the 2012 Young Architects Program at MAXXI, in collaboration with MoMA PS1. Her collaborative project for a Panorama of the Cold War was published in Abitare (Nov 2011).

As an architectural photographer at Esto, Adjunct Associate Professor Albert Vecerka worked on two note-worthy projects at Lincoln Center: making still and time-lapse images of the IBM Centennial Exhibition designed by Ralph Appelbaum, and photographing the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center for the Rockwell Group. Also, he documented a house upstate for Weiss/Manfredi and is currently photographing their new Visitors Center at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. A highlight of his recent work, however, was documentation of CCNY’s own Solar Roofpod.

Associate Professor Christian Volkmann, in collaboration with faculty from the engineering and economics departments, was awarded a $50,000 City SEED grant award from the Provost’s Office in conjunction with the Office of Research Administration for the interdisciplinary proposal “Daylight Reuse for Improving Energy Efficiency in Existing Buildings.”

Adjunct Associate Professor Barbara Wilks, FASLA, and her firm W Architecture and Landscape Architecture, in conjunction with Civitas, won a competition to design a new 21st century park for Calgary on an island in the Bow River which balances the river ecology with recreational needs. 

Associate Professor June Williamson received a $10,000 Independent Award from the New York State Council on the Arts to support publication of her manuscript Designing Suburban Futures. Travelling to the Pikes Peak region of Colorado, she participated pro-bono in a Sustainable Design Assessment Team (SDAT) for the AIA’s Community by Design program. As 2012 George Pearl Fellows at the University of New Mexico, she and Ellen Dunham-Jones delivered a public lecture and day-long “master class.” Her guest post “Retrofitting for Fecundity” was published on the BMW Guggenheim LAB|log. 

An apartment renovation, constructed in primary colored Lego, by Adjunct Associate Professor Suzan Wines’ firm I-Beam Design, was recently featured in New York Magazine (Feb 5, 2012) in the article “The 20-000 Brick Apartment.”

Adjunct Professor Bill Young has been appointed Wetland Scientist for Yellow Bar Island in Jamaica Bay. The project, designed and managed by the US Army Corps of Engineers, will take ten months to rebuild the island back to its historic dimensions. Sea level rise, pollution, and other phenomena have reduced this fifty acre island to almost half its size of one hundred years ago.

Tulane University

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TEN MILE GARDEN  and INSTANT  [play]GROUND  designed by Assistant Professor Marcella Del Signore in collaboration with Mona El Khafif, Cesar Lopez and Anesta Iwam have been selected to receive a grant to support the full construction for the URBAN PROTOTYPING Festival in San Francisco in October 2012. Over 100 projects were submitted and 18 were selected to be displayed at the UP Event. Both projects focus on building a community through civic engagement and participation, reimagining modes of production of public space. 

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