Penn State

DOE-funded project investigates climate change effects on low-income housing

 

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Coastal cities such as Baltimore expect to see increased impacts of climate change, such as severe flooding, heat stress and increased energy consumption, particularly in low-income communities. Researchers from Penn State’s Hamer Center for Community Design are part of a Department of Energy (DOE)-funded effort to study the effects of climate change on the built environment and how American cities can equitably mitigate these events.

The Hamer Center for Community Design, which is housed in the College of Arts and Architecture’s Stuckeman School, serves as a laboratory for community partnerships that integrate socio-economic and environmental conscious resolution to design and planning problems. Co-principal investigators on the project are Rahman Azari, associate professor of architecture and director of the Resource and Energy Efficiency (RE2) Lab, Lisa Iulo, associate professor of architecture and director of the Hamer Center for Community Design, and Hong Wu, associate professor of landscape architecture and director of the Stormwater Living Lab.

“Ken Davis, the principal investigator, learned about this potential DOE opportunity before the actual request for proposals was issued, and he immediately brought it to the Water Council,” said Wu, who was co-chair of the council with Davis, professor of atmospheric and climate science. “We then put a call to action out to faculty that we thought may be a good fit, and Ken highlighted that the expertise that we have in the Stuckeman School, particularly with the built environment, was something unique Penn State could bring to the table.”

That expertise is being provided by Azari, who will co-lead the buildings and energy sub-team of researchers on the project; Iulo, who will co-lead the community engagement cross-cutting priority area team; and Wu, who will co-lead the decision science and equitable pathways sub-team.

Azari said the team was looking to understand the effects of climate change on architecture and, more specifically, its effect on low-income housing structures in Baltimore.

“We are interested in the complex interrelationships between climate change, indoor air quality, air quality in general and energy consumption of the buildings and how the design of such buildings could be a medium to reduce energy consumption, improve air quality and, ultimately, improve the health of the occupants living there,” he said.

Azari stressed the importance of developing a connection between the researchers on the project, who represent a number of different disciplines, the communities affected in Baltimore and also practitioners who need to take climate change into consideration when designing buildings.

“For me, I am interested in determining how climate change and future uncertainties affect the way we design buildings,” he explained. “How can we include the users of the buildings and the people who live there in the design process so we can see what works and what doesn’t work when it comes to climate change? We will use those answers to then create new models for how we think about design.”

Iulo explained that the Baltimore project is a natural progression of the work the Hamer Center has been doing in local flood-prone communities, such as Selinsgrove, Pennsylvania. Baltimore has approximately 52 miles of shoreline, which can rise dramatically during certain weather conditions.

“Baltimore is part of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed area, fed largely by the Susquehanna River Basin, and is representative of many communities that the Hamer Center has worked with, so we have a real opportunity here to further our impact with Baltimore.” she said. “Working with our other University partners, national laboratories and the U.S. Forest Service, we’re looking forward to engaging in Baltimore to involve communities in the process of exploring solutions to the climate change challenges they are facing.”

The pilot project in Selinsgrove looks to inform solutions throughout the Chesapeake Bay region, said Iulo.

“Being able to work in Baltimore, to work with Hong and other sub-teams on water quality and quantity issues, I think is very much aligned with the work we’ve been doing in the Hamer Center,” she said.

Wu brings expertise in the landscape architecture realm, particularly in integrating green infrastructure as solutions to urban climate resilience. Her current green stormwater infrastructure research focuses on investigating the environmental, social, and economic aspects of green stormwater infrastructure across different social and environmental contexts.

She will look at integrating community input into developing equitable climate mitigation and adaptation methods and test them under various future scenarios in the integrated modeling system that the large group will develop.

“I think the Stuckeman School faculty make unique contributions to this project in that we try to connect scientific research to real-world problem-solving,” she said. “The key role for us is to ask, ‘What are the effective traditional and novel solutions that the communities desire for enhancing climate resilience in Baltimore and how do we test those solutions in our modeling and assess how well they work?”

The goal of the Penn State team is to both provide a model for community-oriented, interdisciplinary urban science that promotes climate solutions, and to educate a new generation of urban scientists so they are capable of engaged-community planning in the face of climate change in urban areas across the United States.

Davis is leading the Penn State team that received $6.4 million for the project and includes 21 faculty members from seven different colleges and 12 different departments. They join counterparts from Johns Hopkins University, Morgan State University, University of Maryland Baltimore County, University of Virginia, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, The National Renewable Energy Laboratory, Drexel University, City University of New York and the U.S. Forest Service in studying effects of climate change on the city of Baltimore.

Penn State

Stuckeman School welcomes San Diego-based architectural practice for lecture

 

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Teddy Cruz and Fonna Forman, principals of Estudio Teddy Cruz + Fonna Forman, will join the College of Arts and Architecture’s Stuckeman School virtually at 6 p.m. on Oct. 19 as part of the school’s Lecture and Exhibit Series.

Co-sponsored by the Department of Architecture, the event will be live-streamed by WPSU.

In the lecture, titled “Unwalling Citizenship,” Cruz and Forman will discuss their work on “citizenship culture” at the United States-Mexico border, and the network of civic spaces they have co-developed with border communities to cultivate regional and global solidarities. They ask, in this increasingly walled world and with the surge of anti-immigrant sentiment everywhere: Can the idea of citizenship be recuperated for more emancipatory and inclusive democratic agendas?

Cruz and Forman’s San Diego-based practice investigates borders, informal urbanization, civic infrastructure and public culture. They lead a variety of urban research agendas and civic/public agendas in the San Diego-Tijuana, Mexico border region and beyond. In 2012-13, they served as special advisors on civic and urban initiatives for the City of San Diego and led the development of its Civic Innovation Lab. Together they lead the University of California, San Diego (UCSD) Community Stations, a network of public spaces across the border region co-developed between university and community for collaborative research and teaching on poverty and social equity. Their work has been funded by the Ford Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, ArtPlace America, the PARC Foundation and the Surdna Foundation, among others.

Their work has been exhibited widely in prestigious cultural venues around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, Das Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin, M+ in Hong Kong, the 2016 Shenzhen Biennial of Urbanism and Architecture and the 2018 Venice Architectural Biennale. Their work is also part of the permanent collection at MoMa.

Cruz and Forman have recently published two monographs: “Spatializing Justice” and “Socializing Architecture: Top-Down / Bottom-Up,” both by MIT Press and Hatje Cantz, with a third forthcoming, “Unwalling Citizenship,” to be published by Verso.

Cruz is a professor of public culture and urbanism in the Department of Visual Arts and the director of urban research in the Center on Global Justice at UCSD. The recipient of the Rome Prize in Architecture in 1991, Cruz’s honors include the Ford Foundation Visionaries Award in 2011, the 2013 Architecture Award from the U.S. Academy of Arts and Letters and the 2018 Vilcek Prize in Architecture.’

Forman is a professor of political theory and founding director of the Center on Global Justice at UCSD. She serves as co-chair of the University of California’s Global Climate Leadership Council, and served until 2019 on the Global Citizenship Commission, advising United Nations policy on human rights in the 21st century.

Kennesaw State University

BTES 2023 Call for Abstracts Due 10/31/22

 

The BTES 2023 Submission Portal is OPEN to for its bi-annual conference: Beyond the Artifact: Constructability, Complexity & Constraints.

The Call for Abstracts to the 2023 Building Technology Educators’ Society (BTES) Conference will remain open until Monday, October 31, 2022.

The conference will be held on June 1-4, 2023 at Cosanti in Paradise Valley & Arcosanti in Mayer, Arizona. We invite the submission of abstracts via the abstract portal as indicated in the attached call. Details for submission and more conference information are included on the BTES 2023 conference website.

Please see attached Call for Abstracts and reach out if you have any questions to gloreto@kennesaw.edu and liz@arcosanti.org.

Penn State

Architecture professor earns international innovative research award

 

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Felecia Davis, associate professor of architecture in the College of Arts and Architecture’s Stuckeman School, has been recognized by the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architectures (ACADIA) for her work exploring the use of computational textiles as the recipient of the 2022 Innovative Research Award of Excellence.

The award, which recognizes innovative research that contributes to the field of digital design in architecture, distinguishes research with the potential to transform contemporary architecture.

Davis’ research reimagines how people might use textiles in their daily lives and in architecture through computational textiles, which respond to the environment via programming, embedded sensors and electronics, as well as use the natural transformable properties of textiles.

“I am honored that my work has been recognized and supported by respected colleagues in my field of design computing. ACADIA is an organization that has members from across the globe, so people are contributing many different viewpoints to design computing to this organization,” said Davis. “Even though it feels to me like it has taken a long time to get prototypes and projects completed, things are just getting started. I look forward to using this platform created by the award to support others in bringing their points-of-view to the foreground in design computing, and to continue working on building projects and prototypes that allow for the testing and projection of ideas.”

As the recipient of the ACADIA award, Davis will give a talk at the organization’s annual conference Oct. 27-29 in Philadelphia.

Davis, who is the director of the Computational Textiles Lab (SOFTLAB) in the Stuckeman Center for Design Computing, has earned numerous accolades for her work over the past year from the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, the Architectural League of New York and the Skidmore Owings & Merrill (SOM) Foundation.

She has been featured in the PBS “Women in Science Profiles” series and her work was part of the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) “Reconstructions: Blackness and Architecture in America” exhibition in 2021. That experience led to Davis cofounding the Black Reconstruction Collective, a nonprofit organization of Black architects, scholars and artists that supports and funds design work about the Black diaspora.

The principal of Felecia Davis Studio, Davis is currently penning book that examines the role of computational materials in our lives, titled “Softbuilt: Networked Architectural Textiles.”

The ACADIA is an international network of digital design researchers and professionals that facilitates critical investigations into the role of computation in architecture, planning and building science, and encourages innovation in design creativity, sustainability and education.

College of Distinguished Professors October Newsletter

Dear ACSA Community,

As a member of the Executive Committee of the ACSA College of Distinguished Professors (College) and as its Past Chancellor, I am delighted to welcome Dean Patricia Oliver, DPACSA, FAIA as 2022-2023 Chancellor of the ACSA College of Distinguished Professors; Professor Marleen Davis, DPACSA, FAIA, as Vice Chancellor; and Professor Marilys Nepomechie, DPACSA, FAIA as Secretary. A list of all members as well as a roster of the past officers and links to the work of the distinguished professors can be found at the College website.

The ACSA Distinguished Professors recognition program began in 1984-1985 with the inaugural cohort including Fay Jones, Charles Moore and Ralph Rapson. In 2010, under the leadership of late Marvin Malecha, the inaugural Chancellor Lance Jay Brown and other prominent educators, the ACSA College of Distinguished Professors was formed.

Modeled after the AIA College of Fellows, the College is composed of 161 current members—each of whom are awarded the ACSA/AIA Topaz Medal Laureate and/or the ACSA Distinguished Professor Award. College membership—becoming increasingly diverse—is one of the highest honors the ACSA can bestow upon an educator.

Since its inception in 2010, the College has undertaken initiatives to advance the mission of the ACSA through the Best Paper and Best Project awards at the Annual Meetings, and, most recently, instituted a travel grants program intended to support emerging faculty who are from historically marginalized backgrounds—specifically, Black, native/indigenous, and Latinx faculty, as well as LGBTQ+ faculty and faculty teaching at institutions identified as Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCU) and Hispanic Serving Institutions (HSI). College members continue to be a resource through mentorship and thought leadership.

I would like to thank the ACSA Board of Directors and staff for their continued stewardship of and support for the College as a crucial part of the Association’s academic community.

We welcome you to reach out to the members of the Executive Committee and the members of the College with any ideas and questions that help advance the mission of the Association and the College in order to best serve all members of our community.

Sincerely,

Dr. Mahesh Daas, DPACSA
Past Chancellor, ACSA College of Distinguished Professors
President, The Boston Architectural College
mahesh.daas@the-bac.edu

 

Kennesaw State University

CAll for Abstracts Building Technology Educators’ Society (BTES) Conference 2023.

 

It is with great enthusiasm that we invite everyone from ACSA to participate in the Building Technology Educators’ Society (BTES) Conference: Beyond the Artifact: Constructability, Complexity & Constraints co-organized by Dr. Giovanni Loreto, Associate Dean of Research at Kennesaw State University & Liz Martin-Malikian, CEO/Executive Director at The Cosanti Foundation. BTES 2023 is scheduled for June1-4, 2023 and the Call for Abstracts is due on October 31, 2022. 

The BTES 2023 Conference Committee seeks papers and projects on a broad range of topics that address the external forces advancing the work in our discipline, as well as the internal inventiveness driving our research and our pedagogies. Interpreting architecture as artifact is a matter of reading a building and its environment. To best comprehend the language of buildings, designers often consider form and material grammar in terms of assemblies, details, and systems. How a building reads depends on how all these elements are composed with the intent of being realized as a built object. Today, we are witnessing a reformulation of the grammar of materials leading to a more eco-sustainable syntax of construction and building structure through experimentation and innovation. Rather than seeing architecture from the ‘outside as object’ or built artifact, we need to instead understand the built realm as a form of production ‘from within’ to create a site of negotiation.

Meeting at 2-locations: Arcosanti and Cosanti, this gathering of minds will engage architecture in its role as a cultural agent and examine the way buildings establish and organize dynamic relationships not only between site, program, and material but also architecture and ecology. Attendees will experience both Cosanti and Arcosanti that were built by hand by more than 8000 students and volunteers who came from all over the world to participate in The Cosanti Foundation’s signature multi-week workshop program.

The submission portal with instructions will open on October 1, 2022. Further information regarding the Call for Submissions can be found on the conference website: https://www.eventcreate.com/e/btes.

If you are interested in serving as a peer-reviewer, you will review up to 4-paper abstracts. Please email liz@arcosanti.org or gloreto@kennesaw.edu

Penn State

Penn State work featured as part of Tallinn Architecture Biennale

 

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — An architectural proposal for disaster relief and emergency assistance that was designed by faculty members from the College of Arts and Architecture and the College of Agricultural Sciences at Penn State is featured in the Tallinn Architecture Biennale (TAB) at the Estonian Museum of Architecture in Tallinn, Estonia, through November.

The “Plug and Serve Modular Structure (PSMS)” is a project by Stuckeman School faculty members Laia Celma, assistant teaching professor of architecture, and Benay Gürsoy, assistant professor of architecture, along with Jaime Garcia Prudencio, assistant teaching professor in the Spanish for Agriculture program, and Xi Jin, who graduated in May with her bachelor of architecture degree.

According to Celma, the PSMS is designed to meet the needs of a community should a disaster – such as a hurricane, tornado, earthquake, mudslide, wildfire, drought, chemical spill or even a terrorist attack – strike.

“The PSMS is mobile, interlocking, connectable and, more importantly, a food processor,” she said. “Should a disaster strike, the modules provide shelter for residents while also serving as a community kitchen, an on-site production farm, a solar power station and more.”

The TAB is an international architecture and urban planning festival that promotes architectural culture to empower architects, planners and environmental designers. With a theme of “Edible; Or the Architecture of Metabolism,” this year’s event hinges on five thematic groups: Living Machines, Lifecycle, Food and Geopolitics, Food Systems and the Future Food Deal. Those attending are asked to reflect on food and architecture and to reimagine planetary food systems along with architecture’s capacity to perform metabolic processes,

The Penn State project is featured in the Future Food Deal exhibit of the TAB.

Now in its sixth version, the 2022 TAB was curated Lydia Kallipoliti and Areti Markopoulou, in collaboration with local advisor Ivan Sergejev. More about the exhibition can be found on the ArchDaily website.

Penn State

Stuckeman School leads off lecture series with architecture, urban design firm

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The College of Arts and Architecture’s Stuckeman School is hosting the first talk in its 2022-23 Lecture and Exhibit Series, with Dan Adams and Marie Law Adams, principals of Landing Studio, at 4:30 p.m. on Oct. 5.

Titled “Just Infrastructure,” the lecture will examine the spaces of urban highways, utilities, rail corridors and industrial waterways that support the flow of goods and people, but often at the burden of local places where they bring social and environmental harm.

“This is the context where we have focused our practice,” said Marie Law Adams. “We work across communities, environmental advocates, activists, industrial businesses and public agencies, and use design to transform infrastructure to reflect the priorities of those who are most directly impacted by it, and for the health of the planet.”

Dan and Marie Law Adams founded Landing Studio in 2005 with the Rock Chapel Marine project, a shared-use road salt terminal and public park landscape located in an immigrant community just north of Boston. While working intensively in this community during the first 10 years of practice, they also studied salt production facilities across the globe. Through this parallel global field work and local practice, Landing Studio documented ways that seemingly standardized spaces of production and infrastructure could be shaped by local places and people. This understanding serves as the foundation for Landing Studio’s ongoing work, where the firm looks to bring local voices, new dimensions of human delight and comfort, and natural systems to everyday infrastructural spaces.

Landing Studio’s work has been recognized with national and international awards, including the Architectural League of New York’s Emerging Voices award, the Architectural League Prize, a Holcim Award and a Progressive Architecture Award. Their work has also been exhibited at institutions in the United States and internationally.

Marie Law Adams earned a bachelor of science in architecture from the University of Michigan and her master of architecture from MIT, where she was a Presidential Fellow and recipient of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Medal. She is an associate professor of architecture at the Northeastern University School of Architecture and a licensed architect.

Dan Adams also holds a bachelor of science in architecture from the University of Michigan and his master of architecture from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where he received the AIA Medal and the James Templeton Kelly Thesis Prize. He is the director of the School of Architecture at Northeastern University.

Co-hosted by the Department of Architecture, the lecture will be live-streamed by WPSU.

University of Southern California

NEW BOOK: Streets For All – 50 Ideas for Shaping Resilient Cities

Streets For All by Shyam Khandekar and Vinayak Bharne explores the potential of the most ubiquitous public space in our cities. Going from Egypt to Japan, Sweden to Brazil and New York to Malta, it examines the social, economic, ecological, architectural and technical dimensions of streets across the world and offers tactics and strategies on how they can be recast, repurposed and redesigned towards greater resilience and resourcefulness.

Authored by a variety of individuals – citizen activists, photographers, artists, urban designers, architects, landscape architects, ecologists, sociologists, engineers, professors, practitioners – this book interrogates the notion of who our streets are for, who in turn shapes them, by what means and to what ends. It argues that while we share larger aspirations regarding the future of our streets, the socio-political and cultural realities of the cities in which streets are situated play a crucial role in how we engage in the processes of transforming them.

This book reveals why our urban future is being shaped as much by progressive efforts in affluent nations and those in economically less developed ones.

University of Southern California

NEW BOOK: Urbanism Beyond 2020: Reflections During the COVID-19 Pandemic


A new book by Vinayak Bharne titled “Urbanism Beyond 2020: Reflections During the COVID-19 Pandemic” explores numerous questions triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic: Why is city making a health project? How are ecological and human wellbeing interrelated? How can leadership and governance help bridge gaps in our unjust cities? How might we renew our relationship with dwellings and neighborhoods? How resilient and adaptable are our cities during uncertain times? Amidst climate change and global warming, is the pandemic a prelude to the challenges to come?