Penn State University

Architecture professor awarded faculty fellowship to study in Israel

 

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Ute Poerschke, professor and associate architecture department head for graduate education in the Stuckeman School, was awarded a faculty fellowship by the Jewish National Fund (NJF) USA to travel throughout Israel this summer and meet with Israeli architecture professors with similar research interests in support of the JNF’s efforts to boost collaboration between academic institutions in the United States and Israel.

Poerschke was one of 33 U.S. academics that explored contemporary Israeli society, culture, historical landmarks and the way of life from June 4-20 with the goal of developing partnerships that will lead to research projects, articles and exchange programs between faculty and students.

A native of Germany, Poerschke has taken a deep interest in studying the Bauhaus, the famous German art school that has had an immense impact on modern design and architecture over the last century despite being forced to shut down in 1933 under pressure for the Nazi regime. In 2019, she organized the Bauhaus Transfers international symposium at Penn State to celebrate the Bauhaus centennial and to reflect on the impact of the school’s teachings on design, art and architecture.

Poerschke spent her time in Israel studying how the technical education taught at the Bauhaus, with a focus on solar impact and natural ventilation taught by professors Hans Wittwer and Ludwig Hilberseimer, lived on in the work of the eight architectural students who relocated in Palestine: Arieh Sharon, Leo Baumann, Chanan Frenkel, Edgar Hed, Selman Selmanagić, Shlomo Bernstein, Shmuel Mestechkin and Munio Gitai Weinraub.

“Traveling through Israel with professors from diverse disciplines in an incredibly thoughtful schedule organized by the JNF USA was mind-blowing,” said Poershke. “Opportunities to meet Israeli citizens with different backgrounds and visit landmarks throughout the country were interwoven with visits to the major universities in the country. I was deeply impressed by the superb 20th century architecture, reaching from modernist pioneering structures in Haifa and Tel Aviv to brutalist architecture in Be’er Sheva.”

Poerschke said she was equally impressed with her Israeli counterparts.

“I was amazed to find such welcoming research partners at the Haifa Technion with Or Aleksandrowicz and Dan Price, and at Tel Aviv University with Eran Neuman, and I can’t wait to return for a longer research stay,” she said.

Poerschke’s research interests lie in how architects integrate aspects of technology with expression in architectural projects and education. Most of her recent work focuses on the high modernism of the 1920s to 1940s, particularly on how architects responded to the progressing lighting and heating, cooling and ventilation science, technology and engineering of the time.

The Stuckeman School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture is the largest academic unit in the College of Arts and Architecture at Penn State. The school houses the Departments of Architecture, Graphic Design and Landscape Architecture.

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Penn State University

Recent architecture alumna earns AIA Medal for Academic Excellence

 

Puja Bhagat, who graduated from Penn State in May with a bachelor of architecture from the College of Arts and Architecture’s Stuckeman School, was named a recipient of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Medal for Academic Excellence.

The AIA medal is awarded annually to the top graduating students in National Architectural Accrediting Board (NAAB)- or Canadian Architectural Certification Board (CACB)-accredited degree programs whose “imagination and design thinking will influence the future of the architecture profession and the built environment,” according to the AIA confirmation letter.

“I’m honored to be given such a prestigious award,” said Bhagat. “The AIA Medal for Academic Excellence showcases my hard work and dedication throughout my undergraduate career, and I’m so thankful to the faculty and staff at Penn State who helped shape me into the person I am today.”

A Schreyer Honors College scholar during her time at Penn State, Bhagat graduated with a 3.98 GPA along with minors in sustainability leadership and residential construction. She served as a lab assistant in the Stuckeman School’s Digital Fabrication Lab from 2019 until her graduation and she was a student tutor with the Beehive Student Tutoring Group in the Department of Architecture. She was also a member of the Penn State Solar Decathlon Design Challenge Team from 2018 to 2020.

In the fall of 2021, Bhagat was named the winner of the Department of Architecture’s Corbelletti Design Charrette, a coveted prize among upper-level architecture students.

In May of 2021, she became a Certified Passive House Consultant through the Passive House Institution U.S. (Phius) and in August 2020, she was certified as a U.S. Green Buildings Council LEED Green Associate.

Bhagat, who hails from West Grove, Pennsylvania, is currently an intern with WRT Design in Philadelphia. She will begin pursuing a master’s degree in emergent technologies and design at the Architectural Association in London in the fall.

The Stuckeman School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture is the largest academic unit in the College of Arts and Architecture at Penn State. It houses the departments of Architecture, Graphic Design and Landscape Architecture, as well as two research centers: the Hamer Center for Community Design and the Stuckeman Center for Design Computing.

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University of Nebraska-Lincoln

University of Nebraska Students Research New Ways to Use Eastern Redcedar with Cabin Construction

 

Exploring a more sustainable way to build, Associate Professor Jason Griffiths’ students are designing and constructing Mizer Ruin, a 200 sq. ft., micro-dwelling using Eastern Redcedar at the University of Nebraska’s Cedar Point Biological Station near Ogallala, Nebraska. For many Nebraska and midwestern farmers, these trees can be a nuisance and costly to remove as they encroach on pasture and farmland. Finding creative solutions to this problem is one of the project objectives as Griffiths and his students explore the use of Eastern Redcedar as a construction material. If this team can demonstrate that Eastern Redcedar is a cost-effective, viable building material, this could prove a more sustainable choice for construction as well as a possible solution for offsetting tree removal costs and a means for forest fire management.

The design and programming of the Mizer Ruin, micro-dwelling project was developed from a collective of design-build based studios under the PLAIN Design-Build organization which is led by Griffiths.

The project was originally conceived in a 2018 third-year studio, with further development in 2019 and 2021 master-level design research, design-build studios.

In the fall of 2021, students finalized the design, began site preparation and poured the footings. At the same time, Griffiths began negotiations with Adam Smith of the Nebraska Forest Service and Jon Garbisch, associate director of Cedar Point Bio Station, to coordinate the felling of trees in the canyons around the site. Spring 2022 saw the completion of the forest cutting with over 100 logs prepared for milling. This summer, research and independent study students will mill the logs with a mobile wood mizer in preparation for the fall 2022 construction with the fourth-year, Collaborate design studio.

Over this fall semester, Griffiths is hoping the students will be able to build the main structure in three trips with the aim of final completion in the spring of 2023.

Once finished, the micro-dwelling residence will be used by the Cedar Point Biological Station manager. With only 200 sq. ft., the students had to design for space efficiency, including a tiny kitchenette, a small shower, a living space and a bedroom.

This is the second design-build project Griffiths has collaborated on with the Cedar Point Biological Station. Their first project was the Baxa residence cabin for underprivileged students studying bioscience at the station.

“UNL’s Cedar Point Biological Station has a long-term vision to broaden our use and understanding of field based or place-based research and education in the natural environment. Since 2009 we have partnered with various College of Architecture faculty and architecture courses with this idea in mind, said Jon Garbisch, Cedar Point Biological Station associate director. “The product has wildly exceeded our expectations, and this is visible in Baxa House, and Mizer’s Ruin but has also influenced a wide range of construction and maintenance projects here on the campus.”

Typically for design-build projects like this, the instructor collaborates with a non-profit partner to construct a community-based, socially responsible building. The college picks an educational partner based on their non-profit status who likely cannot afford the expertise of a professional firm but would mutually benefit from engaging in the educational endeavor, as would the local community it serves.

Being built as a sustainability research project, Griffiths will be collecting data for milling the project on-site as a method to reduce the embodied energy of the building materials.

“I won’t know the total environmental costs of this project until it’s all said and done in 2023, but I’m very curious to see the numbers and whether this will be a viable, cost-effective building method,” said Griffiths.

Using a mobile, wood mizer won’t be the only aspect that is unique to this project. The team plans to use the Japanese technique called shou sugi ban to treat the exterior of the log construction. The method includes charring the surface of the wood using a propane wood torch, and then rubbing it with natural oil.

This technique for weatherproofing wood creates a material that is resistant to rot, pests, water and fire.

Being fire resistant was one reason Griffiths chose this finish.

“Any dwelling being built in a forested area has to have considerations for fire hazards,” said Griffiths. “The shou sugi ban treatment offers protection from forest fires because the wood has already been burned and has a charcoal finish on the outer layer.”

Using this type of material also helps forest fire management by harvesting and removing a volatile fuel from the forest habitat that has the potential to burn rapidly and at high temperatures.

“Projects like this are such a win, win, for everyone; the community benefits from the projects we build, and students get first-hand experience of construction,” said Griffiths. “The physicality of a building helps students understand architecture in a way that cannot be captured on the computer or a virtual environment. With their direct knowledge and experience of how buildings work and the money, time and effort needed to build a building, we believe this experience helps accelerate the students’ understanding of the fundamentals of our discipline. Experiences from a design-build studio can help students apply their ideas to real-world scenarios.”

Griffiths says he owes a debt of gratitude to the Nebraska Environmental Trust for funding the development of this project and his partners at the biological station for all their assistance with the students, helping guide the project with their critique and input.

“The Mizer Ruin design-build students led by Griffiths are engaging in an exciting hands-on experiential learning opportunity to design, fabricate, install and quantify the environmental cost of the project,” said Architecture Program Director David Karle. “This multi-year project is helping future architects consider natural systems and environmental impacts when designing a building.”

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Virginia Tech

FINISHING: The End of Architecture — FRASCARI SYMPOSIUM VI : 3/31- 4/1, 2023 @ Virginia Tech/Washington Alexandria Architecture Center.

 

The Tower of Babel, perhaps the original architectural fable, foretells the impossibility of architecture’s completion. The utopic final state dreamed by architects is such that its end never arrives, and may never be finished. This has precipitated lamentations of architecture’s seemingly permanent existential crisis, like a store continuously “going out of business.” Edward Said’s On Late Style identifies finishing as an awareness of coming to an end, yet without actually arriving there. Nonetheless finishing as a topic evokes the tendency to close down, to terminate, to desist, while remaining stubbornly under-theorized. Help us, then, expand the conceptualization of finishing and explain the practices of finishing in architecture along three currents: the surface, the project, and most broadly, architectural time itself.

Finishing up, finishing off, crossing the finish line. Is finishing the endpoint, or itself a process, a concluding stage? Architectural constructing and construing, not limited to the proverbial drawing board, defines a project, defines a building, but also spans an architect’s entire career, her oeuvre. Poetic acts can initiate and sustain architectural conversations when edifices exist in the public sphere, despite Winckelmann’s proclamation of the births and deaths of styles. For something to be complete (full or final), therefore, it need not necessarily be finished (ended), and vice versa.

Finishing also connotes perfecting – applying the finishing touches. Is the end, then, the completion of a design, checking off the punch-list at the end of construction, or does it continue through a building’s lifetime, perhaps even extending to its ruined state and beyond as spoils? Michelangelo’s work often embodies “the poetic of the non-finito,” demonstrating that an unfinished edifice may find “an elegant but incomplete” existence well past the point of being considered a work-in-progress. Unlike the unfinished, Marco Frascari (2015) posits that the non-finito exists outside of time.

This symposium proposes an agenda for theorizing finishing by asking participants to explore the topic through one or more of these three currents:

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1  Surfaces: Finishing as Polishing

      The flow of this current leads to questions of ‘Detail’ via: Material, Tactility and Craft.

2  Projects: Finishing as Completing

    The flow of this current leads to questions of ‘Building’ via: Concept, Completion and Reception.

3  Times: Finishing as Ending

     The flow of this current leads to questions of ‘Architecture’ via: Performance, Teleology and Oeuvre.

We invite submissions of scholarly and creative papers and/or creative and scholarly works. Individuals may submit both writings and works. All submissions will remain anonymous and blind peer reviewed. Email all proposals to Frascarisymposiumvi@gmail.com.

 

Submissions for either category should consist of not more than 532 words and three images in a .docx format. Specify in the email heading Abstract-Writing or Abstract-Drawing and the current to which it is being submitted (Surfaces, Projects, or Times). Individuals are allowed up to two separate submissions. In the body of the email, please include your name(s), institutional affiliation(s), four descriptive keywords, and a brief (100 word) bio of each author. In the case of multiple author submissions, only the submitting author will receive direct correspondence from the organizers.

Drawing abstracts should identify media (including electronic), size (in inches), 2-D or 3-D, and any special installation and exhibition instructions. While we will make all reasonable efforts to accommodate special installation instructions, unusual sizes or other complex requirements, we cannot guarantee they will be possible.

The symposium is planned to be held entirely in person at the Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center. If health requirements preclude gathering in person, we will make a timely announcement at least one month before the event so that everyone can revise their plans for on-line participation.

The final version of accepted papers and drawings are due by Friday, 3 February, 2023. Full papers should be submitted as recorded presentations with images not to exceed 20 minutes in length. During the conference, presenters will have 11 minutes to present a precis of their paper in person. The longer full paper will be available for all participants’ review prior to the conference. This format allows a more substantial discussion time for interaction among the conference participants.

The final version of accepted creative works will be hung in exhibition that will be open throughout the symposium. Makers may install their own work as arranged with the organizers on an individual basis.

Papers and creative works will be considered for a future publication following the symposium.

Important Dates
Abstract submissions due: Friday, 2 September 2022 at 11:59 EST at Frascarisymposiumvi@gmail.com
Abstract acceptance notification: Friday, 2 December, 2022.
Final paper and drawing submission due: Friday, February 3, 2023.
Symposium: March 31- April 1, 2023.

Symposium Website:  https://negarg.wixsite.com/frascarisymposiumvi

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Ball State University

CERES Team Helps Achieve Living Building Certification

 

Ball State University played a key role in Cope Environmental Center earning a unique status that only 28 other buildings worldwide have received. The Centerville, Indiana, center has been awarded “Living Building Certification” by the International Living Future Institute.

Earning this special certification is the result, in large part, of multi-year collaborative efforts that included Ball State faculty and students; Cope Environmental Center staff; and design architect Kevin McCurdy, a Ball State graduate of the College of Architecture and Planning. Mr. McCurdy is a partner at LWC Incorporated.

Living Building Certification is issued in recognition of the achievement of the highest proficiency in the categories of Place, Water, Energy, Health and Happiness, Materials, Equity, and Beauty.

Ball State contributors to this collaboration came from the University’s Center for Energy Research/Education/Service (CERES) faculty, staff, and students, including Robert Koester, Ball State professor of Architecture and CERES director; CERES operations manager (ret.) Jeff Culp; and CERES research assistants and CAP graduates Lauren McWhorter and Ben Grayson.

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University of Southern California

Ginger Nolan Wins the 2022 SAH | Places Prize on Race and the Built Environment from the Society of Architectural Historians

 

The Society of Architectural Historians is pleased to announce that Ginger Nolan has been selected as the recipient of the 2023 SAH | Places Prize on Race and the Built Environment. A collaboration between SAH and Places Journal, the award supports the production of a major work of public scholarship that considers the history of race and the built environment through a contemporary lens.

Nolan is an assistant professor at the School of Architecture at the University of Southern California. Her research examines relationships between architecture, media, infrastructures, and race in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She has published two books with the University of Minnesota Press: Savage Mind to Savage Machine: Racial Science and Twentieth-Century Design (2021) and The Neocolonialism of the Global Village (2018). Her work has been recognized by the Graham Foundation, the Social Science Research Council, the Terra Foundation, and the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst.

Nolan’s project, “Responding to Racialized Risk: African American Insurance, Churches, and Co-Ops,” will examine the strategies that African Americans developed to contend with their exclusion from access to financial capital, affordable housing, and other infrastructures of household risk management. Her proposed article will draw on archives of African American insurance companies, banks, church-sponsored housing projects, and rural co-operatives, as well as articles and ads in African American magazines. The article will also address continuing barriers faced by non-EuroAmericans in accessing infrastructures of risk management, highlighting how those infrastructures are still integral to the global-northern conquest of space and capital.

Nolan will receive a $7,500 honorarium to fund archival research and travel, which will begin this year. Her research will culminate in a public lecture presented by SAH and the publication of an article in Places.

Established in 2021, the SAH | Places Prize was envisioned by Charles L. Davis II, associate professor of architectural history and criticism at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, and co-chair of the SAH Race + Architectural History Affiliate Group.

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