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University of Nebraska-Lincoln

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Two Interior Design Students Named to the Metropolis Future 100

 

Two undergraduate students in the College of Architecture’s Interior Design Program were selected for the Metropolis Future 100, a list naming the top 50 interior design and top 50 architecture students graduating in North America this spring. Jiang Chen and Lauren Shaul, nominated by Interior Design Program Director Lindsey Bahe, were named to this exclusive list through a competitive process. Out of 300 applications and 47 schools from across the United States and Canada, Chen and Shaul were selected by a jury of Metropolis magazine design experts.

Chen and Shaul join an impressive group of rising leaders who have been recognized for their potential in defining and reimagining the practice of architecture and interior design.

“We were blown away by the quality of Jiang Chen’s work, and we feel that Jiang represents a bright future for our industry—one of beautiful, thoughtful, innovative, sustainable and inclusive design,” – Metropolis Magazine.

“I feel so honored to be selected to the Metropolis Future 100. This is wonderful affirmation of my academic and design skills that were developed in my four years as an interior design student,” said Chen.

After graduation Chen plans to enroll in UNL’s Master of Architecture Program where he will continue to focus on creating design solutions that are functional, sustainable and resilient that blur the boundary between the built environment and nature.

“Shaul’s sophisticated, urbane designs are infused with natural materials, biophilic principles and a keen sense of the natural world outside.” – Metropolis Magazine.

“I am so excited to be on the Metropolis 100 List,” said Shaul. “Being nominated was already such an honor, but being named to the Future 100 was thrilling because I know there are so many talented designers both at UNL and around the nation. As I get ready to graduate and enter the workforce, I feel this was a good confidence boost and a great way to end my college career.”

Shaul was first exposed to interior design as a child when her dad worked on beautiful new homes and was inspired by the whole process. Post-graduation, Shaul is still exploring which career path option she plans to pursue.

Interior Design Program Director Lindsey Bahe, was delighted when she found out not only one but two students were selected from the program. “To have the excellence of our students’ work recognized from such a prestigious international design publication and by a jury of design influencers, speaks volumes to the caliber of work that our students are achieving after engaging in our four-year program. It’s evidence to our students’ creativity and rigor, our dedicated faculty, and the quality of our distinctive curriculum that aims to educate future interior designers who are driven to seek authentic and informed interior design solutions that are deeply connected to our societal fabric and strive to positively impact our culture.”

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University of Nebraska-Lincoln

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SGH Concepts & Dri-Design Competition Winners

 

The College of Architecture in partnership with SGH Concepts and Dri-Design, have established a student scholarship competition for the fourth-year, undergraduate, architectural design studios. Today jury members awarded these well-deserved accolades:

Excellence Award | “Community Crucible” by Austin Wahl and Xander Parker

Jury Notes: Overall, a very comprehensively resolved project. The spaces for making and creating community were thoughtfully investigated. The formal response is the strength of the design, including the way it negotiates the site and the corner. The structural system responded to the material constraints yet provided an architecturally appropriate response.

Honor Award | “Atelier – Sheldon Museum of Art” by Ethan Boerner and Mason Burress

Jury Notes: It is a very poetic solution. The connector and transition to the new addition were remarkable. The attention to developing the three facades is thoughtful. Graphics are superior.

A huge congratulations to all the finalists! Tymaree Krusemark, Megan Kortenhof, Ethan Boerner, Blake Phillips, Preston Doerrfeld, Austin Wahl, Xander Parker and Mason Burress. Additionally, we would like to thank all of our critics for spending the day with us offering us the benefit of their experience.

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University of Arizona

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UArizona Architecture Students Win 2022 U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon Design Challenge Grand Prize

 

Each year the U.S. Department of Energy hosts the Solar Decathlon Design Challenge, bringing together students from around the world to showcase their teams’ innovative technologies and designs with the goal of creating the next generation of clean energy buildings.

And each year, University of Arizona student teams guided by Assistant Professor of Architecture and Sustainable Built Environments Jonathan Bean earn their way into the final round, often winning or receiving honorable mentions in their divisions.

The UArizona streak continues for 2022. Once again, three College of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture teams—out of a total of 54 teams representing 37 institutions—advanced to the finals.

This year, Bean and his students achieved a big win for UArizona and Tucson. The Multifamily Building team of fourth-year Bachelor of Architecture students Andrew Norris, Jonah Cummins-Mikkalson, Alex Kolodziej and Nhan Vo not only took first place in their division, but also was selected as the 2022 Design Challenge Grand Winner for Commercial Divisions—a first for CAPLA and UArizona.

“We were pleased to see the jurors recognize the impact of our project, which leveraged the potential of cost-effective and ultra-efficient buildings,” says Bean. “Not only would the students’ project provide much-needed low-income housing for our neighbors in Tucson, but it would also provide enough thermal energy to cool nearly every home in the neighborhood.”

The Multifamily Building team’s project, The Avenue, proposes a three-story, mixed-use development located on the site of a current RV park in Tucson’s Miracle Manor lower-income neighborhood. Like all of the student proposals, the project incorporates the SunBlock distributed heating and cooling system, which links solar energy generation with thermal energy sharing. In addition to residences for approximately 360 people, the building will provide a new retail district that generates income opportunities for residents while also adding education and recreation spaces to support after-school and summer activities for children.

The Avenue incorporates a prefabricated modular assembly from Solar Decathlon Design Challenge industry partner B.PUBLIC Prefab for dwelling units in an effort to minimize cost and carbon emissions during construction. The complex is sheltered by a roof superstructure made of recycled plastic that acts as a host for organic film photovoltaic panels. The design also uses color contrasted against white terracotta panels to “induce a sense of cultural appreciation for Tucson’s historic past,” says the team.

Like the winning team, CAPLA’s two other student teams focused on the very real need for increasing the supply of affordable housing in Tucson—making the teams’ SunBlock energy system concepts even more compelling.

The New Building team of Matthew Dulong, Serena Gray, Matthew Cullen and Andrace Gledhill created the Esperanza system of new housing for the neighborhood. Partnering with Habitat for Humanity, U-Build and Cuadro, the team’s goals were to provide flexible, customizable, affordable net-zero energy accessory dwelling unit (ADU) housing options to maintain generational homes and multigenerational living demands while at the same time providing excess power reserves to surrounding homes.

The Esperanza system incorporates a unique modular approach to ADU usage, responding to the various constraints of existing backyards. “The expansive floor plans and layouts of the system are able to be integrated into backyard environments while using the modular structure and formation to weave around existing structures and vegetation,” says the team. Members of the team have already netted $100,000 to develop their design for the Orange County Sustainability Decathlon, a new collegiate competition focused on sustainable living.

The Attached Housing team of Jesus Nava, Sofia Raffaeli, Nicole Peterson and David Zuñiga proposed Teachers’ Row, a two-parcel project on a site that “places an importance on biophilia and the importance of access and views to nature on the overall occupant experience,” says the team. It also retrofits an existing motel.

The project itself is an affordable-housing initiative in partnership with Pathways to Teaching, a UArizona College of Education teacher preparation program. Teachers’ Row provides seven units of attached rowhome-style housing for teachers at different stages of their life needs. The modular ground floor allows for a simplified construction process as well as easily replicable material composition. The entire project hosts a photovoltaic structure composed of 256 bi-facial solar panels, following the flattened profile of Arizona’s “duck curve”—a breakdown of daily power demand.

Designed for the climate extremes of the Sonoran Desert, SunBlock is a distributed heating and cooling system that generates and stores carbon-neutral thermal energy and shares it with the neighborhood, or micro-community. It reduces stress on the electrical grid and offers residents an economical alternative for space conditioning by using water as a vehicle for storing and sharing abundant solar energy through a community energy system. View details at sunblock.community.

“SunBlock rethinks the traditional, centralized configuration of district energy systems used to heat or cool buildings at the neighborhood scale,” says Bean. “The result is a community-wide system that is scalable, efficient and equitable.”

Bean has been evolving the SunBlock concept with students as part of their Solar Decathlon designs for several years. In the competition this year, Solar Decathlon Design Challenge judges Celeste Cizik of Group14 Engineering, Alexander McDonald of Tesla and Lalitha Suryanarayana of Infineon Technologies hailed the concept as “groundbreaking.”

City of Tucson Housing Development Manger Sarah Meggison, an adjunct lecturer in urban planning at CAPLA, joined the teams for their finalist presentations and is exploring ways to support the SunBlock proposals as the city implements its affordable housing strategy.

“Three finalist teams representing CAPLA is a testament to the strength of the multiyear SunBlock program that Jonathan Bean has created—and of course Jonathan’s guidance and just as importantly the amazing dedication and work of our students,” says CAPLA Dean Nancy Pollock-Ellwand. “If we are truly to build a changing world, we must tackle the challenges of our built environment at a systems level. The projects created by our students for the 2022 Solar Decathlon Design Challenge do just that, and they do it with the kind of craft, design thinking and sustainable focus Jonathan and our other faculty members excel at instilling in our students.”

“The innovative building designs developed by this year’s competitors demonstrate how clean energy technologies can be applied to households across the country, including slashing costs for American families, modernizing energy infrastructure and decarbonizing the building sector,” concludes U.S. Secretary of Energy Jennifer M. Granholm.

Bean and the students are grateful for a grant from Tucson Electric Power that partially funded travel to Colorado for their participation in the competition.

Pennsylvania State University

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Stuckeman School lab showcases work at Biomaterial Building Exposition

 

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The work of Penn State architecture researchers using mycelium, which comes from the root of fungi, to advance the study of biodegradable building composites is featured in the Biomaterial Building Exposition on the University of Virginia (UVA) campus through April 30.

Benay Gürsoy, assistant professor of architecture in the College of Arts and Architecture’s Stuckeman School, leads the team of researchers from the Stuckeman Center for Design Computing (SCDC) Form and Matter (ForMat) Lab that has been exploring how to cultivate mycelium-based composites, which require less energy to make than conventional building materials, for structural use. As a result, the lab developed the “MycoCreate 2.0” project, which has been awarded funding from the American Institute of Architects.

Penn State is one of five universities that was invited to install full-scale installations on the UVA campus in Charlottesville, Virginia that were developed at the architect-scholars’ home institutions.

“The ultimate goal of this research is to lower the growing carbon footprint of the building industry, which currently contributes greatly to global carbon emissions and landfill waste around the world,” said Gürsoy.

The ForMat Lab in the SCDC focuses on computational making and material computation, exploring how material manipulation in design — whether carried out by hand or by digital tools — can become an integral part of the computational design process.

Gürsoy and ForMat Lab researchers Ali Ghazvinian, an architecture doctoral candidate, and Alale Mohseni, an architecture master’s degree student, traveled to Charlottesville on March 11 to start the two-day installation of compression-based structure, which measures approximately 10 feet long, 8 feed wide and 6 feet high. Fabrication of the 64 unique load-bearing mycelium-based components of the project, however, started in the fall 2021 semester with a design research studio instructed by Gürsoy and Ghazvinian.

Arman Khalilbeigi Khameneh and Esmaeil Mottaghi, cofounders of Paragen Creative Studio, assisted the ForMat Lab team with structural form-finding of the project.

According to Gürsoy, MycoCreate 2.0 structure is crucial to Ghazvinian’s doctoral research, and he had “an instrumental role in its conceptualization and realization.”

Ghazvinian is working on enhancing the mechanical properties of mycelium-based composites by investigating the factors that affect their nature and growth. Crucial to his research has been the ForMat Lab team’s collaboration with the Mushroom Research Center at Penn State.

“Based on the constraints and affordances of the cultivated mycelium-based composites, and the outcomes of mechanical tests, we are developing compression-based structural systems using computational form-finding techniques, generative design and optimization methods,” said Ghazvinian.

Gürsoy also presented her lab’s research at the accompanying Biomaterial Building Symposium, which was held on March 14 in conjunction with the exhibition opening.

“It was great to showcase our research efforts at ForMat Lab on mycelium-based biofabrication and connect with other researchers and designers working with biomaterials,” said Gürsoy.

The Biomaterial Building Exposition seeks to establish a multi-institutional scholarly discourse and raise the public visibility of novel approaches to biomaterial construction. Katie MacDonald and Kyle Schumann curated the exhibition, which is hosted by the UVA School of Architecture and funded by The Jefferson Trust and the Center for Global Inquiry and Innovation.The event has garnered quite a bit of media attention this spring with stories appearing via Archinect, UVA Today and Inform Magazine.

University of Tennessee, Knoxville

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University of Tennessee School of Architecture Names Lostritto as Director

 

The University of Tennessee, Knoxville, College of Architecture and Design is pleased to announce the appointment of Carl Lostritto as director of the School of Architecture. Lostritto will assume the position on July 1, 2022.

“Carl Lostritto is an accomplished leader, effective teacher, talented maker and insightful researcher,” said Jason Young, dean of the college. “He leads with empathy, accessibility and collaboration and has significant administrative experience where leadership and sound management have prevailed. Carl’s creative work is timely in a maturing field of computational design work and cultivates important reflection on the interplay of digital technologies and more traditional architectural methods. I am confident his energy and vision will help the School of Architecture continue to make an impact in our state, the region and the world.”

Currently, Lostritto is an associate professor at the Rhode Island School of Design. Additionally, he has served as RISD’s graduate program director since 2017. Prior to joining RISD in 2012, Lostritto taught at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Boston Architectural College, Catholic University of America and University of Maryland.

A scholar and author, Lostritto has published the book, Computational Drawing: From Foundational Exercises to Theories of Representation, a second book coming in 2023, Impossible and Hyper-Real Elements of Architecture, as well as multiple book chapters and journal essays that feature his design research, teaching and creative work. Additionally, he has exhibited in major U.S. cities, including New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and Boston, and lectured extensively nationally and internationally.

“I’m ecstatic about joining the UT School of Architecture. The creative culture reflects collective commitments to experimental making and challenging ideas,” said Lostritto. “I know the school is committed to the impact that both the discipline and profession of architecture can have on the world, and I look forward to doing the work of advancing and critiquing the important contributions. This is hard, necessary work that involves what we do best: drawing, modeling, writing, fabricating, building, diagramming, theorizing, speculating, analyzing and projecting. It’s an exciting moment to be teaching and studying architecture.”

To the role of director, Lostritto brings specialties in pedagogy, computation and digital technology, as well as a strong belief in collaboration to connect art and graphics with architecture. As director, he will lead faculty, staff and students while addressing the complexities of the discipline, the profession and a diverse society and will provide organizational and strategic leadership in the school’s renowned pursuits of teaching, research, engagement and practice.

Lostritto earned a Master of Science in Architectural Studies, Design & Computation from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a Master of Architecture from the University of Maryland and a Bachelor of Science in Architecture, summa cum laude, from University of Maryland.

Lostritto will succeed Scott Wall, professor of Architecture, who has served as interim director of the School of Architecture since July 1, 2021, when the former director, Jason Young, was named dean of the college. Wall (’83 B.Arch) has taught in the college for 19 years and previously served as director of the school from 2009-2014. He will return to teaching in fall 2022.

“The students, faculty and staff in the School of Architecture and across the college are indebted to Scott Wall for his leadership during this transitional year and beyond,” said Young. “His service over the past year, as the world reemerged from the difficulties of the pandemic, was especially critical. He has led with patience, flexibility and compassion to ensure our students and faculty became reengaged in the exceptional education we offer, and for that, I express my and the college’s collective appreciation.”

Founded in 1965, the College of Architecture and Design enriches quality of life in the region and world through transformational design education, a design/build program, key partnerships and award-winning facilities including the state-of-the-art Fab Lab.  The college is comprised of more than 725 undergraduate and graduate students in architecture, graphic design, interior architecture and landscape architecture. Visit archdesign.utk.edu to learn more.

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Contact: Amanda Johnson, amandajohnson@utk.edu

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