Page 39 – Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Illinois School Of Architecture Announces New Cesar Pelli Distinguished Lecture Series

The Illinois School of Architecture is pleased to announce the establishment of the César Pelli Distinguished Lecture Series. The Pelli Lecture Series has been made possible through the generous estate gift of world-renowned architect and celebrated Illinois Architecture alumnus César Pelli. Pelli received his Master of Science in Architecture degree in 1954 from the University of Illinois and went on to design some of the world’s most iconic buildings, most notably the Petronas Twin Towers in Kuala Lumpur.

Rafael Pelli reflected on his father’s fond memories of the University of Illinois campus, “Coming to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign from Argentina was a seminal moment in my father’s life and career. I remember walking on campus with him while our firm was working on the BIF [Gies College of Business Instructional Facility] project. He remembered his time here very fondly and was very appreciative of the support the University gave to a young man away from his country and family for the first time with no money or connections. The Dean of Students helped him with housing and some teaching work. The Director of the School of Architecture introduced him to an acquaintance in Eero Saarinen’s office for a summer job interview, and he later spent 10 years with the firm. He was struck by the communal aspect of University life, so different than his school experience in Argentina, and my parents always remembered the joy of spending evenings in the Illini Union. He was forever grateful for the opportunity to start a new life at UIUC.”

The Illinois School of Architecture will welcome internationally recognized architect Toshiko Mori as the inaugural César Pelli Visiting Lecturer. Toshiko Mori, founder of the New York-based Toshiko Mori Architect firm and the think tank Vision Arc, will kick off the César Pelli Distinguished Lecture Series on March 3. Mori, a member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on Design and the Robert P. Hubbard Professor in the Practice of Architecture at Harvard University Graduate School of Design, is well known for her research-based approach to design. Visiting lecturers, like Mori, will engage students in multi-day co-teaching efforts of graduate studio learning and discussion sessions with faculty and students.

“We are extremely fortunate to have Toshiko Mori as our inaugural Pelli Lecturer,” shared Francisco Rodríguez-Suárez, director of the Illinois School of Architecture. “Aside from knowing César personally, Toshiko is well respected both as a professor and a practitioner. Our academic community will benefit immensely from the various events in which we will share her ideas and experience. This is exactly the kind of energy I wish to imbue within the ethos of our School.”

Other upcoming distinguished visiting lecturers include Mark Raymond, Illinois School of Architecture’s Plym Distinguished Professor and prominent Illinois Architecture alumna Trina Sandschafer. Raymond, director of the Graduate School of Architecture (GSA) in Johannesburg, will lead a joint studio between students in Urbana and Africa, and Sandschafer will co-teach an urban housing studio in Chicago with Christina Bollo. You can register for the Toshiko Mori lecture and other upcoming Cesar Pelli Lectures by visiting arch.illinois.edu/about-us/events.

CONTACT: Joshua Hall, 217-244-1368, hall48@illinois.edu

University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Social Justice Advocate and Urban Designer Destiny Thomas to Deliver Causier Lecture at UW-Milwaukee

MILWAUKEE – Destiny Thomas, a noted anthropologist, entrepreneur and social justice advocate, will deliver the 2021 Charles Causier Memorial Lecture at the School of Architecture and Urban Planning at UW-Milwaukee.

Thomas’ talk, titled “Un-planning Cities: reparative design and atonement in the built environment,” will be take place online on Friday, March 5, at 2 p.m. Please register for the Department of Urban Planning’s annual keynote lecture at this UWM webpage.

Thomas, founder and CEO of the Thrivance Group, is recognized as a national thought leader in designing more equitable cities. Her perspectives help challenge the status quo of professional practices and envision a more equitable and just future.

Thomas’ ideas are particularly relevant for Milwaukee, often ranked as one of the nation’s most segregated urban areas, and in light of protests over racial and social inequality during the last year in southeastern Wisconsin and around rest of the country.

An anthropologist planner from Oakland, California, Thomas has a combined 15 years of experience in nonprofit management and project management in government agencies, including the California Department of Transportation and the City of Los Angeles. Thomas has led advancements in racial equity initiatives in California for more than a decade. She focuses on urban planning, policy writing and organizational development in communities most affected by racial inequities.

“Thomas challenges urban planners and other urbanists to examine their own role in creating racial injustice, particularly in the built environment,” said Robert Schneider, an associate professor of urban planning at UWM. The department recruited Thomas specifically for her emphasis on equity issues associated with planning.

Land-use and infrastructure patterns in southeastern Wisconsin play a role in erecting barriers and denying equal opportunities for residents, particularly those living in the central city, Schneider said. Actions by policymakers, residents, stakeholders and urban planners can contribute to segregated neighborhoods, limited opportunities to access jobs and health care via public transit and streets that prioritize high-speed traffic over local resident interaction and foot traffic for businesses.

Thomas’ interests include: harm-reductive planning, implementing the dignity-infused community engagement methodology, anti-displacement studies, healing environmental and infrastructural trauma, and bolstering agency and voice in marginalized communities within municipal planning processes. She launched the Thrivance Group in 2020 to address these issues. As a culturally rooted, trauma-informed enterprise, Thrivance works to build capacity for those values within municipal agencies, direct service providers and advocacy organizations.

“Milwaukee is an important place to begin the work of improving urban spaces for all, especially the groups Dr. Thomas identifies as marginalized,” Schneider said. “We welcome her to help open our minds to policies and practices that better advance equity and justice in the built environment.”

Thomas was featured on ABC’s “Good Morning America” in July 2020 for her work. Thomas and the Thrivance Group also host the Unurbanist Assembly, a 23-hour, digital event in which more than 8,000 people last year participated in a virtual teach-in that focused on anti-racist frameworks in urban planning, public health and social services sectors. The next Unurbanist Assembly is scheduled to take place in June.

Schneider is available for interviews ahead of the Causier lecture by contacting him at rjschnei@uwm.edu. Thomas also is available for interviews and can be contacted through Schneider.

2021 Call for Nominations: ACSA Committees & Task Forces

February 25, 2021/in ACSA News Board of Directors /by Michelle Sturges

2021 ACSA Board Candidates and Results

February 19, 2021/in ACSA News Board of Directors /by Matrix Admin

2021 Election Results

The ACSA Board of Directors is pleased to announce the results of the 2021 ACSA Election:

Second Vice President: Mo Zell

At-Large Director: Catherine Hamel

At-Large Director: Kwesi Daniels

They will be joined by Shannon Defranza (Roger Williams University / AIAS) as the incoming ACSA Student Director.

Congratulations to all of the new board members.

Candidates and Online Voting

Below is information on the 2021 ACSA election, including candidate information. Official ballots were emailed to all full-member ACSA schools’ Faculty Councilors, who are the voting representatives. Faculty Councilors must complete the online ballot by close of business, February 12, 2021.

+ Download a single PDF of all candidates’ statements & short curriculum vitae

2021 ACSA SECOND VICE PRESIDENT CANDIDATES

The Second Vice President serves on the Board for a four-year term, beginning on July 1, 2021, with the first year served as Second Vice President, the second year served as First Vice President/President-Elect, the third year served as President, and the fourth year served as Past President. The links below include campaign statements written by each candidate and short curriculum vitae.


Hazem Rashed-Ali University of Texas at San Antonio		Mo Zell University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

2021 AT-LARGE DIRECTOR POSITION CANDIDATES – POSITION 1

The At-Large Directors serve for a three-year term, beginning on July 1, 2021. At-Large Directors serve as voting members of the Board. In addition, they have the following roles and responsibilities: (A) Liaison with Member Schools, including participating in organized business meetings; maintaining contact with Faculty Councilors and others associated with member schools; assisting member schools upon request; advising candidate or affiliated schools; and advising the Board of issues and concerns raised by members; (B) Contributing to the Work of the Board through actively serving on Board committees and contributing to collective deliberations; and (C) Performing other duties, as provided by the Rules of the Board of Directors or requested by the Board. The links below include campaign statements written by each candidate and short curriculum vitae.


Kwesi Daniels Tuskegee University		Vincent Hui Ryerson University

2021 AT-LARGE DIRECTOR POSITION CANDIDATES – POSITION 2


Diogo Burnay Dalhousie University		Catherine Hamel University of Calgary

ACSA Election Process

ACSA Bylaws, Article VIII. Nominations, Elections, and Recall, Section 3: Election Process: “Elections shall be held in accordance with the Rules of the Board of Directors. Faculty Councilors of member schools shall be responsible for encouraging colleagues to express their views regarding candidates for Association elections, and shall submit the vote of the member school they represent on behalf of all members of the faculty. The Association shall announce the results of elections and appointments as soon as feasible, consistent with the Rules of the Board of Directors.”

The Faculty Councilor from each ACSA full-member school is the voting representative. Faculty Councilors must complete the online ballot by close of business, February 12, 2021.

+ Download a single PDF of all candidates’ statements & short curriculum vitae

Timeline

January 13, 2021 Ballots emailed to all full-member schools, Faculty Councilors*
February 12, 2021 Deadline for receipt of completed online ballots
March 2021 Winners introduced at ACSA Annual Business Meeting

* The Faculty Councilor from each ACSA full-member school is the voting representative and must complete the online ballot by close of business, February 12, 2021.

QUESTIONS

ACSA Info

Michelle Sturges
Membership Manager
202-785-2324
msturges@acsa-arch.org

Kennesaw State University

February 17, 2021/in School News Mid Atlantic Region /by Elizabeth Martin-Malikian

Liz Martin-Malikian named AIAS Educator of the Year 2020

Kennesaw State University professor Liz Martin-Malikian was recently named Educator of the Year at the American Institute of Architecture Students (AIAS) Honor Awards.

Martin-Malikian, thesis coordinator and professor of architecture in KSU’s College of Architecture and Construction Management, was recognized by AIAS for her outstanding contribution to the education of architecture students, the impact she has made on the education of architecture students and for championing the virtues of excellence in architecture and the environment to the general public. The award also honors educators who align with the AIAS mission to “advance leadership, design and service among architecture students.”

“This award confirms what we already knew about Liz – that she is a first-rate educator who embodies KSU’s value of putting students first,” said Andrew Payne, dean of the College of Architecture and Construction Management. “We are privileged to have her among the faculty in the Department of Architecture, and I’m sure many more accolades will come her way in the future.”

Martin-Malikian has taught at the University since 2006 and has since become the thesis coordinator of the architecture department’s advanced core sequence, one of the few programs nationwide that requires students to pursue thesis projects while earning an architecture degree. Aside from her involvement with thesis sequences, Martin-Malikian teaches courses on environmental technology, materials and methods, third-year studios and urban design. She taught in Auburn University’s School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture as the Paul Rudolph Visiting Professor of Practice prior to arriving at Kennesaw State.

See Kennesaw State University News Link HERE

Dalhousie University

February 12, 2021/in School News Canadian Region /by Michelle Sturges

We are happy to invite you to the Robert H. Winters lecture series Resistance as Practice: Acts of Anti-Racism through Architecture and Planning! The event is hosted by the Dalhousie University Faculty of Architecture and Planning’s Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Committee, in partnership with the SHIFT: Connect conference. Our next event will be on Wednesday, February 25^th at 7pm AST, and will be a lecture by Dr. Vernelle Noel. Noel is an architect, design scholar, artist, TED speaker and the director of the Situated Computation + Design Lab at the University of Florida. Through this work she challenges narratives that have excluded traditional ways of making by incorporating them into the practices of automated making, investigating human-computer interaction, interdisciplinary creativity and intersections of these practices with society. Please see the attached announcement for more details on the panelists and the event, and register through Eventbright here.

The series will extend into March of 2021, and featured architects, planners, scholars and activists whose work focuses on anti-racism on scales local to Halifax, in other Canadian contexts, and internationally. We will end with a panel on institutional barriers to anti-racist work featuring Frank Palermo, Jennifer Llewelyn, and Ingrid Waldron.

We are organizing this series at a critical moment for architects, planners and other disciplines grappling with difficult histories and professional cultures. This means questioning how designed spaces are embedded with power structures that stratify our society, and how practitioners are implicated in this. Just as importantly, we must acknowledge that this is not a new conversation or area of analysis: racialized communities have developed their own planning and design practices in cities when they have not been heard by the faces of power. This lecture series builds on the ongoing powerful response to racialized violence by presenting the work of practitioners, academics and activists who have pursued these acts of anti-racism as a central focus of their work.

We hope that you’ll join us, and stay tuned for information on events in the rest of the series!

Eventbrite link: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/dr-vernelle-noel-on-resistance-as-practice-robert-h-winters-series-tickets-140837987211

In Solidarity,

The Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Committee

Dalhousie University Faculty of Architecture and Planning

New Jersey Institute of Technology

February 12, 2021/in School News Northeast Region /by AMY STINCHCOMBE

Spring Symposium eLCAd: Environmental Life Cycle Assessment in Design March 30- April 1, 2021

Organized and sponsored by the New Jersey Institute of Technology and the American Center for Life Cycle Assessment

Truly sustainable design is increasingly driven by a steady stream of reliable data. What was once a field that relied almost completely on heuristics, sustainable design now leverages computationally guided workflows in conjunction with robust databases. How does this data-driven approach to sustainability liberate design where appearance is now decoupled from substance?

The designer’s primary job is to present compelling synthetic solutions that meet people’s needs. Good design, at every scale, stirs emotions while satisfying multiple utilitarian requirements. At this point in human evolution, however, it is necessary – and possible – to do more. Environmental life cycle assessment (LCA) provides a fact-based scientific approach to evaluate design decisions. It is grounded in a deep understanding of the environmental impacts associated with human-directed natural resource flows and the industrial processes that transform them. Tracking current human impacts on the ecosphere in increasingly detailed ways is critical to reducing and even reversing the negative environmental effects of providing for a global population of nearly 8 billion people.

This inaugural symposium unites these two parallel but separate cultures engaged in dynamic systems thinking. It will explore areas of common cause and mission in two sectors: building and transportation. Through three half days of presentations and working sessions, we will come together to define current and future opportunities brought about through leaps in computational power that promise to augment and improve sustainable design processes at multiple scales.

ACSA Announces Ozayr Saloojee as Incoming JAE Associate Editor of Design

February 12, 2021/in ACSA News Journals /by Amanda

Pennsylvania State University

February 10, 2021/in School News Northeast Region /by Pamela Wertz

Architecture Professor to be Featured in Upcoming MoMA exhibition

UNIVERSTY PARK, Pa. — Felecia Davis, an associate professor of architecture in the Stuckeman School at Penn State who has gained widespread recognition for her work designing lightweight textiles that change properties in response to their environment, is one of 10 architects, designers and artists who will be featured in an upcoming Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) exhibition that examines contemporary architecture in the context of how systemic racism has fostered violent histories of discrimination and injustice in the United States.

“Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America,” which has been described by organizers as “an investigation into the intersections of architecture, blackness and anti-black racism in the American context,” will run Feb. 20 through the end of May. Its original opening date in October was postponed due to the coronavirus.

The exhibition features a series of 10 newly commissioned works that, according to MoMA will “explore how people have mobilized black cultural spaces, forms and practices as sites of imagination, liberation, resistance and refusal.” It is the fourth iteration of the museum’s “Issues in Contemporary Architecture” series, which was launched in 2010.

Davis, who is the Carey Memorial Early Career Professor in the Arts and director of the Computational Textiles Lab (SOFTLAB) in the Stuckeman Center for Design Computing, is developing textile systems for use in architecture that can sense and respond to the world around them through digital electronic programing and sensors. These systems can also be programmed by using the natural transformative quality of the material itself in connection with environmental cues, such as humidity, temperature and light.

The purpose of the textile systems – or “architextiles,” as they are referred to – is to use the responsiveness and sensual qualities of the material to communicate information or, in other words, to tell a story. An example of these systems are soft walls that elicit emotions from people in a space or to help a person who is not in touch with their emotions be able to communicate to a caretaker, doctor or nurse in a nonverbal way.

The 10 artists, designers and architects featured by MoMA – Emanuel Admassu, Germane Barnes, Sekou Cooke, J. Yolande Daniels, Mario Gooden, Walter Hood, Olalekan Jeyifous, V. Mitch McEwen, Amanda Williams, along with Davis – have been giving virtual lectures together at universities and institutions around the nation on issues surrounding racial injustice and Black history since the fall. “The Black Reconstruction Collective,” as the group is known, will be hosted by the Department of Architecture in partnership with Stuckeman School and WPSU at 6 p.m. on March 24 as part of the school’s Spring Virtual Lecture Series.

More information about the show can be found on the MoMA website.

Auburn University

February 10, 2021/in School News Gulf Region /by Michelle Sturges

Associate Professor Margaret Fletcher Named Ann and Batey Gresham Chair of Architecture

Associate Professor and Associate Program Chair of Architecture, Margaret Fletcher has been named the Ann and Batey Gresham Professor of Architecture. Established in 1999 by Nashville architect Batey Gresham (BArch ’57) and his wife Ann, this endowed professorship was designed to provide financial support to outstanding faculty who exhibit a strong commitment to quality instruction, research and service, and who thus “strengthen and enhance the architecture program.”
An innovative educator who consistently brings emerging technologies and methods to her teaching, Fletcher is a practicing architect and artist in addition to her role as faculty at Auburn’s School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture (APLA). Fletcher is also the author of multiple volumes illustrating her expertise and innovations in graphic communication and representation; in 2016 Fletcher published Constructing the Persuasive Portfolio; The Only Primer You’ll Ever Need, followed by Visual Communication for Architects and Designers: Constructing the Persuasive Presentation in September 2020. Most recently, Architectural Styles: A Visual Guide was released in November 2020.

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