Mirror Mirror, the award winning entry in the 2013 Streetfest competition designed by Davidson Rafialidis, was installed at the Bowery in New York City on May 30 for IDEAS CITY 2015: http://www.ideas-city.org/#event/mirrormirror . The tents are in the collection of the New Museum.
Assistant Professor of Architecture and Urban Design Shannon Bassettdelivered a lecture of her design work and research at the Peking University College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture in Beijing in June 2015. The lecture was entitled ‘Weaving Relationships between Ecologies and the Constructed Environment – Catalysts for Urban Development – Design Strategies at the Intersection of Architecture, Urban Design and Ecology’.
Stephanie Cramer is teaching construction at the annual summer Design Workshop Program at Parsons in 2015.
Miguel Guitart, PhD, Visiting Associate Professor at the Department of Architecture at the University at Buffalo, has co-edited the book Emak Bakia! Design Processes Around Man Ray’s Emak Bakia House. The book is the result of a Research Studio around the documentary film Emak Bakia! (Basque for Leave me alone!) in Biarritz, France, that took place in the academic course 2013-2014 at the School of Engineer and Architecture at the University of Zaragoza. The book, co-edited by Iñaki Bergera, Eduardo Delgado Orusco, Miguel Guitart, Jesús Leache and Ana Morón, has contributions of famous Spanish writer Bernardo Atxaga and film maker Oskar Alegria, and has been published by TC Cuadernos.
Edward Steinfeld, director of the IDeA Center, received the James Haecker Lifetime Achievement Award, an award that recognizes individuals who have made outstanding contributions to the growth of the research culture of architecture and related fields. He gave a keynote presentation during the ceremony.
IDeA Center staff shared their research at various conferences including the American Occupational Therapy Association (AOTA), Architectural Research Centers Consortium (ARCC), Environmental Design and Research Association (EDRA), and Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technology Society of North America (RESNA). The list of presentations includes:
Architectural Research Centers Consortium (ARCC) Annual Conference, 2015 in Chicago
Title: Effectiveness of Design Standards in Improving Residence Hall Usability and Satisfaction Author(s): Jonathan White, Sue Weidemann, Elyse Skerker and Edward Steinfeld Presenter(s): Jonathan White and Edward Steinfeld Title: Universal Design in Architectural Education: Who is Doing It? How is it being done? Author(s): Megan Basnak, Beth Tauke, and Sue Weidemann Presenter(s): Megan Basnak
AOTA 95th Annual Conference & Expo, 2015 in Nashville
Poster Session: A Cross-Sectional Study Comparing the Usability of Two ATMs Across Diverse User Groups (PO 1092) Presenter(s): Jim Lenker and Brittany Perez
Environmental Design and Research Association (EDRA) Annual Conference, 2015 in Los Angeles
Title: A Multidisciplinary Survey of Home Modification Professionals: A Snapshot on the State of Practice Author(s): James Lenker, Danise Levine, Karen Kim, and Sue Weidemann Presenter(s): Karen Kim
Title: Factors Influencing Walking Behavior in Older Adults: The Impact of Environmental Perceptions, Personal Characteristics, and Neighborhood Type Author(s): Jordana Maisel Presenter(s): Molly Ranahan
Title: An Exploratory Study of Long Term Care Concerns in the LGBT Community in Western New York Title: Addressing the Needs of Older Adults in Public Rightsof-Way: An Opportunity to Promote Independence, Social Participation, and Active Living Author(s): Molly Ranahan Presenter(s): Molly Ranahan
Title: Effectiveness of Design Standards in Improving Residence Hall Usability and Satisfaction Author(s): Jonathan White, Sue Weidemann, and Elyse Skerker Presenter(s): Elyse Skerker and Sue Weidemann
Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technology Society of North America (RESNA) Annual Conference, 2015 in Denver
Title: Effectiveness of Design Standards in Improving Residence Hall Usability and Satisfaction Presenter(s): Jonathan White and Edward Steinfeld Author(s): Jonathan White, Sue Weidemann, Elyse Skerker and Edward Steinfeld
Title: A Multidisciplinary Survey of Home Modification Professionals: A Snapshot on the State of Practice Author(s): James Lenker, Danise Levine, Karen Kim, and Sue Weidemann Presenter(s): James Lenker
Panel Discussion: Impact of Proposed Changes to the ICC/ANSI A117.1 Accessibility Standard Presenter(s): Jonathan White
Workshop: Improving Home Modifications through Practice-Based Research Moderator(s): James Lenker
ACSA is pleased to announce the second Timber in the City Competition for the 2015-2016 academic year. The competition is a partnership between the Binational Softwood Lumber Council (BSLC), the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) and the School of Constructed Environments at Parsons The New School for Design (SCE).
Are you running a studio this summer? Are you traveling abroad? Share it on social media with the hashtag #IMadeThat and show us. Tag it, and we will feature it on IMadeThat.com.
Named for the AIAÕs first president, Richard Upjohn, these grants provide matching funds of up to $30,000 for applied research projects that advance the value of design and professional practice knowledge. The 2015 Call for Submissions is online and the deadline is September 1, 2015.
Librarians at many institutions are being asked to perform citation analysis, which is typically used to evaluate the merit of an individual publication or a body of work. Over the last few years there have been a growing number of publications that have revealed the deficiencies of the commonly used tools and methods for citation analysis.
On April 14, 2015 Mark Taylor, Assistant Professor in the Illinois School of Architecture, was honored with the 2015 Campus Award for Excellence in Public Engagement for his untiring contributions to improve lives in Haiti. Following the 2010 Haiti earthquake, Taylor made numerous trips to Léogâne, the town at the epicenter of the quake, to help assess the damage in the town and develop schematic designs for a school, a hospital, and a midwifery training center. His trips revealed the enormous challenges related to building safe and resilient structures, in a country where many people live on less than $1 a day. Undaunted by these challenges, Taylor developed collaborations, both internationally and locally, to improve building design, construction practices and the quality of locally produced building materials. The Kay Fanm Yo (Women’s House) was completed in January 2013.
Illinois School of Architecture, Assistant Professor, Sudarshan Krishnan, will be one of the key speakers at the conference “State-of-the-Art in Civil Engineering Structures and Materials” organized by the Universidad de Las Fuerzas Armadas (ESPE) in Quito, Ecuador, in July 2015. The title of his lecture is “Design of Cable and Suspension Structures.” He will also be delivering a series of special lectures to the civil engineering students at the Universidad Central del Ecuador and ESPE on the “planning of structural systems for medium and high-rise structures,” with an emphasis on seismic considerations.
by Maya Gervits, Director of the Littman Architecture & Design Library, New Jersey Institute of Technology
Barbara Opar and Barret Havens, column editors
Librarians at many institutions are being asked to perform citation analysis, which is typically used to evaluate the merit of an individual publication or a body of work. Traditionally, citation analysis has been based on the assumption that if an article has been cited frequently and in a prestigious journal, then it is more likely to be of higher quality. However, over the last few years there have been a growing number of publications that have revealed the deficiencies of the commonly used tools and methods for citation analysis.
These publications argue that “citation data provides only a limited and incomplete view of research quality”[1] and that there is a general lack of understanding of “how different data sources and citation metrics might affect comparison between disciplines.”[2] Moreover, many of them suggest that with the existing system, we witness an “overemphasis of academics in the hard sciences rather than those in the social sciences and especially in the humanities.”[3] A. Zuccala in her article “Evaluating the Humanities: Vitalizing ‘the Forgotten Sciences,’” published in March 2013 in Research Trends echoes H. Moed who wrote that “the journal communication system in these disciplines does not reveal a core-periphery structure as pronounced as it is found to be in science.”[4] Zuccala confirms that in the Humanities (and this is true for art and design disciplines as well-M.G.) information is often disseminated using media other than journals, and that the humanities “demand a fairly wide range of quality indicators that will do justice to the diversity of products, target groups, and publishing cultures present in this field.”[5] Therefore, popular indexes in the sciences like Web of Knowledge or Scopus do not serve as well in determining citation value in art and design disciplines. Many journals, conferences and symposia materials, as well as books and book chapters in these fields are typically not listed at all. Even indexes specializing in the humanities, like the European Research Index for the Humanities (ERIH) or Arts & Humanities Citation Index, still cover only a limited number of titles focused specifically on architecture and design.
In addition to the aforementioned limitations, it is also important to acknowledge that citation patterns in STEM[6] disciplines are different than those in the arts and humanities. For example, as demonstrated on the chart below, it takes longer for a work in architecture to be cited than for a paper in biology or computer science.
Comparison of citation patterns.
Thomson Reuters, owner of the Web of Knowledge database, one of the most popular citation indexes, suggests that even in the fastest moving fields, such as molecular biology and genetics, it might take up to two years to accrue citations, whereas in physiology or analytical chemistry, “the time lag in citations might be on average three, four or even five years.”[7] In art and architecture it might take even longer as authors in these fields cite recently published documents less frequently than their colleagues in the hard sciences. Also, according to David Pendlebury (“Using Bibliometrics in Evaluating Research”), citation rates vary in different fields of research; an observation that has been confirmed by statistical data provided in “The Tyranny of Citations“ by P.G. Altbach. He states: “the sciences produce some 350,000 new cited references weekly, while the social sciences generate 50,000, and the humanities, 15,000.”[8] Pendlebury also noticed “The average ten-year-old paper in molecular biology and genetics may collect forty citations, whereas the average ten-year-old paper in a computer science journal may garner a relatively modest four citations.”[9] The article “How Much of Literature Goes Uncited?“ also reveals a wide gap between the citations even within non-STEM disciplines: 98 percent of arts and humanities papers remain uncited, versus 74.7 percent in the social sciences.[10]
So what can be done to overcome the limitations of traditional tools and data sources? Many researchers have turned their attention to Google Scholar which lately has increased in popularity and acceptance as a tool for identifying and analyzing citations. However, it lacks quality control and it is not comprehensive, as some scholarly journals, publications in languages other than English, or those more recent and forthcoming may be excluded. Book reviews and Google Books can help locate otherwise difficult to find citations in monographs and collections of essays, however their coverage is not consistent.
Scholars whose research is focused on areas related to computer-aided design can use CuminCad and ACM digital library (ACM DL) as sources of additional alternative data. The CuminCad database offers peers’ ratings while ACM DL tracks the number of downloads, which is the cumulative number of times a scholar’s work has been downloaded from the ACM full-text article server. Over the last few years, there has been an ongoing discussion of the correlation between downloads and citations. For example, the article “Comparing Citations and Downloads for Individual Articles at the Journal of Vision,” published in 2009, analyzes the number of unique downloads as a new measure of an article’s impact. It establishes a strong positive connection between downloads and citations suggesting, “substantial correlation, joined to the fact that downloads generally precede citations, would mean they provide a useful early predictor of eventual citations.”[11]
Another commonly used measure for scholarship evaluation is an academic journal’s impact factor, which is traditionally used to determine the relative importance of a journal within its field. Journals with a higher impact are deemed to be more important that those with a lower impact. However, this method has also received some deserved criticism. The article “Ending the Tyranny of the Impact Factor” (Nature Cell Biology, 2013) highlights “limitations of journal impact factors” and bemoans “their misuse as a proxy for the quality of individual papers.”[12] It is also especially important to note that outside the U.S. the distinction between commercial and university publishers is not always clear, and that professional periodicals in architecture and design can be as valuable and prestigious as those published by university presses. AASL has compiled a list of core periodicals essential for the study of design disciplines in academia.
The analysis of statistical data provided by professional organizations and conferences, which often indicate the acceptance-rate of paper submissions, can offer some additional parameters for scholarship evaluation as well. The recently published “Who Reads Research Articles? An Altmetrics Analysis of Mendeley User Categories,”[13] suggests that “Mendeley[14] statistics that record how many times an author’s work has been included in bibliography, can also reveal the hidden impact of some research papers.” The notion that in architecture, design and new media the sources of citations should be broadened to include not only print publications, but also a variety of digital resources available via the web has become more accepted.[15] Emerging alternative tools for citation analysis like Plum Analytics (plumanalytics.com) and Altmetric (altmetric.com) are attempting to include non-traditional indicators in the measurement of impact such as the amount of online attention garnered. For example, coverage in news outlets, blog posts, or tweets. However, these new tools are still focused mainly on fields other than architecture and design.
The Junior FacultyHandbook on Tenure and Promotion published by the Association of the Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) acknowledges that “All too often, discussions revolve around the number of articles or the quality of academic press while the real issue should be: how is the individual affecting and improving his or her field of expertise”?[16] Furthermore, The College Art Association (CAA) document Standards for Retention and Tenure of Art and Design Faculty confirms “an exhibition and/or peer-reviewed public presentation of creative work is to be regarded as analogous to publication in other fields.”[17] They also recommend that judgments of the quality of a candidate’s publication should be based on the assessment of expert reviewers who have read the work and can compare it to the state of scholarship in the field to which it contributes. The review of existing literature and practices suggests that there is a need to design a more holistic model for research assessment: a model that takes into consideration various measures of impact and multiple research outputs, especially for architecture and design. Such a model could then be adopted and used by various institutions as a guideline. The attention given to this issue suggests that perhaps it is time for a more broad discussion among representatives of different constituents such as faculty, administration, librarians and other researchers.
But until such time when a new model is accepted, faculty and librarians must rely on the tools that exist today and learn how to adapt them best to serve current needs. As AASL continues to highlight the challenges of tenure metrics in architecture and design-related disciplines, in this column next month my colleague, University at Buffalo Architecture and Planning Librarian Rose Orcutt, will discuss the range of currently available metric tools that may offer some additional solutions.
[1] Robert Adler, John Ewing and Peter Taylor Citation Statistics: a report from the International Mathematical Union (IMU) in cooperation with the International Council of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM) and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS). In Statistical Science, vol.24,2009, n.1 at: http://arxiv.org/pdf/0910.3529.pdf
[2] Anne-Wil Harzing Citation analysis across disciplines: The impact of different data sources and citation metrics at http://www.harzing.com/data_metrics_comparison.htm
[3] Philip G.Altbach The Tyranny of Citations. Inside Hire Ed,2006 at https://www.insidehighered.com/views/2006/05/08/altbach
[4] The very specific nature of research in these disciplines is reflected in very specific output: the importance of monographs, chapters in monographs, exhibition catalogs, publications in various languages, and the inclusion of revised editions. Moed, Henk Citation Analysis in Research Evaluation. Springer, 2005
[11] Watson.A. Comparing citations and downloads for individual articles at the Journal of Vision. Journal of Vision, April 2009, vol.9 at http://jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2193506
[12] Ending the Tyranny of the Impact Factor. Nature Cell Biology, 16,1 (2014) at http://www.nature.com/ncb/journal/v16/n1/full/ncb2905.html
Attendee Deborah Richmond offers her thoughts on last month’s conference at Parsons School of Constructed Environments on the subject of “Feminism and Architecture.”
We are encouraging students and faculty to use the hashtag #IMadeThat and share what they are making in architecture school. Tag it, and we will feature it on IMadeThat.com. Please consider sharing your end of year projects right away.
Librarians at many institutions are being asked to perform citation analysis, which is typically used to evaluate the merit of an individual publication or a body of work. Over the last few years there have been a growing number of publications that have revealed the deficiencies of the commonly used tools and methods for citation analysis.
Barbara Opar and Barret Havens, column editors Written by Barbara Opar
Care about which architecture periodicals your library receives? Want to have your say as to which major journals in the field are available to your students? Then please take a few minutes to weigh in on the latest revision of the core periodicals list proposed by the Association of Architecture School Librarians. AASL and your school can benefit by you completing the survey.
AASL considers part of its mission to be the creation of best practices for architecture librarianship. At the heart of this concern is the documentation of key resources in the discipline known by AASL as core lists. Core lists enable the new librarian or school administrator to better understand the nature of architectural literature. These lists can also inform students entering the field and serve as guides along the way as they navigate the myriad resources available or as they seek to establish their own private collections. In addition, core lists help academic librarians to assist architecture schools with meeting accreditation standards; librarians use these lists to demonstrate to accreditors that their collection development decisions take into account the collective wisdom of their profession and that their libraries have made the most crucial periodicals available to students and faculty.
To this end, AASL has created two such lists. The recently vetted Core Reference Listoutlines major reference works by topic including dictionaries, surveys, bibliographies, building codes and technical standards. The AASL Core List of Periodicals was first developed in 1995 and has been updated occasionally to keep it current. The need for a core list was first suggested by Pat Weisenburger (Kansas State University) at an annual meeting of AASL. She proposed a list of titles “without which we cannot operate.” She and others have held fast to that principle as, over successive years, members of the group have debated which publications to include. As new members saw the list for the first time they too have suggested and advocated for additional titles. Since the list was created, a number of AASL working groups have tried to create a methodology for the selection of titles. Jeanne Brown of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and Judy Connorton of The City College of New York spearheaded that work. Updates to the list occurred in 1998 and 2002. The list was again revised in 2009.
One of the chief issues facing each of the working groups is the varying nature of architecture schools. Because the schools that have been surveyed during the process of creating and revising the list have included a range of programs, from the undergraduate to the PhD levels, at times, a consensus has been difficult to achieve. For this reason, in addition to the main core list, an optional but highly recommended “supplementary” list has been added. This model has enabled members to refine their selections to meet the needs of their programs and school’s focus. As more schools have embraced a global approach, more foreign language titles have been added and certain titles have shifted from supplementary to core.
AASL members agreed in 2014 that it was time for yet another revision to the list and again a small working group took on the task and completed a draft. AASL members have been sent a survey related to this draft to collect their feedback. We are now asking faculty in architecture and related disciplines to complete the same survey in order to gain their insight. Please take a few minutes to vote in order to help AASL create a core list that will benefit all of us. The survey will remain open through May 31.
In 2014, with architecture students from Howard University and the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, ACSA partnered with Mercy Outreach Ministry International for the Haiti Summer Studio. The project and associated design studio grew from the 2011 Haiti Ideas Challenge Competition that included a project brief focused on developing design ideas to permanently rebuild infrastructure, cities and neighborhoods that were devastated by Haiti’s 2010 earthquake. ACSA is pleased to present the outcomes of this studio.
2015 AIA Intersections Conference
Come a day early to the 2015 AIA Convention to attend the inaugural 2015 AIA/ACSA Intersections Conference, a workshop for practitioners and academics.
Care about which architecture periodicals your library receives? Want to have your say as to which major journals in the field are available to your students? AASL invites faculty to take a survey about the core periodicals list proposed by the Association of Architecture School Librarians.
From July 29 to August 8 the University of Detroit Mercy School of Architecture will host the first bi-annual Volterra International Design Workshop in Volterra (Italy).
The workshop is a new addition to and an extension of the UDM SOA study abroad program in Volterra, which was first organized in 1987. Beautifully and conveniently located in the middle of Tuscany, equal distances from Florence, Pisa and Siena, Volterra offers the UDM SOA students and faculty a genuine immersion in Italian history and culture.
Since 2013 the program has been housed in the UDM School of Architecture’s private facility in the city: the Volterra International Residential College. The new home base in Volterra allows the UDM SOA and its academic partner, the Volterra-Detroit Foundation, which established and now manages the facility, to plan and organize a variety of academic and cultural programs in Volterra, including AIA Continuing Education programs, collaborative academic programs with the University of Pisa (Italy) and – for the first time this summer – International Design Workshops.
This year, selected students from the UDM SOA, together with the Dean of the UDM School of Architecture Will Wittig, will remain in Volterra for an additional ten days beyond the normal length of the program. During this time they will be joined by students and faculty from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign and the Faculty of Architecture of the Warsaw University of Technology from Poland, as well as local academics and professionals from Volterra, Pisa in Italy. The workshop will be moderated by James Timberlake, FAIA, from Kieran Timberlake (Philadelphia, USA), an alumnus of the UDM School of Architecture.
The purpose of the workshop is to create an international academic forum for sharing contemporary architectural ideas. Architecture is becoming an increasingly global profession, which offers new and fascinating inspirations and opportunities internationally. The workshop will give the students and faculty the opportunity to experience international teamwork and collaboration.
The theme of the workshop is “Society and Technology: Water, Food, Waste, and Energy”. In the words of Dean Will Wittig: “In every town, in every society, there is a daily, weekly, and yearly rhythm of arrivals and departures; oranges and milk, newspapers, workers, school children, water, coal, busses, sewage, and garbage. And the logic of logistics can be traced in these systems that anticipate the flow of water, food, energy, and waste. City form in turn is organized and orchestrated to establish the physical ecosystem of a society that enables social capital to flourish.”
For additional information about the UDM School of Architecture and other programs in Volterra please visit http://www.volterra-detroit.org
Diane Ghirardo presented a paper on Idea and Authorship at the Renaissance Society of America annual meeting in Berlin in March 2015; in April, she presented a paper at Yale University titled “Modernity in Renaissance Architecture and Ours. Her article, “The Blue of Aldo Rossi’s Sky,” appeared in AAFiles 70 (May 2015).
Rob Ley was recently awarded a commission to design a permanent outdoor pavilion for the Portland, Oregon City Zoo.
Jose Sanchez is finalising the ‘Blindspot Initiative’ Book, an edited volume looking at designers that challenge the competition model for architectural design by exploring the blurry boundaries of the design field. He is also finishing his video game Block’hood, an interactive city builder simulation that attempts to develop ideas of systemic thinking and ecological urbanism engaging a large audience
Prof. James Steele was named an ACSA Distinguished Professor.
The Courtyard at La Brea, a 32 unit affordable housing project for persons with Special Needs, designed by Professor John V MutlowFAIA and Adjunct Professor Patrick Tighe, FAIA, received the ‘Best of Year-Apartment Building’ Design Award form INTERIOR DESIGN Design Magazine and was published in their January 2015 issue. This project is also on the cover and featured in the current issue of DETAIL, an architectural magazine from South Korea. This affordable housing project was initially featured in September 2014 issue of ARCHITECT magazine.
Lisa Little was a recent lecturer in the Spring 2015 Lecture Series for the Cal Poly Pomona Landscape Architecture Department.
Scott Uriu with partner Herwig Baymgartner will have a large sculptural installation on exhibit at the Los Angeles Municipal Gallery at 4800 Hollywood Boulevard in Barnsdall Park, from May 17 through June 28, 2015, with an opening reception on May 17, 2015, from 2:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. The sculpture is a progression of their study of architectural space constructed of thin shell plastic with an emphasis on the examination of apertures interacting with video projections.
Karen M. Kensek and Douglas Noble were invited speakers at the “Collaborative Creativity Symposium” organized by Murali Paranandi at Miami University.
Ken Breisch has published the article, “Rediscovering the Fachwerk House in America: Preservation, the Bechers and Modernism,” in Die Nobilitierte Hauslandschaft: Zur Architektur der von Bernd und Hilla Becherf fotografierten Fachwerkhäuser des Siegener Industriegebiets, ed. Karl Kiem. Dresden: Eckhardt Richter & Co. OHG, 2015, pp. 75-88.
Professor Joseph Wheeler, A.I.A., Co-Director of the School of Architecture + Design’s Center for Design Research, principal investigator of the VT FutureHAUS initiative, has lead a team of researchers and students in exhibiting a prototype kitchen, the FutureHAUS Kitchen, at the Kitchen and Bath industry show in Las Vegas in Janaury 2016. In May, the kitchen and living room will be exhibited at the National AIA Convention Expo in Atlanta. The research investigates better utilization of industrialized processes to build architecture. By delivering large, complex, house assemblies as “cartridges,” a more sophisticated prefabricated product may be delivered to the job site or the assembly plant. This cross-disciplinary project engages students from Architecture, Interior Design, Industrial Design, Art, Computer Science, and Industrial and Systems Engineering. Professor Dr. Markus Breitschmid, Ph.D., S.I.A., has been invited to lecture at the Colegio Arquitectos del Perú in Lima, Peru. The lecture was supported by the Institute of Peruvian Architects, the Embassy of Switzerland in Lima and with an International Travel Grant from the Virginia Tech – Office of the Vice President for Research.
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