Below is the schedule for Thursday, May 19, 2022, which includes session descriptions and research abstracts. The conference schedule is subject to change.
Obtain Continuing Education Credits (CES) / Learning Units (LU), including Health, Safety and Welfare (HSW). Registered conference attendees will be able to submit session attended for Continuing Education Credits (CES). Register for the conference today to gain access to all the AIA/CES credit sessions.
11:00am-12:30pm EDT /
8:00am-9:30am PDT
Special Focus Session
1.5 LU Credit
Presenters: Kathryn H. Anthony, U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Rashida Ng, University of Pennsylvania
Francisco J. Rodríguez-Suárez, U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Patrick Flynn, TU Dublin
Session Description
The architectural design jury has served as both a symbolic event in the education of an architect and a key pedagogical tool to measure student learning. Yet, given that architectural education has undergone radical shifts in terms of critical theory, growing awareness of environmental plight, social justice, equity, and diversity issues, technological innovation, multidisciplinarity, globality in historical consciousness, the agency of the student, and the growing criticality of the project of “decolonizing knowledge,” the pedagogy of architectural jury warrants a thorough re-examination within the shifting conditions of producing and disseminating knowledge about the built environment. This special session investigates the epistemological challenges the architectural jury faces or should face today.
11:00am-12:30pm EDT /
8:00am-9:30am PDT
Special Focus Session
1.5 LU Credit
Presenter:
Rosa Sheng, SmithGroup
Session Description
Generation Z students face more Intersectional challenges and vulnerabilities than any predecessor: climate crisis, health impacts, social Injustice, economic uncertainty. These “next-gen” students require a holistic ecosystem to support their academic and post-graduate success with intentional space resources that foster belonging, agency, and mentorship. Student engagement in the planning and design of learning environments requires a deeper understanding of what they will need to persist and thrive. This session will compare and contrast project case studies with various student engagement approaches that influenced the outcomes of the design process for student space resources that reinforce high-impact student persistence practices.
11:00am-12:30pm EDT /
8:00am-9:30am PDT
Special Focus Session
1.5 LU Credit
Presenters: Federica Goffi, Carleton University
Neil Leach, Florida International University
Vivian Loftness, Carnegie Mellon University
Barry Wylan, University of Calgary
Session Description
According to the 2019 ACSA Institutional Data Report, member schools are home to (82) post-professional Graduate degree programs and (39) Doctoral degree programs. While these programs do not confer professional degrees for students, they are requisite for the development of a shared culture of original research in Architecture and are a pipeline for tenure eligible faculty. A panel of administrators representing four doctoral degree types will share insights from their programs housed in a diversity of academic, geographic, and disciplinary contexts. With better data, there may be ways of strategically using these programs to increase diversity in our teaching ranks.
11:00am-12:30pm EDT /
8:00am-9:30am PDT
Special Focus Session
1.5 LU Credit
Presenters:
LaVerne Wells-Bowie, Florida A&M University
Mitra Kanaani, NewSchool of Architecture and Design
Ethel Goodstein-Murphree, University of Arkansas
Session Description
The ACSA Distinguished Professor Award recognizes individuals that have had a positive, stimulating, and nurturing influence upon students over an extended period of time and/or teaching which inspired a generation of students who themselves have contributed to the advancement of architecture.
11:00am-12:30pm EDT /
8:00am-9:30am PDT
Research Session
1.5 HSW Credit
The Kunga Accessory Dwelling Unit
Jörg Rügemer, University of Utah
Design Build Award
Abstract
The Kunga Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) is the first realized project of the new D+BSL program at the University’s School of Architecture, and the second ADU permitted in the jurisdiction in which it has been build. The project is designed for a wheelchair-bound mother and grandmother of a former Tibetan refugee family. The design and construction of the ADA-accessible ADU for her is to continue to foster a multi-generational household with growing space needs. To support the Kunga family, the School of Architecture students were working throughout the AY 19-20 alongside the client to design and build a highly energy-efficient, sustainable and accessible 750 sq.ft. building that fit the needs of the client. Within the entire process, the client was integral part of every design decision made by the student team, requiring and describing key considerations for the design of the project. The team interpreted those desires and transformed them into architectural, functional and performative solutions, always considering the stringent ADA and ADU rules. The outcome was further discussed, evaluated and finally developed into a buildable structure that was finalized in September 2020. The project was challenged by a very narrow timeline due to the time the city took for the permitting process. Thus the student team decided to take the risk to prefabricate building components parallel to the permitting process. After designing the building during summer 2019, the entire framing was prefabricated in the School’s wood shop and pre-assembled on the School’s shop yard, which made the project very visible among the University’s population. When the final building permit was achieved in late October 2019, the project was disassembled, moved, and then re-assembled on the freshly poured foundation. The project was dried in before the national shutdown, to be finalized by voluntary participation over the following months.
Reimagining Medical Workspaces through on-site Observations and Bodystorming
Aki Ishida, Thomas Martin, Sarah Hendrickson Parker, Vivian Zagarese, Carl Buck, David Franusich, Denis Gracanin, Vincent Haley, R. Benjamin Knapp, & Reza Tasooji, Virginia Tech
Abstract
Clinicians in acute care hospitals experience highly stressful situations daily. They work long, variable hours, complete complex technical tasks, and must also be emotionally engaged with patients and families to meet the caring demands of this profession, which can lead to burnout. In response to these challenges, a multi-disciplinary team from Virginia Tech collaborated with Steelcase to study the impact of medical workspaces on the clinician experience and how those workspaces could be improved to reduce some of the sources of burnout. The team sought to identify conditions that could either aid or hinder clinician workflow and affect burnout rate, then based on interviews and in-situ ethnographic studies, generated design concepts for nurse stations, both centralized and mobile. Using digital and physical full-scale prototypes, we enacted clinical care scenarios to seek feedback and reflect on the design. ICU teams are multidisciplinary and require that all clinicians bring their professional expertise to the decision-making process. This process, however, requires that each team member is endowed with a shared situational awareness of the patient’s status and plan of care. Therefore, clinical care in the ICU necessitates an environment that facilitates team’s communication and proper workflow for uninterrupted, private, and confidential decision making. Through interviews and in-situ observation, we identified obstructions in communication and workflow. We found that clinicians have challenges finding space to huddle and display shared information effectively, and to find an open workstation for charting (documenting patient care) at the central nurses station. Both of these challenges can result in communication breakdown and contribute to stress and burnout. Based on these findings, we conceptualized an overbed side table, a piece of furniture found in every ICU room, that integrates display technologies for information sharing between clinicians and with patients. Clinicians would use this to chart or huddle in the patient room, hallway, or near the centralized nurse station. During the concept design phase, we enacted clinical scenarios using full-scale prototypes of mobile nurse stations. They built digital models and physical mockups of the concepts, then tested and iterated through “bodystorming”–a brainstorming process that involves enacting with prototypes to understand the experience of others, cutting and taping foamcore quickly based on interpretation of feedback. We also used projection mapping, a technique which enables projection of images and videos onto any surface. The project examined interrelations between occupational problems–stress and burnout, variety of clinical tasks, workers, and the design of spaces and products. As one medical doctor said in response to the design sketches, the bedside table that also functions as a display “could be used to alleviate the workflow of clinicians when it comes to checking in with the patient. This could revolutionize how rounding is conceptualized and make it more efficient,” and subsequently reduce burnout. By designing a work environment that increases situational awareness and ease and accuracy of information sharing, we began to suggest ways to reimagine medical workspaces and positively impact clinicians’ daily work experiences.
Designing Rehabilitating Spaces
Alejandra Meza, Carnegie Mellon University
CRIT Live Student Scholar
Abstract
The views that patients experience during recovery have a crucial correlation to patients recovery [1]. It was shown that designing spaces where people heal according to biophilic design principles, increases smooth recovery and reduces the risks of complications. As part of this approach, materials and element representation within patient rooms is shown to be integral. This thesis will be focused on reducing stress in patient rooms, a space for resting, during a high stress period of time when they are sensitive to ambient characteristics trying to understand how their five senses are impacted. I will be doing this by focusing on material properties, relationship between spaces and sequencing of events. Accommodating to the ostensible needs of patients, is the priority of health care professionals. However, creating spaces that allow for healing is multifaceted; with concerns of lighting, cleanability, safety, noise, temperature, in parallel, to concerns of practicality, efficiency, budget and space. The emergence of Architectural Modernism, the importance of form following function, during the turn of the 20th century has had lasting impacts on healthcare typology. Tuberculosis Sanatoriums were designed in the similar modernism simplistic style, which the white walls and focus on function have followed through to current day hospital design (10) Healthcare design as a field is currently facing an era of change as we face the Covid-19 Pandemic and with these rapid redesigns and considerations there is an opportunity to reimagine how these spaces are to be designed moving forward. . Being in a position where one needs to be in a hospital is a high stress environment for all parties involved; simultaneously removing the familiar comforts of home in an alien hospital environment adds additional stress to patients and their support system. Additionally, when people are in the position where they need to physically heal their physical senses are affected: the sensations feel altered or heightened [2]. This amplifies the emotions and stressors experienced in said conditions.
30-minutes
1:00pm-2:30pm EDT /
10:00am-11:30am PDT
Research Session
1.5 LU Credit
From House to Housing: Remixing Mar Vista
Brian Holland, University of Arkansas
Housing Design Education Award
Abstract
From House to Housing: Remixing Mar Vista is the only design studio in the undergraduate core to address housing and urban issues in a complex metropolitan context. It begins with a readily familiar suburban housing type and steadily increases in social and spatial complexity through three interrelated assignments: House, Houses, and Housing. It is calibrated to build foundational knowledge of a key architectural program type while challenging students to explore how this program type is changing in response to social, economic, and political factors. Design projects engage contemporary models of incremental densification as a means to increase housing access and equity, and programs are calibrated to expose students to diverse household types and relate the economics of housing to urban form and policy. Gregory Ain and Garrett Eckbo’s Mar Vista Housing of 1948 serves as both project site and design precedent for this exploration of housing policy and design. Readings, lectures, and discussions on the history of Mar Vista foreground the tensions between Ain’s collectivist and inclusionary ambitions for Mar Vista, the distinctly individualist “American Dream” of detached single-family home ownership, and the exclusionary housing policies and practices of the mid-century. Building on that foundation, students are tasked with “remixing” Mar Vista in light of both changing household structures and recent efforts to promote greater density in single-family districts. Beginning from a single-family house, students triple the neighborhood’s density twice with two successive multifamily design projects, first on one lot, then on a full block. Ultimately students are asked to draw lessons—using both a social and typological lens—from historical precedents and contemporary life to envision and articulate new forms of dwelling for a changing society, and to consider—in light of urgent questions of access and equity—what their role as future architects might be in the ongoing transformation of the city.
Middle Grounds – New Prototypes for Medium Density Housing
Martin Haettasch, University of Texas at Austin
Housing Design Education Award
Abstract
Middle Grounds – New Prototypes for Medium-Density Housing
Sparked by affordability crises and promoted by New Urbanist concepts such as the “missing middle,” the housing range located in density between the single-family house and the apartment block has gained some traction among planners and municipalities. Yet, often reduced to zoning questions, focused on retroactive densification, or obsessed with rediscovering premodern types, contemporary debates fall short of the transformative agenda and design innovation with which these types were explored by the avant-gardes of the 1960s. The absence of a design-focused discourse around medium-density housing today inspired a series of advanced design studios that address housing not as a problem of zoning or economy (which it certainly also is) but a problem of architecture. Beyond both a fetishization of urban density and the idealization of the suburban vernacular, the idea of the “middle ground” set the tone to explore strategies beyond preconceived dichotomies of city/suburb, typology/innovation or individual/collective. Critically assessing existing types, we asked the question how comforts of the individual house (a sense of ownership, private access and outdoors space(s)…) can be reconfigured to form new types of residential fabric. Three comprehensive design studios [A Home is Not a House (2018), New Prototypes for Collective Housing (2020), and Mat Strategies (2020)] explored variations on this theme on three different sites in Austin, TX. Facing an acute housing and affordability crisis and and increasing divergence between dense mixed-use corridors and a historically low-rise housing fabric Austin provided a context that is mirrored in many urban centers across North America. Projects were therefore intended to be site specific as much as prototypical. The cumulative body of ideas that emerged from the studios begins to illustrate the potentials for new forms of housing as well as – hopefully – inspires future designers to continue the creative investigation of these forms.
Housing at Markham Square: One Square Master Plan, Six Students, Six Housing Projects
Stephen Luoni & Claude Terral, University of Arkansas
Housing Design Education Award
Abstract
Housing at Markham Square: One Square Master Plan, Six Students, Six Housing Projects
How might a design studio illustrate the benefits of compact urban living for a fast-growing and sprawling town of 67,000 despite no history of multifamily housing within its downtown? The School was charged with the development of a housing masterplan to transform a metal scrap yard into a residential square two blocks from Conway’s main street. While design of the square is underway by a landscape architecture firm, the studio designed the square’s expanded perimeter, coupling green infrastructure with multifamily housing for which there is modest but hesitant market demand. Students explored two interconnected architectural issues in constructing living transects that connect public space and housing. First, invoking Christopher Alexander’s pattern language to design the front edge of the building as a place, students proposed building frontages that create a “fuzzy urbanism”. Thick building edges accommodate a variety of social activities through urban building frontage or liminal spaces like stoops, porches, balconies, patios, roof gardens and galleries not entirely specific to one housing type. Second, students worked with neglected but affordable walk-up residential typologies, now key to revitalizing mid-sized downtowns without the population dislocations accompanying gentrification. Housing types ranging between 900 sf and 2,100 sf, with a median of 1,500 sf, were designed to accommodate a walkable mixed-income neighborhood, particularly for workforce populations lacking transportation options. Working with local developers, students conducted architectural explorations into housing types focused on pairing economy of means (targeted construction costs between $110-140/sf) with frontage strategies to create high-quality interior spaces. Frontage + Type—“prospect and refuge”—is a formula that adds value to both the housing and the public realm. Students acquired new capacities in design, development, and advocacy of urban housing, as well as the general art of shaping solutions within ordinary problems and markets resistant to value-added thinking through design.
1:00pm-2:30pm EDT /
10:00am-11:30am PDT
Research Session
1.5 LU Credit
1-452: Embodied Sphere Project
Brian Ambroziak, University of Tennessee-Knoxville
Abstract
Commissioned as a pop-up museum for the university’s Museum of Natural History and Culture, “1-452: Embodied Sphere Project” activates a critical discourse about the role of the museum in contemporary culture. As the philosopher Baudrillard writes, “We live in a world with more and more information and less and less meaning.”1 If this is true, then what consequence might digital preservation evoke for the museum of the future? The curator, by nature of the available real estate housed in a physical structure, must rely heavily on the processes and acts of editing. As such, is it likely that any contemporary exhibit runs the risk of telling less stories and imposing a mere linear narrative upon a rich tapestry of cultural data points? The alternative digital gallery knows no bounds but often times falls short in that its curator has trouble letting go, allowing everything to be sacred to a certain point. Perhaps there is middle ground between these two contemporary models: one that presents a refined collection with physical constraints and one that adds a diverse cultural element to tell the stories often discarded in the design of exhibits and museum catalogues. Sites like Instagram provide an interesting precedent as they include “selfies” in front of historical works as the core of their curated collection, moments where the past becomes an active participant in the present. “1-452: ESP” privileges such moments, the human and seemingly random connection, as a next major step in the evolution of the museum. Polaroids of individuals that have played an active role in the museum are buried within a landscape of pink packing peanuts. Pseudo-archeologists slowly unearth the images, tag them, and then hang them around the circumference of the transparent sphere, thereby yielding a greater embodied space. The design was choreographed over eleven acts that included [01] Inflation, [02] Fastening, [03] Suiting Up, [04] Entry Sequence, [05] Surveying Site, [06] Identifying Dig Site, [07] Excavation, [08] Specimen Recovery, [09] Tagging and Bagging, [10] Landing Sequence, and [11] Acclimation. While highly visual, the installation responded to sound with the inclusion of a piece entitled “m64_Mroot_M64_M64;repeat” composed specifically for the “ESP” and created by a constant rhythmic striking of tuned wooden 2”x4”s. Sound, or a lack thereof, also played a significant role as the pseudo-archeologists that occupied the inflated sphere were trained to translate their various actions through sign-language, thereby yielding an even greater feeling of embodiment and a personal connection between the design and the several thousand visitors to the site.
Decoding Da Vinci’s Sketch To The Ottomans: Galata Bridge
Mohammad Bolhassani & Ahmed Helal, City College of New York
Abstract
Leonardo Da Vinci’s list of accomplishments put him among the world’s greatest artists and inventors. However, over 500 years ago, one controversial sketch wasn’t as much appreciated and has been the topic of many contemporary investigations. Today, more than five centuries later, we are reexamining Da Vinci’s ambitious proposal but not only to look into the structural feasibility of whether or not his design would have been safely constructed, but to delve into the inner workings of Da Vinci’s mind to see if the polymath had prior knowledge of creating stable and efficient forms which has only recently being developed using a computational framework based on the principle of geometrical equilibrium in 3D. Was his sketch just free-handed, something he had done in seconds? Or the renaissance painter and inventor had an intuition that was more than five centuries ahead of its time? Although most historians believe he had no mathematical or geometrical calculation in his design, our study proves otherwise! Through rigorous analysis of Da Vinci’s design, we have found that the polymath had intuitively drawn his sketch according to the principles of geometric design that was developed in 2D almost 400 years after his time and just recently in a 3-Dimensional manner with the help of computational frameworks. This research further continues to explore the potential of Da Vinci’s design with the use of modern materials and methods of construction to see how the design would have been built in our modern time.
Web Model Dot Space
Aaron Jones, Lawrence Technological University
Faculty Design Award
Abstract
Web Model Dot Space looks at the spatial opportunities of archival information – a process we refer to as “embodying the archive”. This work begins with the collection of geospatial building data through LiDAR scanning technology and ultimately envisions and develops a variety of thematic experiences through their subsequent creative applications. Two goals within this work are to 1/ document and archive buildings indicative of cultural legacies within the city over time and 2/ provide opportunities for expanded engagement and interpretation of these buildings through multimedia and mixed reality formatting. The name “Web Model Dot Space” is derived from the point cloud outputs of LiDAR scanning ( dot spaces ) which are then subsequently coded into an online webGL archive as interactive architectures (web models). The result of this work is a series of visual and performance art artifacts which are accessed both through URL (www.webmodel.space) and IRL as big models, small architectures, and printable design ephemera. Of particular interest is the ability to map complex geospatial building data onto simple 2d plottable files which could then assemble back into representational environments. These low-resolution building copies or “home domes” provide a type of physical spatial access to this archival information across expansive geographies and in decentralized simultaneous instances. Through “embodying the archive” these domes become analyzed, occupied, and/ or programmed in new and improvisational ways. Ultimately, the engagement of these existing architectures through multimedia and mixed reality formats provides new avenues for interpretation regarding the ephemerality of buildings, their legacies over time, and their capacity for visionary adaptive reuse.
Vaults versus Memorials: Evoking Fiction in the Architectural Drawing
John Sandell & Emmanouil Vermisso, Florida Atlantic University
Abstract
Part of a comprehensive studio design project, the exercise presented in this paper is a vehicle to investigate design thinking processes and how students construct intentions. The theme is the book and media. The semester’s project begins with seminars on the history of books. The discussion delves into a book’s craftsmanship and as a symbol for embodied knowledge and progresses to the roles books have played in society. Expanding the theme, discussion leads to the question of a book’s preservation (vault) or its destruction in a digital society (memorial). The exercise is contingent upon the opposition created between the two spheres inherent to the title, Vaults versus Memorials. It positions the student in a manner that resists allocation to one sphere or another, an impetus for restructuring specified spheres according to new schemas. Written texts play an interlocutory role during the production of students’ drawings. Each of the assigned texts offers an entry point to a tacit learning situation and a restructuring of semantic fields. With reference to Paul Ricoeur’s research on interpretation theory,1 a mental distancing between text and drawing exposes students to ambiguities and the realization that prejudices play a role in understanding and interpreting meaning in the production of a visual work. The act of drawing produces its own frame of reference that we trace in three modes of production. These can be categorized as metaphoric interaction, textual dissection, and the guess. Vaults versus Memorials establishes a dialectical situation between explanation and understanding which lends itself to an open investigatory process. With the expansion of theme through drawing and by the depth of inferred meanings, students can speculate as to which interpretation is the most plausible fiction establishing probable, subjective criteria to carry forward during later stages of the design.
1:00pm-2:30pm EDT /
10:00am-11:30am PDT
Research Session
1.5 LU Credit
Unpacking Engagement: Strategies for Context-Specific Community-Driven Design
Ceara O’Leary, University of Detroit Mercy
Abstract
For the past 27 years, the community design center based at the University of [redacted] has worked with community organizations and nonprofit partners across the city of Detroit to envision neighborhood spaces resulting from community-engaged design processes. For the past decade, since co-leading a broad and deep citywide civic engagement effort, the center has expanded its methods and tools of engagement with intention and in collaboration with partners and in the context of diverse projects in distinct neighborhoods. Engagement methods aim to enable community-driven design of spaces for and by local communities. Central to the mission and methods of the center is the belief that the best design solutions merge discipline and community expertise, which results from relationship-building, two-way exchange of information, and meaningful partnerships. This approach relates to design processes on projects ranging from building rehab and pocket parks to neighborhood plans and citywide infrastructure. This paper will situate the center’s work in a broad history of community-engaged design, call out lessons for effective engagement from decades of practice, highlight lessons from recent projects with testimonials from project partners, and situate the work in light of recent challenges. A discussion of principles and methods will unpack strategies that draw a direct line from community conversations to design decisions, at a variety of scales. This work recognizes shifts in strategies to be responsive to scale, cultural and community context, and capacity, and considers influencing variables such as trust-building required, project pace, participating partners, and COVID constraints. In turn, this paper articulates lessons for community engagement practice at the center as well as the broader field.
How We Learn to See: Inclusivity in Sensory Experiences in Learning Environments
Nilou Vakil, University of Kansas
Abstract
Profound architecture engages all our senses and placing us in the world with distinct specificity. Memories are triggered by the tactile, sonic, and aromatic qualities of an environment. We are at once very keenly aware of our surroundings while also sometimes viscerally transported to another time and place. This ability for environments to hold us in two places at once is powerful and speaks to the imprint memories can have on us when all our senses are employed. How can sensory-centric design be utilized to create learning environments where the primary learner is dependent on non-visual cues? Can broader notions of exploration, journey, learning and discovery be elevated by these strategies? The project explorations presented here trace inclusive sensory-centric design strategies that allow visually impaired and blind children to engage with their surroundings within learning environments. In working with a community partner, The Kansas State School for the Blind and their orientation and mobility specialists, keen insights to the challenges and barriers in developing appropriate and inclusive environments were documented. This study also draws from two case studies that test the impact of sensory design and its ability to allow users to more fully experience their surroundings: the Denver Anchor School for blind children (2007) and the Glasgow Hazelwood School (2008). Lessons can be taken from these learning environments designed for educational settings in which “ocularcentrism” 1 has not been privileged over experiencing the world through all our senses. The question explored here is whether projects that prioritize sensory engagement create greater human experiences by connecting us more meaningfully to our built environment. In this way, environments not only function better for those with sight impairment but inclusive to all users of the space. Pedagogically, the exploration develops three important skills. First, the ability to conduct research into the needs of a very specific demographic in order to fully emphasize with the needs of that group. Second, the ability to value a collaborative and participatory design processes. And, three, the ability to recognize that designing environments with all senses in mind can yield more meaningful places than designing only for the visual.
Activate, Articulate, Advocate: for the Right to Occupy, Hold Ground, and Upgrade
María Arquero de Alarcón & Ana Paula Pimentel Walker, University of Michigan
Collaborative Practice Award
Abstract
Activate, Articulate, Advocate: for the Right to Occupy, Hold Ground, and Upgrade
This multi-year participatory action research with engaged mentoring of professional students provides a spatial justice lens to the arsenal of tools and strategies available for activist educators. The transdisciplinary project involving 14 favelas and young land occupations, NGOs, and universities, highlights the informal urbanization of green and blue zones in São Paulo’s southern periphery. Building on the Freirean legacy, this collaboration calls for the US academy to adopt an anti-colonial stance, learning from and providing support for informal dwellers’ everyday urbanisms while joining social movements’ struggles for social transformation. The project operates through three tactical actions aimed to [A]ctivate through capacity building; [A]rticulate through knowledge exchange between younger and consolidated informal communities, [A]dvocate through proper funding and policy reform, for the right to occupy, hold ground and upgrade. Activate: The project carries out the co-production of resilient land occupation practices at the community level. Working with the residents of occupation Jardim Gaivotas, students from the US and a local institution engage with grassroots’ methodologies that emerge from the lived experiences of land occupiers, such as the tree of dreams. Articulate: the 14 favelas and land occupations, with a platform to exchange experiences of community organization, which engendered demands for urbanized land, housing, and access to water during Covid-19. Advocate: elevating the action research findings as part of the 1st and 2nd Meeting of Favelas and Occupations in October 2019 and March 2021, where over 70 favelas and occupations and institutions proposed and demanded solutions to the government through Urban Manifestos. Informal dwellers at the megacities of the Global South are citizen- architects & planners, blending nature and artificial environments to create secure shelter and resilient habitats. US universities must recognize their protagonism, joining their fight to defy inequalities. Without Roof, Water, and Floor, We Live No More!
Architecture of Ecological Attunement: Environment Form Feedback
Dana Cupkova, Carnegie Mellon University
Creative Achievement Award
Abstract
Architecture of Ecological Attunement is a collaborative design pedagogy for the core studio curriculum centered on architecture’s response to climate change, designed and led by Dana Cupkova at the Carnegie Mellon School of Architecture from 2015-2021. The studio framework focused on the interface of landscape and architecture: uncovering its social, infrastructural, and ecological histories, and its related patterns of pollution and toxicity as they shape cultures of post-industrial urbanization. Investigating conditions of aging infrastructure as a substrate for new forms of human and non-human habitation, the studio is situated within an urban ecology of perpetual flooding. Structured as BArch/MArch coordinated studio, with collaborative teaching sections, the overarching pedagogy was supported with a series of lectures, computational design workshops, and embedded simulation workflows to enhance the student’s agility in evaluating design impact across scales. The focus was on coupling qualitative design methods with evidence-based design, while emphasizing environmental ethics beyond the professional confounds of sustainability.
Architecture as a Vehicle for Ecological and Communal Restoration: Ecology works across boundaries imposed by social and political systems. Historically, large-scale ecological patterns have been disregarded within the practices of architecture and urban planning. Instead, modernist design thinking as inherited from the era of industrialization was largely co-opted by ideologies of capital that organize social systems according to political and economic engineering, rather than equitable access to resources. This studio nurtures drawing techniques founded in a rejection of such reductivism, borrowing from cartography and dynamic landscape descriptions, while moving towards data-rich design frameworks. Resisting the current trend towards ever larger human ecological footprints, the studio aimed to instill the design of architectures and landscapes to promote new forms of spatial democracy; to provoke novel architectural aesthetics; and to enable a projective design imagination tightly linked to creation of bio-syntsynthetic and natural, multispecies environments.
1:00pm-2:30pm EDT /
10:00am-11:30am PDT
Research Session
1.5 LU Credit
Traces of Oil in the Architectural Archive: Some Aspects of a Larger Project
Andrew Tripp, Texas A&M University
Abstract
This paper revisits the publication of A Bucket of Oil: The Humanistic Approach to Building Design for Energy Conservation, produced in 1973-74 by researchers at the multinational architecture firm Caudill Rowlett Scott (CRS). The publication was a response to the US experience of the oil embargo, but it was also an index of a transformation in the firm’s research practices—a transition from experimental research in the laboratory to historical research in the archive. While arguing for domestic energy conservation, A Bucket of Oil strategically exercised the agency and logic of the archive to occluded the firm’s rapidly growing commitment to the international oil industry and the oil producing and exporting countries of the Middle East, especially Saudi Arabia and its project for the University of Petroleum and Minerals (UPM). The relationship between archival research practices and oil, both then and now, raises serious questions about the nature of the architectural historian’s work in the age of anthropogenic climate change.
Marketing Modernism with the R.S. Reynolds Memorial Prize
Tait Johnson, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Abstract
This paper examines the influence on modern architecture of the R.S. Reynolds Memorial Prize, which bestowed $25,000 and an original work of aluminum sculpture to an architect from 1957 to 1991. Established by Reynolds Metals, once the second largest aluminum producer in the United States, the purpose of the prize was stated publicly: “The Award is conferred annually on an architect who, in the judgement of his profession, has designed a significant work of architecture, in the creation of which aluminum has been an important contributing factor.” Investigating the prize in the context of the competitive postwar aluminum cladding industry, however, reveals a commitment only conveyed privately in company communications: The Reynolds award was largely a tool of competition between industry titans such as rival Alcoa, whereby architects and their projects were appropriated as a marketing medium. Furthermore, to compete with Alcoa, Reynolds even celebrated works of architecture employing Alcoa-sourced aluminum in their own publications and advertisements, blurring the line of authorship between the architect on the one hand and competing producers on the other. Drawing from Reynolds Metals and Alcoa company archives, this paper analyses the Reynolds competition as one of many tactics employed by producers to promote aluminum as the quintessential modern material. By publishing competition-winning works of aluminum architecture in marketing materials, producers enacted them as “silent salesmen.” Reflecting upon the assertions of promoters in the decades surrounding World War II that aluminum was agentic in modernizing the commercial landscape, this paper shows a way in which modernism – the reactions to modernity in visual, textual and architectural productions – was a marketing project. The reproduction of competition winners in promotional material constituted a modernism to sell aluminum for the producer. Examining this award shows one significant example of a broader engagement of material manufacturers with architects, educators, and professional organizations, revealing their persistent attempts to seek profit by influencing opinions and shape the built environment.
Circular Economy for the Built Environment: Reconciling the Actions and Intentions of Building Professionals in West Africa and Europe
Tosin Bamidele, Iowa State University
Abstract
Long before Circular Economy became a buzzword for sustainability-oriented businesses, it was in industrial practice as resourceful people acquired waste for sorting and reuse, often on a smaller scale. This model meant that materials had multiple lifecycles, reducing waste while providing auxiliary economic opportunities for some people. Architectural practice has typically relied on a linear model that produces, constructs, and uses materials until they become waste. The result is a failure to see deteriorating buildings as being at the start of a new life cycle, and instead marks their end by depositing the materials in a landfill. This paper compares different approaches to Circular Economy using examples from Africa and Europe. Its understanding and application in emerging economies differs from those of more developed economies, because building practitioners in the former approach Circular Economy from a need-based perspective, making use of discarded building materials and affordable, easily sourced natural resources to construct buildings that will serve low to middle-income families in the society. Contrastingly, economies like Europe take a more opulent approach, with iconic buildings that are built to serve more exemplary and experimental purposes than occupancy reasons. Case studies from Senegal, Malawi, and the United Kingdom examine how different approaches to Circular Economy offer insights into ways the United States’ building industry could better utilize Circular Economy principles. People in developing economies are an untapped population when it comes to learning about model sustainability practices. In Europe, good intentions to use recycled materials have often become one-off experiments that bring attention to the problems temporarily but rarely affect meaningful change. The case studies need more professional, because designers, building professionals, and building users need to see what is and is not working, and should be inspired by a broader cross-section of global examples.
Engineering Independence: Concrete Architecture in the Global South
Mohamed Ismail & Caitlin Mueller, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Diversity Achievement Award
Abstract
Engineering Independence: Concrete Architecture in the Global South
During the second half of the twentieth century, countries throughout the Global South gained independence from colonial rule. Subsequently, newly-formed nation states commissioned grand architectural monuments—civic and cultural buildings, infrastructure, residential developments, universities—that declared their newfound position on the global stage. At a time when material costs far outweighed the costs of labor, architects and engineers collaborated to realize these iconic and, quite often, materially efficient structures. A growing understanding of concrete’s structural potential paired with the widespread availability of its component materials meant that many of these architectural visions were realized in concrete. As a result, reinforced concrete enabled countless creative advances in architectural design and became an idiom for development and dignity across the globe. Engineering Independence: Concrete Architecture in the Global South explored the global dynamics and local factors that shape the work of architects, engineers, and structural designers working with concrete in the Global South, highlighting significant contributions often omitted from conventional western scholarship. The symposium, hosted in April of 2021, was organized and developed by students and faculty in the MIT research seminar, Collaborations in Concrete, taught by Ismail and Mueller. The proceedings of the symposium formed the foundation of an ongoing archival project, entitled Building Cultures, which offers a collection of the findings from the symposium and student research. Today, over 90% of global urbanization by 2050 is expected to occur in the Global South. This presents an opportunity to reimagine concrete construction in order to provide a contextual architecture that meets the needs of all. Given the immense climate impact of construction, we should draw inspiration from post-colonial designers while crafting the materially efficient construction of the future. Consequently, Engineering Independence highlights the key figures behind the many structural innovations of post-colonial developing countries as inspiration for future materially efficient architecture.
30-minutes
3:00pm-4:30pm EDT /
12:00pm-1:30pm PDT
Research Session
1.5 LU Credit
The Peculiar Purple Fog: A Book to Encourage Youth Engagement in Historic Preservation
Jessica Radomski, Thomas Jefferson University
Abstract
“The Peculiar Purple Fog” is a children’s chapter book that presents the concept of historic preservation to children that is understandable and applicable to their own lives. This is accomplished through the creation of young, relatable characters in a world based on the concept of memories and their importance in a building’s history. In the current pool of children’s literature, there is a lack of architecture-based themes, and the quantity associated with historic preservation is even smaller. Historic preservation is a field that children are not typically exposed to, yet its concepts of reuse and restoration, even outside of the architectural realm, are invaluable lessons when learned early in life. In early 2018, architecture students researched Richard Neutra’s “Hassrick House,” designed and constructed between 1958 and 1961 in Philadelphia. The research uncovered was significant and organized into a successful exhibit in April 2018. Anecdotes and memories from past inhabitants of the house were among the acquired research and were obtained through both digital and in-person correspondence, including interviews and emails. This children’s chapter book project utilizes these artifacts as the basis for the story and its lessons regarding historic preservation. Through the lense of time travel, the story follows two fictional characters as they progress through various memories that span the life of the house and its past families. A strong emotional connection is built between the characters and the house by the end of the book, when the characters ultimately participate in the preservation of the house and its memories. In addition to previous research, the book also incorporates knowledge from professionals in children’s literature, education, and development. Virtual interviews with each professional expanded upon successful techniques already being utilized in the proposed story and identified additional developmental insight for reader engagement. A children’s literature review was conducted based on successful examples noted by the professionals and on literature with a similar message of conservation in its broad definition. Key components in effectively communicating the concept and vital elements used to engage the reader were recorded from each book and ultimately integrated into the final draft of the project. Once the storyline and illustrations were developed, it was read to children in the targeted age group through virtual meetings. Their feedback reinforced the concepts of engagement that were incorporated into the book, and all were engaged, entertained, and comprehended the intended message of embodied memories and historic preservation. All of the children were intrigued that the events in the story were based on true anecdotes from past inhabitants and were eager for the possibility of visiting the house in person in the future. The ability to read about a concept and subsequently experience it through physical presence greatly reinforces the lessons and messages taught in the book, as it then becomes a real and positive memorable experience.
Worthy Curricula: M.Arch Winter Term Options Studios
Ozayr Saloojee, Carleton University
Creative Achievement Award
Abstract
Worthy Curricula: M.Arch Winter Term Options Studios
This submission for the 2022 ACSA Creative Achievement Awards details the structure of the winter term Graduate Options Studios (January-April) at Carleton University’s School of Architecture + Urbanism, in Ottawa, Canada. Designed as 4 paired, six-week studios (separated by the winter break in February), these particular design studios serve as a bridge between the comprehensive building studio (which includes affiliated courses in advanced building systems and professional practice) and the year-long M.Arch thesis during the last year of a student’s course of study. This term serves as an architectural catalyst as well as a disciplinary expansion for students, and are framed as spaces for epistemic reconsideration of and for architectural study. This term emphasizes conceptual and critical thinking and advanced representation, and has (during non-COVID years) included travel studios to Cape Town, Madrid, Belgrade, London for example. Studios are paired by a theme, and may connect through programs, sites, methods or ideas. 2020-21 themes included: The Divided City, Threshold Landscapes, Collective Bodies and Fictional Mobilities. Work from these studios feature in this submission. Visiting faculty are key, bringing multivalent approaches and interests to our students (who come from both architecture and non-architectural undergraduate degrees. Central to our graduate program, Options Studios connect rigorous architectural design through previous coursework to a much more expansive field of architectural practice. They are a space in our graduate education that opens up new possibilities of how we see, do, make and think about architecture. This submission documents a wide array of work: a collective board game, emancipatory design praxis, deep sections, complex mappings, speculative architectural drawings, the collaborative co-production of knowledge and more. Resulting projects were an architectural polyphony – engaging and challenging disciplinary questions of authorship, service, community, design, politics, climate – all within the urgency of our present world.
3:00pm-4:30pm EDT /
12:00pm-1:30pm PDT
Research Session
1.5 LU Credit
Digital Digital Fabrication Fabrication: Remote collaborative teaching and learning in advanced fabrication
Isaac Mangual, Virginia Tech
Larisa Sherbakova, Florida Atlantic University
Ryan Craney, Misri Patel, & Garret Wood-Stenburgh, University of Michigan
Abstract
Many schools of architecture are facing a pressing issue: How do we offer access to fabrication in an equitable and inclusive manner? Furthermore, how can we create a sustainable, pedagogical model for our institutions to share knowledge about machinery and fabrication processes that are often inaccessible? Two architecture programs, one a PWI (Predominately White Institution) and one an HBCU (Historically Black College/University), joined forces during the 2020-2021 academic year. Together they explored the teaching of advanced fabrication in a virtual/remote learning space. Advanced fabrication mentors from the PWI provided virtual/remote mentorship for students at the HBCU, to assist in designing for and using the ShopBot CNC router at their school’s fabrication space. The team of fabrication mentors stayed constant over both semesters, in contrast to a changing cohort of students and project objectives. During the fall, HBCU worked with mentors to complete a bigger scale, parametric modeling project. Throughout this semester, both teams realized that existing practices, already developed for use in other remote learning environments, were not fulfilling the pedagogical goals of these advanced fabrication efforts. In the spring semester, the PWI/HBCU teaching team reworked the curriculum, as the student body progressed towards smaller scale making-focused projects. In addition, the implementation of newer, innovative technologies in live-streaming allowed for more responsive and interactive collaboration. These projects tackled two primary challenges: working through the technical issues of digital and physical fabrication, and establishing a remote, fabrication-oriented mentorship process, which by nature is hands-on and requires in-person work. Coordinated work sessions between the two universities’ fabrication spaces were facilitated through a real-time, multi-camera, CNC set-up which utilized open-source software to sync multiple audio feeds, screen share (Rhino and CNC programing software), and live video feeds of both CNC router setups. Iterative improvements to the technical set-up were invaluable as consistency and learning from past errors were major keys to success, evidenced by a dramatic improvement in the quality of work and participation from one semester to the next. To sustain this new pedagogical model of exchange, a legacy of knowledge needs to be built. This starts by ensuring that there are always more experienced students who can guide incoming students (and those who are new to fabrication). All of this will be possible by maintaining the primary goal of increasing accessibility to the technological and machine-based integration that is necessary for architectural education programs to remain relevant in the future. This collaboration demonstrated that remote digital and physical fabrication is possible, and both universities are working to expand this platform to other projects and collaborations. By recognizing and leveraging the expertise that already exists within faculty and staff of each institution, collaboration-come-knowledge exchange is not only possible but fruitful and highly effective. Remaining vigilant in the efforts to increase equity of access should be the charge of all schools of architecture; embracing ever-evolving pedagogy through an understanding that experimentation is necessary will propel this type of learning, allowing for a model that is both transportable and sustainable.
Cracking the Code: A New Perspective on Architectural Education
Jonathan Bean, University of Arizona
Abstract
Legitimation Code Theory, or LCT, a framework from education studies, offers the potential for a new perspective on architectural education by distinguishing the different forms knowledge can take and the conditions that determine whether knowledge is considered legitimate within a field of practice such as architecture. At a time when the field is under pressure to respond to climate change and social equity, LCT offers a cogent and tested set of tools for understanding the present state of architectural education and influencing its future. Building on the core LCT dimension of Specialization, three potentials for the field are identified in the interest of moving the field toward a polyvalent definition of architecture.
PH01:BRK: Potentials of Teaching Building Science through Design-Build
Charles MacBride, University of Texas at Arlington
Robert Arlt, South Dakota State University
Abstract
The construction of a certified passive house in a rural, red state signals the successful completion of a case-study project that has had far-reaching effects beyond initial expectations. Instituting passive house principles into the curriculum of a newly established professional degree program was highlighted by the design, construction, certification, sale and monitoring of this single-family home. And while the house is the most visible manifestation, the ongoing influence of the larger initiative may prove to be its most important legacy. This includes a solidifying curriculum that teaches passive strategies, environmental stewardship and professional responsibility, and further establishes the department’s role in community design, leading by example in an underserved region. The cycle of certified houses, established by PH01:BRK, now seeks to enter a self-sustaining mode of developing projects. The PHIUS certified PH01:BRK serves as a model to successor projects that hone technical, budgetary and curricular constraints while continuing the momentum established by the first house. This paper describes the initiative within a pedagogical context, as a forerunner of sustainable building within the regional building industry, and as a political marker in a state that rejects regulation and often the notion of climate change altogether. This cultural condition has even created a difficult framework for the continuation of the initiative within the university itself. This paper also summarizes and speculates on the initiative as a unique pedagogical model for design-build studio and supporting technical and professional coursework. Students were exposed to many of the design challenges that we have come to expect from a design-build studio in terms of process, outcomes, and challenges. This does not diminish the student’s effort and embrace of the project. It does, however, bring attention to the positive effects that have been seen in the resulting curricular and service roles of the department and the recognition throughout the community. This is especially significant in a rural state with no residential energy code and negligible building code enforcement, suggesting issues that go beyond pedagogy and are measured against the region’s cultural and sociopolitical landscape.
New Faculty Teaching Award
Camille Sherrod, Kean University
New Faculty Teaching Award
Abstract
An architect and small firm owner of New York-based Subterranean Architects, Camille Sherrod has been a part time faculty member at the School of Public Architecture within the Michael Graves College at Kean University since 2017 and was recently awarded an inaugural Equity In Action Presidential Postdoctoral Fellowship. Camille balances her teaching and creative work with a focus on the relationship between architecture, health, and culture. She serves as studio coordinator and NOMAS faculty advisor allowing her to develop independent study coursework and research opportunities that allow students to complete core course credit for their work on NOMAS design competitions and Habitat for Humanity. She emphasizes methods, tools, and techniques as diverse as her students themselves, reflecting both the diversity of the profession and its capacity to accommodate diverse voices from its practitioners. Camille graduated with an M.Arch from the Architectural Association in London. Camille recognizes the “long, illustrious history of forward-reaching, creative achievements and socio-cultural impacts” in architecture and design, but notes that the “contemporary field suffers from a severe lack of diversity in its ranks as well as in academia.” Her research focuses on the marginalization of design, which she describes as a built environment that does not reflect the socio-cultural richness of its communities. Camille helped lead the establishment of the Center for Design Equity (CDE) at Kean University. The goal of the CDE is to address the critical need to support a diverse profession and to increase and support the meaningful creative output of underrepresented groups in architecture and design. In doing so, the CDE has a three-fold impact: to raise the living standard for under-resourced communities, to grow and support equity-minded leaders in A&D, and to provide opportunities for the public to better understand the value of the built environment.
3:00pm-4:30pm EDT /
12:00pm-1:30pm PDT
Research Session
1.5 LU Credit
Combinatorial Methods: Redundancy in Design and Digital Fabrication
Rachel Dickey, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Abstract
This paper outlines combinatorial methods in design which empower architects with systematic approaches for producing novel spatial and formal aggregations that allow for sustainable and practical approaches to fabrication and construction. Combinatorial design methodologies, differ from parametric approaches in that they explore part to whole relationships, through additive repetition of discrete parts designed to share tectonic relationships in three-dimensional space. This paper outlines two case study projects that appropriate this methodology and describes the formal, material, and manufacturing possibilities of the approach.
Zippered Wood
Blair Satterfield, Alexander Preiss, Derek Mavis, Graham Entwistle, & Jon Ackerley, University of British Columbia
Marc Swackhamer & Matthew Hayes, University of Colorado Denver
Faculty Design Award
Abstract
Zippered Wood | Creating non-orthogonal architectural assemblies using the most common linear building component (the 2×4)
The challenge and our solution: Across North America, the building industry razes and replaces existing light wood-frame buildings with new structures at an alarming rate. Zippered Wood strategically taps into this waste stream, productively feeding waste-wood back onto the job site through the unconventional redeployment of light-frame construction’s most basic component: the 2×4. With Zippered Wood, we take custody of “spent” lumber, pulled from demolished houses, used formwork, and off-cuts; all likely destined for the landfill or furnace. Our technique (and requisite tools) transforms this waste material into new, formally specific elements, ready for reuse in fresh or modified construction. Zippered Wood is our novel take on wood joinery and deformation. We cut digitally generated, formally specific joint patterns into salvaged boards to produce predictably precise bent and twisted members. The technique introduces new formal opportunities for architects. It also extends the 2×4’s material lifespan, sequesters carbon, and offers a second chance for existing material to be useful in new contexts. Our process consists of bespoke geometric analysis algorithms that translate simulated twists or bends into unique joint patterns. Robotic milling transcribes these coded joints into reclaimed stock, removing the need for formwork or skilled assembly. After milling, we assemble corresponding milled members by the simple application of adhesive and pressure. Form is a result of the cumulative displacement occurring between all faces of the internal joint pattern. Zippered Wood uses material-informed digital processes to convert standard 2x4s into formally sophisticated building components (both sticks and sheets). Wood knot detection, radio frequency glue curing, custom CNC saws, and automated assembly are notable in-process research goals. Our ultimate agenda is to intercept what would normally be considered waste lumber (off-cuts and post-demolition material) and, through this novel reclamation technology, to productively extend its usefulness to future generations of buildings.
New River Train Observation Tower
Edward Becker & Kay Edge, Virginia Tech
Design Build Award
Abstract
New River Train Observation Tower
AGENDA: The New River Train Observation Tower (NRTT) student-faculty design-build strives for excellence in design learning outcomes through a tripartite approach: cross-disciplinary education, research innovation, and service to community. The project links “Beyond Boundaries” curricular objectives to design pedagogies through the cross-pollination of scientific and artistic practice during both the early-stage (material research) and late-stage (design research and construction) project phases. EDUCATION: The design-build project is the physical manifestation of nearly eight years of material and design research across multiple collaborating disciplines and university colleges. Stemming from two pedagogically linked courses between Sustainable Biomaterial and Architecture students in 2018, the NRTT project has solidified sustained cross-college collaborations between Architecture, Sustainable Biomaterials, Wood Science, Forestry, and Building Construction through hybrid courses, multi-disciplinary design lab reviews, hybrid thesis committees, student pursuit of minors, and other student learning benefits.
RESEARCH: The NRTT design-build project sets multiple benchmarks for cross-laminated timber (CLT) research, design, and construction globally. Rather than import softwood CLT into oversupplied, hardwood-dominate forest regions of the Eastern US, the student/faculty project team chose to “think local” to reduce carbon costs. The multidisciplinary student-faculty team developed a structurally-viable, high-performance, local-species H-CLT product with low-grade wood and utilized it for the construction of a 30-foot high, 75-foot long publicly-accessible tower. The team’s H-CLT product not only outperforms all other CLT in the US market, but the project is also the first permanent building permitted for, and constructed with, hardwood CLT in the United States.
SERVICE: As the hardwood was harvested and upcycled within a 200-mile radius of the project site, the design-build sets a precedent for the sustainable upcycling of low-value local resources. Programmatically, the NRTT provides handicap access to views over the New River, one piece of a larger community service effort to improve the built environment in an economically-depressed Appalachian town.
Furniture Urbanism: A Pedagogy for Fabrication and Social Engagement
Peter Wiederspahn & Patrick Kana, Northeastern University
Abstract
FURNITURE URBANISM Furniture Urbanism is a fabrication-oriented design studio conducted to provide our students with an experience of engaging the realities of full-scale fabrication and the complexities of designing objects for public urban spaces. Co-conceived and co-led by an architecture professor and a fine-furniture maker who manages the university makerspaces, this course highlighted their varying yet complimentary pedigrees of furniture, fabrication, and material insights. Furniture Urbanism is a hypothesis that is related to urban furniture, the human-scaled urban objects and infrastructures that populate the public realm. It also draws from Everyday Urbanism, the activation of common and unconsidered urban spaces with periodic events and opportunistic uses (Crawford 2008). It also has affiliations with Tactical Urbanism, low-cost, high-impact urban interventions to transform public behavior and use of city spaces (Lydon and Garcia 2015). Furniture Urbanism is meant to stimulate social interaction by engaging people not only with the designed object but also with the other urbanites who are drawn to it. The studio was composed of two phases: Furniture and Urbanism. In the Furniture phase, each student produces a finished furniture object, building skills alongside an awareness of furniture from a creator and user standpoint. This immediately engaged students in improvisational thinking and a ‘designing-through-making’ process. Prototyping early and often supported student improvisation while increasing their confidence in navigating the undiscovered. In the Urbanism phase, students formed design teams to conduct a collaborative process of merging the individual designs into purposeful propositions. The final Furniture Urbanism objects were then deployed as finished prototypes across our urban campus. Through this sequence of individual and collective projects, the students learned to balance what craftsman and author David Pye describes as the “workmanship of risk” that is dependent on individual dexterity and the “workmanship of certainty” that is rooted in systems of production (Pye, 1995). [i] Crawford, Margaret. 1999. “Blurring the Boundaries: Public Space and Private Life,” in Everyday Urbanism, edited by John Chase, Margaret Crawford, and John Kaliski. 22-35. New York, NY: Monacelli Press. [ii] Lydon, Mike, and Anthony Garcia. 2015. Tactical Urbanism: Short Term Action for Long-Term Change, 2-6. Washington, DC: Island Press. [iii] Pye, David. 1995. The Nature and Art of Workmanship. 20. London: Herbert Press.
3:00pm-4:30pm EDT /
12:00pm-1:30pm PDT
Research Session
1.5 LU Credit
Augmenting The Digital Review: Translating Reality As A Form Of Young Scholar Empowerment
Jonathan Scelsa, Pratt Institute
Abstract
Augmenting the digital review serves as an investigation into the use of augmented reality technology within early architectural education as means of introducing both historical and contemporary tools of abstract making and seeing. The research, which culminated in a summer pre-college outreach two-week intensive program, examines the critical usage of image-based software applications, for their ability to bridge the digital-physical divide within a youth population whom, had not previously been exposed to architectural making, but might have native familiarity with readily accessible smart phone interfaces for camera based environmental capture. The research builds upon the optic history of architectural drawing procedures towards a new form of abstraction and representation using photogrammetry and augmented reality. The pedagogy exposed students to analog, digital, and augmented versions of producing the image illusions of false depth, trompe l’oeil, and spatial collapse as a means of bridging the historical principles of architectural drawing into the new iterations of augmented reality technology. The first week allowed the students to familiarize themselves with drawing procedures, image production, scanning, digital modeling, and augmentation in the second dimension, while the second week repeated these techniques in the third. For the first week, the studio structured itself around discussions of a figural corridor as spatial architectural device, which could be designed, and manipulated by the students utilizing one-point perspective construction. Each student designed a figural corridor utilizing the Albertian method of constructing perspective, which were then inked, colored, and digitally scanned. Within the computer this drawing served as a background upon which students could digitally spatialize their figural corridor in a digital model environment. Students began to investigate ways of altering the corridors form, populate with scale figures to inform a creative understanding of this linear world. The first week culminated in a review which allowed students to walk around and view each other’s AR corridor environments wherein each hand-drawing served as a trigger that would utilize their phone to activate the augmented digital model of the corridor allowing for students to deploy these in their own personal realm. The second week’s exercise focused on the third dimensional application of image-scanning and augmented display surrounding a physical model environment. Students produced a third dimensional patterned proto-architectural object which was then scanned utilizing the student’s personal smart phone camera to be deployed as photogrammetric object back into the computer. Within a digital modeling environment, students again altered their three-dimensional scanned image by adding new volumes and people as a means of exploring how this object sits amongst its contexts. The last day of the week allowed the students to deploy their new augmented digital creations amongst their physical models in augmented space and time, creating a palette of mixed realities, inclusive of the physical, the digitally scanned, and a third augmented object. The associated paper will present this reality capture and dimensional translation, as a technique that empowers young students to work in between reality and the abstract world of the computer.
Computational Urban Design: An Exploration of New Urban Science
Dan Qiang, Yun Han, & Yu Ye, Tongji University
Abstract
Classic urban design theories and research methods have been limited to qualitative approaches, such as subjective intuition and small-scale surveys(Batty, 2013; Kvan, 2020). With the emergence of new urban science, adopting big data, virtual reality, and wearable sensors, it is possible to achieve a precise analysis of people’s perception and behavior of urban space(Offenhuber and Ratti, 2014). In this way, not only will new insights in urban study be inspired, but also high-quality, human-scale space design can be generated(Shen et al., 2017; Ye et al., 2019). A systematic review was conducted to map the emerging literature in related fields(Townsend, 2015). With the keywords “urban design”, “big data” and “new urban science,” more than 200 representative journal articles published on Web of Science in recent years were selected as the dataset. There are three new research directions emerging on the leading edge of the literature (Fig.1). In this context, a systemic brand-new framework for computational urban design can be proposed, integrating big data, machine learning algorithms, and geographic design to achieve a refined analysis from a human-oriented perspective. The new algorithm is applied to the depth of the whole process of urban design, with an emphasis on fusing science, technology, and design depth, in the form of quantitative calculation to support a better design(Miao et al., 2018; Wilson et al., 2019; Tunçer, 2020). In order to deal with complex urban design projects, computational urban design has to involve three major directions: data-informed, evidence-based, and algorithm-driven (Fig.2). This paper took the Shanghai Urban Design Challenge as an example of computational urban design in practice(Fig.3). First, the data-informed urban design is helpful to identify problems and formulate strategies. Multi-source city data, such as POIs data, and AutoNavi map path planning API, helps refine the needs, functions, and characteristics of the citizens(Fig.4). The evidence-based urban design with specific inquiries helps to select the design intervention point and control spatial elements. Virtual reality technology, wearable biosensors and the visualization SP method are combined to measure space utility. The final algorithm-driven part can use sDNA, UNA and virtalvizer to simulate spatial elements, to perform morphological analysis and vitality evaluation, and to further adjust the design(Fig.5). This paper introduces systematic and scientific thinking into urban design practice and controls the whole process and all directions of the design process. It can be seen that the application of this framework can make the entire design process more automatic, efficient, and robust under the existing constraints. New design tools enable urban research to directly support the most central part of urban design: scheme generation. More importantly, through simulation prediction, the effectiveness of the scheme is evaluated, and the designer and decision-maker can obtain real-time feedback and check the scheme accordingly. In addition, it helps the perspective of urban design expanding from the previous “top-down” perspective to the “bottom-up” perspective, transforming from a two-dimensional to a three-dimensional, obtaining real-time feedback and optimizing design accordingly, emphasizing embodied perception and hu-man-oriented scale.
Virtual Reality as Collaborative Design Pedagogy on 3 Continents
Olivier Chamel, Florida A&M University
Abstract
In the context of a challenging year for face to face education and more specifically for courses such as design studios, this paper proposes to discuss how a pedagogy based on immersive virtual environments can be conducive to a more collaborative approach in architecture studio. As we are currently teaching design studios with a combination of remote and face to face modalities it seems an opportune moment to explore how Virtual Reality can affect the design and learning process. This paper presents a collaborative design exercise organized between three schools of architecture in Germany, the US, and Mauritius and involved the design of rooftop additions in different urban context on three continents. Students used the Spatial App with Virtual Reality headsets, Conceptboard, Slack, WhatsApp and Zoom to communicate, collaborate, design and formally present their work. The three sites for the rooftop projects matched the school locations in Hamburg, Mauritius and Florida. Each group of students was assigned a site in a location they were unfamiliar with so it would create a challenge in terms of physical and cultural environment. Mauritian students were asked to design a signature commercial building in a US downtown whereas students in Florida planned a subsidized housing project in Hamburg. The German students, on the other hand created Airbnbs in Port Louis, Mauritius. Each rooftop project responded to the specific needs of its context and therefore exposed students to a set of unfamiliar circumstances. The student teams onsite were responsible for providing site and context information to the offsite design teams. Then following a predetermined set of criteria, each student team periodically reviewed the work of the students designing in their location. The projects were initiated by a collaborative process where students exchanged information about site and context. Progress and final presentations were conducted using the Spatial App with either the Oculus Quest headsets, iPads or laptops. Students also used Conceptboard and Zoom as supplemental presentation tools. They also used Slack and WhatsApp to communicate during the overall duration of the project. We postulate that the collaborative process discussed in this paper has value as it introduces different sets of connections between students along with a new sense of community and familiarity through immersive virtual environments and other digital formats. This project focused on emerging technologies as they offer new means for students to connect, problem solve and get exposure to diverse architecture pedagogies and design cultures.
The Color of Air: Integrating Code with Design-Build Education
Nate Imai, Texas Tech University
Abstract
The Color of Air is an installation that integrates code with design-build education to introduce students to the process of computer programming and to evaluate building performance. The project incorporates code, digital fabrication methods, and construction practices to create an interactive space that teaches students fundamental thermodynamic principles by way of their interactions with the structure. Through a project-based curriculum that adopts John Dewey’s experiential approach to education, the installation empowers students with tools and experiences for understanding, applying, and evaluating the impact of their designs within the built environment.
3:00pm-4:30pm EDT /
12:00pm-1:30pm PDT
Research Session
1.5 LU Credit
On the Uses of History, Theory, and Criticism for Architecture
Joseph Bedford, Virginia Tech
Abstract
It has been nearly two decades since Sarah Whiting, Bob Somol, Michael Speaks and Stan Allen, declared that architectural design practice should break from what they described as a design culture bogged down with theory, and restrained by what they called the “critical project.” This paper returns to the twin problematic of posttheory and postcritique. Yet it approaches the topic from a more institutional perspective, developing a new diagnosis based on the fate of institutional arrangements within schools of architecture involving the creation of “history, theory, and criticism” in the mid-1960s and its relation to design practice. It returns to papers delivered by Peter Collins, Bruno Zevi, Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, and Stephen Jacobs at the 1964, ACSA-AIA Cranbrook Teachers Seminar in order to revisit a number of arguments about why schools of architecture should develop a particular relationship to history within their own institutional context, different from art history and uniquely tied to theory and criticism; and how this development would enable studio design practices to be critical. Despite this institutional settlement, which gave birth to a new form of history inside schools of architecture that promised to transform practice into a new critical mode, larger processes of academic growth during the 1980s and 1990s have led to a severance of this relationship and a return to something close to what Collins, Zevi, Moholy-Nagy and Jacobs criticized when they challenged architectural education’s derivation of its history from the independent field of art history, which they deemed too disengaged from creative practice. The paper argues that our posttheoretical and postcritical situation within the culture of architectural design has more to do with the changing institutional configuration within education: namely the professionalization and thus polarization of history and design, and the erasure of the mediating field of theory and criticism.
Manifestos and Manifestations: Dialogues between Ways of Writing and Ways of Building
Michelle Laboy, Northeastern University
Abstract
The urgency to limit the global temperature rise below 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels[i] and the aging and expected decline of global population [ii] are producing dramatic social, political, and ecological shifts that challenge both architectural theory and practice to reconsider their roles in the world. The intersection of urban and climate migration is shifting the profile of practice leaders and its own systems of criticism,[iii] even if not yet transforming academic theory. An ethical theory for this moment of crisis would necessarily engage with this reality, critically examining questions of where to build, what to build with, and who to build for. Contemporary practice has no shortage of prescriptive frameworks of principles or performance criteria for sustainability, wellness, regeneration, resilience, and even social resistance; many of these informing recent attempts at defining design excellence.[iv] Theory challenges and examines the origins, logics and motivations of prescriptive codes.[v] But can a critical theory of building emerge from and empower architects to work confidently within the confines of material practices towards transforming the social and environmental reality of people and the planet? Revisiting Stan Allen’s theory of Pragmatic Realism provides a still relevant critique of dumb practices and dumb theories that are “situated at a distance from the operational sites of technique…” as worlds of “concepts uncontaminated by real world contingencies;”[vi] calling instead for creative practice to be “sufficiently secure in its own technical and theoretical bases to go beyond the simple reflection of the real as given…” and a “realistic conceptual basis from which to cultivate meaningful differences.” [vii] More than twenty years after questioning the discipline’s separation of otherwise co-dependent creative practices of writing and building [viii] this divide between thinking through and about making, and thinking through reading and writing persists in architectural education despite the urgent ethical and transdisciplinary nature of socio-technical challenges facing the profession. This paper examines how academia could intentionally break this separation within the building technology curriculum. Ten manifestos, spanning centuries and regions of socio-ecological ideas, and which emerged from material practices to influence architectural theory—from Aalto to Doshi and Farrell/McNamara—were selected and introduced in a building technology course to examine the translation to and from ways of writing into ways of building. These manifestos aspired for architecture’s long-lasting significance, and thus were analyzed as alternative theoretical frameworks for social and environmental resilience and sustainability. Their built manifestations illustrated building technologies as instances of critical material practices. The study of manifestos and manifestations served as a point of departure for students’ own dialogue between writing and building. Integrated with a material-focused design studio, the lecture course challenged students to simultaneously write theory that transcends a project to define social and ecological agendas, but that also extracts generalizable principles for practice from specific instances of their material investigations. Analyzing the students’ ideological frameworks, evident in the organizational structure of their books, elucidates the opportunities and challenges for integrating Architectural Theory and Design education towards strengthening the critical and ethical foundations of building practices.
Revolution or Co-Evolution? Radical Ecology and Social Design in Berkeley, Circa 1970
Anthony Raynsford, San Jose State University
Abstract
In Berkeley, California in the late 1960s, a number of prominent architects saw it as their responsibility, not so much to serve existing social needs as to collaborate with social forces that were in the process of an entirely new world, both physically and institutionally. Unlike the earlier generation of the modernist avant-garde, who had dreamed of a streamlined, mechanized society, calling into being some universalized “modern man,” these architects instead took their cues from ecology, systems theory, and counterculture communes, theorizing a dynamic unfolding of co-evolving social subjects, within which architectural design might join together with a radical politics of egalitarian interdependence. This paper especially focuses on the research and writing of Sim van Der Ryn between 1967 and 1971, tracing his transformation from an architect primarily concerned improving the social functions of architecture to an architect most closely identified with ecology and ecological systems. These two phases of his career, I would argue, are not as separate or disjunctive as they might first appear. Rather they are the flip sides of an ecological utopianism that emerged in the work of a number of architects around 1970, but whose original problems and meanings have been obscured in subsequent decades.
Symbolism and Sculptural Expression of the Grazer Schule
Celeste Williams, University of Houston
Abstract
Symbolism and Sculptural Expressionism of the Grazer Schule The Grazer Schule (Graz School) was a dynamic Austrian architectural design movement which occurred in Graz, Austria in the late 20th and early 21st centuries in the era of Post-Modernism. Graz, as the second largest city in Austria, functioned as an architectural counterpoint to Vienna, with its more historicist tendencies. The center of this movement was dually in the architecture school of the Technical University of Graz, its students and faculty, and in the visionary practices of such architects as Günther Domenig, Klaus Kada, Szyszkowitz and Kowalski, Volker Giencke, and Team A Graz. Grazer Schule architecture was highly dramatic, with visionary spatial development incorporating soaring volumes, structures that seem to defy gravity, innovative material usage, and the subconscious inclusion of deeper symbolic meaning still readable in the built structure. From the outset Grazer Schule architects had no intention of following norms of design or construction. As opposed to Bauhaus Modernism, the pedagogy of their professors, with its utopian ideals and clear rules of design, the Graz School sought to be unique, individualistic and in opposition to the Viennese post-war. The opposite of a Functionalist aesthetic, it was highly regional, place specific, symbolically meaningful to the architect, and exhibited a high degree of sculptural Expressionism. In the 1960s and 1970s some shared approaches of the new regional style can be seen in early, largely organic or cellular plan development resulting in complex non-linear, non-boxlike forms. Where Bauhaus Modernism embraced clean minimalist lines, a shared color palette, flat roofs and decoration through noble interior materials such as marble and chromed steel, the new Grazer Schule architecture embraced a return to natural materials such as wood, often raw or unfinished on interiors as well as exteriors, or metal panels made of zinc or copper paired with exposed concrete in a Brutalist aesthetic. They also experimented with pneumatics in the 1960s, super-structures, and temporal architecture. As the 1970s progressed they outcompeted one another with increasingly futuristic constructions many with imagery derived from nature. Oftentimes based on complex geometry, these buildings would become the hallmarks of the Grazer Schule in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s. During this time embedded symbolism and metaphor became the theoretical underpinning of the movement, injecting hidden meaning into the built works. In 2003 Graz was chosen as the Cultural Capital of Europe, establishing the reputation of the Grazer Schule architects as creating a node of advanced expressionist buildings, and catapulting them into the international spotlight. This paper will trace the internalization of “meaning” in the architecture of the Grazer Schule through semiotics and overt symbolism expressed in the parti concept, elevations, and forms, culminating in the entirety of built spatial sculptural presentation and a unique regional style.
30-minutes
5:00pm-6:30pm EDT /
2:00pm-3:30pm PDT
Special Focus Session
1.5 LU Credit
Presenters:
Mass Timber & New England
Tom Chung, Wentworth Institute of Technology
Architecture 595 – Mass Timber Building Systems
Paul Fast, U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Mass Timber Design focus in our Master of Science (MS) in Architecture Degree Program
Judith Sheine, University of Oregon
Forest Strong: Timber Solutions for Disaster Resilient Coastal Development
Jacob Gines & Hans Herrmann, University of Mississippi
Timber Super-Block
Nelson Byun, Boston Architectural College
Session Description
2022 Timber Education Prize
The Softwood Lumber Board and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) announce the winners of the 2022 Timber Education Prize. These innovative courses will be taught at architecture schools across North America in the coming years.
These courses seek to recognize effective and innovative curricula that create a stimulating and evidence-based environment for learning about timber. The use of wood as a building material can achieve multiple design, construction, and performance objectives. Therefore, these courses equip students with the knowledge and design skills to achieve green building goals in a range of project types.
5:00pm-6:30pm EDT /
2:00pm-3:30pm PDT
Research Session
1.5 LU Credit
Designing With Water
B.D. Wortham-Galvin, Clemson University
Abstract
One of the myriad consequences of climate change is the increased amount of flooding that communities are incurring. This includes not only coastal communities flooding due to sea level rise and the resultant impacts of astronomical high tides, but also severe storm flooding happening along estuaries and even further inland along rivers and tributaries. Our built environment should permit water’s presence and, thus, designers must begin to accept a perception of water within the built environment and anticipate new interactions between ecological and human systems. How can the dissection of water and its hydrologic movements become the base for exploring how design interventions may tap into this system thoughtfully? How do we allow water to re-enter our built environment, not as a treacherous element as seen in the past (and current) paradigm, but as an element that enriches? In 2020, the US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) released a feasibility report and environmental assessment to address coastal storm risk for the Charleston Peninsula. In 2021 the City asked xxxx to produce a parallel design study in order to examine counter proposals to the USACE proposition, particularly nature-based design strategies. This paper articulates the process and product behind the counter proposal to offer suggestions for design grounded in social and environmental concerns in addition to physical and fiscal ones.
Embodied Carbon as a Path to Embodied Wisdom
David Fannon & Michelle Laboy, Northeastern University
Abstract
To rapidly reduce climate impacts from the built environment, architects must develop both expert knowledge to measure impacts, and the wisdom to interpret results and integrate them into design. This paper describes the application of quantitative life cycle assessment in a studio to advance design synthesis and integration by cultivating intuition about the embodied impacts of structural systems. Students in an integrative studio modeled life cycle impacts of their projects, focusing first on the carbon embodied in the structure and then integrating other systems as the designs developed. Meaningful analysis depends on comparison, and professional judgement develops from repeatedly connecting new knowledge generated through skilled application with prior knowledge. Students compared results to a collaboratively developed baseline building with typical construction, and across the diverse projects of the studio, as well as an industry benchmark of 500 kg CO₂e/m² contextualized studio projects relative empirical data and challenged students to manage the carbon intensity of their evolving design. Neither declarative knowledge about embodied carbon nor the procedural skill of using simulation tools are not learning objectives of the integrative studio: the abstraction of quantitative analysis serves to enable a rich qualitative comparative discourse about design synthesis and integration. Case studies describe the range of outcomes for students engaged in this reflexive practice, and the opportunities and challenges for faculty and students to discern wisdom embodied in benchmarks and cultivate intuition about designer’s agency and material impacts.
Sustainable Design Accelerator: Infusing Entrepreneurship and Evidence-based Design into Architecture Pedagogy
Omar Al-Hassawi & David Drake, Washington State University
Abstract
Development of systems-level thinking and an entrepreneurial mindset is invaluable to prepare architecture program graduates for challenges posed by the global climate crisis. This paper reports initial results from the Sustainable Design Accelerator, a funded project within our Master of Architecture program to advance student skill sets through entrepreneurship and evidence-based design. Prior to this project, our students valued entrepreneurship but lacked curricular opportunities despite recent faculty experience in the area. Additionally, existing courses on sustainability provided only a broad overview of sustainable design principles, with little opportunity for hand-on exploration. By stacking a lab course and a studio course, a semester-long sequence was created, introducing and applying a comprehensive suite of digital and analog tools for entrepreneurship and evidence-based design. In the lab course, tool introduction and application occurred within the context of a design challenge to produce innovative and marketable passive cooling system prototypes, while in the concurrent studio course, students applied tools to calculate environmental impacts at a whole building scale for proposed designs of a multi-family housing community. Both courses featured workshops by national experts in entrepreneurial studies and product life cycle assessment, as well as reviews by practicing architects specializing in environmental stewardship. In addition to direct assessment of learning outcomes, exit surveys were used to assess student perceptions of knowledge depth and the value of newly acquired skills. Survey results indicated improvement in students knowledge in the introduced tools and helped outline modifications to a second iteration of the Sustainable Design Accelerator, to be delivered Spring 2022. Also reported here is the impact on the sequence of the university’s move to online-only education for the 2020-2021 academic year, due to the COVID-19 global pandemic. Return to in-person instruction for the 2021-2022 academic year provides for future comparison between online and in-person iterations.
WERC NYC: Neighborhood-scaled Waste to Energy and Recycling Infrastructure + Public Programming
Alexandra Barker, Pratt Institute
Abstract
New York City generates 14 million tons of garbage per year, or 12,000 tons per day. Seventy-five percent of waste is exported out of the city to landfills upstate and to Pennsylvania, Virginia, and South Carolina. Two-thirds of recyclables end up in landfills. A 2009 study shows that burning waste is greener than landfilling it and generates more energy. Localizing waste management reduces transportation pollution and expense. Layering public programs onto infrastructural programs anticipates the increased densification of the city, where the increasing scarcity of ground-level space will prompt public spaces to continue to stratify. This project investigates proposes the localization of waste management through small-scale waste to energy and recycling facilities that serve the population of a New York City community district. The project assumes the incorporation of the latest filtration technologies developed in places like Japan, Sweden and Denmark that are able to filter 95-99% of different types of emissions. This makes it possible to situate these facilities in dense urban environments where they can locally capture waste streams where they are generated and where they can integrate into the local urban context and be coupled with public programming. It is understood that the long-term solution to waste management is the elimination of the use of fossil fuels and the complete recycling of waste. Localizing the waste to energy facility eliminates the pollution issues associated with transportation. Waste to energy puts garbage to good use by converting it to steam for electricity production and has been proven to be environmentally preferable to landfill, which are known for their greenhouse gas emissions. Combining infrastructure with public programming that can take advantage of the heat and energy byproducts of the WTE process has the added benefit of bringing visibility to the issue of waste. When neighborhoods are constrained to effectively live with their waste they are incentivized to process it as efficiently as they can. The test sites for the project were waterfront locations chosen to align with proposed East River Ferry stops to bring more visibility and efficiency to the proposed system of localized waste processing. Pier 36 in Manhattan and the Brooklyn Navy Yard site straddle diverse residential and industrial urban fabrics. The local community of the Manhattan site includes the Lower East Side and Chinatown, while the Brooklyn Navy Yard includes the Hasidic community as well as other Williamsburg residents. The pedagogical approach involves a team of design and engineering faculty advising teams of students to produce a design proposal with a high degree of technical resolution including the design of building systems and typical details.
5:00pm-6:30pm EDT /
2:00pm-3:30pm PDT
Research Session
1.5 HSW Credit
Addressing Health Equity through Design: A Case Study
Victoria Lanteigne, Traci Rider, Aaron Hipp, Rosa McDonald, & Brianna Creviston, North Carolina State University
Kia Baker, Baker Ingenuity Group
Abstract
While an interest in healthy building has been steadily increasing, COVID-19 has elevated health equity as a priority across architecture, engineering and construction initiatives, as evidenced by the recently launched WELL Health Equity Initiative and the LEED Safety First: Social Equity in Pandemic Planning Credit. This paper outlines preliminary findings from an exploratory case study on how a hybrid elementary school/ YMCA can support health equity through design and affiliated programming. Supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Interdisciplinary Research Leaders Program, the research focuses on exploring how the uniquely designed environment of an elementary school impacts the physical, mental, and emotional health of students, staff, and the greater Southeast Raleigh community. The case school was designed through a highly participatory approach, engaging a health equity lens early in the process to address the needs and wants of an often-overlooked community. This paper outlines findings from initial surveys that aimed to better understand not only the effectiveness of healthy design strategies, but also how the design of this unique environment has impacted aspects of equity in the context of physical and mental health. Opportunities for increasing health equity through built environment design will be outlined and recommendations will be provided to expand future research in this discipline.
A.B. McDonald Elementary School Outdoor Classroom
Scott Lawrence, Brett Carter, & LaRae Tomera, University of Idaho
Design Build Award
Abstract
A.B. McDonald Elementary School Outdoor Classroom
After witnessing the challenges and pressures brought on by Covid-19, design-build students at [redacted] were determined to proactively respond to the needs of their local community. They identified several focus areas and undertook an extensive outreach effort, leading to a partnership with the local school district. The A. B. McDonald Elementary Outdoor Classroom is a unique collaboration between the two schools, providing invaluable experience and knowledge to the students who created it, and safety and resources to the students that will use it for years to come. A. B. McDonald Elementary has long advocated for outdoor learning and encourages students to use the greenery surrounding the school for varied educational activities. An earlier outdoor seating area was located on the site in the past, but was removed in 2018 for safety reasons. With the onset of Covid-19, the loss of that space was acutely felt by the school. They required a permanent and centralized focus area to organize the outdoor space. This would allow students to socially distance and safely enjoy the benefits of the outdoor learning while giving the teachers the structure needed to lead class activities from a single location at the edge of the school gardens and learning forest. The team worked with the principal and staff, school district officials, and engineers to ensure that the classroom would both withstand the test of time, and adapt well to varied and changing instructional needs for the school. For now, it will help young students from kindergarten to 5th grade more safely transition back into normalcy as it also serves as a shaded outdoor lunch room. In the future, it will serve as a safe and durable gathering space for the children of the community to learn.
Human-Building Interaction, Thermal Comfort and Indoor Air Quality in K-12 Schools (before and after COVID-19)
Helia Taheri, CRTKL
CRIT Live Student Scholar
Abstract
Thermal comfort and indoor air quality (IAQ) have a noticeable impact on children’s comfort, health and learning performance. Since people might feel thermally different in the same condition, they might have different preferences to interact with their built environment to improve their comfort. COVID-19 added another layer of complexity to these preferences. On the other hand, people are aware of the impact of their built environment on IAQ and their health, and this awareness has been significantly increased since COVID-19 hits the world in March 2020. All leading agencies agreed on the importance of adequate ventilation rate and outdoor air ventilation in safer reopen schools, during the pandemic. Despite the benefits of thermal and IAQ-related recommendations, there might be some drawbacks that make stakeholders not use the suggested strategies or use them ineffectively. This presentation is a part of an exploratory mixed-methods case study (a doctoral dissertation) that focuses on teachers’ preferred behaviors to improve thermal comfort and IAQ in their classrooms, and the benefits and drawbacks of these behaviors. It suggests strategies for different stakeholders to mitigate the drawbacks of those behaviors while enhancing their benefits. The methods used in this study are surveys and interviews.
5:00pm-6:30pm EDT /
2:00pm-3:30pm PDT
Research Session
1.5 LU Credit
InterLattice
Gregory Spaw, American University of Sharjah
Lee Su Huang, University of Florida
Abstract
This abstract details a process-based design research project that reimagines traditional manual tube bending techniques with the precision and efficiency of digital formative fabrication. Leveraging the positional accuracy of industrial robots using custom tools to bend and interweave metal tubes in geometrically complex and spatially precise loops, the research follows a lineage of projects1&2 exploring the application of robotic bending of linear elements, primarily in solid-core rod form3. The material limitation of rod diameters conducive to bending constrains the span and length of the members, indirectly limiting the overall size of the resultant product. Solid profiles also prove far from ideal in terms of material efficiency when considering structural cross-sections for scaling up to larger inhabitable structures. To overcome this material limitation while building on similar methodology, the project’s focus shifts towards the use of hollow tubes to engage their potential in larger scale constructs. Previous projects highlight the use of traditional bent pipe methods, notably the large-scale installation work of Oyler Wu4, Warren Techentin Architecture5, and FUTUREFORMS6; while the projects achieve the scale and capacity to be inhabitable, they are typically realized through use of elaborate jigs, large fabrication spaces, and intense manual labor. This project attempts to integrate the material efficiency and scalar advantages of tubes with the precision and repeatability of industrial robot-based formative fabrication. Using a Kuka 6-axis industrial robot and a positioner as a turntable, a custom 3d-printed gripper with pneumatic control enables gripping, rotation, and feeding into the external axis turntable with a center die and an outer roller forming pin. For multi-planar bends the robot feeds the tube forward to the correct location, then grips and rotates the tube axially to the correct orientation for the turntable to execute the next bend. The computational workflow uses a parametric definition to reference simple polyline geometry and fillets the corners with a fixed diameter due to the static bending die diameter. The geometry is parsed and sequenced into Kuka KRL code for robot movement simulation, collision detection, as well as external axis instructions for the turntable and gripper. To calibrate the digital process with the physical results, automated springback compensation via linear regression analysis was incorporated into the generated code. As a demonstration piece to validate and showcase the project’s capabilities, InterLattice, a 2.3 meter tall construct consisting of two interwoven loops was designed to interlock and intertwine to offer opportunities for joinery and structural support. The two color-coded loops are folded upon themselves, utilizing pentagonal symmetry, while demonstrating the precision of this fabrication method and its ability to create complex interwoven structures. The accuracy of the irregular multi-planar bends required to realize this piece would be impossible to achieve manually with a similar level of speed and consistency. As an initial prototype in a series of explorations meant to gradually scale up in size and complexity, the project uncovers possibilities for bundled and interwoven tubular structures7 that represent a paradigm shift in how tubular structures might be designed and fabricated in the future.
Thinking and Making – Digital Craft Hybridity
Sinan Husic & Sheryl Boyle, Carleton University
Abstract
The goal of this research project is to engage in a process of thinking by making, this is to say to problem solve (to design) by direct engagement with tools and material at hand. The project argues that in an increasingly digital world, the quality of architectural design is at risk due to the isolation of the maker (architect) from the materials we build with, all exacerbated by modern software.[1] Without retreating into nostalgic ideas of “hand-craft”, this research demonstrates how modern fabrication is a hybrid endeavor, its processes neither solely digital nor analogue in nature, with one depending on the other for good quality results. Thinking (designing) by making requires the maker to directly engage with material, to learn techniques with the tools (digital and analogue), to learn about the unquantifiable phenomena of the material, and to experience failures in the process, all to positively inform future design decisions. This research project is supported by a Mitacs grant[2] to explore methods for 3D printing Ultra-High-Performance Concrete (UHPC). In short, UHPC is a precisely tailored mixture that contains the same traditional ingredients for concrete along with various modern ones which serve to optimize the material’s mechanical properties for a specific application. This greatly reduces the amount of Portland cement used, thereby reducing the carbon footprint of the material. The subject of this project is a chair, chosen because it is often considered analogous to architecture with its structural, programmatic, and ergonomic constraints, while being of a more manageable scale for the scope of this work. This research project is divided into four phases, each phase informing the next in a “forward-looping process of refinement.”[3] The process of thinking by making depends on experimentation and real-time problem solving to arrive at a product that embodies comprehensive thought in materiality, technique, technology, and craft in a design that engages with the human body. The first phase is an exploratory “hand-crafting” phase, meant to become engaged with the material, and to establish acceptable working techniques.[4] The second phase uses the lessons learned of the material and process of making to produce three conceptual models of potential chairs. Phase three enters a more formal design phase, and uses the conceptual models as departing points for the design and fabrication of three half-scale prototypes. The final phase is devoted to the design and fabrication of the final chair, which is predominantly 3D printed, but also incorporates the other techniques used throughout this research thesis. The final chair “prototype” is not without flaws, which can be resolved through more refining and making, but the primary area of interest for this work is understanding how the design and fabrication of the 3D printed UHPC chair is a direct result of engaging in a continuous process of designing by making in a hybrid analogue/digital fashion.
Wood Waste to Pumped Paste: Leveling the Playing Field Using Inventive Design Proxies
Angela Carpenter & Frank Jacobus, University of Arkansas
Abstract
As designers and academics, the tools we have access to become critical instruments for evolving our ideas and bringing new work into the world. Unfortunately, not everyone has access to similar equipment, making the advancement and promotion of new ideas more accessible to a select few. With a desire to investigate wood paste extrusion techniques, and an interest in finding creative ways to level the playing field, a team at the Fay Jones School of Architecture experimented with simulating the type of inquiry that could be done with advanced robotics using an affordable electric caulk gun as the robot’s proxy. In other words, instead of being hampered by our lack of access to a more sophisticated tool which can cost as much as $200,000 – we instead employed a $40 tool that gave us the same feedback regarding extrusion capacity and design potential. This paper discusses ways designers can circumvent the inequities that exist within our academic environments, the type of learning that takes place when using inexpensive tools as design proxies, and how we plan to evolve these processes moving forward.
5:00pm-6:30pm EDT /
2:00pm-3:30pm PDT
Research Session
1.5 LU Credit
Architecture of/as Protest: Action, Place and the Concern for the World
Paul Holmquist, Louisiana State University
Abstract
What is the relation between political action and architectural space? How do protesters and other actors transform urban spaces into stages for envisioning and enacting political change? How do architectural places in turn support, condition or even elicit public action? How are architects and designers political actors, and how can architecture, design, and art be considered to ‘act’ within the public realm? These questions were taken as points of departure for an advanced research seminar in architectural theory taught at Louisiana State University. The course explored the role that architectural spaces and practices play in different forms and modes of political protest action, not only in light of the recent Black Lives Matter protests, but also the global urban protest movements, uprisings and events of the last decades across the spectrum of concerns from human rights to climate change. In this paper I discuss how the seminar sought to examine protest action within the ‘architectural’ perspectives of space, place, inhabitation and making, as well as the capacity of architecture and art practices to ‘act’ in the mode of protest within the political perspectives of agency, speech, the common and appearance. The seminar took as a primary framework the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt, and the intrinsic relation she posits between the places of the fabricated, common world and the very possibility of political action. I then consider how place comes to be at stake in architecture as a mode of protest in students’ research on a wide range of topics, issues, events and practices. I conclude by reflecting on how such an architecture of protest would comprehend a radical place-making, acting to establish the conditions for political action, and to nurture, support and sustain them so that protest actors may enact and embody claims for justice in their own acting and speaking.
Forensics and Fora: Reconstructing and Re-membering the Centre d’Identification de Vincennes (CIV)
Beth Weinstein, University of Arizona
Abstract
Between early 1959 and the declaration of Algerian independence in summer 1962, the Centre d’Identification de Vincennes (CIV) was the primary place where Algerian-French workers picked up during nightly police raids were triaged, interrogated, and far worse. Though this “identification center” and “administrative interment” site is consistently referred to in histories of the Algerian War, the CIV has, for over five decades, evaded location and escaped description as a space and place that was itself a contributor to the violence enacted against this community. Forensic architecture, as a set of methods developed through Eyal Weizman’s eponymous lab (Forensic Architecture or FA), expands the tools and purview of architectural practice to include the “production of architectural evidence and to its presentation in juridical and political forums.”1 These techniques “focus attention on the materiality of the built environment and its media representations”2 as forms of evidence. The relatively recent development of such methods may explain how the razed CIV’s space, place and events that occurred there remained obfuscated for so long. This paper discusses the architectural methods used to produce evidence of the CIV’s location, to virtually reconstruct its material architecture, to speculate on its immaterial atmospheres, and the centrality of these methods to make this architecture knowable as a contributor to state sanctioned violence. Forensic evidence demands a forum; thus, the conclusion discusses spatial and performative fora as potential frameworks for revealing and debating such hidden histories and for collective re-membering.
Paper Architecture: Bureaucracy and Reform after 1968
Ewan Branda, Woodbury University
Abstract
Over two days in early January of 1971, the newly formed Institut de Recherche en Information et Automatique (IRIA) held an international symposium in Paris on the application of computers to architectural design. The final presenter of the event had little to say about computers, however, describing instead a bureaucratic system for the modeling of all social and technical activities of a building prior to the involvement of the architect. Its author, François Lombard, a young French engineer, argued that such a system was a prerequisite to the application of computation to design. His paper model, with its “game of bubbles,” could make design yield to the computational techniques that the other presenters at the IRIA conference had discussed over the preceding days. In this paper, I examine the roots of Lombard’s methods in research conducted in the culture ministry’s Direction de l’Architecture as a strategic response to the disruptions of 1968. I describe the ways in which that research encompassed a diverse set of ideas and practices, including reforms to architectural education and practice, new research in architectural programming, and the emerging field of software and systems engineering. I conclude with a brief examination of Lombard’s first implementation of his methods in the competition brief and detailed program for the Centre Pompidou in 1970, arguing that it proposed a new mode of collective, anonymous, and bureaucratic authorship that shaped one of the 20th century’s most iconic buildings long before the involvement of its architects.
Revisiting Civic Architecture and Advocacy Planning in the US & Italy: Urban Planning as Commoning and New Theoretical Frameworks
Marianna Charitonidou, ETH Zürich
Abstract
Under the headers of ‘advocacy planning’, ‘collaboration’, ‘participatory design’, ‘co-production’, ‘commoning’ and ‘negotiated planning’, participation is, nowadays, at the centre of the debate on urban design. Architects and urban designers are developing new concepts, tools and roles to comply with these new participatory modii operandi. The participatory concern in the urban design process has not only a long history in practice but also in urban design education. Various experimental initiatives with participation emerged in the domain of architectural pedagogy in the late sixties, often starting from student initiatives. Representative cases are The Architects’ Resistance (TAR) – a group formed in 1968 by architecture students from Columbia GSAPP, MIT Department of Architecture, and Yale School of Architecture, – the National Organization of Minority Architecture Students (NOMAS), the Black Workshop, the City Planning Forum, and Associazione Studenti e Architetti (ASEA). Many of these groups emerged within the context of the struggles for civil rights and thus made a plea to have non-hegemonic or ‘other’ voices heard in the urban design process. These initiatives explored how new concepts, roles and tools for participation could become part of the education of the architect and urban designer. The paper investigates an ensemble of counter-events, counter-publications in the US and Italy during the sixties, shedding light on their impact on the institutional status of academia and on how activism can reinvent the relationship between architecture and democracy. Its objective is to reveal the tensions between enhancing equality in planning process and local bureaucracy in the case of advocacy planning strategies, on the one hand, and to reflect upon the necessity to reshape the urban planning models in order to respond to the call for a more democratic society, on the other. The objective of the paper is to explore how, within the context of the contemporary interest in new urban design methods that reinvent the relationship between urban design and democracy, the long history of the participation can offer us clues on how civic engagement and social responsibility can be critically conceived. The contemporary interest in methods of ‘collaboration’, ‘participatory design’ and ‘co-production’, can learn from the long history of participation about how urban urban design can forge a critical relationship with civic engagement and social responsibility. Instead of repeating the concepts, roles and tools that were tested some decades ago, we hope that contemporary urban designers engage more intensively with the historical examples and use them as a base for new critical approaches. Most importantly, historical experiments like The Architects’ Resistance (TAR) and National Organization of Minority Architecture Students (NOMAS) remind us that the issue of participation in not only a question of urban design practice, but also – and maybe most urgently – requires experiments and changes in the pedagogy of architecture and urban design.
Michelle Sturges
Conferences Manager
202-785-2324
msturges@acsa-arch.org
Eric W. Ellis
Director of Operations and Programs
202-785-2324
eellis@acsa-arch.org
Founded in 1912 by 10 charter members, ACSA is an international association of architecture schools preparing future architects, designers, and change agents. Our membership includes all of the accredited professional degree programs in the United States and Canada, as well as international schools and 2- and 4-year programs. Together ACSA schools represent some 7,000 faculty educating more than 40,000 students.
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