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Auburn University

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Brian Bell, AIA, and David Yocum, AIA of the Atlanta, Georgia firm, bldgs have been appointed APLA’s 2012 Paul Rudolph Fellows and will be joining fourth year architecture students Spring Semester 2012. 

Third Year architecture students, directed by Professor Sheri Schumacher, worked with the community of Gees Bend, Alabama to investigate innovative and sustainable design initiatives and activities aimed at improving the social, economic and cultural conditions of the community. Gee’s Bend is a small community of about 700 residents, located on a peninsula in a bend of the Alabama River in southwest Alabama. The community has gained widespread attention for the work of its quilters, recognized most recently through a nation wide exhibition of 70 Gee’s Bend quilts launched in 2002 that transformed the art world.  The remarkable quilt making tradition in Gee’s Bend has made it a destination point for visitors from around the world..

 Schumacher’s students developed design solutions for local projects including a Gee’s Bend Learning Center for the study of quilting, as well as Visitor Housing and Community Regeneration opportunities located in the existing vacant Boykin School building  and the Gee’s Bend Park. The students’ design proposals aimed to communicate the compelling cultural and social history of the community for future educational travel groups visiting Gee’s Bend,  by encouraging economic development and increasing the benefits of local assets.

AL Innovation Engine (Engine, alabamaengine.org/about/) is a new initiative jointly funded by Auburn University and The University of Alabama that is working to create large-scale, positive change and encourage economic development in rural communities throughout Alabama. Engine’s objective is to support communities within Alabama as they work together to realize the potential of their best assets: residents, local leaders, natural resources, and their rich history.

Professor and Head of Landscape Architecture, Professor Rod Barnett is involved in a partnership with the Birmingham City Council and Birmingham Regional Commission to re-design a district of vacant and abandoned properties along Valley Creek, one of the main sources of water in Birmingham.  The design efforts strive to transform the properties into a network of useful and imaginative design interventions that contribute to both the social and the physical rehabilitation of neighborhoods affected by urban blight.

Professor David Hill, AIA, ASLA, LEED AP, received a Merit Award from the Montgomery, Alabama chapter of the AIA for 274 Bragg Avenue. Hill transformed this 3,390 square foot circa 1920’s warehouse near downtown Auburn, Alabama into a residence for the designer and his family.

Russell Harrington, a dual-degree Master’s of Landscape Architecture-Community Planning student, has just won the Alabama Chapter of the American Planning Association Outstanding Planning Student Award for his work with Professor Charlene LeBleu on a grant entitled “Taking Measures Across the Old Federal Road.”  Russell will receive his award and at the 2012 Awards Program to be held at the AL APA Annual Meeting, February 16, 2012, in Mobile, Alabama.

Professor Charlene LeBleu has been elected the Vice President of the Alabama Chapter of the American Planning Association for 2012-2014.

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Auburn University

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Professors Andrew Freear and Cheryl Morgan will receive two of the highest honors awarded to faculty at Auburn University at the seventh annual Faculty Awards:  Celebrating Excellence ceremony on October 30.  Cheryl Morgan, Director of the Urban Studio will receive the Award for Excellence in Faculty Outreach, and Andrew Freear, Director of the Rural Studio, will receive one of the Gerald and Emily Leischuck Endowed Presidential Awards for Excellence.

The Cahaba River Society, Alabama Innovation Engine and Douglas Barrett, Associate Professor of Graphic Design at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, have secured a $47,820 grant from SAPPI Fine Paper North America’s Ideas that Matter program.  The funding will be used to produce a storybook and video to educate people about the region around the Cahaba River and build support for stewardship and increased river access.  Entering its third year of operation, Alabama Innovation Engine is a design-based community development initiative that began as a partnership between Auburn University’s Urban Studio and the University of Alabama’s Center for Economic Development. 

Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture Jocelyn Zanzot and Artist Dan Neil have collaborated through their Mobile Studio with Macon County Youth to enter the National Civic Data Challenge, a competition that asks people to make information about civic health accessible and meaningful.  Their filming entry which documents a co-creative art process to engage the topic and results in landscape architecture proposals for the transformation of the built environment to increase civic health received honorable mention at the annual conference Friday September 14th 2012.

Professor and Chair of Architecture, Behzad Nakhjavan has received a three week fellowship from the Visiting Artists and Scholars Program at the American Academy in Rome for the 2012-2013 Academic Year .

Associate Professor and Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and External Affairs Karen Rogers has been invited to serve on the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center’s selection committee for the 2013-2014 resident research scholarships.  The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum Research Center, a component of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Santa Fe, New Mexico, sponsors research in American Modernism (late nineteenth century to present) by awarding stipends to historians in the fields of art, architecture and design, literature, music and photography and to museum professionals who wish to organize an exhibition at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.

Dr. Paul Cullen was a Visiting Fulbright Scholar with APLA’s Master of Landscape Architecture program during Summer Semester 2012.  An Associate Professor in the School of Visual Arts at Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand, Dr. Cullen teaches sculpture and practices as a sculptor.  While in Auburn, Dr. Cullen collaborated with Rod Barnett, Chair of the Master of Landscape Architecture program on an interdisciplinary project – Contingency – that developed proposals for interventions at a range of sites across Alabama.  These proposals were exhibited in the College of Architecture, Design, and Construction Gallery in June 2012.

The APLA teaching team for Fall 2012 includes the following adjuncts:  Dan Bennett (CPLN), Josh Emig (INDC), Dick Hudgens (ARCH-Rural Studio), Alex Krumdieck (ARCH), Judd Langham (LAND), Jacqueline Margetts (LAND), Stacy Norman (INDC), Randal Vaughan (ARCH), and Ben Weisman (ARCH), Kelly Homan (LAND).
Phillip Ewing, a May 2012 graduate of the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture, was awarded the  first Richard Taylor Fellowship at MIT, where Ewing will pursue a graduate degree in architecture beginning this fall.

The first ever Southeastern Student Planning Conference, developed by the Georgia state chapter of the American Planning Association (GPA), took place in September in Columbus, Georgia.  Intended to encourage student attendance from planning programs throughout the southeast, the experience exposed attendees to other planning students and practitioners in the region.  Sixty-six city and planning graduate students from ten universities attended and of the twenty – two presented papers selected by the Student Program Committee, five APLA Master’s of Community Planning students presented four papers to assembled attendees.  Student presenters were Spencer Moore, Auburn University’s representative on the Student Program Committee and a second year student working toward a dual degree in Community Planning and Public Administration, Jaime Larzelere  (MCP) and Jes Laing (MCP) who jointly presented, Rafael Egues (MCP/MLA), and Juan Diego Donoso (MCP), and Dale Speetjens (MLA).

Auburn University’s chapter of the American Association of Architecture Students (AIAS) recently announced that their annual Internship Fair will be March 18-19, 2013 at the Auburn University Student Center.  Details regarding the event are available at http://apps.cadc.auburn.edu/aias/internship/index.htm

 

Auburn University

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APLA Alum, Daniel Heath (’08), has been awarded the Charles Rieger and John D. Graham Architectural Art Prize, an awarded fellowship organized at the bequest of the late Charles Rieger, Professor of Architecture at Columbia University.

Mark Matel, a 2011 graduate of the College of Architecture, Design and Construction’s Masters of Design-Build program (now the Master of Integrated Design and Construction) has been awarded a the Enterprise Rose Architectural Fellowship. Matel is among five chosen for the class of 2012–2014 Rose Fellows. He will be working in the Roxbury neighborhood, a community in Boston, MA, to redevelop Bartlett Yards, a former transit yard, into a sustainable residential and commercial node. 

Matel is the third School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture alumnus to win a Rose Fellowship since the program began in 2000. He joins Steve Hoffman, class of 2000-2003 and Daniel Splaingard, class of 2009-2012.  Matel will begin his fellowship in January 2012.    

Auburn University

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Auburn’s Urban Studio, directed by Professor Cheryl Morgan, played a key role in a Regional and Urban Design Assistance Team (R/UDAT) project to assist Birmingham, Alabama’s Pratt City community with a recovery plan following April’s devastating tornado.  The R/UDAT project was sponsored by the American Institute of Architects’ Center for Communities by Design and was held at the request of Birmingham Mayor William Bell in October of last year.

Morgan served as a key member of the R/UDAT Local Steering Committee, hosted the national R/UDAT team of pro bono design professionals and experts from around the country for charette studio sessions, and engaged students from Auburn and Tuskegee University in the process. The final report and public presentation to the Pratt City community on October 10 was met with great enthusiasm.

In early August 2011, Morgan gathered a team of AU faculty, professional planners, and designers in Cordova, Alabama to study rebuilding opportunities that were hardest hit by the April 27th tornados.  The team included a group from FEMA along with experienced planners, architects, landscape architects and economists who volunteered their time for the workshop.   The charette was open to the public and many citizens participated.

The summary review of the initial work was presented to 65 citizen attendees on August 28, 2011 and focused on evaluating alternatives to capture Cordova’s assets and opportunities.  Commenting on the community meetings, Morgan observed that, “The input of the citizens of Cordova was the foundation of the work, and the work accomplished during the August workshop establishes the road map for first steps in rebuilding.”  As a result of the combined volunteer and community planning effort led by Morgan other organizations (such as Alabama Forever, founded by longtime Alabama residents in response to the April 27th, 2011 tornadoes) are becoming interested in assisting the Cordova community.  The Urban Studio and other key team members will be planning regular meetings with Cordova’s long term recovery committee and with the community to be sure that they are included in the progress of the work and in the final proposals.

The Urban Studio’s efforts in Cordova are being complemented by other faculty within the School of Architecture, Planning, and Landscape Architecture.  During Fall Semester 2011, Landscape Architecture Professor Jocelyn Zanzot organized a collaborative (landscape architecture and community planning) graduate seminar that worked closely with Professor Cheryl Morgan and the Cordova Long Term Recovery team.  The seminar students focused on post-disaster planning and design for resilience including strategic/resourceful first moves with the idea that the work will seed long-term processes of regeneration. A combined research document was produced with the intention to support future School work in Cordova.  The Master’s of Integrated Design (MID&C) and Construction program at Auburn, under the leadership of Professor’s Josh Emig and Paul Holley, will build on the previous efforts of Morgan and Zanzot by focusing on the design of key civic buildings. Cordova lost almost its entire civic infrastructure due to damage from the tornadoes of April 2011.

The Urban Studio also hosted the Mayors’ Institute on City Design (MICD) South Regional Session on February 15 thru 17.  MICD is an initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and U.S. Conference of Mayors.  The Regional Session in Birmingham was attended by 6 to 8 mayors from around the country and helped teach the value of good city design in context of confronting challenges faced by cities. In the years since MIC&D’s inception in 1986, nearly 900 mayors, governors and members of Congress have been involved in the initiative.

MID&C students have been invited back to Chattanooga by the Urban Design Forum to develop a vision for a Chattanooga Industrial Heritage Center. The proposed center will celebrate Chattanooga’s industrial history, as well as its continued industrial development which balances traditional manufacturing with high-tech startups and a strong ethic of sustainability and community. MID&C students will explore two sites along the proposed north and south extensions to Chattanooga’s River Walk. Industrial Heritage Center projects will combine newly constructed elements with re-use of existing structures.

The $20K House began in 2005 as an ongoing Rural Studio research project to address the need for affordable housing in Hale County, provide an alternative to the mobile home, and accommodate potential homeowners who are unable to qualify for commercial credit.  The $20K House project gets its name from the highest realistic mortgage a person receiving median Social Security checks can maintain.  The objective of the Rural Studio students is to design and build a model home that could be reproduced on a large scale by a contractor and built for $20,000.  Currently, Rural Studio has designed ten versions of the $20K House with costs of approximately $12,000 for materials and $8,000 for contracted labor and profit.

In June 2011, Rural Studio hired Marion McElroy, a 2002 Rural Studio alumna, as the $20K House Product Manager.  Marion is taking steps to move the projects out of the research area and formulating an initial plan to move from $20K Project to $20K Product.

In the early 19th century, the Federal Road was constructed to connect Washington City (DC) to New Orleans through the soon to become State of Alabama. Established first as a postal horse path, the road usurped Creek Indian trails to traverse woodlands, navigate rivers and backwater swamps, and reach remote settlements and trading crossroads. Soon expanded as a military route to defend the United States in the War of 1812, it divided the already compromised Creek Nation and precipitated battle over the land. The road, a conduit for both travel and information, opened the Old Southwest to settlers; it promised wealth and delivered violence. As a place unto itself, it was a site of contested relations and encounters between strangers. Land use transformations that followed the road disturbed multiple ecosystems initiating protracted processes of reconfiguration. The State Legislature has identified the Old Federal Road as a route of significant historic potential that could assist rural economic development.

Beginning in the spring semester of 2011 and continuing through 2012, students and faculty in Auburn University’s Master of Landscape Architecture program have embarked on a 21st century re-exploration of the road in search of viable alternatives to the normative landscape-based tourism that so often conceals Alabama’s rich eco-cultural complexity and post-modern eclectic vernacular. Under the direction of Assistant Professor Jocelyn Zanzot in partnership with artist Dan Neil, the students will work with communities along the Old Federal Road to uncover potentials for place-making that interpret and activate the contemporary landscape of this historic route. A first series of investigations and events have been conducted at Uchee, Burn Corn and Mt Vernon, historic crossroads of significance to the Creek Nation. Results from this first work are forthcoming in Southern Spaces journal, and an on-campus exhibition of Creative Scholarship.

Daniel Bennett, Dean Emeritus of the College of Architecture, Design and Construction, was presented the Alabama Architectural Foundations Distinguished Architect Award Feb. 9 at the Alabama Council of The American Institute of Architects Awards Gala at The Country Club of Birmingham.

Auburn University

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Long-time faculty member, Bob Faust, and his wife, Sherry, have established the Bob and Sherry Faust Endowed Scholarship for incoming freshmen in the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture. Bob served on the APLA faculty for forty-two years and is credited with developing Auburn’s highly regarded design-build ethos. He and Sherry wanted to do something meaningful for future architecture students and planned for creating this scholarship upon his retirement.

Lectures and presentations by faculty and alumni from the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture are included in the New Regionalism in North America, a book published by the College of Architecture and Interior Design at the University of San Francisco de Quito. The book compiles the proceedings from the Twelfth International Forum of Architecture at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito in Quito, Ecuador in November 2011. The Forum was dedicated to the subject of Regionalism: a recurring theme in the architectural landscape of North America and beyond. The event was coordinated by Karen Rogers, Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and External Affairs in the College of Architecture, Design and Construction, and brought together eight North American architects. David Hinson, Head of the School of Architecture, Planning, and Landscape Architecture, and Auburn alumni Marlon Blackwell and Daniel Wicke were among the participants.

Students from Auburn University’s Masters of Real Estate Development program are working with business owners in the Avondale neighborhood of Birmingham, Alabama to explore development potential. The students are looking at two sites in the neighborhood for possible development and investment, and are tasked with documenting the sites’ existing conditions, the area’s market data and the current financial market along with understanding and capitalizing on the sites’ unique history, culture and development process to propose a potential project. The masters program at Auburn consists of 14 graduate students from across the U.S. in their third semester of the Real Estate Development program. Directing this semester’s work is Ben Farrow with Auburn University Building Science Department and Ben Wieseman with KPS Group in Birmingham, AL.

The third issue of StudioAPLA, the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture’s electronic newsletter, was published last month. The International Issue:  Winter 2013 describes how APLA has provided international learning opportunities for students over 30 years, believing that exposure to new cultures enhances design education and ignites a desire to live and work abroad. The newsletter highlights alumni experiences in other countries and illustrates how APLA is becoming a more connected place as the student and faculty population becomes more diverse in the form of international students and visiting international scholars. To view the newsletter, please visit:  http://studioapla.auburn.edu/

Alabama Innovation Engine, a design-based community and economic development initiative jointly funded by Auburn University’s College of Architecture, Design and Construction, and the University of Alabama, recently received a 2012 Cahaba Vision Award from the Cahaba River Society. Engine, with The Nature Conservancy in Alabama, the Cahaba River Society, and the National Parks Service Recreation, Trails, and Conservation Assistance program, is a member of the Cahaba Blueway Partners. The team was recognized for their work developing the Cahaba Blueway, a project designed to tell the story of Alabama’s Cahaba River while encouraging economic development. Engine is working with the Cahaba River Society and the Nature Conservancy to build community partnerships and to improve access points along the Cahaba to help people discover the river, trails, history and communities of the watershed.

The Rural Studio, an undergraduate program in the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture recently launched a new website. Please visit www.ruralstudio.org to learn more about the program, faculty, students, and projects and to explore participating in the Rural Studio’s Outreach Program.

Auburn University

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Professor Charlene Lebleu has been awarded the Auburn University President’s Outstanding Collaborative Units Award for her work with the Center for Forest Sustainability along with CFS partners James Shepard, Kelly Alley, Mark Dougherty, and John Feminella.

Professor Behzad Nakhjavan has been awarded an Auburn University Creative Research and Scholarship Award.  This award, one of two awards in this area made campus-wide each year, recognizes faculty who have distinguished themselves through research, scholarly works, and/or creative contributions to their fields.

Professor David Hill, of Hill Studio, and partnering with Brian Bell and David Yocum of BLDGS in Atlanta, was awarded a commission for the renovation and expansion of the Ferst Center of Performing Arts on the Georgia Tech Campus in Atlanta, Georgia. 

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