Willow Bay Has Been Appointed to Serve as Interim Dean of the USC School of Architecture
A broadcast journalist, media pioneer and digital communication leader, Willow Bay is the dean of the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. The first female dean of USC Annenberg, Bay oversees more than 200 faculty and staff, and more than 2,500 undergraduate and graduate students across the fields of communication, journalism, public relations and public diplomacy.
As dean, Bay has led academic and research innovations while strengthening USC Annenberg’s connections with the communication fields. She launched a series of curricular improvements, including an expansion of the school’s experiential education and career development programs. Since her installation in 2017, Bay also has focused on advancing the school’s portfolio of innovative research that delivers insights, challenges assumptions and offers knowledge-based solutions to drive change. She has increased USC Annenberg’s partnerships with its industries of practice as well as bolstered the school’s academic and financial foundations through endowed support for faculty chairs, student success, diversity in journalism, and conversations amplifying mental health.
Bay has increased Annenberg’s public engagement around critical issues such as the role of communication technology in advancing equity and access, digital media literacy, gender equity in media and communication, and sports and social change. A skilled television interviewer, Bay has also led conversations with a number of global influencers, including former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. She has also attracted highly visible speakers to campus, including Jorge Ramos, Oprah Winfrey and Maverick Carter.
Prior to her role as dean, Bay spent three years as director of the USC Annenberg School of Journalism (2014–’17) and guided the 2014 launch of the state-of-the-art media center in Wallis Annenberg Hall, a newsroom, classroom and incubator of new ideas open to students across the university. During that time, she also introduced the school’s new Bachelor of Arts in Journalism degree program and welcomed the first cohort of the school’s nine-month Master of Science in Journalism program.
Bay’s academic and industry engagement is focused on the intersection of media, technology and business. Building on research from her first book, Talking to Your Kids in Tough Times: How to Answer Your Child’s Questions about the World We Live In (Warner Books, 2003), she is the co-author of a series of global research reports on the impact of mobile technologies on teens and parents titled “The New Normal.”
Bay came to USC Annenberg from her post as senior editor and senior strategic advisor of The Huffington Post, where she managed editorial content and growth initiatives for the pioneering online news site. Her prominent broadcast experience includes reporting and anchoring for ABC News’ Good Morning America/Sunday and serving as a correspondent for Good Morning America and World News Weekend. She was the first woman to co-anchor CNN’s flagship daily financial news program Moneyline. At NBC, she co-hosted NBA Inside Stuff, the NBA’s weekly magazine show, and served as a correspondent for the Today Show. In addition, she was a special correspondent for Bloomberg TV and host of Women to Watch, a primetime program that profiled the next generation of women leaders.
Originally from New York, Bay graduated cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania with a BA in literature and received her MBA from New York University’s Stern School of Business.
Archinect magazine recently interviewed Tulane School of Architecture Dean Iñaki Alday as part of its Deans List interview series with the leaders of architecture schools, worldwide. The series profiles the school’s programming, as defined by the dean – giving an invaluable perspective into the institution’s unique curriculum, faculty and academic environment.
For this installment, Archinect spoke with Iñaki Alday, the new dean at the Tulane School of Architecture. The school hosts a variety of degree and specialized programs that combine architecture, real estate development, historic preservation, and community-driven focuses to provide a holistic design education. Dean Alday recently took the reins of the school with the aim of leading the Gulf Coast region and country, overall, in terms of “what it means to live with water.”
Read below for the full story or click here for the original piece in Archinect by Managing Editor Antonio Pacheco (TSA *14).
Briefly describe Tulane School of Architecture’s pedagogical stance on architecture education.
Tulane School of Architecture has a history of commitment to real, pressing issues, and, especially after Hurricane Katrina, a history of leadership in helping our communities rebuild. We are not interested in the endogamic discourses that have occupied academia for decades, taking us away from society and relevancy. In the past, many schools of architecture have failed as educators and as leaders of our societies. Therefore, our school focuses on urgent problems, not self-indulgent fictions. The school is in the heart of the “Third Coast”–the American Gulf Coast–where all the challenges of human inhabitation of the planet are at play. This exceptional location, being in the Mississippi Delta, also provides us with the opportunity to define the role that architecture can take in facing climate change—including other ecological crises, as well as in the process of urbanization under these circumstances—and the challenges of social and environmental justice that follow.
What insights from your past professional experience are you hoping to integrate/adopt as dean?
A significant part of my professional practice is focused on the connection between cities, and buildings, with rivers and their dynamics. For example, my partner Margarita Jover and I were among the first to “design” the flood that occupies a public space and a building (an arena) in Spain, starting a line of investigation that changes the idea of flooding (and all river dynamics) from a catastrophic event into a positive asset. Since then we have been planning, designing, and building “hybrid infrastructures” in Spain, Asia, and Latin America, and also, working as regular experts for the World Bank. This type of creative, innovative design work is key for Tulane as it seeks to lead the region and country in terms of what it means to live with water.
Academically, I enjoyed being chair of the Department of Architecture at the University of Virginia (2011-16), where I founded the Yamuna River Project together with Pankaj Vir Gupta, an interdisciplinary research program whose objective is to revitalize the ecology of the Yamuna River in New Delhi, thus reconnecting India’s capital city back to the water. This project is proof of how architecture and urbanism can approach complex problems holistically while incorporating multiple fields (history, art history, engineering, economics, religious studies, entrepreneurship, engineering, environmental sciences, and politics, for example). It is a great example of making an impact in one of the toughest urban crises. We are continuing with the project at Tulane, expanding it to other cities in India and the Global South.
Rivers and their associated communities are at the frontline of climate impacts. Globally, river basins provide the majority of the world’s food and freshwater, and more than 500 million people live on river deltas, which also form the major ports of the world. Along the roughly 2,300 miles of the Mississippi River alone are situated at least seven major urban centers, while 50 cities rely on the Mississippi to provide drinking water for 20 million people. The Mississippi River Basin, the world’s fourth largest river basin, spans 31 states and two Canadian provinces, providing more than 40-percent of US agriculture with water while producing $400 billion of economic activity. It is among the leading locations facing significant conditions of accelerating risk, as well. Similar conditions are replicated in multiple river basins across the planet, especially in the Global South, where regions are facing the crises of pollution, floods, and scarcity, and, most critically, in urbanized contexts and in the rapidly growing megalopolises in South East Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
What kind of student do you think would flourish at Tulane University and why?
At Tulane, a student needs to be committed, not only to excellence but also to stepping out of her or his comfort zone, collaborating with other fields inside the school (architecture, preservation, sustainable real estate), and with those outside the school (science and engineering, social sciences, economics, humanities, and law). And above all, our students are encouraged to look beyond themselves, to avoid cherry-picking problems, and to committing to positively impacting the lives of others. The Albert and Tina Small Center for Collaborative Design works directly with communities, URBANbuild produces a yearly miracle of an affordable house designed and built by students, and our river and delta urbanism research offers a unique approach and a track record of substantial impact in the cities set alongside the Mississippi River and alongside the rivers of India, Argentina, and Ethiopia.
What are the biggest challenges, academically and professionally, facing students?
The recovery of architecture as a relevant discipline in the collective imagination is the biggest challenge. Architecture needs to be at the table where big decisions are made. This is the challenge that our students need to take on, and will become experts in, after 50 years of architecture being isolated in disconnected academic discourses or assuming the role of pure service provider. The new generations have the mandate of recovering the leadership role that society and the planet need.
What are some of the larger issues of “today” that you feel an architecture school should be preparing its students for?
We are in the midst of the most significant environmental and social crises, one that is even threatening our own existence on the earth. We urgently need to change the way in which we are inhabiting the planet, change how new buildings perform, how they serve people, how they look, and where they are located. And similarly, we need to rethink what and how to preserve, where and how to develop, and how our cities should be symbiotic with natural elements. Right now, architecture is losing relevance in discussions about the built environment in many countries around the world, and most strikingly, in the United States.
At Tulane, we train students with a holistic approach, giving them interdisciplinary tools to help them learn to identify which are the most pressing issues so they can figure out how to apply their design, preservation, or sustainable real estate development education in order to address them. We advocate for the production of knowledge and innovation through design, which for us, is understood as the creative management of complexity. When we, as architects, are able to go beyond our personal preferences, there is no other kind of professional better prepared for dealing with the complex and uncertain world around us.
What are some of the advantages of the school’s context—being housed within Tulane University as well as in New Orleans—and how do you think they help make the program unique?
Tulane University is a top-tier research university, and the perfect size for interdisciplinary collaborations, which is a priority of the university president, provost and all the deans here. From my perspective, “curiosity” and “ambition” are the two words that define Tulane today and that’s what attracted me here. New Orleans is also the northernmost tip of the Global South. Both facts together position Tulane uniquely as the only top research university that is located in a place that deals with all the challenges—social, environmental, economic—in the most exciting, dynamic, and needed region in the world. And our university is committed to work that brings innovation by crossing disciplinary boundaries. This is the only school of architecture that has fully committed to rebuilding a city after a major catastrophe like Hurricane Katrina. Solving urgent problems, housing people, working with communities to bring them back, developing new scenarios to inhabit our rivers and deltas—those issues are deeply rooted in Tulane’s identity. Because of the uniqueness of Tulane, the School of Architecture is a school that has no parallel.
Tulane needs to keep growing and positioning itself as a genuine voice, very different to our peers due to our unique ecosystem and concerns. We are already a driving force in New Orleans and the region; however, we should also become an international reference working on comparative methods. Our challenges are the world’s challenges, and the best way to learn and move forward is to hold a continuous back and forth between our attention to the local conditions and the lessons learned globally.
Tulane School of Architecture has a significant record of working within the New Orleans community, how will you take on that legacy?
First of all, we should probably say “communities,” as New Orleans is a diverse city with many different communities. They are always complex and contradictory—And there is never a single belonging, but often multiple and always nested systems of them. That being said, New Orleans epitomizes the challenges of thousands of towns, cities, and metropolises set alongside American rivers. We are at the intersection of floods, scarcity, pollution, land loss, and other riverine environmental issues, and we are dealing with the societal impact of those as well as the impacts of post-industrial economic stagnation, transportation crises, and other social challenges. Working from New Orleans—a microcosm of global issues—the Tulane School of Architecture is well positioned to lead the work in terms of how to relate our cities and our rivers in a completely different way. Floods are here to stay, and we have to design our spaces to make them productive—instead of catastrophic—by turning floods into an opportunity rather than a threat. Instead of walls, our rivers and cities deserve public spaces that can navigate the changes and recover healthy ecologies. Buildings need to be adapted to leverage the river or the delta, as well. This is a natural human inclination, but now we must apply it in a different way, undergoing proper transformation.
Can you speak to the nature of collaboration that exists between Tulane School of Architecture’s various programs (Architecture, Preservation, Real Estate Development, the Albert and Tina Small Center for Collaborative Design, URBANbuild, Social Innovation and Social Entrepreneurship) and your plans for those efforts?
Tulane School of Architecture offers the essentials we need to rethink how to inhabit our planet: what and how to preserve, where and how to sustainably develop the land, and how to design buildings, public spaces, and cities. Dual degrees are excellent choices that round-out an effective education and prepare our graduates for thinking broadly, creatively, and responsibly. We have interdisciplinary studios among the three programs, design-build studios with our community partners, and a wide range of courses open to all Tulane students. All in all, every student has the opportunity to excel in her or his degree while being knowledgeable about other areas. An architect needs to know how to deal with existing buildings and to understand the logics of real estate development. Similarly, historic preservationists incorporate design and advanced digital tools while understanding the economic implications of their work, including the risk of gentrification. And a developer of the future cannot be anything other than sustainable, must understand the potential of reusing our heritage, and know how high-quality design improves the conditions of life.
Donna Kacmar, Professor at the University of Houston, has just released her latest book, “Victor Lundy: Artist Architect.” Victor Lundy is an important yet underappreciated figure in the history of American architecture. The first book on Lundy’s life and career documents his early work in the Sarasota School of Architecture, his churches, and his government buildings. In addition to essays on his use of light and material, many of the architect’s original drawings, painting, and sketches now held at the Library of Congress – are reproduced here for the first time.
Graduate students in the design/build studio at the University of Houston Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design received accolades for their design and fabrication of an Embarkation Station at Port Houston. When it is installed, the nearly 400-foot structure will provide seating and shade from the hot Houston sun for many of the 30,000 passengers who take boat tours annually. On rainy days, the station’s roof will direct rainwater to four 130-gallon tanks to lower its flooding impact. Prof. Patrick Peters was the instructor. The project won the Mayor’s Proud Partner Award, Patrick’s 15thaward for his design build projects.
University of Houston Dean and Professor, Patricia Belton Oliver, FAIA, received the 2018 AIA Houston Educator of the Year Award.
Title: Yamuna River Project Wins International Architectural Book Award
Oct 16, 2018
Yamuna River Project, New Delhi Urban Ecology, by Tulane School of Architecture Dean and Koch Chair in Architecture Iñaki Alday and University of Virginia architecture professor Pankaj Vir Gupta, was recently selected as one of the top 10 architectural books of the year by the Frankfurt Book Fair and German Architecture Museum (DAM).
The highly-respected International DAM Architectural Book Award attracted submissions from 96 architectural and art publishers this year. A jury of external experts and DAM representatives judged the 238 total entries on design, content, quality of material and finishing, innovation and topicality.
The Yamuna River Project, founded by Alday and Vir Gupta at UVA in 2014, is a long-term interdisciplinary research initiative working to revitalize both the ecology of the heavily polluted Yamuna River and the essential relationship between the river and life in New Delhi.
As one of the most rapidly urbanizing cities in the developing world, New Delhi faces enormous challenges of urban and social equity at a time of economic and climatic uncertainty. Consequentially, the citizens of the world’s largest democracy live amidst extreme environmental degradation. Existing government structures have been hard pressed to cope with the pace of the complex and rapidly evolving dynamics of economic and climate change.
Yamuna River Project, New Delhi Urban Ecology details five years of research with the goal of engaging government agencies, experts and activists to reimagine and transform the river through a holistic, multidisciplinary approach.
The book is published by Actar and available for purchase online.
Ingalill Wahlroos-Ritter, AIA, Named Dean of the School of Architecture
Woodbury University has named Ingalill Wahlroos-Ritter, AIA, Dean of the School of Architecture. Her appointment is effective June 1st, 2017.
“As an inspiring leader dedicated to connecting the profession to the academy, Ingalill weaves a rich tapestry of interconnected ‘crafts’ with a specific but broad theoretical lens. I have witnessed her integrity and thoughtfulness first-hand as we have jointly worked together on multiple initiatives,” said Randy Stauffer, Senior VP, Academic Affairs. “Woodbury’s programs in Architecture and Interior Architecture at the undergraduate level are now nationally ranked 23rd and 13th, respectively.”
Wahlroos-Ritter has over twenty years of academic experience. She joined the Woodbury faculty in 2005 and has served in multiple administrative assignments as part of her full-time faculty position including Undergraduate and Graduate Architecture Chair, Associate Dean and, most recently, Interim Dean. During this time, Wahlroos-Ritter led many successful initiatives including the creation of the Woodbury University Hollywood (WUHO) gallery, the establishment of a digital fabrication lab, and the launch of graduate programs in architecture and landscape architecture. These achievements underscore her value in supporting a broad-scope of architectural inquiry. Prior to Woodbury, Wahlroos-Ritter taught at Yale University, Cornell University, UCL Bartlett School of Architecture, and SCI-Arc. Wahlroos-Ritter is also Director of WUHO, a venue for exhibitions, installations, and public dialogue. She recently served on the Los Angeles AIA Board of Directors and is now serving as Director on the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design Advisory Board.
Her expertise as a façade consultant specializing in the experimental use of glass and working in multi-disciplinary teams, continues to impact her teaching, academic leadership and professional practice. An influential figure in the field, she contributed to the book Architecture: A Woman’s Profession, where she advocates for design innovation derived from non-biased collaborative practices. In her many capacities as practicing architect, educator, academic administrator, gallery director and head of multiple initiatives, including Woodbury’s Integrated Path to Architectural Licensure (IPAL) Program, a project launched by former Dean Norman Millar, Wahlroos-Ritter works with a wide range of constituencies to bridge the gap between practice and education.
“Our school is a role model for the direction in which the profession is heading – improving economic, gender, and ethnic diversity among its members, and reaffirming the importance of ethical conduct and social responsibility,” she said, “and I am inspired every day by our students, by my colleagues who are a splendid collection of critical thinkers and distinguished practitioners, by the optimism that infuses our School, and by our shared belief in the power of design to address urgent, contemporary issues. I look forward to working with faculty to cultivate and strengthen our student’s unique design voice that is equally committed to professional practice, theoretical discourse, social equity, and to formal and technological inquiry.”
As part of its 5th Annual AIACC Academy of Emerging Professionals Awards Program, the American Institute of Architects, California Council (AIACC), recently conferred its AIACC Educator Award on Wahlroos-Ritter. The jury lauded her for her commitment to shaping young architectural minds. The AIACC, the largest component of the national AIA organization, represents the interests of more than 11,000 architects and allied professionals in California.
Carol Strohecker will be named the next Dean of the University of Minnesota’s College of Design, effective August 31, 2017, and pending approval by the Board of Regents in May, the school announced today.
“Carol brings to the University a wealth of experience as an innovative and collaborative leader who has advanced interdisciplinary research, education, and creative work in a variety of settings,” said Executive Vice President and Provost Karen Hanson.
“I am confident her breadth of leadership experience, her entrepreneurial energy, and her strengths in interdisciplinary research and creative activity will advance the excellence of the College of Design.”
As Dean, Strohecker will provide intellectual and strategic leadership and administrative oversight to the College of Design, one of the country’s most comprehensive design colleges. Additionally, she will work with faculty, staff, students, and a highly engaged alumni and professional community to enhance synergy among the college’s diverse design disciplines, and collaborate with other campus deans to advance the University’s collective mission
“The work that everyone at the College has done together has created a truly unique and attractive place – a place where a variety of disciplines, students, faculty, and staff can thrive,” said Strohecker. “I cannot wait to get started.”
Previously, Strohecker was vice provost for academic affairs at the Rhode Island School of Design, in Providence, R.I., from 2013-2016. She also served as inaugural director of the Center for Design Innovation from 2006-2013, where she held concurrent roles as chief research officer at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts and as a tenured professor in art and visual studies at UNC’s Winston-Salem State University.
Strohecker holds a Ph.D. in media arts and sciences and a master of science in visual studies, both from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has published and presented widely on topics related to learning theory and the development of environments in which people can learn through creative processes. Her portfolio includes creative works in various media, as well as collaborative work in interactive media tools and methods that has resulted in four U.S. patents.
Located in one of the major design cities and in one of the largest research universities in the U.S., the College of Design encompasses the full range of design disciplines at the University of Minnesota. The faculty, students, and staff in the college seek to advance the quality and value of the natural, designed, and social environments with an emphasis on sustainable, socially responsible, civically engaged, user-sensitive, critical and collaborative design work.
John Hoal, associate professor and chair of the MUD program, delivered the presentation, Designing Aging: Urban Design for Healthy Lifelong & Age-Integrated Communities as part of the Conference on Older Adults in the Community: Capacities and Engagement for Aging-in-Place.WUSTL and the National University of Singapore organized the conference as part of the launchof the Next Age Institute. – A video profile of John Hoal, associate professor and chair of the MUD program, and Derek Hoeferlin, assistant professor, is included in Navigating the Rivers: A Collection of Modern-Day Stories. Featured in conjunction with the exhibition Navigating the West: George Caleb Bingham & the River, this event offered a screening of five videos of St. Louisans whose lives are intertwined with the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, followed by an onstage conversation with many of those individuals. As part of I-CARES-funded research, Hoal and Hoerferlin have focused on the development of a Climate Adaptation Performance Model for fluvial zones along the Mississippi, Missouri, and Illinois Rivers. – Railway Exchange Studio Featured on HEC-TV Reporter Sharon Stevens highlighted the efforts of graduate architecture students to reimagine the Railway Exchange Building, working in partnership with Downtown STL, Inc., for HEC-TV’s all new Impact program. Students developed their ideas for the fall 2014 studio Metamorphic Cities: Sustainable Strategies for Adaptive Reuse, led by assistant professor Catalina Freixas. – Cloud Talk: Urbanism Eric Mumford, the Rebecca and John Voyles Professor of Architecture, delivered the talkUrbanism as part of IIT Architecture Chicago’s Cloud Studio. Sponsored by the PhD program, the studio brought together undergraduate and graduate students to work on projects related to the city of Chicago. – Why Lina Bo [Bardi]? Zeuler R. Lima, PhD, associate professor and author of the biography Lina Bo Bardi, reflected on why the Italian-born architect was ignored for such a long time, and emerged 20 years after her death at the center of the discourse about contemporary architecture. The lecture explored the genealogy of her work and life, and raised questions about the recovery of her memory, especially in her native country. – SMALL BUILDINGS: built, unbuilt, unbuildable Juried by dean of architecture Bruce Lindsey and professor of art Buzz Spector, this exhibition explores the craft of the architectural model, and includes work by several Sam Fox School faculty, students, and alumni. On View March 13-May 10. – Lina Bo Bardi: Visionary Architect – Part 1 Associate professor Zeuler Lima participated in the first part of two panel discussions presented by AIA New York that will celebrate 100 years since the birth of architect Lina Bo Bardi. Lima presented his short documentary Lina Bo Bardi, curator, and also showed a timeline highlighting graphic productions that the Italian-Brazilian architect developed throughout her entire life, her thoughts about design, and the authenticity of her texts.
Associate professor Zeuler Lima, PhD, delivered a presentation about the life and work of one of the most important architects in Latin America, Lina Bo Bardi. Lima’s talk unveiled how considerations of ethics, politics, and social inclusiveness influenced the Italian-Brazilian architect’s intellectual engagement with modern architecture which resulted in her experimental, ephemeral, and iconic works of design. In addition, Lima discussed Bo Bardi’s paradigmatic project SESC Pompeia leisure center at MoMA as part of the retrospective exhibition Latin America in Construction: Architecture 1955-1980. – Activating Energy Capacity of Urban Vacant Land Assistant professor Natalie Yates delivered a lecture titled Activating Energy Capacity of Urban Vacant Land at this year’s Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture conference. The talk reflected work undertaken by Yates, assistant professor Patty Heyda, and former assistant professor Christine Yogiaman.
Peter Mackeith Begins Tenure As Dean Of The Fay Jones School Of Architecture
Peter MacKeith began his appointment July 1, 2014, as the new dean of the Fay Jones School of Architecture at the University of Arkansas. He arrives in the school after a distinguished 15-year career at the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, where he rose to tenured full professor and associate dean. He is an internationally recognized design educator whose work encompasses architectural design, design research and publication, and exhibition curation and design. He has spent 25 years as a liaison between the design cultures of the United States and the Nordic nations, particularly Finland.
Links to interviews and announcements about Peter may be found here:
Marlon Blackwell, Distinguished Professor and head of the Department of Architecture in the Fay Jones School of Architecture, has received a$50,000 fellowship grant from United States Artists, a national grant-making and advocacy organization. United States Artists awards several fellowships each year, under names such as Ford, Rockefeller and Knight. Blackwell, who was awarded a Ford Fellowship, is one of 34 artists to receive a 2014 United States Artists fellowship. The Fellows were selected from 116 nominated artists living in the United States and Puerto Rico and were chosen by a panel of expert peers in each artistic discipline. Blackwell, honored in the Architecture and Design category, is a nationally and internationally recognized teacher and one of the nation’s most respected regional modernist architects. He is founder and principal at Marlon Blackwell Architects, based in Fayetteville.Blackwell is the second faculty member from the Fay Jones School to receive this prestigious honor from United States Artists. Steve Luoni, director of the University of Arkansas Community Design Center and a Distinguished Professor, was named a Ford Fellow in 2012. The Fay Jones School joins the ranks of Columbia University, the University of California, Los Angeles and Southern California Institute of Architecture for having multiple members of their faculty selected in the USA Fellows program since it began in 2006.
Vol Walker Hall Project Short-Listed for 2014 World Architecture Festival Awards
The home of the Fay Jones School of Architecture – the renovated Vol Walker Hall with its new addition, the Steven L. Anderson Design Center – has been chosen as a finalist in the 2014 World Architecture Festival Awards, the world’s largest architecture design awards program serving the global community.
More than 400 projects from more than 40 countries were short-listed across 31 individual award categories for the festival, to be held this week in Singapore. The Vol Walker Hall project is one of 16 short-listed projects in the Higher Education and Research category. This project is the only one in its category to represent the United States.
Fay Jones School Architecture Program Receives Eight-Year Reaccreditation from National Board
The professional Bachelor of Architecture program in the Fay Jones School of Architecture recently was granted an eight-year term of reaccreditation by the National Architectural Accrediting Board.
“The team believes that the Fay Jones School of Architecture provides an active learning environment that emphasizes knowledge through drawing, modeling, and experiential design,” stated the visiting team in its summary. “Administration, faculty, and students are committed to design for a new decade that engages community, new technologies, and environmental awareness. The team was impressed with the vitality of the student body, their dedication to community engagement and sustainability, and their passion for architecture.”
In July, the National Architectural Accrediting Board met to review the Visiting Team Report, the product of a three-member team’s visit to the Fay Jones School in February. The directors of the National Architectural Accrediting Board voted to continue full accreditation for the new maximum term of eight years. The Fay Jones School architecture program is scheduled for its next accreditation visit in 2022
For additional information, see: http://newswire.uark.edu/articles/25087/fay-jones-school-architecture-program-receives-eight-year-reaccreditation-from-national-board
Marc Manack and Frank Jacobus, both assistant professors of architecture in the Fay Jones School of Architecture and co-principals of the architecture firm SILO AR+D, have won an award for their project, the Super Sukkah.
Their project was one of the 10 cutting-edge sukkahs selected in the competition, “Sukkah City STL 2014: Between Absence and Presence.” The 10 winning projects, chosen from a field of 33 entries, were created both by individuals and teams of architects and designers from around the country. The winning projects of the competition will be on display from Oct. 7 to 12 at Washington University in St. Louis. Each winning entry receives a $1,000 honorarium to defray construction costs.
Creative Corridor Project in Little Rock Honored by American Society of Landscape Architects
A plan to transform four neglected blocks of Main Street in downtown Little Rock into an arts district has won a 2014 Honor Award from the American Society of Landscape Architects. Faculty and staff members of the Fay Jones School of Architecture at the University of Arkansas designed this award-winning work.
The Creative Corridor, designed by the University of Arkansas Community Design Center and Marlon Blackwell Architect won an Honor Award for Analysis and Planning, one of five awarded. This is the design center’s sixth ASLA award and the fifth that they have received in this category. The ASLA award represents the highest recognition in landscape architecture design and planning open to North American organizations for work underway worldwide. Thirty-four award-winning projects were selected from more than 600 entries.
Fay Jones School Partners With Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
Fay Jones School of Architecture students and faculty have a unique opportunity to be involved with the public display of a 60-year-old house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville acquired the Bachman Wilson House, built in 1954 near the Millstone River in New Jersey. It has been disassembled and transported to the museum’s 120-acre grounds, where it is being reconstructed. This home is one of Wright’s “Usonian Houses,” a group of 60 middle-income family homes that were typically small, single-story structures with no garage and minimal storage. They used native materials, flat roofs and cantilevered overhangs, and emphasized a strong visual connection between interior and exterior spaces.
In collaboration with Crystal Bridges, Fay Jones School students, led by Santiago R. Pérez, Assistant Professor and 21st Century Chair in Integrated Practice, are in the final “prefabrication phase” of a three-semester effort to design, develop and fabricate a small architectural interpretation pavilion for the Bachman Wilson House reconstruction on the museum grounds.
This initiative is a confluence of “Design-Build” and “Digital-Fabrication” cultures and practices, informed by Usonian principles, into a hybrid DESIGNFAB practice model, championed by Pérez. In conjunction with the Pavilion project, Pérez delivered a lecture at Crystal Bridges titled “Rethinking Wright: Adapting Usonian Principles in 21st Century Architecture.”
In addition, during the fall 2014 semester, Fay Jones School students will analyze and document the reconstruction of the house for inclusion in the Historic American Buildings Survey, under the leadership of professor Greg Herman.
On April 26, 2014, Dean and Professor Emeritus Constantine E. (Dinos) Michaelides participated as a keynote speaker in a seminar organized by the Hellenic Society for the Protection of Cultural Heritage and the Natural Environment (ELLET – NGO) and the School of Architecture at the National Technical University of Athens, Greece. The seminar took place on the island of Hydra. Titled “The Study of Hydra, Fifty Years Later” Michaelides’s presentation focused on both the Greek and US roots of the original study as well as subsequent publications on the development of the island town during recent decades.
AGENCY partners Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller have been selected to contribute to the United States Pavilion at the 2014 Venice Biennale as an OFFICE US Outpost Architect. The mission of OFFICE US is to “critically reflect on the production of US architectural firms abroad, while simultaneously projecting a new model for global architectural practice open to all of us.” Commissioned by Storefront for Art and Architecture and curated by Eva Franch i Gilabert, Anna Miljacki, and Ashley Schafer, the US contribution will collaboratively research, study, and remake projects from an onsite archive‘ of 1,000 buildings designed by US offices over the last 100 years. AGENCY is one of 90 architects worldwide who will collaborate with the eight OFFICE US partners headquartered in the US Pavilion at the 2014 Venice Biennale to collectively redefine architectural production.
Professor Neyran Turan and Wortham Fellow Neeraj Bhatia were recent recipients of two separate Graham Foundation Grants. Turan was the founding editor-in-chief of the Harvard-based journal, New Geographies, which was awarded its second grant from the Graham Foundation for its upcoming issues next year. Bhatia’s grant was awarded for the project, Housing in the Arctic Petropolis of Tomorrow, which, “seeks to catalogue the landscape, cultural, material, and construction systems of the indigenous Inuit housing types, and the modern prefabrication construction techniques and materials employed in the Arctic, to forecast new housing typologies that will provide sustainable shelter to the emerging Arctic petropolis.”
Dean Sarah Whiting, whose essay Speculating Beyond Iconicity: Bertrand Goldberg’s Urban Project appears in the Art Institute of Chicago exhibition catalog, Architecture of Invention, lectured on Goldberg’s work in a symposium at the Art Institute on October 29 and will be giving a solo lecture on Goldberg at the Chicago Arts Club on January 11.
The work of Nonya Grenader, Professor in the Practice of Architecture and Associate Director of the Rice Building Workshop, was featured on November 9 in the New York Times article, For the Director of the Menil Collection, an Unadorned Home.
On October 24, Professor Albert Pope lectured at the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA. Professor Pope showed two recent projects: his design for the Kaohsiung Maritime Cultural & Pop Music Center Competition (a collaboration with Schaum/Sheih), and his redevelopment project for the Fifth Ward of Houston funded by the National Endowment for the Arts. The intent of the presentation was to propose a unified design logic capable of spanning from the architectural scale of 10 blocks to the urban scale of 1000 blocks.
Wortham Assitant Professor Reto Geiser lectured at the University of Toronto, Canada on November 7 at a conference held on the occasion of Marshall McLuhan’s 100th birthday: McLuhan100 Then/Now/Next International Conference & DEW Line Festival. His plenary talk was titled From the Faculty of Inter-Relation to the Explorations Group: Exchanges Between Sigfried Giedion and Marshall McLuhan. Additionally, Geiser’s essay, In the Realm of Architecture, Some Notes on Ai Weiwei’s Spatial Tempations appears in the exhibition catalog, Ai Weiwei: Art / Architecture.
John J. Casbarian, Director of External Programs and Harry K. & Albert K. Smith Professor was invited to participate on the panel Changing Academic Economies at the annual ACSA Administrators Conference, which was held on November 11 in Los Angeles.
Professor Carlos Jiménez lectured in conjunction with the exhibition, Breaking Borders: New Latin American Architecture, a joint effort of Latin Pratt and the Pratt Institute of Architecture. The exhibition highlights contemporary architecture of the past 10 years from 45 firms representing more than 10 countries in Latin America. Jiménez also served as the juror for two distinguished competitions: Houston’s internationally acclaimed touring program of short-form media, Independent Exposure 2011: Visual Architecture (Oct. 10-11), and the Open Competition for Fundecor Headquarters, Puerto Viejo, in San Jose, Costa Rica (Oct. 20-22). Additionally, Jiménez lectured at the Third International Congress of Architecture and the Environment at UNAM, Mexico City (Oct. 18), and delivered In-sights on Color and Architecture at the Rice Gallery (Oct. 25).
Stephen Fox, Senior Lecturer in Architecture, led a day-long tour of domestic architecture in the border city of Brownsville, Texas, on September 22 in conjunction with the Building Communities Conference, sponsored annually by the Lower Rio Grande Valley Chapter of the American Institute of Architects. Additionally, on October 15, Fox was the first recipient of the Institute of Classical Architecture & Classical America Texas Chapter’s Board of Directors Award as part of the John Staub Awards Celebration.
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