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American University of Sharjah

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In April, the American University of Sharjah (AUS) became the first university in the Middle East invited to participate in SaloneSatellite.  Begun in 1998, the annual event held in Milan, Italy brings together the most promising young designers from the world’s most prestigious universities and design schools.  Eight students as well as recent AUS alumni from the College of Architecture, Art and Design (CAAD) exhibited work in furniture.  Following a highly competitive selection process, CAAD students were invited to join approximately seven-hundred other young designers and eighteen international design schools for this year’s event.  The participating students were accompanied by Bill Sarnecky, Assistant Professor in Architecture, and Amir Berbic, Associate Professor in Design.  Also accompanying the group was the Dean of CAAD, Peter Di Sabatino.

Noting the significance of this opportunity, Dean Di Sabatino stated that, “we are much honored to be the first university from the Middle East selected to exhibit at SaloneSatellite.”  Adding, “this furniture fair and design week in Milan is the most important annual design event globally, and the selection process for SaloneSatellite is extremely competitive.  I am very proud of the students and faculty from the College of Architecture, Art and Design; they have done excellent work.”

The eight furniture pieces exhibited were designed and built by the students; four pieces were from the Furniture Design Basics course taught by Sarnecky, and four pieces were developed in a collaborative course entitled Form, Furniture and Graphics taught by both Sarnecky and Berbic.  Emphasizing the collaborative nature of the pieces from the latter course, Sarnecky said, “After teaching beginning furniture design for five years at AUS, I teamed up this past semester with Amir Berbic to teach a new course, Form, Furniture and Graphics.  Students in the course were encouraged to explore the potentially reciprocal relationship between two-dimensional graphics and three-dimensional form.  Four of the eight pieces traveling to Milan for the exhibition emerged from this course.”  Noting the overlap between the two programs and the effect on the work produced, Berbic added, “In some examples of student work, typographic patterns became a skin for the piece of furniture while in others the form of letters was the shaping element.  Students from both the architecture and design departments enrolled in the course and the unique conditions of the course resulted in a hybrid between two-dimensional and three-dimensional design.”

The eight pieces selected were all, coincidentally, designed by women of Middle Eastern heritage (AUS is a co-educational institution).  Students whose work was chosen were Rasha Dakkak, Sarah Alagroobi, Maha Habib, Noor Jarrah, Ghenwa Soucar, Heba Hammad, Danah Al Kubaisy and Marwa Abdulla Hasan.  Several of the furniture pieces were strongly influenced by specific regional traditions, practices and contexts.  For example, Palestinian student Rasha Dakkak’s piece, a table titled “Veto,” reflects a desire to shape visual culture in a way that best represents a modern Arab identity.  The table’s form is derived from a cross-sectional transformation of the Arabic word la (meaning refusal, denial or disbelief) into kalla (indicating strong disapproval, protest or objection).  The concept was inspired by dissent expressed in the Arab world during the Arab Spring revolutions.  Sarah Alagroobi, an Emirati student, created “Amal’s Prayer Chair.”  The idea originated from her desire to aid her mother and late grandmother who struggled to pray in the prostrate position.  According to Islamic tradition, those who cannot physically endure prostration may pray in a sitting position.  The typographic pattern on the skin of the chair is derived from the Arabic letter kaf and refers to “The Throne” (Ayatul-Kirsi), a powerful verse in the Holy Quran.  The verse states:  “His Chair doth extend, Over the heavens And the Earth…”  The chair also rocks to aid in the act of praying.

The selection of AUS student work exhibited at SaloneSatellite reflects the academic vision and institutional goals of the College of Architecture, Art and Design which promotes a culture of design excellence, opportunism, entrepreneurship and leadership in both the regional and global creative culture and the creative economy.  Design faculty and students at CAAD have a history of making in the applied and aesthetic contexts that contribute significantly to the regional and international material culture.  As a participant in this year’s event in Milan, AUS is proud to be recognized internationally for the quality of its architecture, design and art programs and for collaborating or partnering with regional and international entities.

As Dean Di Sabatino notes, “It is very much an honor and very gratifying to be sharing the creative voice and the creative energy of the Middle East in such a significant global venue.”

For images of the student work, please visit http://www.aus.edu/caadmilan#.T51bedlMGSo

 

Morgan State University

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Baltimore – Students and faculty from the School of Architecture and Planning have been invited for the third straight year to participate and exhibit an environmental installation for Artscape. The project, titled Destination 1 is a music pavilion and DJ dome inspired by the visionary ideas of Buckminster Fuller. A forefather of the modern sustainability movement, Fuller sought ways to help humanity better understand the inherent connections of Earth’s living systems that bind us all together. Melding with Artscape’s 2013 theme “No Passport Required,” Destination 1 seeks to celebrate the oneness of the human race regardless of nationality, ethnic, geographic, cultural or financial boundaries. Working with reclaimed / re_purposed materials, Destination 1 seeks to deconstruct those boundaries. Thus, by promoting a global “oneness” and encouraging visitors to think holistically about our planet, we can encourage all to be better stewards of the planet we share, our “Spaceship Earth.”

Led by faculty members Brian Grieb, AIA and Brian Stansbury, Destination 1 will be a centerpiece of the festival along the Charles Street promenade. The team has collaborated with local DJ’s and artists who will help activate the space with music performances. Throughout the three_day event, DJ’s will be spinning found records for a local salvage company. On Saturday evening, the sounds of Kinetic Light Instruments designed by artists McCormack and Figg, will help bring the first ever “Artscape After Dark” event to life.

“We are excited to once again be selected by Artscape and the Baltimore Office and Promotion & the Arts,” said Brian Grieb, faculty advisor for Destination 1. “The event provides a fantastic environment for our students to display their talents and creative energy, while creating a vibrant and thought provoking space for festival attendees.”

“Working on Destination 1 is extremely rewarding to see our concepts and models become physical structures,” said team member Courtney Morgan, a junior in the architecture program at Morgan State University. “It’s hard work, but at the end of day when you walk past all the things we have built, it definitely puts a smile on my face seeing what we have accomplished.”

Learn more at: www.destination1.org

University of Oklahoma

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Assistant Professor of Architecture Thomas Cline has completed the design, fabrication, and installation of a tabernacle for the St. Thomas More University Parish in Norman, Oklahoma.  The existing parish and student center was designed by Raymond Yeh, FAIA, former Dean of the OU College of Architecture. The white oak tabernacle features a gold-leafed carving of a pelican feeding its chicks, a traditional Eucharistic symbol of the Catholic Church.

Stan Carroll, AIA, joined the Division of Architecture as a Professor of Practice for the Spring 2012 semester. He will be working with the first year students to help transform the way they think, both digitally and in the Creating_Making focus of the division’s new curriculum. Stan is president of Beyond Metal and works as a hands-on designer of sculpture, architecture, furniture, and architectural metal specialties.

The OU College of Architecture’s undergraduate program was named among the top 10 in the South, according to “Design Intelligence,” a twice-monthly report of the Design Futures Council. The design recognized three aspects of the college — creative programs, outstanding faculty and premier facilities. Read more. 

The Institute for Quality Communities continues their Streets for People lecture series this semester among other lectures and events in the College. Get the Spring calendar here with additional events to be added throughout the semester.

University of Kansas

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The Department of Architecture celebrates its centennial with a reunion that will take place in Lawrence April 26-27, 2013. The centennial was launched last spring with the publication of Vitruvius on the Plains: Architectural thought at Kansas, 1912-2012 (The Lowell Press, 2012). Edited by Professor Stephen Grabow, the book offers a brief history of the school and its faculty. It contains a collection of thirty-seven essays written over the last century. The collection illustrates the way various schools of thought have converged at KU during the past 100 years.

Associate Professor Shannon Criss was recently elected to serve as the ACSA West Central Regional Director. She has also been selected to serve a two-year appointment as a University of Kansas Service Learning Faculty Fellow. She will work with faculty and staff to program new initiatives that broaden the understanding of engaged-community learning pedagogy within the university. She also recently presented a paper at the Biannual National Conference of the Design Communication Association at Oklahoma State University in October 2012 entitled  “Drawn Through: The Sectional Perspective as a Tool of Engagement.”

Students in Professor Kent Spreckelmeyer’s Health & Wellness capstone studio won a number of honors for their spring 2012 semester work. Sara Mae Martens, Maia Hoelzinger, Stephen Mayer, and Lindsay Slavin won an honorable mention for their submission to the AIAS/SAGE “Renewing Home” Competition.  Rana Elmghirbi won a third-place award in the Open Political Response category of the [Un]Restricted Access Competition, hosted by Architecture for Humanity. Dan DeWeese won first prize in the open-submission category of the ACSA Steel Competition.  Sara Mae Martens had her thesis project published in the November 2012 issue of the AIA/AAH Academy Journal, and Graham Sinclair had his thesis published in the October 2012 issue of Healthcare Design.

Four graduate students won an honorable mention in the ACSA’s Sustainable Lab Competition. The students, Ike Chinton, Joel Herman, Sara Lichti, and Taylor Maine were in a design studio taught by Associate Professor Paola Sanguinetti.  

The University of Kansas awarded Keith Diaz Moore, Associate Dean of Graduate Studies, one of five Strategic Initiative grants. This grant will support an interdisciplinary examination of the role architecture plays in resilient lifestyles for older adults.  This research involves colleagues in environmental studies, gerontology, nursing, occupational therapy, psychology, political science and urban planning. It is notable for placing architecture and design at the forefront of KU’s efforts to enhance its impact upon the world. 

Assistant Professor Chad Kraus and the students of the design-build Dirt Works Studio completed the Roth Trailhead, a 122-foot-long rammed earth wall and sun-shading canopy. The Roth Trailhead received an Honor Award from AIA Kansas and the Monsters of Design Best-in-Show award from the AIA Kansas City Young Architects Forum. In addition, during the summer of 2012, Professor Kraus presented and published two essays on rammed earth architecture as part of RESTAPIA 2012, the First International Conference on Rammed Earth Conservation in Valencia, Spain.

In June, Architecture Lecturer Bob Coffeen, received a Bose Educational Excellence Award. He also served as chair for the national meeting of the Acoustical Society of America held in Kansas City in October. 

NIls Gore, Associate Professor and Interim Chair, presented a paper at the ACSA Offsite conference entitled “Designing Better Portable Classrooms.” The paper described a design studio process that started with the observation that virtually every school district in the U.S. utilizes portable classroom units as a way of relieving overcrowding and as “short-term” solutions to changing enrollments, shifting demographics, and uncertain funding for capital improvement projects. 

Assistant professors Genevieve Baudoin and Bruce A. Johnson presented a paper entitled, “Off-Site / Off-World: Prefabrication for Extreme Conditions and Unpredictability,” at the ACSA Off-Site Conference in Philadelphia, PA. Their paper is a product of their overlapping research in the integration of systems, structure and site. It explores the techniques employed in parallel industries at the limits of prefabrication as a means of generating site-specific relationships in normative prefabrication.

Chester Dean Lecturer Frank Zilm along with Professors Kent Spreckelmeyer and Keith Diaz Moore, received an honorable mention for their 2012 NCARB Awards proposal. It was titled, “Integrating Specialized Knowledge in Architectural Curricula”. The awards are intended “to challenge conventional teaching pedagogy and create new curricular models for design studios. ”

In August, Studio 804 – led by Dan Rockhill, the Department of Architecture’s J.L. Constant Professor of Architecture – completed Galileo’s Pavilion, a highly sustainable classroom building, for Johnson County Community College, in Overland Park, Kansas. This fall, Studio 804 received two AIA Kansas Honor Awards for Galileo’s Pavilion and another project, the Center for Design Research, completed in 2011.

In early November, the American Institute of Architecture Students sponsored the Midwest Quad Conference. The event, themed “Building Communities” was held in Kansas City, Mo., and drew over 300 students from 13 states. Professor Dan Rockhill gave the keynote, address. The SADP’s Dean, John Gaunt, held a drawing workshop. Faculty members Genevieve Baudoin, Bruce Johnson, Chad Kraus, and Anne Patterson also gave presentations. Assistant Professor Kapila Silva is the KU AIAS faculty advisor.   

University of Minnesota

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2013 marks the Centennial Celebration for the School of Architecture at the University of Minnesota. Since 1913, the University of Minnesota School of Architecture has been building a vibrant legacy.  Over its first century, the collective impact and achievements from this program in the College of Design have been both significant and extensive. The School of Architecture Centennial Celebration was a two-day tribute to how this remarkable school—as a nexus for students, educators and practitioners—has been shaping spaces and the future of architecture through its educational vision. On October 25-26, classmates and colleagues celebrated 100 years of education and shared ideas and dreams for the next century of achievement. Events began Friday evening with a Centennial Reunion Party at Ralph Rapson Hall and culminated Saturday evening with a Centennial Gala at the Historic Train Depot in downtown Minneapolis.
Blaine Brownell, Associate Professor of Architecture: Blaine Brownell’s fifth book, Material Strategies: Innovative Applications in Architecture was published by Princeton Architectural Press last year. He continues to teach studios and seminars with a focus on emergent materials and applications at the University of Minnesota, where he was promoted to associate professor with tenure last spring. Blaine’s recent pedagogical collaborations include an international workshop with Kaori Ito at the Tokyo University of Science, a biomimicry studio with Marc Swackhamer at Tianjin University, the Transmaterial Research Symposium with Tim Schork and John Sadar at Monash University in Melbourne, and a responsive architecture studio with Billie Faircloth and Ryan Welch (KieranTimberlake) at the University of Minnesota. His work was recently featured in the Architalx Voices of Design exhibition at the Portland Museum of Art and the Hello Materials exhibit at the Danish Design Center. Blaine co-directs UMN’s M.S. program in Sustainable Design, serves on the editorial board of the National Institute of Building Sciences’ journal JNIBS, and recently completed a three-year term on the editorial board of the Journal of Architectural Education. He also writes a monthly print column and biweekly online article for Architect magazine entitled “Mind & Matter.”
John Comazzi, Associate Professor of Architecture: In July 2013, Professor Comazzi lectured and participated in a panel discussion (with Will Miller) on the Miller House and Gardens in Columbus, Indiana. The program was part of the Member’s Weekend for members of the Association of Architecture Organizations, and Professor Comazzi’s lecture focused on the collaborative practices of design that produced the Miller House and Gardens based on archival research he has been conducting at the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the Eero Saarinen Archive at Yale University. This Fall, Professor Comazzi and colleague Marc Swackhamer (Associate Professor, University of Minnesota) completed a design-build project for the redesign of the front offices in the School of Architecture at the University of Minnesota. The two faculty worked with three graduate students and utilized the digital fabrication lab at the University to complete the project. Also, in May and June of 2013, Professor Comazzi led a group of 10 undergraduate students (8 architecture, 1 landscape architecture, and 1 interiors), on a program abroad in Florence, Italy. The program explored the development of the city’s urban morphology, building typologies, and landscapes, in a hands-on active learning experience.
Thomas Fisher, Dean and Professor: Dean Fisher gave a talk “Cities and the Survival of the Species” at the Future Cities, Livable Futures conference in Cincinnati; has written a chapter “The Performance of Buildings, Architects, and Critics” for a forthcoming book Architecture Beyond Criticism; and has written a chapter “Variability in Fracture-Critical Systems” for a forthcoming book Sources of Variability in Human Performance.

R.T. Rybak, Distinguished Visiting Professor:  Outgoing Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak will become a distinguished visiting practitioner, with a joint appointment at both the Humphrey School of Public Affairs and the College of Design. Rybak will teach one course this spring, titled “Mayor 101”, in which he will explore the political, administrative, design and bureaucratic challenges of running one of the largest and most dynamic cities in the United States. The course will be open to both undergraduate and graduate students. Under the auspices of the Humphrey School and the College of Design, Rybak will also plan and host a conference for faculty, students, and civic and policy leaders, focusing on the key challenges facing urban areas in the United States. He will teach two additional courses, one in fall 2014 and one in spring 2015.

Marc Swackhamer, Associate Professor of Architecture: Professor Marc Swackhamer and his HouMinn Practice partner, Blair Satterfield from the University of British Columbia presented their research on variable vacuum forming in October at the annual ACADIA Conference (Association of Computer Aided Design In Architecture). Their paper, titled “Breaking the Mold: Variable Vacuum Forming,” focused on a renovation project in Minnesota’s School of Architecture main office. The space was re-skinned with a new programmatically-tuned, adaptive surface as part of the School’s Centennial celebration in late October. Professor John Comazzi from Minneosta’s Architecture program was also a designer and adviser on the project, along with a group of Masters of Architecture students. 

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