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Pennsylvania State University

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Internationally recognized architecture firm to visit Stuckeman School

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – Yolande Daniels, co-principal of Studio SUMO – an award-winning architecture firm known for its thoughtful approach to design both in the United States and Japan, will speak on Oct. 30 as part of the Stuckeman School’s Lecture and Exhibit Series. Hosted by the Department of Architecture, the “Building and Unbuilding” lecture will begin at 6 p.m. in the Stuckeman Family Building Jury Space.

The firm’s name – “SUMO” – is a blend of co-principal Sunil Bald’s first name and Daniels’ nickname in graduate school (Momo) at Columbia University, which is where the two met. Founded in 1997, the SUMO name became even more fitting when the firm began designing buildings for Josai University in Japan in 2000. The pair was commissioned for an array of buildings for the private university’s campuses including a museum, dormitory and school of management.

That same year, Bald and Daniels were asked to design the Architectural League of New York’s exhibition and were invited to design a temporary new home for the Museum for African Art in Queens, New York. A year later, SUMO’s design was built and several years after that, the firm was invited to design the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporic Art in Brooklyn, which was completed in 2006.

SUMO, which is based in New York, has been featured as one of Architectural Record’s Design Vanguard and the Architectural League of New York’s Emerging Voices. In 2015, the firm was awarded the Annual Prize in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and also received a Young Architects award from the Architectural League. A finalist in the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program, SUMO has also received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and New York State Council on the Arts.

The firm’s work, which ranges from installations to institutional buildings to apartment buildings, has been exhibited in the National Building Museum, Museum of Modern Art, the Venice Biennale, the Field Museum, the GA Gallery and the Urban Center.

Daniels is currently an assistant professor at the University of South California School of Architecture. Previously, she was a visiting professor at Yale University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has taught graduate-level courses at Columbia University, the University of Michigan, Pratt Institute and the City College of New York, and also served as the interim director of the Master of Architecture program at Parsons School of Constructed Environments.

Daniels holds a master of architecture from Columbia University and a bachelor’s degree in environmental science from the City University of New York.

Pennsylvania State University

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Stuckeman School participates in Textile Intersections conference in London

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – As part of a project developed for an architecture elective course on responsive fiber composites, two recent landscape architecture graduates and their instructor traveled to London in September to display their work at the Textile Intersections conference.

Julian Huang and Jimi Demi-Ajayi, who both graduated in the fall of 2018, along with Felecia Davis, an assistant professor in the Department of Architecture who also directs the SOFTLAB in the Stuckeman Center for Design Computing, installed their “Phototropic Origami Fiber Composite Structure” project at the two-day event. Hosted by the Textile Design Research Group at Loughborough University, the conference was designed to explore collaborations in textile design research.

The project was sponsored by the American Composite Manufacturers Association, which lent the group its expertise and project materials. Students from both the Stuckeman School and Carnegie Mellon attended a workshop for the project that was held at Penn State in February 2018. The purpose of the workshop was to introduce students and faculty to the architectural applications and case studies using fiber composites. Fabrication techniques for fiber composites were demonstrated in the Penn State Stuckeman Family Building Shop.

According to Davis, her team’s project was inspired by “Chakrasana,” an accordion art pavilion that was developed by Joe Choma, assistant professor of architecture at Clemson University. Davis and her architecture and landscape architecture students developed a responsive fiber composite foldable structure by embedding conductive and resistive yarns into a fiberglass knit fabric.

“We used origami as a method to make folds in the fabric allowing the structure to collapse and be flat,” Davis said. “We hoped to make a lightweight portable structure that could take on different shapes when clipped and positioned. This could be used as a shelter in a landscape setting or as a portable structure.”

Davis explained that they embedded a conductive thread that carries an electric current up a length of fiberglass knit that could then carry an electronic signal to a series of LED lights, which are sewn on to the front side of their origami project.

“These LEDs are connected to a photocell that turns the LEDs on and off according to the level of light,” Davis said. “In bright daylight, the LEDs are off and as evening arrives the LEDs are on.”

Demi-Ajayi said that one of the goals of the conference was to integrate cross-disciplinary collaborative research efforts beyond their current work.

“We set up our interactive origami pavilion structure at the conference and exchanged ideas with distinguished guests,” he said. “Overall the event was extremely informative and a lot was learned from the different demonstrations and lectures we attended at the conference.”

When asked about the importance of the conference to other students in architecture, landscape architecture or engineering, Huang added that some of the research that was presented at the conference has great potential for real-world applications.

“There was a chemist who spoke about his research on some interesting aspects of fabric including the development of a suit that could detect low heart rate and other health issues,” Huang said. “Sensors are embedded into the chemical level of the suit material so it would show you when your blood sugar or cholesterol level are high based on sweat. I think people need to know about this invention and be more informed of the potential of the textile industry.”

Pennsylvania State University

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Design by architecture, engineering professor featured in Architect magazine

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – The design of mobile low-carbon structures by DK Osseo-Asare, assistant professor of architecture and engineering design at Penn State, has been featured by Architect magazine, the journal of the American Institute of Architects (AIA). Titled “Fufuzela,” the experimental bamboo structures are designed to function at the intersection of architecture and furniture while integrating biology with environmental design and engineering.

As a finalist in the 2019 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) PS1 Young Architects Program, Osseo-Asare, who is also co-founder/principal of the Austin, Texas and Ghana-based architecture and integrated design firm Low Design Office, was commissioned to develop a proposal for the MoMA PS1 museum courtyard in the form of a series of images and a large-scale architectural model. The Fufuzela model and one of the renderings was exhibited over the summer at MoMA PS1, one of the oldest and largest contemporary art institutions in the United States, in Queens, New York. The model will next be on public view as part of an exhibition of architectural models in Austin, Texas, organized by the AIA.

The Stuckeman School provided production support for the development of the project. Architecture students in Osseo-Asare’s Humanitarian Materials Lab helped develop the project concept and build the final model. Danielle Vickers, an undergraduate architecture student, created concept images as part of the presentation delivered to MoMA’s design jury, while Sam Rubenstein, a master of architecture student, conducted bamboo research and created digital 3D models for computer-assisted machining. Rubenstein’s digital model was then used to fabricate all of the component pieces of the site model using a computer numerical control router. Jamie Heilman and Dani Spewak, staff members in the Stuckeman School’s Digital Fabrication Lab, provided instrumental support for iterative design development and production of the final model for MoMA PS1.

“We foresee a future wherein architecture is alive and mobile,” explained Osseo-Asare. “Our research is part of an anticipatory project toward that re-formation of spatial experience wherein architecture can sense and interact with people and its environment.”

The entire model, which measures more than 9 square feet, was packed flat in the Stuckeman Family Building and snapped together upon arrival in New York City, without the use of glue or fasteners. The individual architectural units were built out of laser-cut acrylic modules in the scale model. At full-scale, these architectural elements are a structural scaffolding for a variety of biomaterial systems, which architecture faculty continue to research at Penn State.

Yasmine Abbas, an assistant teaching professor of architecture and engineering design, was also involved in the project by providing materials research and specifying certain configurations to create specific ambiances within the courtyard setting by modulating lighting, humidity and proximity of people to the structures.

True to Osseo-Asare’s research interests in rethinking waste, the site model that was exhibited was constructed entirely out of the packaging crates from a large-format 3D printer. The printer, which was funded by the College of Engineering ‘s School of Engineering Design, Technology and Professional Programs, will be used to support interdisciplinary collaborative research around humanitarian materials through additive manufacturing by connecting architecture and engineering students through hands-on materials research.

Pennsylvania State University

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Stuckeman School research and design on display in Oslo Architecture Triennale

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – The interdisciplinary research and design of a project by several Stuckeman School faculty members and a recent alumna is currently on display at the 2019 Oslo Architecture Triennale (OAT) in Norway through November 24.

“Scorched Earth” is a proposal by Miranda Esposito, a 2018 alumna of the architecture program at Penn State; Marc Miller, assistant professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture; Laia Celma, assistant professor in the Department of Architecture; and Pep Avilés, assistant professor in the Department of Architecture and the Stuckeman Career Development Professor in Design that pays tribute to the once-thriving Pennsylvania mining town of Centralia, which has been burning underground since a coal mine fire erupted there in 1962.

Once home to more than 2,000 residents, by 2018 the population of Centralia had dwindled to just seven. The proposal, which began as Esposito’s thesis project, is a memorial to all that was lost in the evacuation and abandonment of the city in the months and years after the fire, which is anticipated to burn for another 50 to 200 years.

Funding for Scorched Earth was provided by the H. Campbell and Eleanor R. Stuckeman Fund for Collaborative Design Research at Penn State. Additional funding came from the Program for the Internationalization of Spanish Culture of Acción Cultural Española and the Museum of Architecture in Oslo.

The Penn State team traveled to Oslo for the installation and opening of the exhibit on Sept. 26 and was one of just three teams from U.S. universities invited to exhibit its work.

Held every third autumn at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design over a period of approximately ten weeks, OAT attracts citizens and users of the city, decision makers, professionals and international guests. It is known as one of the world’s prominent arenas for dissemination and discussion of architectural and urban challenges. The theme of this year’s event is “Enough: The Architecture of Degrowth.”

Pennsylvania State University

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Architecture’s Hadighi coedits new book on fashion label building he co-designed

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – Mehrdad Hadighi, Stuckeman Chair of Integrative Design and head of the Department of Architecture at Penn State, has coedited a new book that explores the architecture of the 11-story Lafayette 148 New York clothing factory in China, which he designed in collaboration with Tsz Yan Ng, an assistant professor of architecture in Taubman College at the University of Michigan.

The Lafayette 148 New York label is described as “clothing designed for the modern, sophisticated woman made from the most luxurious fabrics.”

Twisted, which was recently published by Actar Publishers, features detailed documentation of the building and explores the architectural, socio-cultural, artistic, and historical contexts of the building in Shantou, China. The factory is organized around the flow of production – from the design of a garment to the shipment of the final product.

Hadighi and his coeditors – Ng and Marc J. Neveu, head of the architecture program in The Design School at Arizona State University – break down the design process of the Lafayette 148 New York building while weaving in essays about the complex socioeconomic and structural challenges such a project presents.

The publication, which is geared to those with a strong interest in architecture, touches on some of the larger issues that go into the design of a building, including the ecological footprint, social concerns regarding labor and construction and the historical context of the area, among others.

More information on Twisted can be found on the Actar website.

Cover imagery: But-Sou Lai Photography

Pennsylvania State University

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Architecture faculty exhibit work at world famous museum

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – Yasmine Abbas and DK Osseo-Asare, assistant professors of architecture and engineering design at Penn State, are among the invited artists whose works are on display in the “Africas in Production” exhibition at the ZKM | Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. 

The exhibit is part of the Digital Imaginaries project, which began in spring 2018 with events in Senegal and South Africa before heading to Germany. Throughout the year partners including Kër Thiossane, an independent art and multimedia center in Dakar (Senegal), the Fak’ugesi African Digital Innovation Festival and Wits Arts Museum, both in Johannesburg (South Africa), collaborated on a series of distinct but connected programs, including workshops, seminars, talks, performances and exhibitions. These activities were designed to “bring together artists, architects, makers, hackers and researchers to question and reimagine how globalized technologies shape and shift African futures.

Penn State’s submission to the exhibit stems from the Agbogbloshie Makerspace Platform (AMP), founded by Abbas and Osseo-Asare in Ghana. AMP is a youth-driven community-based project that couples the practical know-how of makers in the informal sector with the technical knowledge of students and young professionals in the science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics (STEAM) fields to amplify inclusive innovation. 

Abbas and Osseo-Asare’s AMP project has received international attention, winning the Rockefeller Foundation’s Centennial Innovation Challenge Award, being named the Africa 4 Tech Digital Champion for Educational Technology (EdTech) and the Design Corps Social Economic Environmental Design (SEED) Award for Public Interest Design. Most recently, the duo received seed funding via a Penn State College of Arts and Architecture faculty research grant to advance their “spacecraft” research around community-enabled materials design research, which is currently ongoing with a number of graduate and undergraduate students at the University Park campus.

The pair traveled to Germany in November to install their third-generation AMP Spacecraft, which featured a “building performance” wherein graduate students and faculty from the Karslruhe Institute of Technology participated in an experimental test build to provide feedback on Penn State students’ design work to date. AMP Spacecraft is small-scale, incremental, low-cost and open-source, operating simultaneously as a set of tools and equipment to “craft space,” and empowering makers with limited means to both navigate and terraform their environment. Made in Ghana by grassroots makers and shipped from the first AMP maker hub in Accra’s Agbogbloshie scrapyard, the AMP Spacecraft prototypes a smart canopy device – or “Scanopy” – that collects air quality data and explores opportunities to amplify environmental sensing in data-scarce regions.

While in Germany, Abbas and Osseo-Asare presented the AMP project along with their on-going design research around maker ecosystems in African spaces during a “Tangana” panel at the “Open Codes: The World as a Field of Data” installation at ZKM. Panelists included makers from Ghana and Germany that discussed common trends in open-source maker and technology culture, as well as opportunities for bottom-up (democratic) innovation by leveraging citizen science initiatives and/or models of open science.

ZKM | Karlsruhe is the fourth-highest ranking museum in the world by ArtsFacts.net and houses both spatial arts, such as painting, photography and sculpture, and time-based arts, such as film, video, media art, music, dance, theater and performance. The “Africas in Production” exhibit is now open and will remain on display until March 31, 2019.

Kennesaw State University

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Kennesaw State University thesis students presented ‘Miniatures: A Snapshot of Thesis’ during a 3-hour gallery-style critique. Reviewers consisted of 35-alumni, local practitioners, and faculty divided into 7-teams providing feedback on students critical research as a method of intellectual investigation. Each student’s research culminates in a Theorem that serves as the intellectual grounding of the work to be undertaken in the Thesis Studio during the following semester. This ‘Miniatures’ exhibition is an attempt to help students bridge the gap between idea and project.

 

Kennesaw State University

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Taught by Professors Liz Martin-Malikian, Peter Pittman and Arash Soleimani, 60-Students display their ‘Materials Exploration’ projects from Environmental Technology: Materials & Methods course. Exploring material characteristics, students worked in teams of 2-3  to make three parametric tiles in concrete, wood, and polymer all with the same design, but with a different material.

Under the direction of Professor Zamila Karimi, architecture students are challenging what constitutes an urban space by creating outdoor furniture that is interactive and playful instead of drab and utilitarian. This fall, students taking the Tactical Urbanism course offered by the Department of Architecture were tasked with creating a series of so-called “urban chairs.” The chairs were designed and built by the students with the intent that they could be configured in multiple ways in order to make public spaces more appealing. See link to video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A25fR5nLBFk

Virginia Tech

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Virginia Tech – Architecture Program:

Faculty Publications, Awards, Exhibition, Invited Lectures, etc.:
Professor Jack Davis, F.A.I.A., Dean Emeritus, was awarded the William C. Noland Medal, the highest award given to a member architect by the Virginia American Institute of Architects, for his extraordinary achievements over the past several decades. The medal was bestowed upon the recipient during the Visions for Architecture gala at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in November 2018.

Professor Emeritus Dayton Eugene Egger’s book The Paradox of Place: In the Line of Sight was published by ORO Editions. The book was edited by Gregory Luhan. It is supplied with a foreword by Kenneth Frampton. A book vernissage was held at the Washington-Alexandria Architecture Center in November 2018.

Visiting Assistant Professor Kevin Jones, A.I.A.was recognized with the Virginia Emerging Professional Award by the Virginia American Institute of Architects.

Professor Dr. Markus Breitschmid, S.I.A.and architect Valerio Olgiati’s new book Non-Referential Architecture was published by Simonett & Baer. The book appeared in its original English version as well as in a translated German edition. The book was presented during the annual Porto Academy held at the Faculdade de Arquitectura da Universidade do Porto (FAUP) in Portugal in July 2018.

Following faculty member has been granted promotion by the university:
Associate Professor Patrick Doan, R.A. has been promoted from the rank of Assistant Professor to the rank of Associate Professor with tenure.

Associate Professor Aki Ishida, A.I.A. has been promoted from the rank of Assistant Professor to the rank of Associate Professor with tenure.

Associate Professor Paola Zellner-Bassett has been promoted from the rank of Associate Collegiate Professor to the rank of Associate Professor with tenure.

Following architecture faculty have been appointed to administrative positions:
Professor Dr. Paul Emmons, Ph.D.,has been appointed Associate Dean for Graduate Studies of the College of Architecture and Urban Studies.

In Memoriam:
Professor Emeritus, Dean Emeritus, and Virginia Tech President Emeritus Dr. Charles Steger, F.A.I.A., passed away on May 6, 2018.

T.A. Carter Professor Emeritus Dr. Dennis Kilper, A.I.A., with a 34-year tenure (1975-2009) at Virginia Tech’s architecture program, passed away on January 14, 2018.

Professor Emeritus Robert Ning-Shee Chaing, a professor at Virginia Tech’s architecture program form 1968 to 1998, passed away on October 9, 2017.

Kennesaw State University

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Co-chaired by Dr. Saleh Uddin from Kennesaw State University and Dr. So-yeon Yoon from Cornell University, KSU Architecture was well-represented by Dr. Saleh Uddin and Associate Professors Kathryn Bedette, Chris Welty and Michael Carroll at the recent Design Communication Association (DCA) hosted by Cornell University in Ithaca, NY.

Prof. Carroll’s paper on ‘Digital_Hand_Materiality’ was part of a session looking at Virtual and Actual: Process and Product moderated by Prof. Chris Welty, AIA. Examining creative processes, Prof. Kathryn Bedette, AIA paper on Drawing Motion through Stillness: Comparing Disciplinary Approaches; Prof. Chris Welty, AIA paper co-authored with Dr. Arief Seitawan paper entitled Embracing Slowness, Methods to Digital Fluency; and Dr. Saleh Uddin’s paper Current Decline of Design Grammar during the Rise of the Digital Fabrication Era all challenged the relationship between digital/analog and its influence on the way we link the process and product of design.

We are also very proud to note that Architecture Student Kathryn Stapleton received the DCA Juror’s Choice Award in Undergraduate Design Foundation for her “Kinetic Structural System from Geometry.” Congratulations!

See DCA link: http://www.dcaconference2018.org/

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