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Architecture professor honored with Cooper Hewitt National Design Award

 

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Felecia Davis, associate professor of architecture in College of Arts and Architecture’s Stuckeman School at Penn State, has been named the winner of the 2022 Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum National Design Award in the Digital Design category for her work that explores the use of computational textiles.

Established in 2000, the National Design Awards recognize those leaders in nine design categories – Design Visionary, Climate Action, Emerging Designer, Architecture/Interior Design, Communication Design, Digital Design, Fashion Design, Landscape Architecture and Product Design – as determined by a multidisciplinary jury of practitioners, educators and leaders from a wide range of design fields.

A lead researcher in the Stuckeman Center for Design Computing and director of the Computational Textiles Lab (SOFTLAB), Davis’s research reimagines how people might use textiles in their daily lives and in architecture through computational textiles, which respond to the environment via programming, embedded sensors and electronics, as well as use the natural transformable properties of textiles.

Davis was recognized by the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum for her “innovative design of digital products, environments, systems, experiences and services.”

“This award was a great surprise, and I am honored to be among such respected colleagues in the 2022 National Design Award cohort,” said Davis. “Receiving this award is especially encouraging in that it recognizes a body of work that has been happening over a number of years.”

Davis said she feels like feels like it has taken a while to get her works off the ground because most everything she does is prototyped with real materials. In addition, coming from architecture, that has also meant prototyping at scale.

“The award is also important to me in that it recognizes digital work that is about human interaction with textile material that has been fabricated with digital tools, embedded with digital sensors or uses the natural properties of the material to communicate some information to people about themselves or their environment,” she said.

Davis was recently named a winner of the Architecture League of New York’s Emerging Voices 2022 competition and she was awarded a Skidmore Owings & Merrill (SOM) Foundation Research Prize as the principal investigator for “MycoKnit,” an interdisciplinary, collaborative project that explores mycelium-based and knitted textiles to form a sustainable building material.

She has been featured in the PBS “Women in Science Profiles” series and work was part of the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) “Reconstructions: Blackness and Architecture in America” exhibition in 2021. That experience led to Davis cofounding the Black Reconstruction Collective, a nonprofit organization of Black architects, scholars and artists that supports and funds design work about the Black diaspora.

The principal of Felecia Davis Studio, Davis is currently penning book that examines the role of computational materials in our lives titled “Softbuilt: Networked Architectural Textiles.”

Learn more about this year’s class of National Design Award winners on the Cooper Hewitt website.

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Architecture Professor to be Featured in Upcoming MoMA exhibition

UNIVERSTY PARK, Pa. — Felecia Davis, an associate professor of architecture in the Stuckeman School at Penn State who has gained widespread recognition for her work designing lightweight textiles that change properties in response to their environment, is one of 10 architects, designers and artists who will be featured in an upcoming Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) exhibition that examines contemporary architecture in the context of how systemic racism has fostered violent histories of discrimination and injustice in the United States.

“Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America,” which has been described by organizers as “an investigation into the intersections of architecture, blackness and anti-black racism in the American context,” will run Feb. 20 through the end of May. Its original opening date in October was postponed due to the coronavirus.

The exhibition features a series of 10 newly commissioned works that, according to MoMA will “explore how people have mobilized black cultural spaces, forms and practices as sites of imagination, liberation, resistance and refusal.” It is the fourth iteration of the museum’s “Issues in Contemporary Architecture” series, which was launched in 2010.

Davis, who is the Carey Memorial Early Career Professor in the Arts and director of the Computational Textiles Lab (SOFTLAB) in the Stuckeman Center for Design Computing, is developing textile systems for use in architecture that can sense and respond to the world around them through digital electronic programing and sensors. These systems can also be programmed by using the natural transformative quality of the material itself in connection with environmental cues, such as humidity, temperature and light.

The purpose of the textile systems – or “architextiles,” as they are referred to – is to use the responsiveness and sensual qualities of the material to communicate information or, in other words, to tell a story. An example of these systems are soft walls that elicit emotions from people in a space or to help a person who is not in touch with their emotions be able to communicate to a caretaker, doctor or nurse in a nonverbal way.

The 10 artists, designers and architects featured by MoMA – Emanuel Admassu, Germane Barnes, Sekou Cooke, J. Yolande Daniels, Mario Gooden, Walter Hood, Olalekan Jeyifous, V. Mitch McEwen, Amanda Williams, along with Davis – have been giving virtual lectures together at universities and institutions around the nation on issues surrounding racial injustice and Black history since the fall. “The Black Reconstruction Collective,” as the group is known, will be hosted by the Department of Architecture in partnership with Stuckeman School and WPSU at 6 p.m. on March 24 as part of the school’s Spring Virtual Lecture Series.

More information about the show can be found on the MoMA website.

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UNIVERSTY PARK, Pa. — The work of the Department of Architecture’s Autonomous Builders Collective (ABC) in the Stuckeman School using waste cardboard to develop resilient, low-cost housing has been accepted into the Seoul Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism 2021. The show, which has a theme of “Crossroads, Building the Resilient City,” opens on Sept. 16 and runs through Oct. 30.

Marcus Shaffer, associate professor of architecture and the director of the ABC, along with lab members Elena Vazquez, an architecture doctoral candidate and Julio Diarte, a doctoral candidate in architecture who recently defended his thesis, have been invited for their entry titled, “Tapping into Urban Recycling for Low-cost/No-cost Housing Solutions: Using Waste Cardboard to Build and Sustain the Resilient City.” In their submission, the trio proposes a series of workshops in Seoul during which the lab members would work with informally employed waste collectors around the city to explore the potential of using post-consumer waste cardboard and common, discarded vinyl flooring to produce cast concrete building elements, such as screens, blocks, beams, floor slabs and window frames.

According to Shaffer, the ABC’s creative mission to “develop and/or revitalize building technologies and material strategies that empower people to create and realize architectures for themselves” neatly aligns with the focus of the 2021 biennial, which is “considering the city of tomorrow as a collective invention.”

The team’s work, which will be displayed in the Cities category of the biennial at Zaha Hadid’s Dongdaemun Design Plaza, will include cast artifacts, process videos and ‘how-to’ documentation produced in lab workshops, as well as cardboard-based building elements, tools and material studies. The project builds on the extensive doctoral work of Diarte on waste cardboard-based architecture and community workshops, and on Shaffer’s experiences with waste cardboard-based concrete formwork in the first-year architecture studios in the Stuckeman School

Some of the objects and tooling to be displayed by the team in Seoul were created by Diarte, Shaffer and Vazquez in the Stuckeman Building Yard, and they represent a range of architectural technologies, including hand-crafted objects and building components largely fabricated through digital workflows and tooling. Through their proposal, the group seeks to match recycling scenarios, housing needs and the building skills transmission tested by Diarte’s work in Asunción, Paraguay to similar conditions and needs in Seoul.

“Being accepted to exhibit our work on waste-cardboard reuse for architecture at the Seoul Biennial 2021 is a great honor,” said Diarte. “The Biennale motivates us to advance the project at a distinct level, exploring waste cardboard-based architecture at the scale of a city like Seoul, a city that has a strong cardboard recycling culture and paper use tradition in architecture.”

Shaffer is particularly happy to take Stuckeman School work to Seoul, where he spends his summers, often accompanied by students who participate in the Department of Architecture’s Korea/Japan Summer Study Abroad Program for design majors.

Held every two years, the Seoul Biennial was established in 2017 as an event that focuses on cities and gathers their representatives to discuss the challenges linked to the urban condition and share their potential solutions. With 10 million inhabitants, Seoul is one of the most representative examples of contemporary metropolises and, as such, a particularly relevant context to frame the event.

Sponsored and organized by the Seoul Metropolitan Government’s Urban Improvement Bureau, this year’s event is directed by French architect Dominique Perrault and is co-curated by architect Choon Woong Choi, University of Seoul Professor Marc Brossa, the Seoul-based design group FHHH Friends and the architectural studio BARE.

More information about the Seoul Biennial can be found here.

Pennsylvania State University

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UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — The Stuckeman Center for Design Computing (SCDC) is collaborating with the School of Engineering Design, Technology and Professional Programs at Penn State to bring its annual Flash Symposium and Open House to the virtual environment on Sept. 25. The theme of the 2020 online event is “Design Thinking.”

“This symposium explores how, as designers, we design thinking,” said Yasmine Abbas, assistant teaching professor in the Stuckeman School’s Department of Architecture and the lead organizer of the event. “How do we design holistic approaches to curating and optimizing the spaces, scenarios and systems within which we design – so as to fully and beneficially leverage the feedback loops between our environmental (and social and psychological, etc.) contexts and our thinking (processes and outcomes)?”

“Making the program virtual is particularly meaningful at the present moment,” added DK Osseo-Asare, assistant professor of architecture and engineering design, and symposium co-organizer. “Especially during a time of COVID-19 – when many of us are socially distanced from not only each other, but also our research labs, libraries, classrooms and workshops/fabrication labs; and when systemic issues of racial and social justice and equity are resurfacing once again in the United States.

“It is critical for us, as a society, to discover how better understanding of these relationships can inform redesign of our world to be more just, more sustainable, more healthful and more inclusive into the future.”

Speakers for the virtual event, which will run from 9:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., include:

  • Winifred Elysse Newman, acting associate dean for research and graduate studies and Homer Curtis Mickel and Leona Carter Mickel Endowed Chair in the School of Architecture at Clemson University, and director of the Institute for Intelligent Materials, Systems and Environments. In her talk, titled “What does digital have to do with it?” she will speak about the expanding digital world and how the relationship between designers and digital tools fosters computational design thinking.
  • Dan Lockton, assistant professor in the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University and director of the Imaginaries Lab. “New Ways to Think, New Ways to Live: Imaginaries, Design, and Futures” will explore idea of imaginaries — the mental images and understandings people have of big concepts from the climate to their own health — and how designers can work with these, to uncover them, help people share them and help people reimagine how life could be.
  • Aradhana Goel leads research and design strategy for Bayer Pharmaceutical’s cardiovascular therapeutics platform as part of the Digital Ventures team. She will speak on “Design Thinking in Service of Behavior Change,” or how design and data together can help create sustainable behavior change and help reframe people’s perspectives.
  • Katja Hölttä-Otto, associate professor of product development in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Aalto University. Her talk will touch on the role of empathy in design for well-being and discuss evidence-based decision-making in multidisciplinary design processes.
  • Darla Lindberg, professor of architecture at Penn State, will also present the findings of her book “Outside the Skin: Systems Approaches to Society’s Larger Structural Issues.” Published in January 2019 by Applied Research & Design, the book takes design thinking outside the skin (of buildings and people) to present an emergent architecture of collective choice and consequence.

“We are fortunate to have a some of the leading engineering design researchers right here at Penn State. This event will help strengthen our students’ and faculty ties with international design leaders and help us continue to broader our notions of design and its impact in the world.,” said Scarlett Miller, associate professor of engineering design and industrial engineering, and director of both the Brite Lab and the Engineering Design program in SEDTAPP. Miller also contributed to organizing the symposium.

In addition to the speakers, SCDC faculty and student researchers will share the projects they have been working on for the past year via an online platform that translates the physical layout of the SCDC and SEDTAPP facilities into in a virtual interactive space.

“Typically, our researchers have their posters on display in our lab within the Stuckeman Family Building during the Open House and they discuss their projects with symposium participants who tour our space,” explained José Pinto Duarte, director of the SCDC and the Stuckeman Chair in Design Innovation. “This year, due to concerns surrounding the spread of the coronavirus, our researchers will present their posters online, which actually allows people from around the world to see the important work we are doing, not just those who are on campus.”

The SCDC is devoted to advancing design research and learning in computational design. The center’s research includes engaging in architectural robotics, simulation and visualization, game development, geographic information systems, sustainable development and digital fabrication, as well as historical and theoretical aspects of computation in design.

Registration for the 2020 Flash Symposium, which is free and open to the public, is required via https://bit.ly/Flash_20. For more information, including the full schedule of events, visit the event website.

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UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Özgüç Çapunaman, a doctoral candidate in the Stuckeman School’s Department of Architecture, has been recognized for his research by the Association for Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA) as the recipient of the Young CAADRIA Award. His research centers on interactive digital fabrication, programmable composites, computational making and architectural tool development.

Prior to attending Penn State, Çapunaman earned a bachelor’s degree in industrial design with high honors from Istanbul Bilgi University and a master’s degree in computation design from Carnegie Mellon University. His master’s thesis was titled “CAM as a Tool for Creative Expression: Informing Digital Fabrication through Human Interaction” explores human agency in digital design-fabrication workflows.”

Selection of the Young CAADRIA Award recipient is based on the merit of a full research paper, research contribution and relevance to CAADRIA with demonstrated depth of research interest by a committee consisting of people from CAADRIA, the Paper Selection Committee and the conference host. According to Çapunaman, many important individuals in the field of computational design have been given the award in the past years, which made it a desirable goal for him to reach.

“Interactive digital fabrication within the design computing field is an up-and-coming area of interest for researchers,” he said. “Being awarded the Young CAADRIA Award hopefully means more attention can be brought towards this subject. Personally, being recognized in this way is very encouraging as I begin my Ph.D. efforts here at Penn State.”

Çapunaman’s paper submission focuses on interactive digital fabrication workflow. His research, which he began to establish during his time at Carnegie Mellon University, aims to question the human relationship with digital fabrication tools that are used in the field, such as CAM and CAD.

“The paper presents an interactive and adaptive design-fabrication workflow where the user can actively take turns in the fabrication process,” Çapunaman wrote in his abstract. “The proposed experimental setup utilizes paste extrusion additive manufacturing in tandem with real-time control of an industrial robotic arm. By incorporating a computer-vision based feedback loop, it captures momentary changes in the fabricated artifact introduced by the users to inform the digital representation.”

According to Çapunaman, the tools that designers may currently use are important in pinpointing the design space they navigate. He believes that these tools are not being questioned enough and that digital practitioners should be paying more attention to the means of expression with which they work.

Benay Gürsoy Toykoç, assistant professor of architecture at Penn State who is also a previous Young CAADRIA Award recipient herself, encouraged Çapunaman to apply for the honor. Gürsoy Toykoç was one of Çapunaman’s instructors during his undergraduate studies at Istanbul Bilgi University and she currently leads the Form and Matter — or ForMat — Lab  in the Stuckeman Center for Design Computing where the graduate student is a researcher. According to her, the paper Çapunaman submitted presented an original challenging approach to robotic fabrication in design fields.

“Without any hesitation, I can say Özgüç was one of the best undergraduate students I’ve ever had the chance to work with; he’s always pushed the boundaries,” she said. “As a Ph.D. student, he is again very ambitious, self-sufficient and eager to learn and explore. He likes challenges and does not feel comfortable in his comfort zone.”

Gürsoy Toykoç explained that from the very first class she taught with Çapunaman as a student, she could tell that he would be particularly successful. She always enjoyed their intellectual conversations, which she felt always kept her perspective on things fresh.

“What makes Özgüç stand out [as a student and researcher] is his directness, openness and critical approach to solving problems. He thinks outside the box,” she said. “He communicates himself very well in both written and spoken conversation and I think one of the reasons he was given this award is his ability to clearly communicate complex ideas.”

Pennsylvania State University

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UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Penn State Stuckeman School architecture alumna Stella Murray was recently named a recipient of the Jonathan Speirs Scholarship which supports architecture students who wish to enter the architectural lighting design profession.

A Schreyer Honors College scholar with interdisciplinary honors in architecture and architectural engineering, Murray graduated with her research-based master’s degree in architecture in May while simultaneously earning undergraduate degrees in architecture (B.Arch.) and Italian.

According to John Roake, chairman of the Jonathan Speirs Scholarship Fund (JSSF) Board of Trustees, “Both [recipients] made outstanding submissions which concisely and clearly expressed their phenomenal passion and drive to use light as a major part of their ongoing studies, as well as their intended future careers.”

“It is difficult to fully express in words my gratitude for having been selected as a recipient of the Jonathan Speirs Scholarship Fund,” said Murray. “The scholarship grants me a host of opportunities; however, it is the acknowledgement of my potential as a lighting designer that means the most to me.”

The Jonathan Speirs Scholarship Fund is a UK-registered charity that has been set up at the behest of the late Jonathan Speirs to allow “a student of architecture to investigate the study of architectural lighting design.”

Speirs was recognized as one of the world’s leading architectural lighting designers up until his death in 2012 at age 54 due to cancer.

Murray was one of two recipients of the 2019-20 Speirs scholarship.

In addition to the Speirs award, Murray earned a 2020 Distinguished Master’s Thesis Award from Penn State for her thesis titled “Bringing to Light the Qur’an: The Theophany of Allah By Means of Lighting Design in the Süleymaniye Mosque.”

She was also recently named the recipient of the Architectural Research Centers Consortium (ARCC) King Student Medal for Excellence in Architectural and Environmental Design Research. The award acknowledges students for their innovation, integrity and scholarship in architectural and/or environmental design research.

Murray has been working virtually as an intern with Horton Lees Brogden (HLB) Lighting Design this summer. HLB leadership has been so impressed with her work and passion that she was offered a full-time position at the firm as a design assistant. She will transition into her new role at HLB in October.

Murray is also currently studying for the WELL Accredited Professional (AP) exam, which she plans to take in September. Being a WELL AP “denotes expertise in the WELL Building Standard and a commitment to advancing human health and wellness in buildings and communities around the world.”

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UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – The Agbogbloshie Makerspace Platform (AMP), which was founded by Penn State Stuckeman School faculty members DK Osseo-Asare and Yasmine Abbas, has been awarded the Smart Cities Urban Innovation Award for Citizen Engagement in the Le Monde 2020 Global Urban Innovation Challenge.

The annual Le Monde competition promotes the best urban transformation projects worldwide and awards those that: stand out for their originality, efficiency and impact; address the area’s major challenges, such as global warming, social and gender inequalities, democratic governance, etc.; contribute to improving city services and quality of life; and draw upon citizen involvement. The 2020 competition drew 61 entries representing five continents — down from the average of 200, which can be attributed to the COVID-19 pandemic. Entrants are vying for the overall Grand Prix (Grand Prize) and the top prize in each of five categories: mobility, energy, habitat, urban planning and civic engagement.

An international selection committee comprised of experts in urban change submitted its top choices to the jury, comprised of journalists from Le Monde, who named the awardees.

The civic engagement award, in particular, celebrates “a democratic, horizontal process, whereby citizens play a role in developing and managing physical and virtual urban spaces and services.”

Launched in 2012 by Osseo-Asare, assistant professor of architecture and engineering design who also leads the Humanitarian Materials Lab at Penn State, and Abbas, assistant teaching professor of architecture, the AMP is a transnational project that helps bolster maker ecosystems in Africa by teaching students and young professionals how to reuse recycled materials.

The project, which is in Ghana, has received numerous accolades, winning the Rockefeller Foundation’s Centennial Innovation Challenge and Design Corps’ 2017 SEED Award for Public Interest Design. The AMP was also exhibited at the 2017 Seoul Biennale for Architecture and Urbanism.

Osseo-Asare is a cofounding principal of Low Design Office (LOWDO), an architecture and integrative design studio based in Austin, Texas and Tema, Ghana that explores the links between sustainability, technology and geopolitics. LOWDO was a finalist for the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program in 2019 and was named to Domus magazine’s 50 Best Architecture Firms in 2020 list.

Le Monde is a French daily newspaper with a circulation exceeding 323,039 copies per issue in 2009. It is considered one of France’s three newspapers of record.

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UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Julio Diarte, an architecture doctoral candidate in the Stuckeman School who is focusing his research on repurposing waste materials for low-cost housing, has been named a 2020 Engineering for Change (E4C) Research Fellow.

The E4C Research Fellowship Program is extremely competitive; more than 420 applications from 72 countries were whittled down to the 2020 cohort of 25 researchers. The program is designed to prepare professionals to solve local and global challenges and create knowledge as a public good. Fellows support the development of research collaborations defined together with E4C’s local and global partners.

A native of Asunción, Paraguay, Diarte said the fellowship program stood out to him because of its ability to run remotely while allowing him to continue his work, which focuses on developing technologies for upcycling waste cardboard as construction materials for low-cost housing.

As a researcher, Diarte believes it is essential to facilitate conversations with people around the world to promote diversity and to communicate the importance of his work. He is also fascinated by research that can be accomplished in collaboration with international institutions that are working on real-world problems in underserved communities.

“I thought this fellowship could be an excellent opportunity to connect with these institutions and learn what they do, how they work and potentially work with them in the future,” he said. “I became interested in global development because we are living in an ‘all hands-on-deck’ environment where underserved communities worldwide demand the collaboration of architects and designers to improve their environment.”

As an E4C Fellow in the Habitat sector, Diarte is part of a multidisciplinary research team that collaborates with Penn State. The research investigates affordable housing and disaster risk reduction in East African countries.

“In addition to the research collaboration between E4C and Penn State, I will be researching technologies that will be incorporated in the E4C Solutions Library,” Diarte said. “The library is a living database of innovative products and services for those living in resource-constrained environments. The library includes technologies in agriculture, energy, habitat, health, informational and communications technology, sanitation, transportation, and water.”

Diarte is excited about the opportunities that will open up after he completes the fellowship because of the team he will be working on, which includes researchers from many countries working in different areas. He believes the fellowship will strengthen his professional development in the sector and the networking opportunities could help him establish future research collaborations or projects.

“This fellowship is an opportunity to be part of a unique worldwide network of professionals working on global development,” Diarte said. “I believe the experience will strengthen my expertise as an architecture researcher interested in contributing to projects for underserved communities worldwide.

E4C is a non-profit organization made up of engineers, technologists, designers, social entrepreneurs, nongovernmental organizations and community advocates who are committed to improving the quality of life in communities around the world by facilitating the development of affordable, local appropriate and sustainable solutions to the most pressing social challenges.

More about the fellowship program can be found at https://www.engineeringforchange.org/e4c-fellowship/.

Pennsylvania State University

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UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – Felecia Davis, who has gained widespread recognition for her work designing lightweight textiles that change properties in response to their environment, is one of 10 architects, designers and artists that will be featured in an upcoming Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) show examining contemporary architecture in the context of how systemic racism has fostered violent histories of discrimination and injustice in the United States.

Opening Oct. 17, “Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America” is described by organizers as “an investigation into the intersections of architecture, Blackness and anti–Black racism in the American context.” The exhibition will feature a series of 10 newly commissioned works that will, according to the MoMA “explore how people have mobilized Black cultural spaces, forms and practices as sites of imagination, liberation, resistance and refusal.”

The show is the fourth iteration of the museum’s “Issues in Contemporary Architecture” series, which began in 2010. As with previous exhibitions in the series, community workshops and panel discussions will be held next spring that will delve into each contributor’s work.

An assistant professor of architecture and director of the Computational Textiles Lab (SOFTLAB) in the Stuckeman Center for Design Computing, Davis is developing textile systems for use in architecture that can sense and respond to the world around them through digital electronic programing and sensors. These systems can also be programmed by using the natural transformative quality of the material itself in connection with environmental cues, such as humidity, temperature and light.

The purpose of the textile systems – or “architextiles,” as they are referred to – is to use the responsiveness and sensual qualities of the material to communicate information or, in other words, to tell a story. An example of these systems are soft walls that elicit emotions from people in a space or to help a person who is not in touch with their emotions be able to communicate to a caretaker, doctor or nurse in non-verbal way.

Yolande Daniels, co-principal of Studio SUMO and a speaker in the Stuckeman School’s 2019-20 Lecture and Exhibit Series, will also be featured in the MoMA show.

“Reconstructions” will be on view from Oct. 17 through Jan. 18, 2021. More information can be found via the MoMA website.

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UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – Vincent Morales Garoffolo and Juan Antonio Sánchez Muñoz, principals of KAUH arquitectura & paisajismo in Granada, Spain, will speak on Wednesday, Jan. 29 as part of the Penn State Stuckeman School’s Lecture and Exhibit Series. “The Possibility of Architecture: A collection of works” will be held at 6 p.m. in the Stuckeman Family Building Jury Space and is free and open to the public.

As a firm, KAUH integrates architecture, public space and landscape design for both public and private clients. Morales Garoffolo and Sánchez Muñoz operate on the assumption that there are possibilities and impossibilities for every project. They also believe in the perceptive experience their work generates within the construction of the environment.

The duo has stated that a project can be found anywhere and can come to be out of any action, which blends in with KAUH’s foremost interest: to add value and enhance what belongs to everyone as the places in which we all interact – the spaces in which what is public can be expressed.

Some of KAUH’s most recent work includes the public space intervention “Outline of the Nasrid House” within the Alhambra, a palace and fortress complex in Granada, and a family-run hotel in the coastal town of Conil de la Frontera in the province of Cádiz. Construction is about to begin of the firm’s urban and infrastructure renewal project of the Utrera fairgrounds in Seville, and Morales Garoffolo and Sánchez Muñoz will be developing the design of La Hoya park this year, the result of their proposal winning an international competition focusing on the spaces surrounding the historic Alcazaba in Almería.

The firm has received numerous awards and accolades for its work, including the Torres Clavé Award from the Official College of Architects of Cádiz for the design of 20 social housing units in Conil de la Frontera. That project was also selected for the 13th Spanish Architecture and Urbanism Biennale in 2015. KAUH was also the recipient of a Málaga Architecture Award from the Official College of Architects of Málaga (Spain) in 2009.

Morales Garoffolo and Sánchez Muñoz received their architecture degrees from the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Sevilla in 2003 and shortly thereafter established kauh arquitectos in Seville in 2004. In 2012, the firm changed its name to KAUH arquitectura & paisajismo and moved its operations to Granada in Andalusia region. They are licensed architects registered at the Colegio de Arquitectos of Granada.

Morales Garoffolo and Sánchez Muñoz have participated as jury members, committee members and conference speakers and have authored numerous articles and chapters on architecture and design theory. They joined the Department of Architecture at Penn State this semester as visiting faculty.

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