Assistant Professor Rachel Berney and Visiting AC Martin Chair Oliver Schulze are guiding students through an investigation of the Mobile City of LA in our current studio course, ARCH 642 “The Mobile City – People, Transport, & Public Life.”  While we tend to link the city of Los Angeles with the automobile (think: Missing Person’s “Nobody Walks in LA”), the reality of transportation in LA is far more complex. The city pioneered large streetcar systems in the late 19th century and early 20th century. The last incarnation of those systems – the red line – was collapsed in favor of embracing freeway construction in the mid 20th century. Since the 1970s, however, public transportation networks and services have grown rapidly in LA. The city now has the largest bus system in the United States and there has been more transit building in the last decade in LA than in any other city in the United States. LA also hosts the most-traveled urban commute rail line in the country – the Blue Line – with 80,000 trips per weekday. The next iteration of Los Angeles is that of THE MOBILE CITY, one connected and networked via public transit options with higher density housing at nodes and with opportunities to reweave the urban fabric of the city to incorporate visible and legible natural systems and public space. It is a crucial time for reinvention and change in the city’s life. The challenge is great. The possibilities for design greater.

Laurel Consuelo Broughton was named one of the fifteen 2014 Racked.com Young Guns of Fashion for her collection, WELCOMECOMPANIONS an offshoot from her design studio WELCOMEPROJECTS. Her residential project Shed House is now under construction in Malibu, CA and slated for completion January 2015. In July she gave the talk Soft Abstraction as part of UCLA Jumpstart’s Series, Endlessly Worthwhile Dilemmas. Her project Retrospective City is on view at the A+D Museum in Los Angeles until August 31, 2014. Gallery Attachment, a collaborative project with Andrew Kovacs, was selected to participate in the Storefront For Art and Architecture’s exhibition program WorldWide StoreFront, forthcoming fall 2014. 

Patrick Tighe, FAIA (Professor Adjunct) USC School of Architecture received the IDEAS 2 Award for Excellence in Steel Frame Building Design from the American Institute of Steel Construction for an affordable housing project in West Hollywood. The Sierra Bonita Affordable Housing project for people living with disabilities also won an Award of Merit for Structural Engineering from the Structural Engineers Association of Southern California (SEOSC).

Chu+Gooding Architects (Annie Chu and Rick Gooding) has recently completed design and drawings for a 110,000 sf Collection Storage, Conservation and Research Facility for the new Autry Resource Center in Burbank. A 110,000 sf Collection Storage, Conservation and Research Facility which is scheduled to start construction in January.  Chu+Gooding Architects is also in the design phase for the 100-Room Tiverton House Renovation at UCLA. Rick Gooding’s Subterranea drawing exhibit in the Napa Gallery at Cal State University Channel Islands from November 13 to December 5 and will include about a dozen of the USC Student 3rd Year Models from this past Spring Semester.

Adjunct Associate Professor Eric Haas’s firm, DSH // architecture, was the recipient of Honorable Mentions for both the Para Los Niños Family Center and the Villa Tangente in the Re-Thinking the Future 2014 Awards. 

Assistant Professor Alison B. Hirsch received the James H. Zumberge Research and Innovation Fund Grant to develop her next book, Landscape as Thick Description. She conducted a new MLA research studio titled “The Geography of the LA Riots: Designing the Public Realm in the Insurgent Spaces of the City.”  

Lauren Matchison, NCARB, will serve as Interim Director of the Master of Landscape Architecture program for the remainder of 2014.

Professor G. Goetz Schierle is preparing a book on fabric structures.

Ed Woll is enjoying a re-organized practice focusing more completely than before on design of affordable housing.  The re-organized firm — TWG Architects Inc — is a troika/collective with three equal principals and is currently in production on two substantial projects: one in LA (Eagle Rock neighborhood — 46 units at 4 stories over parking) and one in the Bronx (120 units at 13 stories with no parking!).  Both projects are for special needs clients and incorporate extensive social service provisions; both feature site development that includes some urban farming. 

Sofia Borges, Lecturer, released two new books in August. Hide and Seek:The Architecture of Cabins and Hide-Outs and Building Better: Sustainable Architecture for Family Homes are now available on Amazon and bookstores worldwide.

Dr. Joon-Ho Choi was recently selected for the ARCC New Investigator Award in 2014. His research, entitled “Human-Building Integration for Assessment of Indoor Environmental Quality for Human Health and Environmental Sustainability:  Pupil-Size Based Visual Environment Control in the Workplace” was submitted and reviewed as an emerging and innovative research topic. This experimental research provides unique knowledge concerning how an individual’s physiological signals can be translated to estimate his/her visual sensation and comfort level, as a function of pupil sizes, their fluctuations, and time frequencies. Therefore, the research outcome will be potentially applicable as a control and diagnostic tool for designing a workplace environment, where the occupants’ environmental health, work productivity, and energy performance are critical.

Professor Kyle Konis, Ph.D, AIA was invited by the Illuminating Engineering Society (IES) to speak at its annual conference, Nov. 2-4 in Pittsburgh on the topic of daylighting design impacts on health.

Jose Sanchez is coordination a session and presenting at Smart Geometry in Hong Kong. He is also presenting in the ‘Serious Games’ conference at USC cinema school.

Anders Carlson recently presented his concepts for an interactive seismic map at the national workshop, “New Audiences, New Products for the National Seismic Hazard Maps” sponsored by the Science Application for Risk Reduction Project. Researchers in 18 fields were gathered to discuss opportunities and he proposed a map or app that would allow users to see the strongest shaking a building has felt, what it is expected to feel, and an estimate of what level of shaking it was designed to resist.

Adjunct Associate Professor of Architecture, Yo-ichiro Hakomori, and landscape architecture professor Takako Tajima conducted a joint 2 week urban design workshop with USC graduate landscape students and graduate architecture students from Meiji University School of International Architecture and Urban Design in June of this year.  Participants examined a development project by Forest City Enterprises in downtown San Francisco at the epicenter of urban transformation south of Market Street.  During the visit to San Francisco, students received a tour of the site and presentation of the project by the developer, as well as visits to Gensler, SOM, and AECOM.  The design workshop was later conducted on the campus of USC with a final presentation to the developer of the work produced by the students via Skype.  “I was so impressed with the level of detail and creativity the students were able to produce in such a short period of time.” says the Project Manager from Forest City. 

This spring, Chris Warren taught a studio in Como, Italy for the USC MXP Study Abroad in Italy program.  Also, in June, the construction was completed on A.P.C. Melrose Place, a new 2,500sf flagship store for the French clothier.  He is in now in the process of completing new stores in Downtown LA and Silverlake for the retailer, as well as moving into construction on a new home in Venice.

Patrick Tighe Architecture was shortlisted for the 2014 World Architecture / Inside Award. The shortlisted projects and the winners to be lauded at the World Architecture Festival in Singapore in the Fall. Patrick Tighe Architecture also recently completed 2 stores for fashion designer Rick Owens, a flagship store in Milan and another shop in London.

Mic Patterson is on the scientific review committee for Glasscon Global, which just completed its inaugural three-day conference in Philadelphia in July, and where he presented a paper entitled: The Millennium IGU: “Regenerative Concept for a 1000-Year Insulated Glass Unit,” and chaired a session “energy performance of buildings influenced by glass.” Mic is also in the Advisory Group for the Council for Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat, and will attend their world congress in Shanghai in September, where he will present another paper: “Curtainwall Lifecycles: Evaluating Durability and Embodied Energy.” 

Mario Cipresso AIA was recently a juror for the 2014 AIA Orange County Student Design Competition.

Rob Ley and his firm, Urbana, recently completed a 13,000 s.f. interactive facade for Eskenazi Hospital in Indianapolis, IN.  The project and design methodologies behind its inception and fabrication will be presented at this years’s ACADIA Conference, held at USC, October 23-25, 2014 

Professor G. Goetz Schierle is preparing a research grant and book on Fabric Structures

Gail Peter Borden won three grants [USC-URAP and two USC-URSPs] to support his work in material age and surface and was named one of 100 Notable Professors at Top Research Universities, [the only architect on the list] by onlinephd.org. He has been selected to participate in the prestigious Dallas based Architect vs. Artist Exhibition and will serve as a juror for the ongoing Marfa Housing competition.

Susanna Seierup has begun design on a new residential project in Santa Cruz, California. 

Eric Nulman recently presented his paper “Pedagogy at Full-Scale” at the 2014 ACSA International Conference in Seoul, Korea. The paper considers the value of full-scale prototyping in architectural education, and outlines an alternative model of pedagogy that utilizes prototyping exercises to cultivate material agency in studio projects. The presentation highlighted recent undergraduate coursework completed at USC, and how full-scale exercises were employed as an instructional tool towards achieving a desired learned outcome. 

Alexander Robinson recently negotiated and arranged for the signing of a joint research agreement between the USC School of Architecture and the Los Angeles branch of the Army Corps of Engineers, with the intention of strengthening and supporting a collaborative research program on the future revitalization of the Los Angeles River.  Also, following a successful studio review about the sourcing the water for the Los Angeles River with the attendance of nearly a dozen Los Angeles City officials Alexander was invited to become a stakeholder in the One Water LA planning effort and attend and comment on a landmark planning effort about the future integration of water in Los Angeles. 

Vinayak Bharne spoke on his recent book Zen Spaces and Neon Places: Reflections on Japanese Architecture and Urbanism at the USC Pacific Asia Museum on July 20. He is also one of the invited contributors to the forthcoming 50th Issue of the DOCOMOMO Journal. Bharne’s article titled “Rereading Our Recent Past: Notes on Chandigarh and New Gourna” examines the ongoing dilemmas surrounding the future of two contemporaneous iconic modern places, Le Corbusier’s largest urban project in India, and Hassan Fathy’s groundbreaking adobe village in Egypt.

Scott Uriu’s firm Baumgartner+Uriu has been feature at the Morphos “Sustainable Empires” exhibition at the Palazzo Albrizzi in Venice, Italy in collaboration with the International ArtExpo which opened June 6^th, 2014.   

Douglas Noble and Karen Kensek coordinated a four-day architecture licensing workshop in Los Angeles in May.  Twenty-eight classes were taught to more than 800 attendees.  Kensek and Noble have been organizing licensing programs for just over seven years, with more than 325 class taught and over 12,500 participants.  There are 2000 members of the “Not Licensed Yet” group, known as NotLY.  Whenever a member becomes licensed, they are ceremoniously thrown out of the group.  NotLY received an ACSA award in March, and was the subject of a presentation at the AIA National Convention in Chicago in June.

Assistant Professor Alvin Huang has been featured as a “Next Progressive” by ARCHITECT Magazine in a 5-page profile & interview entitled “The Synthesis of Digital Craft” in the June 2014 issue of the magazine. Additionally, his firm Synthesis Design + Architecture has recently won a public art commission for the Silver Line Metro in Los Angeles.  He is currently co-chairing the 2014 ACADIA Conference with David Gerber and Jose Sanchez (October 23-26 in Los Angeles).

The Platform is a collaborative design/build project by Assistant Professor Victor Jones for the Watts House Project (WHP), a non-profit neighborhood redevelopment organization located in South Central Los Angeles.  The Platform is part of a grassroots effort to transform three dilapidated shotgun houses on 107th Street to establish a cultural destination accommodating administrative offices, a community-run coffee shop, gardens, exhibition spaces and a meeting hall.  Assistant Professor Victor Jones united members from the community, an artist, two grant agencies, and five students from USC’s School of Architecture to realize the project.  Students worked alongside local residents to envision the insertion of a multi-purpose surface that redefines the entire site.  One continuous wall sheathes the front elevations of two existing structures and encloses the open space between them to create two new public spaces: a pocket park along the sidewalk and an internalized courtyard space.  The collaborative team identified existing forms of fence enclosure in the surrounding neighborhood to imagine how a ubiquitous residential element could be adopted to serve institutional and commercial needs.  The subtle manipulation of property enclosure allows the Platform to fit comfortably within its residential setting while adapting to specific performative needs.   

Selected for its embrace of technology and sustainability, the TR+2 StudioHouse in Pacific Palisades, designed by Adjunct Professor Mark Cigolle and Professor Kim Coleman, was the site of one month of events marking the international launch of BMW’s i8 carbon fiber hybrid sports car.

Associate Professor Amy Murphy’s chapter “New Orleans, Nature, and the Apocalyptic Trope” has been included in the recently released Verso publication New Orleans Under Reconstruction: The Crisis of Planning, co-editors: Carol McMichael Reese, Michael Sorkin, and Anthony Fontenot, with a foreword by Mike Davis.  

Professor Diane Ghirardo, Ph.D. presented a paper, “Who is the Architect?” at the American Association of Italian Studies conference in Zurich in May 2014; in April, she lectured at the University of Enna in Sicily on “Women and Space in Early Modern Italy,” and on “Lucrezia Borgia entrepreneur,” at Casa Romei, in Ferrara. 

Vittoria Di Palma’s essay “Empire Gastronomy,” which explores connections between architecture, the outline drawing, and the invention of nouvelle cuisine, has just been published in AA Files 68. 

Patrick Tighe, FAIA, had the privilege of being a juror for the 2014 New York AIA Awards. Jurors included Giancarlo Mazzanti, Kunle Adeyemi, Reed Kroloff, Sheila Kennedy, Sharon Johnston, Robert Campbell, Alberto Campo Baeza, Regine Leibinger and Joeb Moore. An exhibition of the award winning work is currently on view at The Center for Architecture, New York. Patrick Tighe Architecture was awarded a 2014 AIA, HUD Secretary’s Housing Award. The award is granted by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development along with the National Chapter of the American Institute of Architects. The project will be recognized at the 2014 National AIA Convention In Chicago (June) where Tighe will participate in a panel discussion and present the work. Tighe also served as a juror for the 2014 2 x 8 competition. The 2 x 8 honors and exhibits the best work of California’s Architecture schools. 

Scott Uriu’s work has been added to the permanent collection of the FRAC Center in Orleans France for his firms model, drawings, and animation of the project “Animated Apertures”.   Uriu will be featured in the July 2014 issue of Interior Design Magazine for his “Aperture” installation at the SciArc gallery (Baumgartner+Uriu).  

1567 will be Co-Chairing ACADIA 2014 together with Alvin Huang and David Gerber, to be hosted in October 2014 in USC School of Architecture. Keynote speakers include Zaha Hadid, Will Wright and Casey Reas among others. The event will bring together the design community interested in the intersection between design and technology showcasing the fore-front of techniques and paradigms that constitute our practice.  Jose has also been selected as a cluster champion for Smart Geometry Conference 2014 to be held in Hong Kong.  Together with Satoru Sugihara and Sergio Irigoyen, the ‘BLOCK’ cluster will focus in developing a game app, for urban speculation and analysis of the different agencies that determine the urban density of Hong Kong.

Neil Leach has been appointed Professor at the European Graduate School, and is teaching on their new PhD program in Digital Design. He is publishing three new edited volumes this year, including an issue of Architectural Design on ‘Space Architecture: The New Frontier of Design Research’. 

Adjunct Associate Professor Jennifer Siegal’s newest mobile project will be featured in the Truck-A-Tecture exhibition at the Kaneko Museum opening on June 27 in Omaha, NE. In August it will travel and be on display at Google, Venice (Silicon) Beach, CA.

Adjunct Associate Professor Yo-ichiro Hakomori will be leading the Global Initiative Study Abroad program to Asia in the Fall Semester, 2014.  Along with landscape professor Takako Tajima, the two will lead a group of students to Japan and China.  While in Japan, the program will engage in a joint urban design workshop with students from Meiji University School of International Architecture and Urban Design, and the University of Dortmunt, Germany.  In China the group will work with students from the Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture to research preservation and repurposing the traditional Hutong.  The semester will culminate with an landscape urban design studio at the Hong Kong University in Shanghai.

Eric Nulman recently completed a fellowship at The MacDowell Colony. While in residence, Eric worked on the project Mono Environments; Mono Environments was design research on the use of ephemeral ornament (colored-light shadows) to generate a singular spatial aesthetic. Eighteen light patterned environments were created using physical models with custom cut theatrical gels to filter sunlight onto interior walls and floors; these temporary environments were documented in situ with photographs and represented through drawings. 

Rob Ley, Lecturer, recently completed an interactive curtain wall facade as part of the New Wishard Hospital in Indianapolis, IN.  The project stretches 12,000 s.f. and changes color through lenticular articulation in response to the building users’ direction of travel and speed. 

Dr. Travis Longcore (Lecturer in Landscape Architecture and Associate Professor (Research) of Spatial Sciences) was an invited speaker at the USC Center for Sustainable Cities Spring Symposium “Envisioning Drought-Resilient Cities.”  He spoke on “Interstitial Greening for a Drought-Reslient City.”  Longcore was also a quoted expert in the Los Angeles Times on issues associated with alley cleanups.   

Dr. David Jason Gerber is co-chairing this years’ ACADIA 2014 Annual conference titled Design Agency held at the University of Southern California School of Architecture. Dr. Gerber chaired and edited the 5th annual conference on Simulation in Architecture and Urban Design. 

Professor James Steele, Ph.D. has been selected to be a member of the  jury for the International Design Competition for the Noble Quran Oasis, held from May -1 to 15^th in Madinah, Saudi Arabia.

Lecturer Mina M. Chow, AIA, NCARB and USC School of Cinematic Arts Adjunct Associate Professor Mitchell Block have won a prestigious documentary grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts  for their film FACE OF A NATION:  “What Happened at the World’s Fair?”  An inquiry into national identity and the importance of the vision through the architecture of World’s Fairs, the film introduces the debate about the importance of vision created by architects as part of the immigrant American dream. 

Dr. Joon-Ho Choi, Assistant Professor of Building Science at USC was recently invited to the National Math and Science Competition as a special lecturer. He talked about “How and why to be an engineer/ scientist” for K-12 students. Dr.  Choi will open a new course, titled “Sustainable Design for Healthy Indoor Environments” in the fall semester of 2014 based on his robust research experience with the Workplace 20.20 project supported by the General Services Administration. He will present two of his research papers at the 13th International Society of Indoor Air Quality: “Evidence-based model of building façade features using data mining for assessment of building performance”, and “Visual environmental quality control using human physiological signal in an office workplace”. The conference will be held in Hong Kong in July 7 to 12, 2014. 

Lawrence Scarpa and his partner Angela Brooks of Brooks + Scarpa were named the recipients of the 2014 Smithsonian Cooper Hewitt Award in Architecture. 

Assistant Professor Rachel Berney has been awarded entry into the USC Advancing Scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences Grant Writing Mentorship Program. During the 2014-2015 school year, she will develop funding proposals for her new Los Angeles-based research project MOBILE CITIES, under the mentorship of Dr. Ann Forsyth of Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. 

Assistant Professor Alexander Robinson recently delivered a keynote lecture at a symposium on “Parametrics” at Washington State University. He also presented his recent work in a lecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and presented peer reviewed work at CELA in Baltimore and SIMAUD in Tampa, Florida (by proxy). 

Victor J. Jones, Assistant Professor of Architecture has been newly appointed to the Board of Directors of the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design.

Lecturer Vinayak Bharne’s latest book Zen Spaces & Neon Places: Reflections on Japanese Architecture and Urbanism was released on May 1. The book brings together two decades of Bharne’s scholarship on Japan since his first trip in 1993 as the Asia-Pacific Development Commission Traveling Scholar from India.

Lecturer Nefeli Chatzimina – Founder of X|Atelier Architects – completed construction of a Flagship store for a prestigious Insurance Company in Athens, Greece. Nefeli during the Summer 2014 will be organizing International Architectural Design Workshops in Europe [Athens and Innsbruck]. Selected students from USC will participate in this design academic research with the title ‘Functionless’ using the latest computational design techniques and digital fabrication technologies. X|Atelier workshops are based on Nefeli’s current PhD Research as a selected candidate from the University of Athens in Greece.