Interior Urbanism Workshop, drawing lesson at the Cemetery of Mercy, Florence, July 2012. Photograph by Franco Pisani.

The Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis has recently hired a number of new faculty. Chandler Ahrens is a new Assistant Professor of Architecture. Ahrens is a co-founder and director of Open Source Architecture, and was a lead designer at Morphosis Architects. Prior to joining the Sam Fox School faculty he taught at Woodbury University in Los Angeles. Andrew Cruse is a new Assistant Professor of Architecture. Cruse had been teaching as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Sam Fox School, prior to which he was an Associate at Machado and Silvetti Associates in Boston. Kees Lokman is a new Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture. Lokman recently received a MDes degree from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, prior to which he had been teaching at the Illinois Institute of Technology and at Archeworks in Chicago. Eric Hoffman is a new Professor in Practice of Architecture. Hoffman had been teaching as a Visiting Assistant Professor at the Sam Fox School. He is a co-director of the firm patterhn and was previously HOK’s design liaison for the St. Louis Art Museum expansion with David Chipperfield Architects.

Peter MacKeith, Associate Dean and Associate Professor of Architecture, was appointed Honorary Consul for Finland in the state of Missouri on June 23. MacKeith was Curator for the Nordic Pavilion at the 13th Venice Biennale of Architecture, installing an exhibition entitled LIGHT HOUSES, comprised by 32 site-specific installations by Finnish, Swedish and Norwegian architects, in the Sverre Fehn-designed pavilion. MacKeith’s essay, “The Building Art, the Social Art: Reflections on Nordic Public Architecture,” was included in the catalog for the Louisiana Museum (Denmark) summer exhibition New Nordic: Architecture and Identity.

Peter MacKeith and Eric Hoffman recently completed the construction of Make a House Intelligent shelter/pavilion as part of the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum’s exhibition Design with the Other 90%: Cities at Washington University’s Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum.

Igor Marjanovic, Associate Professor of Architecture and Director of Undergraduate Programs, organized the Interior Urbanism Workshop in Florence together with Franco Pisani from the Institute at Palazzo Rucellai and Alessandro Ayusso from the University of Westminster, London. The workshop brought together a number of UK and US students around issues of cultural identity and collective memory in contemporary European cities. Specifically, the workshop focused on the city’s Cemetery of Mercy and its conversion into a new public space. The workshop also included drawing lessons by Regan Wheat, senior lecturer in the Sam Fox School of Design and Visual Arts, and a public lecture series titled “The July Issue,” which was held at the Fondazione Michelucci in Fiesole. “The July Issue” featured conceptual artist and architect Gianni Petena, artist Paolo Parisi, the University of Florence, and architects Elena Barthel from the Rural Studio, Alabama, and Jonathan Hill from the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London.

Robert McCarter, the Ruth and Norman Moore Professor of Architecture, published Wiel Arets: Autobiographical References in summer 2012, and Understanding Architecture: A Primer on Architecture as Experience, co-authored with Juhani Pallasmaa, in fall 2012. McCarter also had several essays and chapters published during summer 2012, including “The Limits of Form: Critical Practice and the Creation of Place,” in The Limits of Form: Enrique Norten TEN Arquitectos, edited by Alejandro Hernandez; “Making Brick Modern: Louis Kahn’s Masonry Structures” and “What Concrete Wants to Be: Louis Kahn’s Precast Concrete Structures,” chapters in L’architrave, le plancher, la plate-bande: A New History of Construction, Volume II, edited by Roberto Gargiani; “A Middle-Ground Modernism: On the Making of an Architecture Appropriate for Its Place and Time,” in A Living Tradition: KPF Arkitekter 2002-2012; and “Frank Lloyd Wright” and “Louis I. Kahn,” chapters in The Great Builders, edited by Kenneth Powell. McCarter gave the lecture, “Demanding Presence: The Unbuilt Works of Louis Kahn,” at the Arhus School of Architecture, Arhus, Denmark, in spring 2012. In his professional practice, McCarter is involved in the renovation and restoration of Le Corbusier’s Apartment and Studio in Paris, as well as in the bookshop and cafe conversion of the garage of Alvar Aalto’s Maison Louis Carré outside Paris, both in association with Alfonso Architects of Tampa, Florida. McCarter helped organize the new Master of Science in Architectural Studies degree now offered at Washington University in St. Louis, and he coordinates the MS in Architectural Pedagogy degree.

 Eric Mumford, Professor, lectured in the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum Spotlight Series “Fumihiko Maki’s Mildred Lane Kemper Museum” on November 9, 2011,  and at the European Architectural History Network (EAHN) conference, in Brussels, Belgium in June 2012 with a paper presentation in the session: Neither “Modernism” nor “Avant-Garde”: A Roundtable Discussion in Honor of the 90th Birthday of Alan Colquhoun.  He was also reappointed as Chair of the Harvard Graduate School of Design Visiting Committee through 2013.