Diane Ghirardo organized a conference for the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (UCLA) on “Love and Death in the Renaissance Castle,” in November 2015, where she also presented a paper entitled “Lovers and Demons.” In December 2015, she presented a paper entitled “The Seals of Lucrezia Borgia and Isabella d’Este” at a conference on Seals and Status at the British Museum, London.
David Gerber, Assistant Professor, is co-chairing a special session at the 2016 ACSA Annual conference on Big Data and the City. He was a keynote speaker at Brazil’s SindusCON annual Building Information Modeling conference and at Anahuac University in Mexico City.
On November 17, 2015 Victor J. Jones, assistant professor of architecture inaugurated a new lecture series at Arc en rêve centre d’architecture in Bordeaux, France. Organized by Gilles Ragot, Émilie d’Orgeix, Gilles-Antoine Langlois, and Gauthier Bolle, the series is dedicated to new research in architectural history (XX-XXI centuries). Jones presented ‘Sens dessus dessous: le pont de Basento’ (Topsy-turvy: The Basento Bridge), a lecture about the Basento Viaduct (1966-76) in Potenza Italy. In anticipation of his forthcoming book about the Basento Viaduct, Jones also lectured at the Institut national des sciences appliquées in Strasbourg, France on November 8, 2015 and the Katholieke Universiteit in Leuven, Belgium on November 23, 2015.
Alexander Robinson is presenting a paper on the intricacies of combining Blue-Green Open Space with Urban Infrastructure in Los Angeles at the international conference Water, Megacities, and Global Change at the UNESCO Headquarters in Paris alongside the major global warming conference, COP21. Following this, he will be presenting his work in Belgium at the KU Leuven Landscape Architecture Series.
Vinayak Bharne was among the nine international trans-disciplinary urban thinkers and invited speakers honored at the Urban Edge Award Seminar at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Architecture & Urban Planning (SARUP). Introduced in 2006, the biennial Urban Edge Award (now in its fifth iteration) recognizes excellence in the broad field of urban design and the ability of individuals to create major, positive change within the public realm through engaging research, critical practice and urban activism. Bharne was also recently part of a panel discussion on the Los Angeles Mobility Plan 2035 in the USC Urban Growth Seminar Series. His article “The Affordable City: Balancing Two Extremes with an Equitable Middle” was published in My Liveable City, Oct-Dec 2015 issue in India.
Larchmont Charter at Lafayette Park, the renovation of Welton Becket’s 1955 New York Life building for a charter school by Adjunct Associate Professor Eric Haas‘s firm DSH // architecture, was published on savingplaces.org, a site of the National Trust for Historic Preservation.
Hraztan Zeitlian, AIA, LEED BD+C, NCARB, was on this Year’s Jury for the American Institute of Architects California Council (AIACC) Design Awards. He was also on the AIACC Monterey Design Conference Organizing Committee. The Conference was held in mid-October.
Assistant Professor Alvin Huang will be speaking as part of the Future Tense Lecture Series hosted by the Alaska Design Forum on Monday Dec 7 (Anchorage), Tuesday Dec 8 (Juneau), and Wednesday Dec 9 (Fairbanks). His firm, Synthesis Design + Architecture was recently honored with a 2015 A&D Trophy Award (Best Retail/Commercial Building) for The Groove@CentralWorld in Bangkok, and a 2015 SXSWEco Place By Design Award (Data/Technology Category) for the Pure Tension Pavilion. The recent release of “50 Under 50: Innovators of the 21st Century” by Images Publishing and edited by Beverly Russell, Eva Maddox, and Farooq Ameen features the work of multiple USC faculty including Patrick Tighe (Patrick Tighe Architecture), Scott Uriu (B+U), Alice Kimm (JFAK) and Alvin Huang (Synthesis Design + Architecture), as well as USC alumnus Mark Lee ’91 (JohnstonMarklee).
Professor G. Goetz Schierle was appointed Executive Editor of the Journal of Steel Structures & Construction.
Victor Regnier will return to Lisbon, Portugal in the Winter and northern Europe in the Spring to continue his research on housing and community design for frail and long-lived populations.
Scott Uriu, lecturer at USC has been included in the new book Fifty Under Fifty: Innovators of the 21st Century, by Images Publishing The book showcases honorees located across many different countries, including Bangladesh, Belgium, Brazil, China, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, Mexico, The Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Thailand, Turkey, and the United States. A distinguished five-person jury presided over the final selection: Stanley Tigerman, founding partner, Tigerman McCurry, Chicago; Ralph Johnson, design principal, Perkins+Will, Chicago; Jeanne Gang, founder Gang Studio, Chicago; Marion Weiss, founding partner, WEISS/MANFREDI, New York; and Qingyun Ma, Dean of Architecture, University of Southern California, and founder MADA s.p.a.m., Shanghai and Beijing.
Mark C. Childs, Professor and Associate Dean for Research, recently published “Learning from New Millennium Science Fiction Cities,” Journal of Urbanism, V8, N1, March 2015, 97-109.
Kristen Shaw and Mira Woodson, Lecturers, are curators and participants for the extensive city-wide exhibition On the Map: Unfolding Albuquerque Art + Design. Following architecture faculty are participants of this exhibition: Tim Castillo, Kramer Woodard, Kima Wakefield, Chris Beccone, Efthimios Maniatis, Cory Greenfield and Jared Winchester. www.ABQontheMap.com
Eleni Bastéa, professor of architectural history and theory, was the keynote speaker in the 2014 IASTE conference (International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments) in Kuala Lumpur. Her talk, “Silent Histories of the City,” was presented on December 14. http://iaste.berkeley.edu/uncategorized/iaste-2014-conference-program.html
Assistant Professor David Gerber has been invited to return to give a keynote lecture to Brazil’s SindusCON an event that combines the leading Architecture, Engineering, and Construction communities on the Future of BIM and Design Technology. He has also been invited to co-organize a special session at the upcoming ACSA conference in Seattle on Data and Architecture. Dr. Gerber has been re-appointed to the Board of Directors for the Association of Computer Aided Design in Architecture.
Gail Peter Borden was elevated to the AIA College of Fellows. He was also recognized with the USC Associates Award for Artistic expression (the highest honor the University bestows for creative achievement) as well as being awarded the USC Mellon Mentoring Award.
Dr. Joon-Ho Choi organized and ran a seminar, entitled “Human-Building Integration: Thermal Comfort Control for an Individual Setting”, during the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) Summer Conference held in Atlanta, GA. He also presented one of his research themes, “Human-Building Integration As a Proactive Environmental Control Strategy “. In July he was a speaker at the Healthy Building 2015 Conference, “Development of an Automatic Thermal Control System Using Human Facial Skin Temperature.” Dr. Choi has been recently invited as a scientific committee to the 2016 PLEA Conference the 2016 International Conference on Indoor Air Quality Ventilation & Energy Conservation In Building.
Alexander Robinson was selected to present a paper at the UNESCO Conference: Water, Megacities, and Global Change in Paris this December, alongside the international UN Climate Conference. He is also presenting this work in the University of Leuven Landscape Architecture Lecture Series in Belgium.
Prof. G. Goetz Schierle updated his computer program SDG: Structure Design Graph to design diverse structures for gravity and lateral wind and seismic loads
Dr. Travis Longcore (Landscape Architecture Program) was an invited instructor for the National Park Service at their Sustainable Outdoor Lighting Training Workshop in Fort Collins, Colorado in August. He published a book chapter on lessons learned from 20 years of butterfly conservation work in California, titled “Butterflies are not grizzly bears: Lepidoptera conservation in practice” (in Butterfly conservation in North America: Efforts to help save our charismatic microfauna, Springer). Dr. Longcore has also recently been certified as a licensed Geographic Information Science Professional (GISP) by the GIS Certification Institute.
Victor Regnier has a book contract with Wiley to look at housing design and service solutions for the oldest-old–that is–people in the 85+ and 100+ age cohorts. These age groups are the faster growing ones in the US population. Regnier will also keynote the Canadian Seniors Housing Summit in Toronto on November 4th.
Geoffrey von Oeyen was recently featured in the August 2015 issue of Architect Magazine. In “Next Progressives: Geoffrey von Oeyen Design,” Architect published a firm profile and images of von Oeyen’s current professional work, as well as a photograph of his Sailing Architecture exhibition at the USC School of Architecture. The piece concluded that by “looking at the way naval design leverages environmental forces like wind and water to deal with external forces– human occupation, space, and mechanical systems– while also creating elegant structures that are smarter, lighter, and stronger, von Oeyen is able to create innovative designs that have the potential to steer architecture through uncharted waters.”
USC will co-host the Passive and Low Energy Architecture conference in Los Angeles from July 11-13. Professor Marc Schiler is the Scientific (Review) Committee Chair. PLEA2015 was held in Bologna, Italy, with representation from 42 countries. This will be the first time that PLEA has been held in the USA, since its founding in 1981. It has been hosted in 30 cities across the globe. The conference will deal wit Regenerative Environments at the scale of Cities, Buildings, People. See PLEA2016.org.
Alice Kimm presented a TEDx talk entitled “What Architecture Can Do For You (if you take the time to ask),” at The Broad stage in Santa Monica, CA. Alice is also Chair of the upcoming 2015 Monterey Design Conference, to take place in Monterey, CA over the weekend of October 16-18. Her firm, John Friedman Alice Kimm Architects, was awarded a 2015 AIACC Residential Design Honor Award for its Field House, as well as an AIACC Design Merit Award for its Resnick Sustainability Institute / Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis at Caltech.
Vinayak Bharne was appointed as the urban design and planning adviser to the Government of Karnataka Directorate of Urban Land Transport, India, to help craft strategic mobility plans for four cities in the state. He was nominated to the Editorial Board of the Journal of Architecture and Urbanism in London. He was invited as one of seven international architects and planners to the “Chandigarh Rethink” symposium in India, to opine on planning directions for the future of the city of Chandigarh, originally designed by Le Corbusier in the 1950s. He was recently interviewed by Monocle 24 Radio, UK, in the program, The Globalist. The interview focused on the City of Los Angeles’ Mobility Plan 2035, that lays the policy foundations for making Los Angeles a multi-modal, bicycle-friendly city.
The LA River Public Art Project, co-founded by Esther Margulies ASLA, will hold the inaugural 10 FEET event in Frogtown on the LA River on October 10th. The event is a temporary installation of site specific pieces calling attention to the value of curated arts and culture along the river, and the newly created 10 foot wide river friendly zone along the 32 miles in the City of LA.
Assistant Professor Alvin Huang has been selected as one of four “Emerging Voices” to speak at the upcoming 2015 Monterey Design Conference hosted by the AIA California Council in Asilomar, California. Additionally, he recently lectured on his design research as part of the Forum Lecture Series for Ottawa Architecture Week in Ottawa, Canada hosted by the Azrieli School of Architecture at Carleton University.
Michael Ellars was an exhibitor for DLR Group at the TASA/TASB Conference in Austin, Texas, on October 2nd and 3rd. DLR Group’s K-12 Sector sponsored the “Student Innovation Challenge” at the conference, which brought teams from three high schools and two middle schools across the state to Austin for the weekend with the challenge to develop solutions to significant problems, including how to eliminate the national debt. Ellars crewed the exhibit hall booth to demonstrate the use of Virtual Reality technology for architectural visualization of projects at various stages of design, which is an on-going result of my DLR Group “Personal Development Grant” that he was awarded in January.
David Baird, Professor and Director of the UNLV School of Architecture, recently announced that he will step down as Director and return to the faculty starting January 1st, 2016. Over the past 6 years Baird’s administrative accomplishments have been numerous, including the development of a design-construction initiative responsible for placing 2nd in the 2013 Solar Decathlon Competition. The design-build studio is currently designing and constructing modular facilities for the Nevada State Parks. Baird will return to teaching—having more time to devote to his scholarship, artwork, and award winning design + construction firm.
I would welcome hearing from any of your students who might be interested in graduate studies in building science at the University of Southern California. We are an expensive private University, but we have some scholarship funding to help partially offset tuition. We are not as expensive as some people think!
We have an outstanding and growing faculty supporting building science (Schiler, Schierle, Carlson, Noble, Konis, Choi, Kensek, Gerber, Huang, Borden, Sung, and more). Our two new faculty have settled in already (Kyle Konis and Joon-Ho Choi).
Prof. Marc Schiler has been promoted to Vice-Dean.
I am now the Director of the Building Science program (again) and still chair of the Ph.D. program in building science.
Please have interested students contact me by email: dnoble@usc.edu
Thank you.
Doug
Douglas E. Noble, FAIA, Ph.D. Chair of the Ph.D. Program and Co-Founder of the CLIPPER Lab School of Architecture University of Southern California Los Angeles, California 90089-0291 USA 213•740•4589 dnoble@usc.edu
Professor Graeme Morland was honored with a major exhibit this semester at the USC School of Architecture. “A RETROSPECTIVE, 50+ YEARS OF ARCHITECTURAL DRAWINGS AND SKETCHES, 1963—2015. BC. (before computer). The work exhibited presumed to be both educational and informative to students of architecture and design at USC today, and hopefully fueled the healthy discussion and debate regarding design description and presentation which now bridges from the soul of emotion with hand drawings, to the current wizardry of digital technology. An exhibition of work, initiated at the Glasgow school of Art, Scotland, developed at the U of I in Chicago, and realized at USC in Los Angeles, covering a 5o+ year period, required the compilation, editing and formatting of hundreds of drawings, generally classified in three categories, namely, A) The “Sketchbook”. Images of places and events visited, B) Drawings that describe “ Visions of Place”, architectural ideas & projects, and C) Drawings that inform the anatomy and material assembly of “Place”, the method and process of “making and constructing.” A catalogue of this exhibit will be forthcoming.
Lisa Little will be a presenter at the Los Angeles AIA ‘Powerful’ symposium at the Annenberg Space for Photography on February 27th. Her topic is entitled “A Diversity of Practice: Expanding Opportunities”.
The Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) is hosting a recent survey and report by Lauren Matchison on their website. The survey, The Effect of Social Media on Architecture Graduate School Selection, takes a close look at how prospective graduate students use social media as a tool to research architecture schools.
Assistant Professor Alvin Huang has been named to Engineering Record News California’s “Top 20 under 40 2015” and annual award which honors the “cream of the crop in the design and construction industry who have built extraordinary industry portfolios before the age of 40”. Huang recently gave a lecture on his recent work at the CalPoly Pomona Department of Architecture, and will also be lectures in March at Syracuse University School of Architecture and the CalPoly San Luis Obispo LA Metro Program.
The latest built project of Lecturer Nefeli Chatzimina has been nominated for the Mies Van der Rohe Awards 2015 and was featured as a cover for the EK Magazine. During February Nefeli lectured at the BNCA University of Pune, the University of Mumbai and the Studio-X of Columbia University in Mumbai, India.
Professor Kyle Konis, Ph.D, AIA was recently awarded $149,400 from the California Energy Commission (CEC) to support research and development of his project entitled the Occupant Mobile Gateway (O.M.G.), which received the highest ranking during technical peer-review among all proposals submitted statewide. The objective of the O.M.G. is to leverage mobile sensing as a platform to enable design teams to validate and continually refine the performance of low-energy and environmentally responsive design strategies. The project is a continuation of a multi-disciplinary collaboration between Professor Konis and Professor Murali Annavaram in the Viterbi School of Engineering.
Vittoria Di Palma’s book, Wasteland, A History (Yale University Press, 2014) has won two prizes. It was awarded the 2015 J. B. Jackson Book Prize by The Foundation for Landscape Studies, and was the runner-up in the Architecture and Urban Planning category for the 2015 American Publishers Awards for Professional and Scholarly Excellence (PROSE).
Hraztan Zeitlian was appointed to the American Institute of Architects California Council’s prestigious Monterey Design Conference Committee (AIACC MDC), with other USC Faculty Larry Scarpaand Alice Kimm as well as Anne Fougeron, and David Meckel among others. http://aiacc.org/mdc/about-mdc/
Professor Gail Borden was elected to the AIA College of Fellows as the youngest member in California. He was awarded the 2015 USC Associate Award for Artistic Expression, the highest honor the University faculty bestow on it members for significant artistic expression. His solo exhibition “Faceted Line” opened late February at Galleri Urbane in Dallas, Texas presenting his newest paintings which implement space, depth, and color to create shallow and abstract architectural environments. He was recently commissioned by Routledge to do a follow-up book entitled Lineament: Material and Geometry in Architectural Production to build on his best-selling book Matter: Material Processes in Architectural Production.
Associate Professor Charles Lagreco in collaboration with Lecturer Gary Paige and Associate Dean Gail Borden have submitted a grant proposal to USC Neighborhood Outreach for a partnership with the 32nd Street / USC Magnet Center K-12 school to work together on a School of Architecture Research + Design + Build Program to build a portable performance facility to support the school and the neighborhood around USC. The proposal which identifies a $150,000 budget target to design and build the project, is proposed to extend over three semesters in the 2015-16 academic year and is partially funded by the Marnell Endowment recently established to provide support for design build studios in the School of Architecture curriculum.
At the request of the USC Career Center and intended for the entire university community, Professor Michael Hricak recently spoke on, and moderated a panel focused on, Careers in Design.
Lecturer Andy Ku and his firm OCDC have been selected for a public art commission in Downtown Los Angeles. The project takes on the idea of “traffic” as both a cultural mission and an urban contextual activity. The design depicts the signs of nature and culture in a single environment, as a contemporary meditation on traditional Japanese woodblock prints (Ukiyo-e “drawings of the floating word”)
Karen Kensek has two research papers for the upcoming Architecture Research Centers Consortium (ARCC) Conference, Chicago, IL, 2015.
Hijazi, Mohammad, Karen Kensek, and Kyle Konis, “Bridging the gap: supporting data transparency of BIM to BEM”
Chen, Yiyu, Karen Kensek, Joon-Ho Choi, and Marc Schiler, “Using modified weather files for predicting future building performance,” accepted for the Architecture Research Centers Consortium (ARCC) Conference
In January, Rob Ley won an invited design competition to develop and fabricate a permanent installation for the Portland Zoo in Oregon. Also in January, Rob completed a permanent installation for the Kansas City Police Department.
Assistant Professor Alvin Huang was named to the Board of Directors for the Association of Computer Aided Design in Architecture. Additionally, his Pure Tension Pavilion received a 2015 R+D Award from Architect Magazine (featured in the July Issue) and was also named as a finalist for the SXSW Eco Place by Design Award. Alvin will be one of 5 finalists pitching their projects to the jury at the annual SXSW Festival in Austin, Texas in October.
Alexander Robinson is the 2015-2016 recipient of the Prince Charitable Trust Rome Prize for Landscape Architecture. He will be developing new tools to investigate the intersection of infrastructural design and picturesque theories.
The book Young Architects 16: Overlay, was published by Princeton Architectural Press in July 2015, featuring the work of Geoffrey von Oeyen from the 2014 Architectural League Prize. Also in July, Geoffrey von Oeyen participated in the symposium “Mapping the Middle Zone” in Shenzen, China, organized by fellow USC faculty member Gary Paige under the leadership of Dean Qingyun Ma.
Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects [LOHA] was recently shortlisted for a student accommodations project in Dublin. As a part of the Grangegorman Development Agency master plan, the student accommodations will help develop a new university quarter for the Dublin Institute of Technology and other institutions. LOHA is one of six firms participating in “Shelter: Rethinking How We Live in Los Angeles”, an upcoming exhibition at the A+D Architecture and Design Museum curated by Sam Lubell and Danielle Rago and opening on August 20th. LOHA’s proposal will examine the relationship between urbanization and water use to develop new modes of urban occupation along the Los Angeles River. LOHA’s UCLA Adjacent Student and Faculty Housing was recently awarded an AIA California Council Honor Award, and the Flynn Mews House was honored with a People’s Choice Award and an AZ Award of Merit from Azure Magazine.
Rick Gooding was recently one of the jurors for the North Carolina AIA Design Awards. Chu+Gooding Architects design for the Autry Resource Center in Burbank is currently under construction. This 102,000 Sq Ft Storage and Research Facility is a climate controlled, high-density Archive that will house the Autry National Center Collection of artworks and artifacts focusing on the American and Native American Southwest. As part of the primary design team including Populous, HMC Architects and OLIN, Chu+Gooding Architects is proud to announce that our collective has been awarded the $350 million Los Angeles Convention Center renovation project. The progressive design focuses on place-making, forward-thinking functionality and authenticity of experience.
Michael Hricak, FAIA, who served as the Editor-in-Chief of the 13th Edition of the Architecture Students Handbook of Professional Practice (AIA/Wiley 2008), is serving on the Advisory Committee for the upcoming 14th Edition of the ASHPP, reviewing articles and providing content.
Adjunct Assistant Professor, Mario Cipresso AIA, as Design Director with CO Architects is currently designing a new start-up medical school for the California University of Science and Medicine (CUSM) in Colton, CA. CUSM is only the 9th medical school to be established in Southern California and is scheduled to welcome it’s first class in 2017. As the first structure planned for the new campus, the 100,000 SF facility includes research laboratories, classrooms, various medical simulation and training spaces along with communal spaces for students and faculty.
Dr. Travis Longcore (Landscape Architecture Program) was an invited plenary speaker in May at the 3rd international Artificial Light at Night conference (ALAN 2015) in Sherbrooke, Quebec on the topic of light pollution as global change. In June, Longcore and an international group of co-authors published a paper in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution presenting “A framework to assess evolutionary responses to anthropogenic light and sound.” Dr. Longcore was also a featured guest speaker discussing drought and the Los Angeles landscape at Los Angeles design firm Rios Clementi Hale.
Professor Marc Schiler presented a paper at the American Solar Energy Society’s conference, Solar 2015, on teaching environmentally responsive design in Architecture entitled “Sage on the Stage AND Guide at the Side: Teaching Strategies and Experiences in Preparing ZNE Capable Architecture Students” by Marc Schiler, Kyle Konis and Tim Kohut. Professor Schiler also gave an invited presentation titled Architecture and Environment: 40 years of climate responsive design, passive solar Architecture, and zero net energy. Professor Schiler was awarded the 2015 Passive Solar Pioneer Award at the Awards Banquet. “The American Solar Energy Society has established this award for passive solar pioneers. It honors those in the passive field whose pioneering work set the stage for others to follow. Honorees are men and women who developed the theories, early research efforts, new concepts, and opportunities for later researchers to develop. Their foresight, innovative thinking, and creativity opened the doors for others.”
The first full-length book on the Gamble House has just been published by CityFiles Press (Chicago) and the Gamble House/USC School of Architecture. “The Gamble House: Building Paradise in California” draws on recently discovered archival material to re-write the narrative of a house whose story had been assumed a settled matter for years. This publication, by Edward Bosley, Anne Mallek, Ann Scheid and Robert Winter, reveals new information about the Gamble family, their Pasadena winter home and the gardens designed for them, illustrated with stunning new photography by renowned architectural photographer Alexander Vertikoff. Available September 1 at the Gamble House Bookstore and other outlets specializing in architecture titles.
PHOTO: La Cage aux Folles, a 17 foot bent steel tube structure by Warren Techentin, was previously on exhibition at Materials & Applications (M&A) in Silver Lake from April 19th through September 2nd. Once built, La Cage actively engaged the community by opening the sidewalk as a pocket park and through curated performances
Assistant Professor Alexander Robinson was selected to be a Rome Prize Fellow in Landscape Architecture for 2015-2016. This spring his machine for designing the Owens Lake Dust Control Project was exhibited at the Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions gallery as part of the show “After the Aqueduct”. In May he and Associate Professor Vittoria Di Palma will co-present at the Dumbarton Oaks conference, “River and Cities”.
Associate Professor Vittoria Di Palma was recently awarded the 2015 Louis Gottschalk Prize by The American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS) for her book, Wasteland: A History. The annual prize is awarded for the best scholarly book on an eighteenth-century subject. Di Palma and Wasteland: A History were also recognized by the PROSE Awards (The American Publishers Awards for Professional and Scholarly Excellence) this year with an honorable mention in the architecture and urban planning category. In addition, Wasteland was one of five books awarded the 2015 John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize by the Foundation for Landscape Studies.
This semester select landscape architecture students are enrolled in a unique studio: A New Waterfront for Old Istanbul / Rethinking the Eminönü Waterfront. Taught by Adjuncts Takako Tajima and John Dutton. The studio reimagines the public infrastructure at the water’s edge of Eminönü, a neighborhood on Istanbul’s Historic Peninsula within walking distance to Istanbul’s most famous sites (i.e. Hagia Sophia, Topkapi Palace, the Blue Mosque, etc.). The work of the studio aims not only to develop ideas for a new urban space and waterfront edge but also to address how the new will connect to the old. The studio included a weeklong site visit to Istanbul during which time students had the opportunity to present their preliminary designs at Istanbul Bilgi University’s Faculty of Architecture.
Professor and program director Kelly Shannon co-authored (with Bruno De Meulder) ‘Towards a Resilient Hoog Kortrijk, Belgium: The conversion of a fragments, post-war development’ for Topos 90: Resilient Cities and Landscapes and penned ‘Preemptive design opportunities to mitigate disasters’ (the editorial) for the Journal of Landscape Architecture (theme issue Disaster: 2015-1) as well as the journal’s ‘Urbanization and Risk: In Conversation with Miho Mazereeuw’ and short book review of ‘Humanitarian Architecture: 15 Stories of Architects Working After Disaster’. In July, she will be a keynote speaker at the Designing Inclusion: Co-Producing Ecological Urbanism for Inclusive Housing Transformations in Guayaquil, Ecuador at the International Summer School.
Professor Emeritus and former Landscape Architecture Director, Robert Harris, received the USC Faculty Lifetime Achievement Award. USC proudly praised his inspiring creativity, compassionate teaching and mentorship, and enduring contributions to the University and the School of Architecture
Associate Professor (Research) Dr. Travis Longcore, published research in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B on the feasibility of configuring LED lamps to minimize insect attraction, with targeted application in the tropics to reduce transmission of insect-borne diseases. The paper was part of a special issue on the impacts of artificial lighting on biological communities and received significant international media attention.
Assistant Professor Alison B. Hirsch presented “City Choreography” at Portland State University as part of their annual lecture series. In late March, she was an invited speaker in the “Spatial Politics and the City” symposium at the Belkin Gallery of University of British Columbia.
Associate Professor (Research) Dr. Travis Longcore and Assistant Professor Rachel Berney organized a multi-school talk and discussion on cities and climate change, headlined by USC¹s Director of Graduate Studies in Landscape Architecture, Kelly Shannon, with her talk on “Water Urbanism: Learning from Then and Now.” Visitors included the McKinley Futures joint MLA-MARCH studio from the University of Washington, Seattle, under the direction of Dave Miller and Ben Spencer, and faculty member Måns Tham from KTH in Stockholm, along with students from KTH¹s 5-year architecture program. Tham also gave a guest lecture and workshop on hybrid urban infrastructures in Longcores¹ Urban Nature class.
Assistant Professor Rachel Berney, Assistant Professor of Practice Lauren Matchison and Lecturer Lee Schneider have created a new course, called Visual Storytelling and Entrepreneurship in Media. Itwill provide graduate students with much needed entrepreneurial expertise and literacy in online media to define and promote design-driven projects. Further, the course offers graduate students new methods of visual research. It embraces an entrepreneurial approach and addresses current trends in design, data, and research.
Dr. David Gerber has recently published the book ‘Paradigms in Computing’ with eVolo Press. He has also published and presented his research at the Simulation in Architecture and Urban Design annual conference (SimAUD 2015). His work has also been accepted for publication at the CAADFutures 2015 bi-annual conference and will be included in the CAADFutures Book published by Springer.
Vinayak Bharne was elected to the Board of Directors of Pasadena Heritage, one of Southern California oldest heritage non-profits. He was also one of seven invited presenters at the Urban Edge Prize 2015 Seminar – Resilience & Change – at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee.
John Dutton will be a featured speaker for two panels at the 2015 Dwell on Design Conference May 29th -31st at the Los Angeles Convention Center. He will be presenting new ideas for urban housing for baby-boomers with architect Barbara Bestor as part of their Grey Gardens collaboration. At a second panel, he will present his vision for the transformation of Los Angeles freeways into new networks of greenways.
Assistant Professor Alison B. Hirsch presented “City Choreography” at Portland State University as part of their annual lecture series. In late March, she was an invited speaker in the “Spatial Politics and the City” symposium at the Belkin Gallery of University of British Columbia.
Vittoria Di Palma’s book Wasteland, A History (Yale 2014) has recently been awarded three prizes: the 2015 Louis Gottschalk Book Prize by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, a 2015 John Brinckerhoff Jackson Book Prize by the Foundation for Landscape Studies, and a 2015 PROSE Awards Honorable Mention in the Architecture and Urban Planning category.
Assistant Professor Kyle Konis, Ph.D, AIA was invited to speak at the 2015 AIA National Convention on his ongoing research focused on daylight and health in buildings.
This year, Doris Sung was named a 2014 US Artist Fellow, joining an impressive list of past architects and artists. She also received an ACSA Faculty Design award for ³eXo” and a National AIA Small Projects Award for ³Bloom”.
Aroussiak Gabrielian’s research will be exhibited at the USC School of Cinematic Arts at the end of this month. Additionally, she has been invited to present her work at AVANCA|CINEMA 2015: International Conference of Cinema, Art, Technology, and Communication which will take place in Portugal in July, and at the International Visual Methods Conference 2015, taking place in Brighton, UK in the Fall.
Assistant Professor Alvin Huang has been named to Perspective Magazine’s 40 Under 40 2015, a selection of “40 creative stars under the age of 40 who will shape the design world in the decades to come.” Huang will be giving a lecture on his recent work as part of the CalPoly SLO LA Metro Program spring lecture series in May and will be featured in a panel discussion about “3D Printing and the Future of Design” at the Dwell on Design Conference in June at the LA Convention Center.
The work of Patrick Tighe FAIA featured on the cover of the recent issue of Global Architecture / GA Houses 140.
Professor Joon-Ho Choi recently attended the Architectural Research Centers Consortium Conference, held in Chicago, IL. As an ARCC New Investigator Award recipient, he gave a special lecture on “Human-Building Integration: Proactive Indoor Environmental Quality Control Approaches” at the conference. Dr. Choi also presented his recent research outcomes with his students, Spurthy Yogananda (Climate-Responsive Evidence-Based Green Roof Design Decision Support for the U.S. Climate), Chao Yang (Methods for Estimating Energy Use Intensity Based on Building Façade Features), and Yiyu Chen (Building Performance Analysis Considering Climate Changes). Dr. Choi was invested and gave a special talk on his research, titled “Comprehensive Post-Occupancy Evaluation” to the U.S. Green Building Council – Los Angeles Chapter.
Christopher Warren participated in the group exhibition, “Waiting for Guggenheim,” at the University of Southern California on April 8th, which highlighted faculty submissions to the competition. He also participated in the panel discussion for the event, which examined the inherent complexities that exist in competitions of this grand scale. His office, WORD, currently has two projects under construction for French fashion company A.P.C. (in collaboration with French design architect Laurent Deroo), as well as a cafe and new residence in the L.A. area
Hraztan Zeitlian, AIA, LEED BD+C, NCARB, is a Juror this year for the American Institute of Architects California Council (AIACC) Design Awards.
Geoffrey von Oeyen’s work for the 2014 Architectural League Prize will be featured in the book Young Architects 16 by Princeton Architectural Press, to be published in May. In June, Geoffrey will be curating an exhibition of graduate student work and moderating a panel discussion regarding his advanced design studio titled “Performative Composites: Sailing Architecture.” The event will take place on June 16 at the Annenberg Community Beach House in Santa Monica, California, and is sponsored by the USC School of Architecture, The City of Santa Monica, and the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design.
Larchmont Charter at Lafayette Park by DSH // architecture, the firm of Adjunct Associate Professor Eric Haas, was published in the May 2015 issue of Dwell. Haas will present the project, a renovation of Welton Becket’s 1955 New York Life building for a charter middle- and high school, at Dwell on Design in June. DSH’s project Cat’s Cradle will be published in the forthcoming Nanotecture from Phaidon Press.
Laurel Consuelo Broughton and her studio WELCOMEPROJECTS’ diptych, The In Crowd was published in Offramp #9, the SCI_arc architectural journal and the research project Two-Face is forthcoming in the Princeton School of Architecture’s journal, Pidgin #19. In April, Laurel gave the talk and workshop, Things Become Other Things at Syracuse University School of Architecture. This past fall she was selected with Andrew Kovacs to be part of the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design’s Out There Doing It event series where they discussed their own work as related to their collaborative project Gallery Attachment / As Builts. An outdoor installation and companion drawing show, Gallery Attachment / As Builts was sponsored by the Storefront for Art and Architecture and the John Chase Memorial Fund and shown at Jai & Jai Gallery in Los Angeles. In November, she presented the talk, At Play, as part of the symposium Delight at Princeton University.
Karen M. Kensek and Douglas Noble were selected to present at the 2015 AIA National Convention on the subject of professional licensing in architecture.
Gail Peter Borden was elected to the AIA College of Fellows as the youngest recipient in the history of California. He was honored with the 2015 USC Mellon Mentoring Award for Undergraduate Students, and was also awarded the USC Associates Award for Artistic Expression, the highest honor the University Faculty bestow on it members for significant Artistic Expression. His book Matter: Material Processes in Architectural Production has been commissioned with a follow-up compilation entitled Lineament: Material Geometry in Architectural Production forthcoming in 2016 and also by Routledge Press.
G. M. Morland, Architect. NCARB. ARCUK. Assoc Professor, curated an exhibit of his work called: A RETROSPECTIVE: 50+ YEARS OF ARCHITECTURAL DRAWINGS AND SKETCHES: 1963—2015. BC. (before computer). The work exhibited presumed to be both educational and informative to students of architecture and design at USC today, and hopefully fueled the healthy discussion and debate regarding design description and presentation which now bridges from the soul of emotion with hand drawings, to the current wizardry of digital technology. An exhibition of work, initiated at the Glasgow school of Art, Scotland, developed at the U of I in Chicago, and realized at USC in Los Angeles, covering a 50+ year period, required the compilation, editing and formatting of hundreds of drawings, generally classified in three categories, namely:
A. The “Sketchbook”. Images of places and events visited.
B. Drawings that describe “ Visions of Place”, architectural ideas & projects.
C. Drawings that inform the anatomy and material assembly of “Place”, the method and process of “making and constructing”. A catalogue of this exhibit will be forthcoming.
The latest built project of Lecturer Nefeli Chatzimina has been nominated for the Mies Van der Rohe Awards 2015 and was featured as a cover for the EK Magazine. Nefeli lectured at the BNCA University of Pune, the University of Mumbai and the Studio-X of Columbia University in Mumbai, India. Nefeli is organizing International Advanced Architectural Workshops in Athens during the Summer.
Also as founder of X|Atelier recently received a commission for the construction of an interior law office space downtown Los Angeles.
Lawrence Scarpa’s firm Brooks + Scarpa was selected from the shortlist of Snohetta, BIG, SHOP and NAADA to design the new $75 mil. mixed-use parking structures as part of the $2 billion MCCA Boston Convention Center expansion. Brooks + Scarpa has also been shortlisted to compete for the $370 million Seattle/Sound Transit E360 Metro line extension which includes two stations, a major transit center and pedestrian bridges connecting to the Microsoft Campus in Redmond, WA. Lawrence Scarpa, FAIA also received the 2015 Lifetime Achievement Award from the American Institute of Architects California Council.
UPCOMING CONFERENCE: Landscape Architecture as Necessity 3-Day Conference, University of Southern California, Los Angeles Thursday – Saturday, 22-24 September 2016
As climate change rapidly takes its place at the forefront of contemporary global challenges, landscape architecture is becoming an urgent necessity. Landscape architecture is uniquely able to synthesize ecological systems, scientific data, engineering methods, social practices, and cultural values, and integrate them into the design of the built environment. At the same time, its creative methods and visual vocabularies can help to shape questions and formulate novel approaches in more traditionally scientific or data-driven fields. Expanding and sharing platforms and interests will activate greater comprehension of the value of landscape-based strategies in environmental decision-making. Landscape Architecture as Necessity seeks to demonstrate, through international built work and ongoing design research, that the professions of the built environment, together with expertise from a wide range of relevant fields, are essential to moving beyond rhetoric to address the myriad challenges confronting urban and rural territories alike. A call for papers will be coming shortly. For more information, confirmed speakers and updates, see the conference website: arch.usc.edu/landscapeasnecessity
Diane Ghirardo presented a paper on Idea and Authorship at the Renaissance Society of America annual meeting in Berlin in March 2015; in April, she presented a paper at Yale University titled “Modernity in Renaissance Architecture and Ours. Her article, “The Blue of Aldo Rossi’s Sky,” appeared in AAFiles 70 (May 2015).
Rob Ley was recently awarded a commission to design a permanent outdoor pavilion for the Portland, Oregon City Zoo.
Jose Sanchez is finalising the ‘Blindspot Initiative’ Book, an edited volume looking at designers that challenge the competition model for architectural design by exploring the blurry boundaries of the design field. He is also finishing his video game Block’hood, an interactive city builder simulation that attempts to develop ideas of systemic thinking and ecological urbanism engaging a large audience
Prof. James Steele was named an ACSA Distinguished Professor.
The Courtyard at La Brea, a 32 unit affordable housing project for persons with Special Needs, designed by Professor John V MutlowFAIA and Adjunct Professor Patrick Tighe, FAIA, received the ‘Best of Year-Apartment Building’ Design Award form INTERIOR DESIGN Design Magazine and was published in their January 2015 issue. This project is also on the cover and featured in the current issue of DETAIL, an architectural magazine from South Korea. This affordable housing project was initially featured in September 2014 issue of ARCHITECT magazine.
Lisa Little was a recent lecturer in the Spring 2015 Lecture Series for the Cal Poly Pomona Landscape Architecture Department.
Scott Uriu with partner Herwig Baymgartner will have a large sculptural installation on exhibit at the Los Angeles Municipal Gallery at 4800 Hollywood Boulevard in Barnsdall Park, from May 17 through June 28, 2015, with an opening reception on May 17, 2015, from 2:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. The sculpture is a progression of their study of architectural space constructed of thin shell plastic with an emphasis on the examination of apertures interacting with video projections.
Karen M. Kensek and Douglas Noble were invited speakers at the “Collaborative Creativity Symposium” organized by Murali Paranandi at Miami University.
Ken Breisch has published the article, “Rediscovering the Fachwerk House in America: Preservation, the Bechers and Modernism,” in Die Nobilitierte Hauslandschaft: Zur Architektur der von Bernd und Hilla Becherf fotografierten Fachwerkhäuser des Siegener Industriegebiets, ed. Karl Kiem. Dresden: Eckhardt Richter & Co. OHG, 2015, pp. 75-88.
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