Gail Peter Borden, Discipline Head of Architecture and Director of Graduate Architecture Programs was awarded a 2014 ACSA Faculty Research and Design Award honorable mention for his project “fur-lined”. His installation Light Frames will be included in the University Art Museum at California State University Long Beach museum exhibition on Materials & Application entitled Build Something Beautiful opening January 25th and running through mid-April. His fourth book: Process: Material and Representation in Architecture [Routledge] will be on shelves in March along with his introductory framing essay to Material ConneXtion’s Material Innovation: Innovations in Architecture [Thames and Hudson]. This summer Professor Borden will offer his travel study program that tours the southwestern United States, looking at Land Art, Architecture and Landscape. 

Associate Professor Charles Lagreco in collaboration with Senior Lecturer Gary Paige are offering a new experimental seminar Research + Design + Build this spring term to initiate a new curricular program for support of this type of effort. The effort will seek to build on the great traditions of community activism and former design build efforts at the USC School of Architecture and involve the professional community in the actives. the USC Architectural Guild has already provided a seed grant to assist in the effort.

Michael Hricak, FAIA, has been selected to represent California in the AIA College of Fellows.

Christopher Warren, adjunct assistant professor of architecture, and his office WORD finished in second place in a national competition for K+BB with their Shoreheights Residence project.  Also, their project for French fashion label A.P.C. will begin construction this month.  The store, located on Melrose, will finish construction in early April, 2014.

Karen Kensek and Douglas Noble received an ACSA Creative Achievement award for their work supporting licensure.

Trudi Sandmeier, graduate Director of the USC Heritage Conservation program, was recently appointed to serve as the 1st Vice Chair and Membership Chair of the National Council for Preservation Education, a coalition of educational institutions promoting academic excellence in historic preservation and its allied disciplines

Victor Jones, assistant professor of architecture has published (IN)FORMAL L.A. – The Space of Politics. Released by eVolo Press, the book traces another course to uncover Los Angeles’ primal sources of creation – land and speculation. Within the endless sprawl there resides flurries of uncodified spatial configurations that no high-definition map or satellite image can accurately capture nor present. Composed of essays, photos, projects and interviews, (IN)formal LA explores a range of unique spatial practices and pedagogies through the lens of politics in Los Angeles providing a spatial awareness culturally rooted, socially responsive and vitally connected to the city — embracing the quirky, celebrating the wide and embellishing the close range to expose the complex social organizations within this contemporary urban network.

Adjunct Associate Professor, Warren Techentin, received a California AIA award for the Montrose Residence. Additionally, this winter his firm WTARCH will install La Cage aux Folles at the Materials & Applications gallery. The project received grants from both the Andy Warhol Foundation and the Pasadena Art Alliance.

Tigran Ayrapetyan, Adjunct Assistant Professor established relationship within the years between the undergraduate Building Science program at the USC School of Architecture and Simpson Strong-Tie, who kindly offered to include USC into their scholarship program. For the 1st time, USC will be eligible to participate in the Simpson Strong-Tie Structural Engineering / Architecture Student Scholarship Program, for the 2013-2014 academic year.  

Qingyun Ma, AIA, was named one of the “30 Most Admired Educators for 2014” by DeignIntelligence.  

Lisa Little‘s pavilion Three Horned Beast (designed by Layer, Lisa Little and Emily White) is moving to a new exterior home in Plummer Park, West Hollywood. The pavilion is thirty feet tall and was commissioned by The New Children’s Museum in San Diego. The pavilion is made of over four hundred unique laser cut and folded aluminum elements finished with seven powder coat colors.

Hraztan Zeitlian, AIA, LEED BD+C, NCARB, Visiting Critic at the school this semester is the 2013-2014 Chair of the American Institute of Architects California Council (AIACC) Design Awards Committee. He is also the 2013 Vice President of the California Architects Board. He was originally appointed to the Board in 2011 by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.