Professor David Heymann recently returned from the southern France, where he was in residence with the The Brown Foundation Fellows Program at the Dora Maar Residence. Directed by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and based in Ménerbes, France, the program provides residencies for mid-career professionals in the arts and humanities to concentrate on their fields of expertise. While at the Dora Maar House, he worked on a manuscript of essays.

Heymann is a practicing architect and a Distinguished Teaching Professor in the School of Architecture at The University of Texas at Austin. The focus of Heymann’s writing, research, and practice is the complex relationships of buildings and landscapes, particularly sustainable constructions and natural landscapes. His built work has been variously published and recognized with design honors, including selection for Emerging Voices by the Architecture League of New York.

Professor Heymann’s article, “The Eastward-Moving House,” was just published at Places: Design Observer. The subject of the essay is the relationship of house form to values held regarding land, landscape, the landscape of the family, nature and cosmology. The form of the essay is a fiction, generated in response and as an addition to another fiction: J.B. Jackson’s “The Westward-Moving House.” Written in 1953, Jackson’s great essay (long out of print) is also posted in Places.

From Heymann’s introduction: “If the centerline of Jackson’s “The Westward-Moving House” is the availability of unconsumed land to be transformed by value systems into landscapes, the conceit of this later essay is that such land no longer exists, and a cycle of re-consumption in landscape making has begun.”

Wilfried Wang, O’Neil Ford Centennial Professor in Architecture, co-curated the exhibition and co-edited the catalogue on “Alvaro Siza: From Line to Space” at the Siza Pavilion, Hombroich, Germany. Professor Wang also contributed to the Capus Ultzama 2011, Pamplona, Spain, June 23-25, 2011, on the subject of abstraction and modernization. The conference was organized by the Fundación Arquitectura y Sociedad, Madrid/Pamplona. Other speakers included Gerardo Caballero, Eduardo Pasquera, Marcelo Villafañe, Tadej Glazar, Anne Lacaton, and Camilo Rebelo.

Professor Juan Miró contributed an article titled “Let’s Guide Austin’s Growth to Preserve Landscape, Offer Compact Alternative” to the June 15, 2011, edition of the Austin American-Statesman. In the article, Miró compares two models of city development-the Landscape City and the Compact City-and suggests: “As Austin continues to grow, it is not about choosing one model over the other; we must embrace the virtues of both models and mesh them successfully.”

Assistant Professor Igor Siddiqui is featured in Archinect in their  “Working out of the Box” series.
Archinect highlights Siddiqui’s current work and explores his professional path. In part, Siddiqui explains, “I am increasingly interested in ways of defining space through means other than the introduction of new architectural volumes, focusing instead on imaginative re-tailoring of existing structures, performance-driven surface manipulations, exploiting relationships between objects and occupants, and taking advantage of ephemeral aspects of spatial experiences such as light, sound and smell.”