Architecture faculty Michael Pyatok and Sharon E. Sutton joined landscape architecture faculty Richard Haag and Julie Parrett, and artist Milenko Matanovic, as jurors in this year’s EDRA Great Places Awards.  The EDRA Great Places Awards are unique in recognizing professional and scholarly projects that enhance the experience of place through interdisciplinary and participatory processes. Jurors selected one winner in each of the award’s four categories: planning, design, research, and publication.  The awards will be presented at EDRA’s annual conference in Seattle on 31 May.

Steve Badanes was an invited speaker at the International Forum on New Regionalism in North America at the University of San Francisco in Quito, Ecuador in March 2011. In February, Badanes was  a juror for the Jeff Harnar Award for Contemporary Architecture in Sante Fe NM, and delivered a lecture at University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. In November he spoke at University of Hawaii, Manoa, and he will be the keynote speaker at the Timber Framers Guild of North America conference in Port Townsend WA in may.

Associate Professor of Architecture Rick Mohler and ten architecture graduate students traveled to Australia for the second Architecture 502/506Murcutt/Australia studio to work closely with Pritzker Prize and AIA Gold Medal winning architect Glenn Murcutt.  The two and a half week program commenced with Murcutt leading tours of some of his best known buildings outside Sydney including the Boyd Center and Simpson/Lee and Walsh houses.  The group then boarded two vans for the six hour drive north to Glenn’s farm near Kempsey, NSW.  The Kempsey Farmhouse (aka Marie Short House) served as the base of operations and accommodations for female students and faculty.  A nearby tractor shed, remodeled by Murcutt in 1992, served as the design studio while an adjacent cottage housed the male students.  Glenn is a walking encyclopedia on the flora and fauna of southern Australia, which made working in a remote landscape surrounded by it all the more compelling. 

The assigned design project, the adaptive re-use of the historic Trial Bay Gaol (jail), is located on a spectacular ocean site at South West Rocks about 40 minutes from the farm.  The program includes artist-in-residence live/work studios as well as a theater, gallery and public dining facilities.  Murcutt and Mohler worked with students in the studio for 7-8 hours a day, five days a week for two weeks with an emphasis on hand drawing and model making.  Each week concluded with a pin-up in the farmhouse.  Mohler will continue to work with the students in developing the designs through the completion of the spring quarter.  A publication of the student work is planned. 

Assistant Professor Ann Marie Borys and Assistant Professor Ann Huppert of the Department of Architecture, with Thaisa Way, Department of Landscape Architecture, organized the symposium “Drawing and the Renaissance Architect,” hosted by the University of Washington’s Rome Center in December.  The well-attended event featured a keynote talk by Ian Campbell of the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome and University of Edinburgh, and a full day of presentations and discussions among an international group of scholars exploring the role of drawing in professionalization of sixteenth-century Italian architectural practice.  The research presented will clearly yield significant knowledge, linking the act of drawing with the development of the design professions, an important area of emerging scholarship.

Professor Jeffrey Karl Ochners new book, FURNITURE STUDIO:  MATERIALS, CRAFT AND ARCHITECTURE, has just been published by University of Washington Press.  Furniture Studio: Materials, Craft, and Architecture explores the origins, methods, results, and influence of the furniture design and fabrication studios offered by the University of Washington Department of Architecture since 1989.  Illustrations and descriptions throughout the book showcase the extraordinary projects created by students, many of which won awards in competitions.

Professor Emeritus of Architecture and Art History Grant Hildebrand is has a new book entitled Gene Zema, Architect, Crafstman by University of Washington Press (2012).  In the three decades following World War II, a group of architects centered in the Puget Sound region were designing buildings of extraordinary quality, whose most evident commonality was the use of wood in profusion, as exposed, meticulously detailed structure and as interior and exterior surface. Gene Zema, a 1950 graduate of the University of Washington and a student of the legendary Lionel Pries, was one of this group. In a career that spanned twenty years, Zema designed forty-six houses, seven clinics, two architectural offices, a nursery, and a golf clubhouse, and he participated in the design of two University buildings. He built several buildings with his own hands, developing a consummate sense of appropriate design in wood. The luxuriantly crafted details and uniquely dramatic spatial compositions of his work place it at the forefront of that remarkable movement.

Professor Robert Mugerauer was appointed Visiting [Adjunct] Professor, University of Bournemouth, UK at the School of Health and Social Care Center for Qualitative Research and recently Elected to the Board of Directors at the International Association for Philosophy and the Environment at annual Meeting in Philadelphia, 2011.  He has two new publications; “The City: A Legacy of Organism-Environment Interaction at Every Scale,” in Ingrid Stefanovic and Stephen Scharper, editors, The Natural City: Re-Envisioning the Built Environment (University of Toronto Press, 2012) and “Architecture, Light, and Embodied Experience: Northern Phenomenologies and Holl-Pallasma’s Kiasma” in Matti Itkonen et al, editors, Hyperborean Wind: Reflections on Design and the City (University of Jyvaskyly, Finland Press, 2012).