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March 12-14, 2020 | San Diego, CA

108th ACSA Annual Meeting

OPEN: Reinvented Annual Meeting

Conference Notice: COVID-19

In light of the recent public health updates regarding COVID-19, the ACSA Board of Directors has decided not to hold the 108th ACSA Annual Meeting in San Diego next week. Recognizing the scholarly work that is shared throughout the conference is important and timely, we are exploring alternate options to deliver the conference content by virtual means. We regret having to make this decision, but determined we must prioritize the health and safety of our conference attendees.

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Schedule

June 5, 2019

Paper/Project Submission Deadline

September 25, 2019

Call for Special Sessions Deadline

December 2019

Presenters Notified

January 2019

Registration deadline for presenters

SCHEDULE WITH ABSTRACTS
THURSDAY, MARCH 12, 2020

9:00am
Woodbury U.

Pre-Conference
Workshop

Border Consortium Workshop

Organizers: ASINEA & ACSA

Day 2 - San Diego, US

For Actionable Spatial Practice and Research

The US/Mexico border is home to unique spatial practices and resources, locally grounded but geographically distributed along its 1,954-mile length. This workshop provides a rare opportunity to condense this distributed content by convening a diversity of spatial practitioners, researchers, and educators in one space, in order to outline challenges and opportunities specific to the border context, to forge new partnerships, and develop shared knowledge and resources.

Thursday, March 12, 2020 – San Diego
8:00am                         MX group meet at PedWest (San Diego)
9:00am-9:30am         Overview & Prep for Group Work
9:30am-11:00am        Working Groups
11:00am-12:00pm      Outcomes & Manifesto
Working Groups
Border Research: discussion of methodological challenges, barriers to spatial research in the borderland, identification of cross-boundary research initiatives and resources.
Border Pedagogies: identify experimental regional pedagogies and possible institutional partnerships
Border Imaginaries: identify common narratives, counter-narratives, and miscommunications of borderland spatial practices, challenges and opportunities for clearer communication within the region and beyond
Trading Borders: catalog capacities and nascent shifts in regional manufacturing, trades, tools and techniques, and speculate on productive and mutually-supportive alliances
Borderless: identify needs and experiences of spatial practitioners working on border issues remotely
Borderlines: adopt mechanisms for the support and promotion of border-positive projects, and structures for advocacy against exploitative practices

9:00am
Salon D

Pre-Conference
Workshop

Research & Action Workshop

Organizers: TAD & BTES

Defining Your Research

Defining Your Research
Organized by TAD: Technology | Architecture + Design

Defining Your Research explores methods and dissemination for new knowledge created through research. Designed for tenure-track faculty, particularly those in the early stages of the tenure process, this interactive workshop is useful for anyone who wants to strengthen or refresh their research and promote it through peer-review publication. The workshop is structured with presentations, small group discussion, and a hands-on work session. The workshop format allows participants to discuss research methods, apply concepts to their research and comment on others. Editors for Technology | Architecture + Design (TAD) and the Journal of Architectural Education (JAE) will lead the workshop and facilitate the exercises.

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Writing A Successful Grant Proposal

Writing A Successful Grant Proposal
Organized by Building Technology Educators’ Society

The goal of this workshop is to provide an understanding of the grant writing process, discuss overall strategies, and help participants develop skills to carry ideas from conceptualization to fundable proposals. The workshop will begin with an introduction to various steps involved in writing successful proposals and discuss the contrasting approaches of academic writing versus grant writing. Through the presentation and workshop activities, the participants will learn how to plan a proposal, how to organize a team, write a grant application, and develop a budget consistent with proposal objectives.

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2:30pm
Gaslamp 3

Study of Practice

Moderator: Beth Lundell Garver, Boston Architectural College

Subsidiary Architecture: Multi-Firm Practices and the Blurring of Distinction Between Large and Small Firms

Aaron Cayer
University of New Mexico

The 1960s ushered in a wave of transformations among large American businesses: many industrial organizations—from Textron to International Telephone & Telegraph (ITT) to Litton Industries—began to intensely diversify by merging with and acquiring firms in entirely different industries in order to maintain stability in the face of a turbulent economy. Beyond industrial organizations, however, this practice, known as conglomeration, was also common among several of the largest architecture firms in the United States after the 1960s, including Los Angeles-based Daniel, Mann, Johnson, and Mendenhall (DMJM and now AECOM); Houston-based Caudill Rowlett Scott (CRS), Hellmuth Obata and Kassabaum (HOK), and Perkins and Will. Many of these architecture firms grew to become the largest in the world, and they developed and acquired subsidiary organizations and services that were historically viewed as “peripheral” to an architect’s practice—ranging from computer processing to real estate services to graphic design to finance. While the conglomerate form of practice was relatively short lived—diminishing in most industries by the 1970s and tapering among architecture firms by the 1990s—it has since regained traction in the 2010s. This paper examines this historical trajectory and definition of conglomeration in architecture, and it describes how the more recent turn to multi-firm practices has not only come to characterize large multinational architecture corporations, but small firms, as well. Many small firm owners have begun to develop multiple firms beneath their single umbrellas, including rendering firms, post-occupancy-evaluation firms, as-built drawing firms, and computer consulting firms, which complement or support their primary architecture practice. Combining both historical analysis with interviews of firm owners and business leaders, this paper considers how and why the tendencies of large corporations have trickled down to small firms, and how such practices have rendered the traditional distinctions between small design-driven boutique firms, and large, commercial-motivated firms, null and void. If, at its core, architecture can be understood as a field of cultural production whose strength is predicated on the ability of scholars and practitioners to distinguish between commercially-motivated practices (historically: “large”) and design-motivated practices (historically: “small”), then the turn of both small and large firms to corporate subsidiary practices may suggest that firms be distinguished by the detail of their composition, rather than merely the rhetoric of their founders or the number of workers within them.

A Big Data Approach to BIM Models

Christopher Beorkrem
University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Alireza Karduni
University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Fernando Claudio Rodriguez
University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Ashkan Radnia
University of North Carolina at Charlotte

This paper will describe the creation of a series of prototypes which are intended to convert an archive of Building Information Models (BIM) from a large Architectural Design firm (Top 60 U.S.) into a database which can be analyzed using Big Data approaches to data analysis. Over the last 18 months we have worked with XXXXX Firm an early adopter of Autodesk Revit to develop an understanding of what information might be available within their archive of approximately 300 design models (an initial data set).  This archive (as those with most firms have) were modeled using an evolving subset of standards which have been loosely adhered to within the firm structure.  In addition to these models we have access to the personnel and financial data associated with the production of each respective model and of each respective building.  Each model also has a widely varying number of backups which were archived during the modeling process. This results in a large and rich set of unstructured data which doesn’t necessarily follow a consistent set of modeling standards or definitions.  We have been working to develop a process by which we can harvest particular data points within these models and add parameters to their definitions to be able to subsequently use them for creating benchmarking standards for internal office processes as well as programming and design of future projects.  These tools will allow for each model to be standardized and then easily mapped using typical database tools to better understand past programming standards for a program type (office, retail, etc.). Secondly, we have developed a tool which will strip each of these models of their unnecessary data and create data models which will have a uniformly searchable set of standards regardless of how, what version, or when they were modeled.  This tool can be used to create a uniform data set which can represent both past and future work of the firm. These uniform inter-project data sets can be used for analysis using simple data analysis and exploratory visualization tools. With more complex tasks and inquiries, these datasets can enable advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms. Each of these tools are based upon databases created using PyRevit and the Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) export, each of which creates a simple self-referenced database of all the elements in a given model.  At their core the databases allow for more typical approaches to data analytics, but they are quite large and have object IDs which are often duplicitous.  The default exports are then rendered more complex by the often-changing standards used to tag objects within the model by users.  Lastly, both user-defined and manufacturer-produced families have a wide range of parameters often with contradictory naming conventions.  With user input or with standard presets, our tool preemptively modifies these databases, creating a uniformly searchable and analyzable system. This approach will then allow for deeper inquiry using exploratory visual systems or with more advanced Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to conduct both supervised and unsupervised analysis of the data given various problems architectural firms might be facing. This approach will allow for us to better understand the implications of the processes we use to design and make buildings in the 21st century and allow us to see unobservable patterns in the way we design, work and build.  These patterns could prove to be immensely valuable in understanding the implications of BIM modeling on the built environment.

Forensics Studio

Federico Garcia Lammers
South Dakota State University

The “design project” in the Forensics Studio is a collaborative, rigorous study in which students build narratives and graphical descriptions of the process of making a building by conceptually undoing it. Students analyze meeting minutes, specifications, emails, ASIs, RFIs, drawing sets, etc ― they theorize about and unravel the ordinary tasks that define the everyday aspects of architectural labor. The investigation is student-driven, faculty-guided, and done in collaboration with the architects that designed the buildings that are being studied.

As a combination of precedent study, professional practice course, and speculative research studio, the Forensics Studio allows students to critique and learn from the local professional community, the public, and clients involved in the making of architecture in South Dakota. The studio is the primary bridge between a nascent architecture program and its professional community. Students speak passionately about the connections between practice and theory by discussing the ethics of practicing in an architecturally underserved place.

2:30pm
Gaslamp 2

Health

Moderator: David Theodore, McGill University

Increasing Interdisciplinary Dialogue about What Matters for K-12 Students’ Mental Health

Lynne Dearborn
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Marisa Urbina
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Recent media coverage spotlights the burgeoning mental health crisis among adolescents and teens, amplifying the need to understand influences on student mental health. This secondary-source research project details findings from built-environment-focused studies of factors found to influence student mental health and studies published in top educational psychology journals examining the relationship of schools’ built and learning environments to K-12 students’ mental health. The study employs an ecological model as its framework, whereby students are conceptualized as affected by varying levels of environment ranging from micro to macro systems [1]. The influence of the built environment on student mental health is often ignored; existing research linking student mental health to the built environment is scant. Factors in educational environments that impact student mental health include the presence of vegetation or nature, pleasant vistas, day-lighting, noise, material qualities of the environment, and classroom organization. Just as presence of nature and interior materiality have an impact on mental health, so do factors on which educational psychologists focus, such as social relationships, stress, and academic achievement.

Current educational psychology literature fails to address the potential of the built environment for mental health, instead focusing primarily on the learning environment. Broadening the discussion in educational psychology to include built environment factors might reduce students’ anxiety levels, among other significant impacts on students’ health and wellbeing. Many people, decisions, programs, and initiatives can positively impact student health outcomes. In presenting this research, we hope to increase awareness and fuel discussions about the positive influence that the built environment of schools can have on student mental health and to propagate fruitful interdisciplinary dialogue and initiatives. Collaboration has the potential to engender a situation where students are educated in environments more supportive of positive mental health outcomes and contribute to reversing the mental health crisis among youth.

[1] Urie Bronfenbrenner, “Ecological Models of Human Development,” International Encyclopedia of Education 3, no. 2nd Edition (194).

Design Logics: A Diagrammatic Approach to Research & Representation of Health Pathways in the Built Environment

Schaeffer Somers
University of Virginia

Frameworks to conceptualize and evaluate programs in public health can be adapted as tools to guide research and contribute to the visual culture of architecture. One such framework is a logic model, a graphic tool that details specific components of an intervention and the proposed short and long-term outcomes. The logic model is a cornerstone of program planning and evaluation, a systematic method for collecting, analyzing, and using data to examine the effectiveness of a specific program and to understand why it may or may not be working as planned. The tool has been used to assess the health outcomes of plans, policies, and projects in urban planning through a methodology called Health Impact Assessment (HIA). The collaborative research process to develop a logic model has the potential to play a more generative role in architectural design. In this paper, I explore methods to bring the logic modeling process into design pedagogy and to promote potential applications in integrative design practices. Three examples are examined: 1) a logic model used in a comprehensive HIA of a community development project, 2) visualization of scientific research, and 3) a logic model representing a solution for an intergenerational health center in a design competition. Logic models can play a significant role in the design, evaluation, and
monitoring of health outcomes in architectural projects at any scale and level of complexity. The work will demonstrate the potential of using logic models to conceptualize projects from the earliest stage of development to support integrative and collaborative research methods in design.

Health-Promoting Buildings: The Future of Design

Cedra Goldman
Colorado School of Public Health

Traci Rider
North Carolina State University

Approaches to “healthy buildings” are shifting from a focus on how design and operation impacts the environment (water/energy usage, refuse generation, etc.) to how the built environment can impact the health of occupants.  (Jones, et al. 2016)

This paper outlines the “Why, What, and How” of educational opportunities encouraging health-promoting buildings:

  • Why are healthy buildings important from a public health perspective?
  • What are the current trends related to “wellness” in the built environment?
  • How can schools of Architecture and Design play a critical role in advancing efforts to create health-promoting environments?

Architects and designers have the responsibility to safeguard the health of the people that occupy their buildings/spaces.  Public health issues such as obesity, asthma and depression are consistently growing; these are issues that Architects, Urban Planners, and Interior Designers need to help solve.  Studies have shown correlations between indoor environments and mental/physical health where built environment factors can have impacts such as decreased cognitive function (DeAngelis, 2017) and increased risk of respiratory and allergic conditions (ELF, n.d.), but also lower levels of depression and stress. (Singh, et al. 2010)

In recent years, the use of healthy-building certification tools has increased exponentially.  In the four years since the launch of the WELL Building Standard from the International Well Building Institute (IWBI), 2,161 projects have registered for certification, encompassing over 389 million square feet across 51 countries. (IWBI, 2019) The Fitwel certification tool from The Center for Active Design (CfAD), in collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), was launched in 2017 and already has 790 registered projects in over 35 countries.  CfAD reports an 80% increase in Fitwel projects achieving certification between 2017 and 2018. (Fitwel, 2019) Not only are we seeing a trend towards healthy environments reflected in building certifications, we are also seeing companies asking for environments that support total worker health.  It is becoming increasingly common for large companies such as United Healthcare, Shamrock Foods, and GE to allocate funding specifically for creating health-promoting workplaces because these types of environments result in tangible benefits like employee retention and positive PR. (Healthiest Employers, 2018)

Existing architecture and design programs are reviewed to identify current best practices, gaps in educational offerings, and opportunities for collaboration. Ultimately, a position is established outlining how architectural education can play a critical role in advancing efforts to create health-promoting environments  The training of our future practitioners needs to recognize these trends, and actively work to enable future Architects and Designers to be leaders in the design industry, as advocates for healthy buildings.

References

European Lung Foundation. (n.d.) European Lung White Book.  Retrieved from https://www.erswhitebook.org

DeAngelis, Tori. (2017, May) Healthy buildings, productive people. Monitor on Psychology, Volume 48, Page 40. Retrieved from https://www.apa.org/monitor/2017/05/cover-healthy-buildings.aspx

Fitwel. (2019) Retrieved from https://fitwel.org/

Healthiest Employers. (2018) 2017 Winners.  Retrieved from https://healthiestemployers.com/awards/healthiest100-winners/

International Well Building Institute. (2019) WELL: About Well. Retrieved from https://www.wellcertified.com/

Jones, Stephen A., et al. (2016) The Drive Toward Healthier Buildings 2016: Tactical Intelligence to Transform Building Design and Construction Smart Market Report. Retrieved from the Dodge Data and Analytics Website.

Sing, Amajeet, et al. (2010, September) Effects of Green Building on Employee Health and Productivity. American Journal of Public Health. Retrieved from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2920980/.

Therapeutic Lighting Design to Decrease Depression in Older Adults

Nastaran Shishegar
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Mohamed Boubekri
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Wendy Rogers
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Elizabeth Stine-Morrow
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Yun Kyu Yi
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Depression is a common symptom in older adults with the estimated prevalence of 5-15% among those residing in community dwellings. Lighting in buildings is one main envi­ronmental attribute that plays a significant role in managing behavioral and psychological symptoms through impacting visual and circadian systems. Considering the age-related changes in eyes and the circadian system, specialized lighting design is essential to promote mood and overall well-being in older people. This study aimed to evaluate the effects of two whole-day ambient lighting interventions on depression in older adults. Both lighting interventions were designed to create a direct/indirect ambient illumination that provided a high illuminance level (500 lux) in the morning (8:00 – 12:00) and then the illumination was dimmed gradually throughout the day and reached 100 lux in the evening (after 20:00). One lighting condition (L1) delivered a constant Correlated Color Temperature (CCT) of 2700 0K. In the other lighting condition (L2), the CCT was changing in a range of 6500 0K – 2700 0K from morning towards evening. Fourteen healthy older adults (mean age = 73.2 years; 11 female), from two senior residential communities in Saint Louis, Missouri, par­ticipated in a counterbalanced crossover study. Participants were exposed to each lighting condition for 9 days. Using the Geriatric Depression Scale to measure depression levels before, during, and after lighting interventions we found a significant decrease in depression after exposure to both lighting conditions; there was more reduction for the L2 intervention. These findings illustrate the beneficial effects of adding varying illumination and spectrum to the ambi­ent lighting quality in residential buildings. Given that older adults spend the majority of their time indoors, designing whole-day ambient lighting with varying intensity and tuning spectrum could be an effective therapeutic solution to create an antidepressant environment and improve quality of life in older adults.

2:30pm
Salon B

Design Justice

Moderator: Nadia Anderson, University of North Carolina, Charlotte

Radical Access

Brent Sturlaugson
University of Kentucky

Like many cities in the United States faced with suburban sprawl and housing shortages, Lexington, Kentucky is attempting to amend its zoning to allow for accessory dwelling units (ADU). Commonly known as ‘granny flats,’ ADUs offer improved urban access for people with disabilities while contributing to the density and diversity of the built environment. Partnering with the Lexington-Fayette Urban County Government (LFUCG) and the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), this project developed in three phases. First, a small team sponsored an ADU design competition for both students and professionals that stipulated a standalone building with a maximum area of 500 square feet, a maximum height of 20 feet, various setbacks from lot lines and existing structures, and requirements for universal design features. An exhibition of the competition entries enabled public engagement with a range of possible solutions, and it provided a platform for the newly elected mayor to voice her support of the effort. The competition and exhibition also granted participants an opportunity to engage with policy as it is being shaped, and the initiative received both local and national press. Second, the team worked with the LFUCG planning department to develop a handbook that outlines important design principles for ADUs. Guided by these principles, a prototype was designed and built as a physical model for a typical residential lot. The goal for this prototype was to create an environmentally sensitive and universally accessible intervention that blends in with the existing urban fabric. To achieve this, it enlists passive design principles to facilitate natural heating, cooling, and lighting, as well as universal design principles to promote accessibility. Conceptually, the prototype draws inspiration from the continuously changing character of the built environment. At its entry, the unit presents a roof profile that reflects much of the existing residential landscape. Toward the back, this profile is inverted to create an unconventional roof that signifies a departure from existing practices. Between these profiles, the underside of the roof undulates as it reconciles the conventional with the unconventional. Third, the prototype was presented at a series of public meetings hosted by LFUCG. Concerned with maintaining privacy between the main house and the ADU, the model demonstrated ways of orienting views and creating protected outdoor space, among other considerations. The competition entries were also on display, offering another opportunity for public engagement with a wide range of possible designs. Feedback from these meetings will be factored into the text of the zoning amendment, and in the coming weeks, the team will present the model to the LFUCG planning commission as they consider the proposal. If the amendment passes, the goal will be to find an appropriate site to build a full-scale prototype. Ultimately, this project seeks to integrate design issues into the development of policy that promotes radical access. By targeting both urban and architectural scales, it shows how designers might contribute to creating a more sustainable and equitable environment through a series of collaborative efforts.

Willingness to Invest in a Carbon and Water Neutral Future: Mobilizing Community Decision-Making and Anchoring Bias

Courtney Crosson
University of Arizona

The Anchoring Effect is the cognitive tendency to rely heavily on an initial piece of information when making a decision, especially under uncertainty.  This phenomenon was first documented by Nobel prize winning economist and psychologist Smith and Kahneman (1974) to characterize bias in the way people intuitively assess probabilities.  In participatory design and planning, citizens typically are overly reliant on the reality in which they live as their anchoring image.  To correct this potential decision-making distortion, citizens must attach to new visions that they judge as viable to support bolder choices for their future cities, particularly under the uncertainties of climate change.   Through a case study of Tucson, Arizona, this paper extends this heavily studied heuristic to citizens’ willingness to invest in the sustainable infrastructural improvements in transportation, energy, and water necessary to achieve carbon neutrality in their city by 2050.  A public-private-academic partnership formed between GLHN Architects & Engineers; City and County staffs; and university Bachelors of Architecture students used quantitative analysis and design inquiry to create augmented virtual realities (VR) and rendered visions of the carbon neutral future in 2050.  These projected futures were then experienced by citizens attending a large downtown exhibit of the work through VR headsets and visual materials.  This paper analyzes the results from three evaluation tools that measured 200 citizens’ willingness to invest in a carbon neutral future after experiencing these new anchoring images and virtual realities: (1) verbal survey, (2) tactile graph, and (3) visual maps.   Of the 200 participants, 78% said that they could see themselves living in the future community presented.  The majority claimed a willingness to pay an increase of 10-20% on their energy and water bills to fund the sustainable infrastructure shown, with an upper bound of a 30% increase by 8% of those surveyed.  Over 70% claimed a willingness to change current usage behavior if their urban environment was modified as shown in the anchoring images.  The paper concludes that the introduction of new anchoring images can positively impact citizens’ willingness to invest in the necessary retrofits in transportation, energy, and water infrastructure for a carbon neutral future. Every five years, Tucson citizens vote on the general plan for their city’s future course of development. This paper provides a replicable model for academia to join with practice and local governments to (1) engage citizens in envisioning the future sustainability of their city’s long-term policy adoption and (2) provide feedback to government on citizens’ willingness to invest ahead of voting.  The model has secured multiyear private investment and won national awards.  The exhibit and engagement activities were covered by local magazines, the state newspaper, regional television, and interviews on local radio programs.

Isochronic Mountains: Mapping, Modeling, and Materializing Urban Inequities

Joshua Stein
Woodbury University

The Isochronic Mountain project is a series of “landscape” models that offer the public a physical manifestation of the invisible infrastructures and inequities that shape everyday life in their contemporary cities, refiguring and recasting the sprawl of the global city through the historical technique of ceramic casting. These mountains integrate a varied set of architectural tactics to render GIS and demographic data apprehensible and productive inside contemporary debates concerning the right to the city. Specifically, by visualizing time spent on public transit as the z-height, the Isochronic Mountains offer an intuitive understanding of the “uphill climb” necessary to move through the city without a car. Initiated with a comparative study of Sao Paulo’s transit network both past (1939) and present (2013), the resulting Mountains dramatically yet accurately demonstrate the struggle to move through the city by transit. Each landscape reveals the neighborhoods that are infrastructurally underserved, “transit valleys” where the uphill climb to reach the city center is more intense. Viewed comparatively, the geological metaphor also visualizes how this struggle has intensified over the last 75 years due to the “erosion: of transit infrastructure in relationship to the growing urban megalopolis. The most recent Isochronic Mountain study examines similar issues in Buffalo, NY through a collaboration with local GIS analysts and transit advocates. While the erosion of Buffalo’s once great transit network has had repercussions for the entire city and region, the impact has not been equal across all of the city’s inhabitants. Perhaps most significantly, the demise of the streetcar network, along with other related factors, would help to segregate the city in a structural way that remains in place today. Buffalo’s inhabitants with no access to cars are three times more likely to spend 1.5 hours per day commuting. This translates to significant economic segregation, which reinforces Buffalo’s extreme racial segregation. As public funding shifted from street cars to roads, only a certain portion of the population was able to take advantage of this new infrastructure. According to the “One Region Forward” study by the UB Regional Institute, “across the US, workers who use public transit earn almost as much as workers who drive alone, but in Buffalo Niagara, workers who use public transit earn only half as much as those who drive alone.” * The paper charts the translation of raw GIS data and archival research into a material artifact that expressively conveys the geological metaphor of difficulty and loss while accurately representing the experience of the lived city. *Source: University at Buffalo Regional Institute, State University of New York at Buffalo, School of Architecture and Planning. 2014. “One Region Forward: A New Way to Plan for Buffalo Niagara,” p.68

Design Studio as Integrated Living Lab for Climate Justice: Houston

Jessica April Ward
Prairie View A&M University

Integrating the issues of regional equity into design studio methodologies is becoming the new normal. This paper takes an intimate look at a design studio that has incorporated service learning curriculum at a Historic Black College and University (HBCU) to increase designs for future resilience in a real world process. Through the analysis of local seniors impacted by climate change and natural disaster, one architecture studio is addressing both climate change impacts that exacerbate climate gentrification and the design process as a living lab for environmental justice and aging in place design. August 2017, Hurricane Harvey hit Houston, Texas and devastated neighborhoods historically the most impacted by natural disasters and environmental injustice. 51.6 inches of rain fell, damaging an estimated 43,330 single family homes in Harris county. Of those homes, 45% or 19,499 are families earning at or below 80% AMI for Houston and Texas. Of these families, seniors living on fixed incomes are hit hardest by the need to shelter in place, find immediate temporary housing, and repair damage from multiple mega- storms, as well as protect their health and home ownership. Architecture students use research based design strategies to engage seniors impacted by hurricanes, to record their testimonies and their community legacy. The research becomes a tool that informs housing and neighborhood scale design, neighborhood planning professionals, City officials, non-profit agencies, and homeowners.   In “Smart Growth Meets Environmental Justice” Dr. Bullard writes “people of color have borne greater health and environmental risks than society at large, independent of income and class status (Institute of Medicine 1999).” (Bullard, 2007. p.27) This research-design studio explores “racial disparities” that “exist in natural-disaster preparedness”, participation and smart growth. The studio asserts the participation methodology between seniors and Architecture students at the HBCU, who generate designs for aging in place to push back against gentrification forces. Supported in part through University grants and an AIA Grant for Aging in Place, the studio: builds mock up wall sections; conducts walking audits and semi-structured interviews; and collects air quality samples. The studio uses environmental and climate justice as a framework for integrated project delivery and delivering a place-based project with contextual integrity. Community-based laboratories as described by Dr. Nance are at the heart of this studio structure as “a new strategy.. that views the crisis as rooted in democracy itself along multiple dimensions including race, class, environment, gender, age, citizenship status, disability, and so on, and with an expanded objective of empowering the public to take action to defend their health and protect their property. The new strategy moves beyond the civil rights discourse of the U.S. EJ movement and adopts the broader perspective embraced by the global environmental health movement, which includes participatory development, appropriate technology, and human rights.” ( 2009. P. 160) This paper explores how students and homeowners are working together to develop a storm-ready prototype accessory dwelling unit designed with local and regional building science knowledge, AIA COTE goals, Fortified Home and FEMA specifications for coastal climates.

Collective Landing: Exploring the Power of Housing Design to Improve Economic and Social Resilience

David Birge
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Carl Schmitt argued that the critical first step in the creation of an autonomous (self-directed) society was the appropriation of land [1]. The market based control of land within current neoliberal, developer driven American society leads, therefore, to more than just a housing affordability crisis. Over the long-run, incremental decisions as to what land will be developed and how it will be developed determines the social, economic, and cultural trajectory of society itself. If most American urban, suburban, and rural land alike is universally privitized (parcelled and zoned) and commodified, and if we designers and planners believe that developers and large capital-holders should not be the primary force for spatial and thus socetial development, what options remain for everyday Americans to regain control over their destiny? Can land be aquired by citizens through the marketplace? If so, how? And if there is indeed a how, can this method be scaled? This project aims to reveal the latent (theoretical but untapped) power for collective action among middle-income Americans to aquire land and take command of the spatial and institutional design of their life-worlds — spaces of living, teaching, socializing, and food and mobility access. Using industrial land in Somerville, MA (outside Boston) as a case study, and deploying a custom-coded spatial-numerical model in Grasshopper (Python), I show how the convergence of land-choice, radical and not-so radical housing design, and shared space and institutional organization can signifigantly increase the economic well-being (average savings rate) and resilience of collective members (long-term savings) [2]. For example, a couple with a combined income of $70,000 in the Boston area, and with typical spending/savings habits [3] would have less than $100,000 in retirement savings after 20 years, well below the AARP’s recommened amount [4] — and thus putting the couple in a precarious condition. The same couple, with identical consumption habits but living in one of many possible proposed collective developments, would be able to set aside over $750,000 (2 times AARP recommendation). The increased savings comes from a combination of space sharing, smaller housing size, and better fitting house design through self-design and partial self-construction. Critically, this project shows the impact design to maintaing or improve functioning while lowering cost. The power of design cannot be leveraged however, until Americans control the process and purpose of development. In the context of the substantial benefits of collective land development shown by this study, I also consider the spatial, social, and economic hurdles to project initialization and scaling. The problem of scaling has up till now not adequately been tackled by the increasing list of community oriented housing projects [5]. Lastly, from an educational and professional perspective, this project shows the power of rigorous yet speculative design to imagine real alternatives and reveal pathways to an improved future.

[1] Schmitt, Carl, Tracy B. Strong, and Leo Strauss. The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition. Translated by George Schwab. Enlarged edition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007.

[2] Model relies on standard econometric formulas and historic data for investment returns. Cost of land and housing based on government data, RSMeans cost of construction data, and validated against multiple reports of construction costs in Boston area including: Bluestone, Barry, Catherine Tumber, Nancy Lee, Alicia Sasser Modestino, Lauren Costello, Tim Davis, James Huessy, William Reyelt, and Rebecca Koepnick. “The Greater Boston Housing Report Card 2014-2015.” Dukakis Center for Urban and Regional Policy Northeastern University, 2015. http://www.tbf.org/tbf/51/~/media/424EF40B9DA24C56A72D589543C45783.pdf.

[3] Spending habits of Americans are complied by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (https://www.bls.gov/home.htm)

[4] AARP. “AARP Retirement Calculator – Retire The Way You Want.” AARP. Accessed June 19, 2019. http://www.aarp.org/work/retirement-planning/retirement_calculator.html. [5] Examples include: Nightingale (https://nightingalehousing.org/), The Collective (London, NYC), Pier Aureli’s work at the AA, WeLive (NYC). Other examples are easily found on www.housinginternational.coop/co-ops

2:30pm
Gaslamp 4

Public Space + Urbanism

Moderator: TBD

How Do I Look? Visualizing the City through a Gendered Gaze

Mireille Roddier
University of Michigan

Whereas most categories of photography—be it portraiture, still life, experimental, or any of the genres traditionally represented in award categories—are close to having achieved gender parity, street photography still lags far behind. Why does the visualization of the streets still stand as a dominantly male activity? From “street-literature” (the literary genre that grew out of the modern city, influenced by its capture on film) to contemporary urban representations, this paper traces whose voice or gaze has had the authority to chronicle the public sphere, and how these narratives were constructed as dominant, or disseminated as alternative point-of-views. Divided between historical analysis and creative program, it engages the character of the flaneuse as writer, painter, photographer, cartographer, and the authority of her gaze as cultural apparatus, in order to uphold a contemporary mode of urban image production specific to, rather than concealing of, its subjects. The essay is structured according to a three-part progression that begins with the idea of “reading” both the book and city, followed by the notion of “copying,” and ends with the act of “writing” or “re-writing” the scripts that have been heavily rehearsed onto the scenes of the public sphere. Understanding the city as the locus of the theatrum mundi, the paper borrows from interdisciplinary theoretical fields including visual studies and film theory, feminist performance theory, and urban studies in order to demonstrate how the act of representation is one of appropriation, contending that those who immortalize the streets uphold their ownership of it. It also underscores its corollary: belonging is a product of narrative wars.

Appropriation of Space – Perpetuation of Patriarchy: A Feminist Critique on Public Space Design in Iran

Seyedeh Ladan Zarabadi
University of Cincinnati

This research uses a feminist lens to examine Iranian urban public parks designed for use by women only. This analysis accomplishes two purposes. First, it reveals translations of patriarchal cultural values from an architectural micro scale to an urban macro scale and questions the (over) contextualization of these parks’ design. Secondly, it examines women’s experiences of these parks and their responses to such urban public spaces. I draw on Henri Lefebvre’s theory of production of space and Jurgen Habermas’s and Nancy Fraser’s views of public spheres to theorize women-only parks’ existence as a hegemonic production of space, as well as to identify women’s production of counter-hegemonic spaces. I argue that despite the Iranian government’s claim that the purpose of these women-only parks was to provide women a safe and free public space, this type of urban public space actually appropriates the design logic of courtyard houses, materializes patriarchal culture, and perpetuates patriarchal values in an urban configuration. In other words, women-only parks in Iranian cities are an embodiment of patriarchal culture in which gender segregation is used as a strategy to fulfill Islamic values and disguise patriarchal dispositions into a false sense of spatial and gender justice. I also argue that Iranian women contribute to feminist place-making by reclaiming mixed-gendered public spaces, despite the existence of women-only parks. Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution and the establishment of the Islamic Republic in Iran, urban environments have undergone changes due to the influence of Islamic doctrine. The Republic’s adherence to a strict dichotomous model of male/female and rigorous control over gender relations has led to the segregation of people by gender in some urban public places and obligates women to cover their hair and bodies in mixed-gendered public places. Thus, the Islamic Republic practices a form of Islamic patriarchy, not only in its constitution and legal system, but also through urban policies and design strategies. The most recent urban phenomenon is the creation of these women-only public parks in which women can remove their veils. I conduct spatial, formal, and cultural analyses of traditional Iranian courtyard houses, comparing them with women-only parks. This comparison reveals that women-only parks are aligned with the spatial relations within Iranian courtyard houses. The parks follow the same layouts and logic characteristic of the classic residential typology of the courtyard house. This research elucidates forms of delicate gender oppressions in the name of context, culture, and religious values perpetuated through architectural and urban design.    This qualitative and interdisciplinary research uses a mixed method approach (alternating between formal and discursive analyses as needed) and multiple sources of data. Data collected on-site from three women-only parks in Tehran (including photos and videos) serves as the primary source for this analysis. I also use reports from online news agencies and social media, as well as previously published interviews conducted by sociology scholars. In addition, I have collected architectural maps and drawings from reference books, visual, textual, and archival materials, and pictures from online sources to provide a comprehensive data set.

Smart Cities and the Sharing Economy: The Evolving Nature of Urban Public Space

Celen Pasalar
North Carolina State University

George D. Hallowell
North Carolina State University

Over the last decade, a new generation of city design and planning paradigms have emerged as a result of advancing technology. Digitally interconnected and shared technologies have been a driving force in defining new spatial development and uses. Traditionally, urban public spaces have ensured the functional operation, social meeting places and resource sharing of a city. For centuries streets, plazas, squares and parks have played a critical role in supporting cultural, social, political, and economic functions for the benefit of society. Because of new technologies and the evolving concept of sharing economies and the urban realm, however, the uses of urban public spaces are dramatically changing as these spaces are being redefined. Sharing economies, often defined as collaborative consumption or a peer-to-peer business models, allow a process for underused resources to be easily shared or transferred to others to create additional value or bring greater benefits to an urban community. As part of ongoing smart city development and an emerging focus on people, designers, policy makers, and economists are looking into these concepts, questioning the socio-cultural and economic effects of a shared economy on the use and experience of public space. Technology associated with sharing economies is producing a significant impact on the formal and spatial qualities of cities, while affecting the function and configuration of individual plazas, parks, and streetscapes. For millennia, cities have looked at public areas to segregate, contain, or enclose uses. Designers are now considering how urban public spaces provide affordances that can help to create new relationships of use through technology and provide engaging public experiences within these spaces. However, it is not clear how shared economies will change the activities and formation of space in city parks, plazas, and streetscapes.   Through a meta-analysis of current and core interdisciplinary literature, this study explores the impacts that new sharing economies and smart technology may have on the way urban public spaces are generated, used, and altered. If we consider that space in cities is a spectrum from the most public along a street, to the most intimate spaces in our homes, this spectrum is made ambiguous by the technologies and socio-economic and cultural practices of the sharing economy. At the public end, we examine the use of streetscapes that change as autonomous cars and sharing technologies alter parking and drop-off zones as well as the use of the road itself. We examine the way that Privately Owned Public Spaces (POPS), blur the line between private and public use of urban areas such as plazas, parks, and even building lobbies. We focus on how the sharing economy may have increased, clarified, or confused POPS in cities such as New York or Seattle. Streets, sidewalks, porches, yards can all be altered by the technology and economics of sharing. At the extremes of the public/privacy spectrum, we study how sharing business models such as AirBnB may change the nature of our living rooms, streets and neighborhoods.

Domestic Extensions: An Analysis of Public Space in Glasgow’s Multi- Family Residential Neighborhoods

Ryan Franchak
University of New Mexico

“Multi-family residences are one of the key ingredients in the composition of every city. Over the past three centuries in Glasgow, Scotland’s largest city, there have been four major urban residential housing typologies that shaped both the city’s skyline and the way its inhabitants live. While the architecture acts as a framework of each neighborhood, the public space that underpins the buildings and thus links the site to the city’s urban fabric has ultimately affected how the users live, interact with others, and establish their own relationship with the city.

This case study looks at the public space and composition of four neighborhoods that exist on the periphery of the city’s center. The analysis begins with the Woodlands, an archetypal tenement located in Glasgow’s West End that dates back to the mid-nineteenth century. From there, a modernist housing example attempts to reinvent the neighborhood plan along Charles Street, which was eventually discarded as a city-wide housing typology. The solution was then to give multi-family housing more of a communal appeal, as seen throughout the Crown Street Regeneration Project, and revert back to the design of the four-story walk-up style apartment building. The study concludes with Laurieston, a contemporary development under construction at the time of this writing, yet arguably possesses successful site design elements from the previous three housing typologies.

Technological advancements have only pressured the built environment to continually advance in terms of design and construction. This notion cannot be more apparent in Glasgow as each multi-family housing model throughout history has attempted to reinvent the way individuals inhabit domestic space. The specific turning point in the timeline happened during Modernism, where high-rise residential structures began to litter the cityscape. The design of space between the buildings in each neighborhood has a larger affect than one may generally think. It can arguably be said the quality of the site design has more of an impact than the building’s architecture because the exterior space between buildings is what threads users to the urban fabric.

Each of Glasgow’s four multi-family housing styles have shaped the city over the past century—the traditional tenement, the modernist tower block, the modern village, and the contemporary development have each responded to their neighborhood context in various ways. However for the sites’ residents, the piece of public space in-between the buildings that reinforce these communities act as the primary link between the individual and the city as a whole. ”

2:30pm
Gaslamp 5

Studio Pedagogy

Moderator: Kathryn Bedette, Kennesaw State University

The Return of the Building and the Problem (and Potential) of the Comprehensive Studio

Sarah Deyong
University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Craig Babe
University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Ever since the crisis of high modernism in the postwar era, the gap between academia and the profession has slowly but surely widened over the decades. More symptomatic in the United States than the Continent, the reasons for this gap are, of course, complex. One by-product has been the weakening of architecture’s disciplinary identity and an abdication of expertise to supporting fields in the domains of building technology and history & theory, for example. However, the recent publication of José Araguez’s anthology, The Building, is a clear sign that the tide has turned. Published in 2016, the anthology should be seen not as the dawn of a new direction, but as the culmination of collective voices, since the millennium, on topics like the projective (Sarah Whiting), operative history & theory (Sylvia Lavin, Robert Somol, Jeff Kipnis and Todd Gannon, among others), and the rise of experimental and collaborative practices, engaging political, social, and ecological concerns, in tandem with formal issues. With its collection of essays by architects onarchitects, Araguez’s timely book is an irrefutable sign of academia’s bid to reclaim the building as belonging to its own critical terrain. In this light, it is perhaps important, now more than ever, to reflect on the problem of the Comprehensive Studio, which often falls short of its potential to develop compelling projects and critical positions around the building.  In so doing, this paper does not so much present the agenda of a specific studio, as it reflects on teaching pedagogy in the face of challenges, such as addressing the baseline of NAAB criteria related to technical, programmatic, material and site concerns. Indeed, what is often at risk in the Comprehensive Studio is precisely the gap between academia and the profession, between critical thinking and the standardization of practice as it becomes corporatized. In the absence of any prescriptive method for teaching the design process, this paper reflects on strategies that might begin to counter this problem and potentially bridge the gap. Drawing a loose comparison with Gordon Harvey’s “Twelve Elements of an Academic Essay,” the authors assert the continued need for a lexicon pertaining to architectural composition. Just as the elements of an academic essay – thesis, motive, structure, style, etc. – are the components of all well-written arguments, the elements of an architectural composition – parti pris, poché, phenomenal transparency, character, dimension, hierarchy, scale, promenade, organizing grids,narrative, and so on – can be similarly construed as elements that enable the architect to eloquently organize the facts of a building’s program, context and structure while giving agency to architectural ideas that were once insulated within the walls of the academy, far away from the realities of practice. Parti pris, after all, means to take a position. To be clear, these terms are not so much the parts of a building (i.e., walls, ceilings, stairs, columns, doors, etc.) as the conceptual elements of a discursive architecture. While some of these terms have evolved over time, others remain more or less the same since the Beaux-Arts, and still others are emergent, such as those proposed by the Possible Mediums group. This paper discusses the deployment of the elements of an architectural composition in the context of making arguments and of taking a position with buildings, and finds evidence for this deployment in historical and contemporary precedents and within the larger scope of recent discourse that has reinvested itself in the problem and potential of the building.

Communicative Learning in an Interdisciplinary Design Studio

Jennifer Shields
California Polytechnic State University

Ellen Burke
California Polytechnic State University

Jill Nelson
California Polytechnic State University

“Communicative learning involves at least two persons striving to reach an understanding of the meaning of an interpretation or the justification for a belief. Communicative learning involves understanding purposes,values, beliefs, and feelings… it becomes essential for learners to become critically reflective of [underlying] assumptions.” – Jack Mezirow

Complex design problems rely on communicative skills that build empathy through understanding, rather than reify disciplinary tensions. While these ‘soft skills’ are critical, they are not yet a fundamental part of design education. Design studio courses in undergraduate education tend to craft simplified simulations of professional practice experiences to explore formal, organizational, conceptual, and technical design approaches. One common simplification is for each discipline to learn independently in isolated courses, without being informed by the realities of multi-disciplinary practice. ‘Communication’ in these siloed studios refers to graphic and verbal presentations that convey student ideas to peers, faculty, and perhaps practitioners, with an emphasis on disciplinary conventions and graphic skills, and the use of discipline-specific language. Yet successful communication in practice requires complex and inclusive skills beyond the products of design, and leverages both interpersonal (between) and intrapersonal (within) communication skills in order to advocate for disciplinary values and needs during design negotiations. This paper describes the course format and outcomes for an interdisciplinary design studio consisting of students and faculty from architecture, landscape architecture, and structural engineering. The studio took a transformative (communicative) learning approach to the development of communication skills such as empathy, resilience, flexibility, and competence-based trust as integrated factors of design. Students were assigned to 7-person teams to design a campus media library and landscape. Lectures, activities, and readings scaffolded the learning of both ‘soft skills’ and technical design skills in the studio. In grading the student projects, equal weight was given to evidence of the development of communicative skills and to the attainment of design goals. Outcomes were measured using several instruments, including surveys, writing assignments, and presentation prompts that focused on describing interactions between the disciplines rather than solely on design product.  The submitted images illustrate the collaborative nature of both the design process and the design products for one of our interdisciplinary teams.

Strategic Deviations: Pedagogical Surprises in the Expected Flow of Things

Angeliki Sioli
Delft University of Technology

Kristen Kelsch
Louisiana State University

Engaging a pedagogical methodology developed to interrupt the status-quo of the design studio, this paper discusses research on architectural pedagogy. Titled the “Strategic Disruptors,” this suggested methodology argues for the necessity of carefully orchestrated provocative and unexpected moments in the curriculum; moments that unsettle the students by connecting them with elements of the creative world outside architecture. By doing so the goal is two-fold: to expand their understanding of architecture’s definition and role in our contemporary society and to amplify the students’ willingness to engage with new challenges so that they may move from a feeling of anxiety to one of creative control. The discussion sets off with an overview of the approach’s philosophical and pedagogical underpinning, elaborating on the educational context in which it was employed and the motivations which lead to its conception.  It then zooms into a case of a recent first-year studio and three strategic disruptors designed specifically for the given context and year-level: “The Dinner Party,” “The Literary Imagination,” and “The Long View.” Examining the way each of the disruptors functions in the given architectural environment and the way it enhances the learning outcomes, the paper demonstrates how this methodology opens up possibilities to transform a student’s trajectory moving forward. Intentionally aligned with the very beginning, middle and end of the semester (although the students are not aware of this intention), all three disruptors are meant to appear random at the moment of their introduction, are quick-paced and short in duration, and conclude with a discussion on the interdisciplinary links between architecture and other creative fields. Presented as an opportunity to celebrate the beginning of a new semester, “The Dinner Party” is a playful and engaging way to bring forward architecture’s social capacity. It pulls from culinary culture to emphasize that architecture is often the design of an atmosphere, ritual or experience. Introduced as a deep breath during mid-term exams week and camouflaged as a typical reading assignment, “The Literary Imagination” pulls from works of fiction and poetry to introduce students to alternative approaches for understanding, studying and representing space through the arts. Although seen as an end of the semester convivial party, “The Long View” reinforces the first-years’ role and responsibility as part of a larger design community. It demonstrates the field’s collaborative nature and the importance of a deep understating of all the design disciplines related with architecture. Following a detailed presentation of the aforementioned examples, the paper concludes by exploring the relevant discourse related with similar pedagogical approaches as well as the possibility of the methodology to work in different contexts and with contents appropriate for these different contexts. It argues for the importance of an architectural education that surprises the students and consistently connects them with the richness of the life and the world outside the confines of the discipline; the world for which they will be called to design for in the future.

Decolonizing Studio Pedagogy Through Critical Theory and Integrated Research Methods -- A Curriculum Reimagination

Lisa Henry
University of Utah

José Galarza
University of Utah

The School of Architecture at The University of Utah has engaged in curriculum reimagination for the last three years. At the heart of this faculty-wide effort is the mission to make architects civic entrepreneurs and socially responsible global citizens. In response, we have sought to broaden our disciplinary horizons. Our collective has envisioned an integrated curriculum in which research methods and critical theories from many disciplines such as literature, queer theory, ethnography, or indigenous studies become the primer for design. Students learn that research is a systematic inquiry directed towards the creation of knowledge, and that each method produces different ways of knowing. Our primary aim is to disrupt the notion that the acquisition and application of knowledge is somehow universal, as opposed to the result of a particular set of cultural constructs. The “integrated model” with research methods at its base allows us to move towards a larger project of decolonizing design pedagogy. By decolonizing we mean braiding together Western and other ways of knowing to transform the imagination and structure of design practice and the academy. The metaphor of braiding in this case maintains the identity of each mode of knowledge, while strengthening the whole by introducing different critical views of land and property, design and project delivery, plus client and community1. Placing diverse critical theories as well as both western and indigenous research methods as the foundation of the curriculum allows us to ask difficult questions about how architecture can contribute to the cultural survival, resilience, and healing of cultures devastated by European Enlightenment, the foundation of modern education, with its roots in racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, and economic exploitation of the colonized world.

2:30pm
Salon D

Special Focus Session

Architecture Education as a Means for Community Resilience in Iran

Moderator: Mitra Kanaani, NewSchool of Architecture & Design

Session Description

BIHE Architecture Program (The Baha’i Institute for Higher Education)
From a documentary film based on the theme of “Community Sustainability” from the 2019 AIA Film Challenge. This session intends to introduce the potential of architecture to make a difference in the lives of communities. The BIHE Architecture Program documents the story of how architecture education has become a means and a solution to transform a major social and political issue of a community of deprived and discriminated minorities in their homeland from the legitimate right for higher education through the most positive possible approach.

Arash Rod
Iraj Majzub
Niknaz Aftahi
Sepideh Eslami

2:30pm
Salon E

Special Focus Session

Careers in Architectural Education

Moderator: Christine O. Theodoropoulos, California Poly. State U.

Session Description

Distinguished Professors Posit the Future
The 2020 recipients of the Distinguished Professor Award will reflect on the changes that influenced their careers and engage in dialog that posits how change will influence careers in the future. The ACSA College of Distinguished Professors invites new faculty, faculty mentors, faculty seeking future career directions and colleagues to take part in a conversation about the career journeys of architecture educators, how they shape and are shaped by change in architecture as a discipline and architectural education as a practice.

Gail Dubrow
University of Minnesota

Karen Kensek
University of Southern California

Stephen Luoni
University of Arkansas

Vikramaditya Prakash
University of Washington

Richard Sommer
University of Toronto

2:30pm
Gaslamp 1

Special Focus Session

Course Development Prize in Architecture, Climate Change, and Society

Moderator: Jacob R. Moore, Columbia University

Session Description

Architecture, Climate Change, and Society
Education in architecture and urbanism is well positioned creatively and critically to address the exigencies of climate change. However, pedagogical methods that prioritize immediate applicability can come at the expense of teaching and research that explore the sociocultural and ecopolitical dimensions of the crisis. This, in turn, ultimately limits the range of approaches addressing climate change in professional practice.

Adaptation To Sea Level Rise
Mason Andrews
Hampton University

Public Issues, Climate Justice, And Architecture
Bradford Grant
Howard University

Unthinking Oil: Public Architecture And The Post-Carbon Imaginary
Gabriel Fuentes, Daniela Shebitz, and Julia Nevarez
Kean University

Design Based On Estimating Ripple Effects Of Carbon Footprint
Jeanne Homer, Khaled Mansy, John Phillips, and Tom Spector
Oklahoma State University

“Exist, Flourish, Evolve” — Territorial Care and the Upper Misi-ziibi
Gabriel Cuéllar
University of Minnesota

2:30pm
Balboa 1

Special Focus Session

The Cultural Ribbon/Lazos Culturales Initiative

Moderator: Nélida Astrid Escobedo Ruíz, Tecnológico de Monterrey

Session Description

A Transborder Collaborative Studio
Borders are inevitable, they belong to a human behavior of expansion and delimitation, they represent the inherent quality of identity formation. This process has been present since the beginnings of human settlements, as a way of protecting, organizing, and dividing resources and space. Nowadays, in the urban and climate change era, our society is facing great challenges such as environmental degradation, water crisis, and poverty at a scale and intensity that require alternative ways of conceptualizing and understanding borders.

The Cultural Ribbon/Lazos Culturales Initiative is a collaborative studio where academics, citizen-driven organizations, and the private sector explore, design, and project opportunities to stitch together the political and physical barriers that the Mexico-U.S. border creates. At the meeting point between these countries we look at “places of opportunity” to promote produce intensive economic activity and also to generate comprehensive proposals that include environmental systems and human habitat protection and management.

This session will share the experiences gathered in the studio organized between Tec de Monterrey (Mexico) exploring Los Dos Laredos and Illinois Institute of Technology (US).

Erin Conti
Illinois Institute of Technology

Paola Aguirre
Borderless Studio

Rubén Segovia
Tecnológico de Monterrey

4:30pm
Gaslamp 3

Applications of Practice with Digital Means

Moderator: Clare Olsen, Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo

Automating Design and Construction: The Emergence of "Offsite Manufacturing"

Alfredo Andia
Florida International University

Thomas Spiegelhalter
Florida International University

In the last two decades, large parts of the US economy have been radically transformed by digital and automation processes. However, the impacts of digitalization in the Design and Construction sector have been restricted to the use of software such as CAD, BIM or project management programs. These technological implementations have not radically changed the efficiency in which we build our environments. The lack of productivity in the construction industry has had many impacts in our cities. Today the lack of affordable housing, labor shortages in construction, and an inability to respond with significant innovation to our ecological condition are becoming national themes. In this article we argue that to truly transform the construction industry we need to rethink the whole processes of design and construction.    The Rise Of “Offsite:” Manufacturing Construction In Industrial Warehouses. In this paper, we argue that the “offsite manufacturing” of construction has been quickly gaining significant traction in the past 3 years and is bound to challenge traditional “on-site” construction. “Offsite” construction moves a significant part of the design and fabrication of buildings to a manufacturing plant away from the building site.  We present several cases of companies such as Katerra, Prescient, Broad Group, BLOX, Randek and Lindbäcks Bygg that are moving into prefabricating from flat elements to entire buildings in a manufacturing environment. We compare it to the developments of “car platforms” in the automobile industry and strategies such as “chunking” in the airplane industry to look at the future of design and construction. In this paper we analyze the forces that are guiding these changes, the aging construction labor, the consolidation of procurement, the rise of lean robotics, and the large venture capital that is coming to these enterprises. Architectural Thinking for Offsite Manufacturing. At the core of this paper we examine how “Offsite” construction will impact architectural thinking. We look at the work of two of these enterprises: Katerra and BLOX. Architects in Offsite manufacturing ventures are beginning to focus more on the variation of a particular program type and find opportunities to produce standards that could guide a more rational manufacturing process. But in standardization there must be variations because there are different sites, markets, clients and special conditions that make each design projects very unique. In the paper we show how Katerra and BLOX are working in developing design processes that develop processes similar to the ones one can find in the “car platforms” in the automobile industry and “chunking” in aerospace manufacturing. Conclusion. We predict that by 2035 close to 50% of all construction in the US will be “offsite” construction. We argue that although today’s “offsite” construction is highly manual, both in design and in the manufacturing plants, we see a clear trend in the development of semi-automated design processes based on manufacturing construction systems and the introduction of automated assembly lines (particularly in Sweden, Japan, and China) that are already prefabricating entire customized elements in warehouses and quickly assembled on site.

Equity In practice: Digital Architecture’s Role in Maker Culture

Yasaman Esmaili
University of Washington

Low-tech building methods have been gradually developed over thousands of years according to the actual needs of a community and the demands of location-specific requirements. High-tech digital design has advanced the level of precision and control over material applications and has increased the possibilities for studying design options. But where might the two meet? How can innovation in construction carry forward the lessons learned from vernacular and low-tech building solutions? How can contemporary technology be used to create new solutions that are as context-aware and affordable as low-tech solutions in places that low-tech solutions are still generally practiced? This paper explores the relationship between digital design and low-tech application by local labor looking for opportunities to advance the exchange between both the design process and the practice. The goal is to study and advance the linkage between the precision and design innovation of computational technology with traditional building systems in a context-aware manner. The study process starts by observations from designing and  building a screen brick wall in a school Project in Afghanistan which leads to developing an algorithmic digital 3d modeling tool that allows the users to design brick masonry wall systems in a digital world and to create construction guides for building the wall in the physical world, allowing for back and forth communication between the designer, the community and the mason during the design and construction process. This process lets the team simultaneously study different design factors including form, pattern, and solar exposure and allows the designer to communicate the result with the mason using simple paper guides called “DNA guide”. This approach advocates a collaborative process where the form-making, prototyping and building is a shared experience between the designer, the community and the layperson. Instead of presenting an image of a complex form and imposing a digitally fabricated foreign form in a traditional setting, the community are presented with a tool that allows them to engage with the designer and the mason to study the form, the texture and the materiality of a future design and advocate for their needs and desires.   Rather than solely relying on high-tech tools, this approach links digital design with traditional making techniques and builds upon existing low-tech methods for greater global implementation at smaller costs. The design tool connects high-tech digital methods with traditional brick masonry practices to create a “high-touch”, more responsive process. This paper explores an alternative approach to the practice of digitally designed artifacts by looking at brick screens as a manifestation for projects of bigger scale.  To develop the digital design algorithm and the practice toolkit a full-scale brick screen prototype was first designed and built, then the toolkit was applied in designing and building a Compressed Earth Block (CEB) screen wall, constructed in Western Africa by local labor as part the facade of a multi-family housing project. A third prototype is also designed to test the application of the toolkit at a larger scale.

VEER: Rice Husk Bio-Composite Chair

Andrew Colopy
Rice University

David Costanza
Cornell University

VEER investigates an innovative new biocomposite material to create a chair design that is durable, comfortable and visually striking. The concept was developed for an outdoor school in Zambia where durability was the utmost important concern. In response, the examination looked to a biocomposite that incorporates a rapidly renewable agricultural byproduct, rice husks, used primarily as an exterior building cladding. The combination of materials provides the durability, formability, and strength of a composite with a surface quality more akin to wood. The material’s properties recall both the bent plywood and fiberglass chairs of mid-century, Panton meets Eames, and so the design takes a cue from both. The concept begins with a single, filleted profile along one edge but replaces a logic of surface fillets with conic sections. The result is added strength, an ability to nest for shipping, a space for storage in the leg, and a subtle, iconic asymmetry. More complex curvature, achievable given the material’s plasticity, is also introduced to provide both added strength and comfort at the feet and chair back. The design process utilized rapid prototyping of scaled models to test the basic performance and viability of different geometric variations. From these small heuristic models, general stability, ease of nesting and variation in deflection due to curvature were easily evaluated. In parallel, full-scale material tests were undertaken to examine the plastic thermoforming limits of the biocomposite, a proprietary material (Resysta®) comprised of approximately 60% agricultural waste and 40% PVC. A series of half-scaled prototypes were then undertaken to develop and evaluate the molding and thermoforming process, ultimately resulting in a five-part, double sided mold to accommodate the repeated inflection of the curved surface. The final mold was CNC milled from MDF and set within a plywood frame (to reduce weight). A series of five strategic clamping locations at either side provided the needed compression to form the material into the mold. Once cooled, the mold limits were traced upon the formed material which was then trimmed and sanded smooth. A second and final iteration of the chair doubled the layers of material—from 8mm to 16mm, chemically welded with PVC cement—for added strength and rigidity. Developed and tested using fused filament additive manufacturing methods, future investigation into the viability of 3D printing the biocomposite material are anticipated with the aim of reducing material waste and eliminating the high production cost of a more robust mold.

Ashes & Ashes Cabin

Leslie Lok
Cornell University

Sasa Zivkovic
Cornell University

Ashes & Ashes Cabin is a small building 3D-printed from concrete dust and clothed in a robotically fabricated envelope constructed from irregular ash logs. The cabin has a footprint of 3×3 meters and lifts off the ground on 3D printed legs which adjust to the sloped terrain. The concrete structure is characterized by three programmatic areas, a table, a storage seat element, and a 6.5m tall working fireplace. 3D printed from concrete and sliced from trees, the project aims to reveal the 3D printer’s idiosyncratic tectonic language while questioning preconceived notions about material standards in wood. The custom 3D printing process explores how the layering of concrete, the relentless three-dimensional deposition of extruded lines of material, and the act of corbelling can suggest new strategies for building. Built without formwork, concrete 3D printing eliminates substantial construction waste. For its envelope, the cabin utilizes wood which is widely considered as “waste”. The invasive Emerald Ash Borer threatens to eradicate nearly all of the 8.7 billion Ash trees in North America. Many of these trees cannot be processed by regular sawmills and are therefore regarded as unsuitable for construction.

Mature ash trees with irregular geometries present an enormous untapped material resource. Through high-precision 3D scanning and robotic fabrication on a custom platform, this project aims to demonstrate that dying ash trees constitute a valuable resource and present architectural opportunities. Utilizing a robotic arm with a custom band saw end effector, irregular tree logs can be sawn into naturally curved boards of various and varying thicknesses. The boards are arrayed into interlocking SIP façade panels, resulting in a minimum waste fabrication method. The curvature of the wood is strategically deployed to highlight moments of architectural importance such as windows, entrances, roofs, canopies, or provide additional programmatic opportunities such as integrated shelving, desk space, or storage.  From the ground up, digital design and fabrication technologies are intrinsic to the making of this architectural protoptype, facilitating fundamentally new material methods, tectonic articulations, and forms of construction. At various scales, the cabin’s performance, structure, and architectural expression are inherently derived from its digital construction protocols, design logics, and natural materiality.

4:30pm
Salon B

Community Practices

Moderator: Christina Bollo, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Mind the Gap: Embodied Cognition, Curiosity, and Recent Designs for Academic Libraries

Henry Pisciotta
Pennsylvania State University

The library of the 1960s was a hierarchic machine for the retrieval of information, proud of it’s clarity and predictable floorplans. But as systematic retrieval moved from the floor to a web page, the building’s other, overshadowed, functions were revealed.  While there are many reasons we continue to build new libraries, I want to focus on those suggested by recent writings on social infrastructure and embodied cognition – and further to propose that psychological research on curiosity might explain the success of some specific features of libraries designed by OMA, MVRDV, and Snøhetta.  Sociologist Eric Klinenberg, cultural critic Shannon Mattern, and others, value libraries as “social infrastructure” (the “facilities and conditions that allow connection between people.”)[i] Among many spaces inviting people into the public realm, Kleinenberg highlights libraries as the site of self-improvement and openness to alternatives – exemplary hope for a polarized society.[ii] The OMA design of the Seattle Central Library seems to have predicted the rhetoric of social infrastructure with its “urban living room” panorama of group and individual functions.  Among those noting the variety of social interactions it facilitates, Kim Dovey shows how vistas and circulation patterns successfully offer visitors choices, freedoms, and chance encounters, but risk navigational bewilderment.[iii] The response to Seattle’s library has included many of the critical approaches and research methods linking physical and perceived space.[iv]  But the current discourse on embodied cognition provides an additional lens for looking at library spaces.  Writers such as philosopher Mark Johnson leverage recent breakthroughs in neuroscience to survey the subliminal powers of design.[v]  One power deserving more attention is Johnson’s “non-conscious simulation.”  MVDRV’s “Book Mountain” confronts the visitor with a dramatic pyramid of book-filled shelves.  Even if anyone can resist scaling the ziggurat, the trek has been imagined, perhaps before the form was fully perceived.  The body has reacted.  The building has invited exploration. The psychological literature on curiosity also seems relevant to library design.  Since curiosity is an important characteristic of academic success, researchers like Sophie von Stumm conclude “educational settings should fully exploit their plentiful opportunities to induce and inspire curiosity.”[vi]  If any building can, by design, foster inquisitiveness, it would best be a library – if only because of the broad scope of it’s offerings (be they collections, disciplines, services, or random personal encounters.)  Stimulating curiosity, many psychologists observe, is a matter of creating an information gap – a “sweet spot” between clarity and chaos that ignites the desire for more information.[vii]  These ideas will be introduced visually, using features from three recent designs for academic libraries by Snøhetta (at NCSU, Ryerson, and Temple.)[viii] such as:      – unusual sightlines triggering imagined bodily actions      – balance between visual clarity and obfuscation      – vertical circulation encouraging exploration of each floor’s plan. The library’s role in social infrastructure hinges on it’s non-capitalist agenda of sharing, yet affordances for curiosity are often borrowed from retail design – an irony not to be ignored.

[i] Klinenberg, Eric, Palaces for the People, (Crown, 2018); Mattern, Shannon, ‘Library as Infrastructure’, Places Journal, 2014.

[ii] Kleinenberg overstates the potential of libraries, but concedes “while social infrastructure alone isn’t sufficient to unite polarized societies… we can’t address these challenges without it”

[iii] Dovey, Kim, Becoming Places, (Routledge, 2010) 103-124, analyzing spatial syntax.

[iv] Dalton, Ruth, & Christoph Hölscher, (eds.), Take One Building: Interdisciplinary Research Perspectives of the Seattle Central Library, (Routledge, 2017).

[v] Johnson, Mark, “Body, Mind & Imagination”, in Robinson & Pallasmaa, (eds.) Mind in Architecture, (MIT, 2015), 33-50.  Embodiment’s debts to phenomenology and environmental psychology are too often unstated.

[vi] vonStumm, Sophie, & Benedikt Hell, “The Hungry Mind: Intellectual Curiosity – the Third Pillar of Academic Performance”, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 6 (2011), 574-88.

[vii] Kidd, Celeste, & Benjamin Hayden, “The Psychology & Neuroscience of Curiosity”, Neuron, 88 (2015), 449-60 review the long history of the information gap theory.   Rare examples of interest from designers relate to gaming & interactive systems.

[viii] The examples are based upon interviews and site visits.

Decolonizing Frameworks: A Cultural Design Resource for Corrections

Cathi Ho Schar
University of Hawaii at Manoa

Nicole Biewenga
University of Hawaii at Manoa

Mark Lombawa
University of Hawaii at Manoa

Indigenous people are overrepresented in the criminal justice system throughout the  world.   In Australia, Aboriginal people represent 2.3 percent of the total population, yet make up over 28 percent of Australia’s prison population.   In Canada, Indigenous people represent 4 percent of the Canadian population yet make up 23.2 percent of federal inmate population.  In the United States, Native American populations have incarceration rates that are 38% higher than the national average, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. In Hawai’i, the 1893 overthow of the Kingdom of Hawai’i subjected Native Hawaiian people (kanaka maoli) to the sufferings of colonization, that has likewise contributed to the disproportionate over-representation of Native Hawaiians in every part of the criminal justice system. In response, multiple task forces have called for a new vision for corrections that restores Native Hawaiian individuals to their families, communities, and the land (aina).  In 2018,  the State of Hawai’i Department of Public Safety (DPS) established a partnership with the University of Hawaii Community Design Center (UHCDC) to explore a new corrections model for Hawai’i, a restorative model that addresses and leverages the state’s unique social, cultural, ecological, and economic context.  The center assembled a multi-departmental team of faculty, staff, and students from the School of Architecture, College of Engineering, and Social Science Research Institute, to develop different scopes and studies to inform this new vision. The School of Architecture’s scope evolved into the development of a Cultural Competency Framework aimed “decolonizing” the state’s correctional system, understanding facilities, programs, and agency operations as an inseparable whole. This paper provides a brief introduction to decolonization, Hawai’i’s post-colonial history, and correctional system, before discussing the development of the Cultural Competency Framework, that leveraged three tiers of university activity: teaching, research, and outreach. This paper also outlines the research process and deliverables, which include expert interviews, the production of a Cultrally Integrative Design Process, Cultural Design Resource, and Aina-based Design Strategies that aim at more culturally competent planning and design processes, and ultimately a restorative cultural landscape for incarcerated individuals. 

Sustainability Laboratory and Urban Garden (SLUG)

Christopher Trumble
University of Arizona

Linda Samuels
Washington University in St. Louis

The Sustainability Laboratory and Urban Garden (SLUG) – brought together a team of educators, gardeners, middle and high schoolers, design students, and faculty with practice in design/build and sustainability to envision and implement an experimental space for downtown Tucson. The SLUG began as a relationship between neighboring educational initiatives – UA’s Sustainable City Project (SCP), and Tucson’s pioneer charter school, CITY High School (CHS) – over their common goal to use the city and its challenges as a teaching and learning laboratory. The addition of a middle school to the CITY campus meant the burdens on their already encumbered space were soon to increase exponentially. A historic façade renovation grant put the purchase of a neighboring building within reach, leaving an uninhabitable and publicly accessible alley – the school’s only outdoor space – between the original CITY building and its future expansion. The landing of a $35,000 Green Fund grant instigated the College of Architecture, Planning, and Landscape Architecture outreach studio that would partner with SCP and CITY.

The opportunity to reimagine this alley as a laboratory for sustainable thinking, play, and urban agriculture built upon the place-based, hands-on pedagogical strategies of CITY High and the site-specific, sustainably-focused design capabilities of the students and faculty of SCP and CAPLA. Over the course of a year, the full dedicated team met weekly, learning collaboration, design, construction, and management skills through an assortment of team-based methods. The primary programmatic components emerged from the need to accommodate multiple age groups, school-based and public events, growing and eating space, and formal and informal teaching and learning; every component is flexible, adaptable, and multi-functional, guided by the SLUG performance criteria – sustainability+laboratory+urban+garden. The space today is an active component of the CITY culture and curriculum and a model of sustainable design in downtown Tucson.

The Future of the Netsch Campus

Judith De Jong
University of Illinois at Chicago

Endorsement

Across her scholarly, teaching and administrative work, Judith has advanced the broad understanding of the relationship of architecture to the city, in particular as it aligns with the contemporary university campus and the role of public education in the arts. More specifically, Judith’s joint administrative appointment as Associate Dean in the College of Architecture, Design and the Arts has provided a significant platform to advance the values of architecture through conceiving and leading competitions, exhibitions, and 

public programming that have resulted in the most exciting architectural project to be proposed on the UIC campus in its fifty year history, namely a new $100,000,000 Center for the Arts. There were of course many steps and players involved in this major accomplishment, but it is without question that it would not have happened without the central intellectual and organizational leadership of Judith. 
— Robert Somol, University of Illinois at Chicago

4:30pm
Gaslamp 4

Borders

Moderator: Shawhin Roudbari, University of Colorado Boulder

Borderlands: An Exploitation of the U.S. / Mexico Political Geography

Cesar Lopez
University of California, Berkeley

When architects interject in the social and policy debates surrounding borders and immigration, the speculation largely remains architectural in the strictest of ways. Politicians, political pundits, pro and anti-immigration activists respond to surges in illegal crossings with an obsession and scrutiny on the border wall.  Often, no attention is given to the surrounding communities that line and cross the border daily. Architectural discourse follows suit by attaching itself to the most apparent architectural problem—the shape, height, materiality, and porosity of the border wall. However, more dangerous than any geopolitical maker are the policies that empower it. Might agency be found in leveraging the political and environmental forces as an overlay on the border rather than simply installing an architectural figure?  Borderlands examines the trans-national metropolitan region of El Paso (Texas, USA) and Ciudad Juarez (Chihuahua, Mexico), where the border is not an abstract line on a map. Instead, the legal demarcation of the border is the Rio Grande River—a flood-prone with a constantly re-adjusting path making a static legal boundary unobtainable. This illegibility in the border promoted unfettered access between the two cities with over fueling a sustainable border economy through trade and commerce. (1) However, in the 1960s after a century of various territorial claims and disputes between the United States and Mexican governments, the joint Chamizal settlement regulated the Rio Grande River’s path. The resolution entrenched the river in a concrete channel and deployed a system of upstream levees and dams to suppress seasonal surges and flooding reducing the river/border to a thin trickle, helping maintain a static border. (2) In recent years the El Paso and Ciudad Juarez border’s accessibility was further restricted when the outbreak of the Mexican Cartel War prompted many Juarez residents to decamp to El Paso, leaving behind a sea of abandoned homes and buildings. These vacancies expand the Mexican Cartel’s occupation, prompting robust political geography led by a unilateral approach to the U.S. border security. (3) The severing of the two cities limited trans-border foot-traffic; producing economic, social, and environmental issues that challenge the equilibrium the border communities have relied upon.  Borderlands is a proposal that leverages the El Chamizal dispute as a legal precedent to construct a territorial gray-space between El Paso and Ciudad Juarez. By removing the upstream levees and dams and restoring the Rio Grande River’s seasonal hydrological cycle and diminished ecology, additional tributaries will be required to protect the surrounding cities from flooding. Excess river flow can be diverted to a series of tributaries that productively flood vacant lots and abandoned buildings known for hosting the cartels trafficking networks; transforming the collection of cartel-run spaces into a river network. Although the Mexican cartel is resilient and will always find methods to operate, these design strategies intend to eradicate their hidden occupations, thereby offering a new way to self-police the city’s vacant spaces. These actions subvert the devices that separate the region and reconfigures them into a dispersed circulation system in which one is always crossing borders. The blurred river/border offers a new state of alterity enabling new ways to conceive the political geography and its devices, while a new sense of contact through unaffiliated spaces allows the trans-border publics to re-engage in social and economic exchanges. While an El Paso-Ciudad Juarez border will always exist, overlaying the complexities of a natural river on the boundary re-represents the border and no longer affirms separation.

1. John F Dulles, “Impacts of Federal Immigration Law Enforcement on Border Communities” in Federal Immigration Law Enforcement in the Southwest: Civil Rights Impacts on Border Communities (Darby, Pennsylvania: Diane Pub,1997), 12-21. 2.  Gladys Gregory and Sheldon B. Liss, “CHAMIZAL DISPUTE,” Handbook of Texas Online (http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/nbc01), accessed November 18, 2012. Uploaded on June 12, 2010. Published by the Texas State Historical Association. 3. Robert Buffington, “Prohibition in the Borderlands: National Government – Border Community Relationships,” Pacific Historical Review 63, no. 1 (1994): 19

Los Parques del Muro

Sharlinee Ceniceros
Ibero

Una de las grandes problemáticas de la ciudad de Tijuana, es su déficit en cuanto a áreas verdes y espacio público, una ciudad que ha crecido de manera tan rápida, no le ha permitido reservar suelo para destinarlo a estos espacios. Por otro lado, la dinámica región de Tijuana y San Diego, en donde su franja fronteriza es traspasada diariamente por habitantes que resuelven su vida entre ambos países, sufre por el gran tráfico que genera este cruce fronterizo. La dependencia del vehículo y la falta de impulso a la movilidad sustentable, provocan una conexión aún más caótica, esta región depende únicamente de dos cruces los cuales benefician mayoritariamente al vehículo privado. Una gran área de oportunidad, para atacar las problemáticas de déficit de espacio público y de cruces caóticos, es precisamente el muro fronterizo. El presente trabajo propone como atención a dichas problemáticas, la generación de una serie de parques y espacio público en las áreas residuales del muro fronterizo. Cada parque será definido de acuerdo a la vocación natural de su contexto y actividad propia de la zona (de barrio, urbano, ecológico, turístico, etcétera), lo cual brinda la posibilidad de que en ciertos espacios de este tipo se puedan generar cruces peatonales y con trasporte no motorizado; atendiendo a una problemática global en torno a la movilidad urbana sostenible, y como respuesta a esta dinámica tan única de la región. Aunque este proyecto depende de ambos países y de las prácticas propias de cada ciudad en cuanto a movilidad, es emergente empezar a imaginar nuestra región con una movilidad más eficiente, sostenible y menos dependiente del vehículo privado. Este imponente y rígido elemento urbano que divide dos mundos y que en realidad es traspasado diariamente por unos cuantos, sería contrarrestado con esta gran pieza verde que entrelazaría ambas ciudades, simulando de esta manera, su simbiosis cultural y económica existente en esta región y que, a su vez, atendería problemáticas urbanas muy específicas de las mismas.

Online/On-site

Cyrus Penarroyo
University of Michigan

This mapping-based research and design project studies the digital divide in Detroit, focusing on Internet access in the city’s most disenfranchised neighborhoods. As investors pour money into the residential and commercial development of areas like Downtown, Midtown, and Corktown, residents in marginalized neighborhoods lack access to digital infrastructure and the necessary skills to use information effectively once connected. Indeed, despite recent development, Detroit has the lowest rate of Internet connectivity in the United States, excluding thousands of people from the opportunities for education, employment, and belonging afforded to those with the ability to get online. This condition is exacerbated by the economic precarity of many Detroiters, the high costs of individual residentially-based internet access, and uneven broadband internet service provision throughout Detroit’s neighborhoods. Referred to as “digital redlining,” some view disinvestment in digital infrastructure for less affluent, non-white communities as commensurate to discrimination. Many of those affected are school-aged kids that need the Internet to complete their homework, submit job applications, or simply socialize with their classmates. While research shows that most teens have some access to the Internet via schools, libraries, or public WiFi connections, young people remain at a severe disadvantage if their households are unable to get online. As various grassroots and political organizations work to build a robust digital ecosystem, and urban development is increasingly influenced by broadband or wireless accessibility, what kinds of egalitarian spaces emerge under this evolving techno-infrastructure? If the Internet fosters a more complex sense of belonging, how is the built environment reconfiguring to support nascent social structures and promote inclusion? How does access (or lack thereof) to these virtual networks challenge conventional understandings of public and private space? How do teenagers in the iGeneration occupy or navigate a metropolis that is significantly offline? If citizens are emboldened by access to digital technologies, how might a community-driven network architecture breakdown certain hierarchies and power structures commonly found in the city? To address these questions, this project combines publicly available spatial data in G.I.S. with information gathered from interviews of high school students in the city in order to map detailed geographies of digital access and exclusion across Detroit’s neighborhoods. The project identifies latent opportunities to reimagine Detroit’s disinvested neighborhoods in ways that enable public assembly and internet connectivity, proposing urban design scenarios that are rich with innovative ways to connect physically and virtually. Among other outcomes, the project results in detailed maps that articulate what would be necessary in order to develop strong community mesh networks across Detroit for internet access. By visualizing these invisible networks, this project hopes to create a heightened sense of community, empower citizens to create new spaces for public discourse in their neighborhoods, and redefine what digital access and equity could look like in the urban environment.

Tangent to the Earth: Tracking Site Conditions According to Horizontal Solar Light

Victoria McReynolds
Texas Tech University

“Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky in the morning, sailor take warning.”

Exceptional tools tracking thermodynamic properties of our atmosphere are at our disposal. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the National Weather Service (NWS), and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) provide a handful of resources that make available satellite data from Earth’s various atmosphere layers. These resources enhance the ability to track solar performance on site, and make it possible to extend an analysis of light beyond light-ray diagrams and sun polar charts. This abstract introduces a logic of understanding solar light inclusive of the thermodynamic properties evident in the atmosphere surrounding a site. As the adage above suggests, sunrise and sunset, when light passes along tangent to the surface of earth, are optimum times of the day to “read” the sky and realize thermodynamic properties influencing a site. Solar light arriving tangent to the Earth travels through roughly forty-five times more troposphere on its way to reaching a site and, most likely, will have encountered various clouds, particulates, and pollutants along the way. We experience these dynamic moments, the last of visible light, as perceptual shifts in our environment, and physiological shifts in our eyes as cones and rods tradeoff absorption responsibility of the electromagnetic spectrum. The qualitative measurement of light tangent to Earth’s surface is inevitably more than the altitude and azimuth reading of solar light. Site mapping during sunrise or sunset draws together often separate analysis of meteorological and terrestrial features towards an environmental ecology. Traditional means of designing with solar light rely upon quantitative measurements of the light ray. Charts, diagrams, and software compute the object-ness of illumination. Gregory Bateson, in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, writes, “It is important to see the particular utterance or action as part of the ecological subsystem called context and not as the product or effect of what remains of the context after the piece which we want to explain has been cut out from it” urging that object and field, or figure and ground, are analyzed in relation to the other. By extension then the light-ray geometry of solar light is in context with the atmosphere and corresponding meteorological elements. Essential site features such as wind patterns, particulate density, moisture content, and terrestrial formation incorporate a contextual reading of light and offers a bridge between the quantitative geometry to qualitative experience of a particular place. The paper, “Tangent to the Earth: Mapping Site Conditions According to Horizontal Solar Light” will continue to expand on the atmospheric conditions that influence light and the ability to cast a broad more inclusive reading of site through the properties of solar light.

Strengthening Social Bonds in War-Torn Burundi Through Public Space

Gwendoline Albright Ndikumagenge
Andrews University

In the last century, public spaces have been of the most studied elements in urban design as some of the most used and impactful places that shape public life. Unfortunately, the necessity of public spaces for public life is not a focus everywhere. In places that have continuously experienced war and instability over the years, like Burundi, the public realm is often perceived as a source of problems rather than a promoter of the city’s well-being. Public spaces are seen as settings that contribute to an increase of insecurities and instabilities in the city. This project seeks to harness the possibility of intentionally redesigning an existing public space using design principles and patterns into a well-designed space that would help promote positive public life in the city. It will consist of assembling a toolbox of design principles and patterns that can be used in the redesigning of Bujumbura’s public park “Jardin Public,” as one of the underutilized parks in Burundi, with the hope to help promote a peaceful and community-oriented neighborhood in Bujumbura.

4:30pm
Gaslamp 2

Building Science and Technology

Moderator: Robert Dermody, Roger Williams University

Watering Architectural History

Adnan Morshed
Catholic University of America

Only 2.5 percent of Earth’s 70 percent water is fresh, making potable water one of the scarcest and most valuable natural resources of the world. Even though this hydro-ecological view of the planet is a modern one, it should paint a historical picture of how the engineering of water was as critical to the Neolithic farming communities in Mesopotamia as they are to 21st-century societies. The domestication of water was at the epicenter of first-society geopolitics of agriculture, migration, division of human labor, and production of space. Yet, canonical histories of architecture have been written with a “land bias,” that is, these histories are essentially land-centric narratives, only occasionally considering water as a factor in the analyses of extreme geographies. Architecture students remain oblivious of how social, political, and spatial management of water catalyzed the growth of civilizations. To discuss the history of Egyptian pyramids only through the lens of the grandiloquent funerary practice of the Pharaohs is to ignore the robust role that the nilometer (a hydrometric apparatus first referenced in 3000 BCE) played in forecasting the nature of the Nile flood—which, in turn, helped systematize the labor for mass irrigation agriculture and, eventually, monumental works of architecture. It is not surprising that the Pharaoh’s elite priest-managers were called “inspector of the dikes,” “chief of the canal workers,” and “watcher of the nilometers.” In De Aquaeductu Urbis Romae (97 CE), Sextus Julius Frontinus, the Roman Superintendent of Aqueducts and author, championed the primacy of water engineering for Roman civilization, perhaps with a bit of cynicism and Roman hubris: “Just compare with the vast monuments of this vital aqueduct network those useless Pyramids, or the good-for-nothing tourist attractions of the Greeks!” Roman baths were at the heart of the empire’s social life, and aqueducts created an imperial footprint across the empire, making robust political statements about imperial authority, opulence, and identity. Yu the Great, China’s legendary hero and the founder of the Xia Dynasty (2100–1600 BCE), controlled the river flood problem not by constructing dykes, but by creating extensive irrigation architecture, an effort historically interpreted as a Taoist adaptation to river ecology. Socrates encapsulated the Mediterranean world’s seafaring personality thus: “We inhabit a small portion of the earth … living round the sea like ants and frogs round a pond.” In recent times, Vernon Scarborough, Steven Solomon, Steven Mithen, Dora Crouch, Charles Ortloff, and A. Trevor Hodge have presented nuanced views of how the philosophy of water management is as intricately related to a society’s cosmological imaginations, political aspirations, and environmental consciousness (among other factors) as it is to a society’s ability to harness the power of water to utilitarian ends. Despite the plethora of new research on water organization, architectural histories continue to be written as telluric epics. Building an epistemological case in favor of a land-water historiography, this paper argues that without histories of water management the pedagogy of architectural history remains not only incomplete but also misleading.

Of Life and Death: The Interior Atmosphere-Environments of the Greenhouse and the Gas Chamber

Ryan Ludwig
University of Cincinnati

This paper considers architecture as the creator of interior atmospheres of “environmental potential” capable of cultivating spaces conducive to maintaining life through the mediation of variable external stimuli, but equally as possible is the articulation of this potential towards the construction of spaces intent on occasioning death.  Architecture conceived with this awareness requires a rethinking of parameters, moving beyond the visual modalities of geometry, composition, icon or style, to instead utilize various qualitative materials like temperature, light intensity, relative humidity, air composition, air pressure, auditory and olfactory stimuli.  This understanding is what Reyner Banham has called an “environmentalist” approach.[1] These two oppositional potentials of architecture’s capacity as a creator of “environmental potentials” are considered in this paper first through examining a brief history of the development and design of the greenhouse – beginning as temporary wood structures assembled around planted specimens, to the development of permanent structures incorporating heating and ventilating technologies, to the iconic 19th century greenhouses designed by Louden, Paxton, Turner and Balat with their greater use of glass and cast iron structure.  In juxtaposition to the greenhouse is an examination of the development and design of the gas chamber – first adopted in the U.S. by the state of Nevada in 1921 pursuant of a more humane method of execution, but later advanced by the Nazis during WWII for the mass execution of Jews, minority groups and political prisoners.  While providing opposing goals, both the greenhouse and the gas chamber were conceived as alternative “natures” of habitation through the construction of their respective interior atmosphere. Special attention in the paper is given to the ideas of contemporary German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk in his book In the World of Interior Capital (2013) pertaining to the social, ethical, economic and geopolitical aspects of Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace (an extreme manifestation of greenhouse design which Paxton had developed prior to the Palace at a smaller scale), as well as Sloterdijk’s understanding of the 20th century’s explication of the atmosphere-environment applied towards military warfare discussed in his book Terror From the Air (2009).  This paper concludes with a brief examination of the perverse agricultural development plan of rural Poland set forth by the Nazis whereby Auschwitz-Birkenau camp inmates were tasked to build several experimental greenhouse stations in the Village of Rajsko as part of Himmler’s planned agricultural estate of the German East.  As built these stations were used for cultivating flowers and vegetables to sustain the German military elite; today they stand in ruin as relics of the potential for cultivating life and death through an “environmentalist” architectural project. Aspects of this research were explored through an elective seminar course I taught in the Spring of 2017 titled “Climates of Resistance” which examined a variety of “environmentalist” case study projects intent on creating specific interior atmospheres.  Select work from this seminar research will be included throughout the paper.

[1] See Reyner Banham, “The Environmentalist” in Program 2 (Spring 1962) 57-64.

Chrysalis, and the Promise of Pneumatic Architecture

Whitney Moon
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

In 1970, Chrysalis—a Los Angeles-based architectural collective comprised of Mike Davies, Chris Dawson, Alan Stanton and Joseph Valerio—headed to the desert. Unlike their countercultural peers, who were fascinated by the barren landscape as an unchartered terrain for aesthetic and rhetorical exploration, Chrysalis initially employed the extreme environment as a method for advancing both the technical and social project of pneumatic structures. It was in Palm Desert, California that they tested the thermal performance of various materials and inflated assemblies, calling into question issues of durability and human comfort. In the course of just a few years, Chrysalis designed and executed dozens of innovative projects. Developed in collaboration with local aerospace, film, and media companies, their early works eclipsed the low-tech naiveté of pneumatics being generated by many of their contemporaries (e.g., Ant Farm, Archigram, Haus-Rucker Co., Coop Himmelb(l)au, etc.), and were guided instead by the refined structural and material experimentation of lightweight engineers like Frei Otto and R. Buckminster Fuller. Although little has been previously written about their practice, Chrysalis occupies a key position in the history of inflatable architecture. Their pioneering constructions index a few key ideas and phenomena: the rise of pneumatics as a radical project during the late 1960s and early 70s, the viability (and promise) of air structures as an alternative solution to conventional buildings, and the factors which likely led to the collapse of inflatables by the mid 1970s. By examining a selection of experimental structures generated by Chrysalis from 1970-1975—including those that prompted their initial formation—this essay maps their contributions to the development of pneumatic architecture as both a radical and pragmatic endeavor. Through their work with air, this collective of four young architects made visible the potential and pitfalls of an unorthodox construction type. Although inspired by the rhetoric and representational allure of countercultural architectural groups like Archigram, Chrysalis aspired to move pneumatics beyond an editorial project. According to Valerio, “What we did is we said: ‘We believe in all that stuff, but we also think that we need to raise the level of technology so that it’s not purely ephemeral.’”[1]Chrysalis viewed pneumatics as radical because they offered an alternative to the norms of professional practice and served as a vehicle to expand the boundaries of architecture without abandoning building altogether. Dedicated to the advancement of inflatables as a viable form of architectural production, Chrysalis asked what air structures can do, and how they could do it better.

[1]Joe Valerio, in conversation with the author, 06 October 2016.

Against Potemkin, the Thick-Envelope: Towards a Theory of the Façade in Contemporary Architecture

Thiago Maso
Columbia University

Façade is the oldest, most ubiquitous architectural element in the history of architecture, and is constantly subjected to be the protagonist of its practice. At least since the orthogonal drawing in the renaissance, from compositional principles of the beaux-arts until its dissolution during the modern movement, the façade acquired the role of representing the ideals of its builders. Recently, the façade becomes void — a picture frame without a painting. Advocating the recovery of meaning, postmodern theorists proposed that the façade became the ultimate architecture — whatever the shed, its applied decoration absorbed the interest of the architect, and its consumers on it.  Historically, we can imply that the façade is an assemblage of symbols attached to the external face of a (generic) wall, and understand this lobotomy as a signifier to the city. But to reduce the definition to this superficial, linear comprehension of symbols and sheds is not so far from modernist thought — a proto-pop banality of this action was used, at least, in the height of the heroic modern period. Le Corbusier on his Nestle Pavilion in 1928 already applied a superficial treatment on the outside-skin as decoration to a shed to convey meaning. Thus we shall look deeper on the definition of the (contemporary) façade by researching not the decoration, but the relationship between the façade towards its thickness. Flat or folded, decorated or transparent, the façade always kept one fundamental principle as its definition: it had to be a surface. Even if the “invention” of the brise-soleil was a crucial points on the development of the thick façade, a device to control the environment that creates a new type of space, an in-between that belongs not to the inside nor to the outside that, although much studied from a technical point of view, as an architectural device it lacks a proper history. A new political, representational space was created, and the lack of its theoretical evaluation opens a new field of exploration with this research.  When Bernard Tschumi’s Lerner Hall creates a thick-envelope composed of ramps, the façade assumes a thickness that negotiates the inside-outside relationship, an in-betweeness that questions the position of the envelope as a threshold. A new condition appears, one that blurs the limits of the object and the city and assumes a new political role. WORKac’s Miami Garage expresses the magnitude of the concept: decorating the shed of the most generic building, the thickening of its envelope encloses spaces performing urban events. Not a functional snapshot of the building nor a representational portrait of symbolic meanings, the thick-envelope exhibits a renewed both-and attitude — function and meaning are flattened in a choreography displayed by the users. If the contemporary discussion focuses on the political and architectural production of spaces, relating to the question of interior urbanism becomes an active agenda to understand the construction of social spaces. Without a clear definition of spatial boundaries, the performative agency of its limits are questioned — the architect’s role is expanded to that of the urbanist — the subject of architecture becomes the city as much as the users of the building. With this research, I propose that contemporary architecture is the architecture of the thick-envelope, of the quasi-urban space where the definitions of inside and outside are mixed and its political boundaries collapse. In the inhabited space of the thick-wall the city and the building become one, and the question of whether to submit to public or private laws and behaviors are blurred: the new space invokes new performances. To understand the contemporary condition is to understand the thick-envelope as the mediator between object and city. The thick-envelope assumes the (last) role of political architecture, a space of architectural agency long ignored.

4:30pm
Gaslamp 5

Alternate Pedagogies

Moderator: AnnaMarie Bliss, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Open Conversation as a Mode of Learning

Yoonjee Koh
Boston Architectural College

A recent project has been initiated by faculty and students in the School of Architecture to create an open forum for in-depth discussion on topics encompassing our spheres of living. Each installment revolves around a changing topic with a guest moderator and an active participatory that collectively questions, examines, and imagines terrains of thought and thought-making. These conversation-based sessions rely on a series of shifting topics, which provide variegated indexes for learning. Topics range from issues of diversity and inclusion, social awareness, and matters of discipline, to more design-specific issues on the matter of critique, discipline, and the meaning of making. As each topic opens up a lieu of questions, the conversation is driven by a series of questions and provocations posed by the participants. There is no presenter and no audience. Instead, each person leads the conversation – students, faculty, alumni, staff, and any person interested in the topic in discussion is welcome steer the conversation. As there is little hierarchy amongst the crowd, a system of intelligence that builds upon the knowledge of the crowd manifests the conversation floor. This is a time to churn through what we know, what we think we know, and what is aspired to be known. One or a group of moderators, who raise the topic for discussion, lead the conversation, often guiding the crowd through heated debates and moments of thoughtful silence. These are often guest faculty, or a group of students who raise a pressing topic and hold a conversation session in contextually timely moments. These conversations are moments to learn how to explore, to question, and to think critically. Raising criticality, these conversations often reverberate in classes and hallways, germinating new ways of thinking. Students, in addition to faculty, weigh in constructive feedback in studio sessions, opening up questions for dialogue as they do in the Conversation sessions. Also, history and theory courses become opportunities to dig through deeper questions that stirred movements and schools of thought. Harvard GSD’s Talking Practice, Cornell’s The Living Room, MIT’s Dinner with the In-Laws, and an increasingly growing number of Architecture Schools have recently begun to employ these flexible, open platforms for learning. As these conversation sessions are extracurricular, students are free to join or leave amidst a conversation. This free-to-come, free-to-go format operates on the single strand of interest. As today’s consumer media culture expands beyond the hand-held device, the value of interest and ability to retain a stream of followers seem to permeate today’s classrooms. Schools have begun to radically shift methods to reach out to current and prospective students, to professionals, and to the public. Pioneering different approaches to not only instruction, but also ways of learning that may allow for more open and variegated approaches, the mode of learning through open, yet constructive conversation warrants a closer look in the study of Architecture.

Making as a Means to Construct Design Thinking

Christopher Welty
Kennesaw State University

Arief B. Setiawan
Kennesaw State University

In The Craftsman, Sennett argued that engagement with things, tools, and procedures could facilitate leaps of imagination. 1 These engagements are a way to improve qualities of experiences, or the craft of experience, by understanding their forms and procedure, or techniques of experiences. In pedagogy, it is a form of learning-by-doing. Our awareness of the properties of materials, the ways tools perform, and the techniques we work with could help us explore possibilities in transforming a thing into another; in other words, design. Sennett mentioned the principle of joining at a right angle, of which our ancestors applied on joinery in shipbuilding, which in turn informed joinery of buildings, and eventually informed organizations of streets and blocks of a city. He termed this as a process of transposition. In this vein, we are interested in developing a design pedagogy that started from engagements with things, tools, and techniques. Thus, we set design problems that started from and problematized observations; procedures in drawing and modeling, both manual and digital; properties of materials; and artifacts. We applied this problem in studios in different years with increasing complexities, because we were interested in the development of students’ design thinking. Findings from these problems would serve as a starting point for design iterations of habitable space. In the first-year studio, we set design problems from observations of small, manmade artifacts. The findings would serve as a basis for the design of personal space. The next project started from explorations of woods and carving and joining techniques; which would inform design of a small structure with a simple program. We reiterate this strategy in the third-year studio. The design problem started by designing a small apparatus that would lead to the design of a wall system, which would evolve into a design of a medium-scale, mixed-use building.  Of interest here is the way students transpose engagements to an artifact, a type of material, or a production technique to generate a design process. In this line, we distinguished operative rules from generative rules. The former were rules and procedures to execute a task; while the latter were rules to organize design elements, including ordering systems. We also distinguished methodical and axiomatic thinking. Methodical thinking was a repetition of a set of formal procedures, while axiomatic thinking was critical of fundamentals in design. What would be teaching methodology to facilitate the growth from operative into generative rules and from methodical into axiomatic thinking? How did students go about finding solutions? This paper documentsour efforts to develop and refine this approach, as well as our observationsand experiences from both studios. It aims to discuss the learning process and the growth of design thinking abilities. It is also a reflection of our pedagogical approach of linking making and thinkingin design pedagogy.

1. Sennett, R. (2008) The Craftsman. New Haven, Yale University Press

Zairja-Thinking: A Second Virtuality for Design

Don Kunze
Pennsylvania State University

Medieval scholars and astrologers developed the Zairja (زايرجة) as a kind of “reverse computer.” Instead of compiling data and reducing it to more refined categories or determinative structures, the Zairja worked in reverse, using astronomical data and aleatory processes to extend potential and even fantastical relationships. Most historians presume that the Catalan mnemonicist/mystic Ramón Llull, whose methodology was taught at the University of Paris until the 1500s, based his Ars Magna (1305) on the Zairja and intended his various combinatorial diagrams to work in the same way, with the aim of spiritual perfection.  What does the Zairja offer to the modern thinker? Especially, what does it mean for the architecture student, teacher, or professional whose ambitions overrun the standard resources of history and critical theory? I propose that the Zairja idea may be extended to bridge between formless and form, indeterminate idea and sensible shape. The Zairja requires rigorous methodological exactitude while at the same time it resists limiting preconceptions. Zairjas are better made than found. The Zairja I propose begins with a process of note-taking derived from a more local source: the Irish author James Joyce’s detailed extraction of accidentally encountered conversations, taken out of context and reconfigured as “epiphanies.” The structure of the epiphany is that of the rebus, the form Sigmund Freud claimed that dreams assume to build conceptual bridges between interior details (latent content) and conscious dream-memories. The rebus belongs to both perspectival and a-perspectival orders. As Joyce demonstrated, the rebus “object” may be verbal or experiential. It makes connections without the prejudice of determinative interpretation and thus remains true to the logic of over-determination by which, in the dream, any single effect is the result of multiple causes.  My Zairja borrows graphical and narrative tools from Llull, the 16c. mnemonicist Giulio Camillo, the American poet Wallace Stevens,  and other sources. I employ stochastically paired topics to expand experimental data sets while simultaneously contracting structures to correspond to geometrical/diagrammatic/numerical conditions that may then relate to historical paradigms, such as the polyhedron used by Albrecht Dürer in his famous emblem-image, “Melencolia §1.” At this point physical/formal extension is required, and the thinker must become a teacher, and the teacher an architect. I will endeavor to explain the basics of the Zairja technique and demonstrate it with a design example. Furthermore, I argue that the Zairja promotes, more than other methods, the ideals of openness and innovation.

Actual Reality: An Alternative Approach to Post-Digital Drawing

Ross Wienert
University of Houston

In his essay Architecture Enters the Age of Post-Digital Drawing, Sam Jacob writes: “Instead of striving for pseudo-photo-realism, this new cult of the drawing explores and exploits its artificiality, making us as viewers aware that we are looking at space as a fictional form of representation. This is in strict opposition to the digital rendering’s desire to make the fiction seem “real.” While one can argue that the merits of “pseudo-photo-realism” are dubious, the same argument could be made for methods of representation that carry architecture closer to the fictional and farther away from the experiential qualities of architecture. In an age saturated with digital images, where many value the instagram-ability of spaces over actually being there, perhaps it is time that architecture lent more credence to the reality of buildings and how they are experienced in the world. As an alternative to both striving to “make the fiction seem real” (virtual) and “exploring and exploiting artificiality” (post-digital), this paper focuses on an approach to architectural education that asks students to concentrate on the actual as it relates to architecture and human experience. These investigations utilize both physical models and digital technology in an effort to explore and document the physical reality of architecture. In these investigations, students build artifacts at a scale large enough to stick their head inside in order to engage their “peripheral vision, which enfolds the subject in space.” (Pallasmaa) This jump in scale allows students to peer inside and observe qualities of space, light and material, as well as how these qualities change over time. The studio utilizes this method both in the exploration of precedents as well as students’ own design projects. This change of perspective shifts the focus of their efforts away from the formal exploration of abstract objects toward the interior and the experiential. These artifacts are not approached as models, but as “concrete objects, three dimensional works on a specific scale” (Zumthor) in order to emphasize that they are a representation of reality.

4:30pm
Gaslamp 1

Domestic Design

Moderator: Jason Carlow, American University of Sharjah

Narrative Homes

Matthew Celmer
Syracuse University

Narrative Homes is an ongoing self-initiated theoretical research project exploring home design through the lens of literature. The creative exploration focuses on the relationship of narratives (story telling) to the architecture design process. Each home in this series is designed based on a selected portion of narrative literature. The project will investigate the techniques an architect and writer have at their disposal with the intent of discovering affinities and overlaps in method. How would one approach designing a home when a narrative text is the primary constraint? As a traditionally trained architect my current focus is finding ways to disrupt my received ideas on architecture. Narrative Homes uses two tactics to circumvent the common approaches to architectural design. First, it looks outside of the field of architecture to understand and borrow techniques from adjacent artistic spheres. Secondly the project is an investigation in voluntary self-imposed constraints. Historically in art, self-imposed constraints have been harnessed to produce unexpected and unpredictable results. The first home in this series was designed using text from The Stranger by Albert Camus and was completed in the 18-19 academic year. The full research project is envisioned as a series of four homes with each using a different literary text as the point of origin. The serial nature of the research is critical for comparison, referencing and retrospective analysis. Using literary narratives as a starting point for design requires invention and experimentation with architectural representation and media. The typical architectural drawings of floor plans, sections and elevations are static and do not allow for the dynamic nature of a moving narrative. Exploring unconventional architectural representation techniques through drawing, collage and physical models is a continued focus for this research. The Narrative Homes research project was recently accepted by the I-Park Foundation, an International Artists-In-Residence program as part of their summer General Residency Program. The proposal was reviewed by an architecture/landscape discipline specific selection panel. During the 4 week residency this summer the preliminary design of the next two homes in the series will be developed. Narrative Homes has also received a Faculty Research Grant for the 2019-2020 year from the Syracuse University School of Architecture. The grant funding will go towards the development of physical models for each home in the series and will be used in the upcoming academic year. The five images included with this abstract are from the first Narrative Home based on a selected portion of the novel The Stranger by Albert Camus. For the ACSA 108th Annual Meeting all four completed Narratives Homes would be presented as a series.

GATOR house: A Typology of Resilience

Sarah Young
University of Louisiana – Lafayette

Michael McClure
University of Louisiana – Lafayette

Ursula Emery McClure
Louisiana State University

Most buildings in southern Louisiana’s wet, hot, humid, and more often than not volatile climate seek to resist the extreme conditions by creating a presumed impenetrable barrier. Since the advent of HVAC, levees, dams, and surge barriers, a construction culture of resistance has permeated the built environment. This has proven less than resilient and has resulted in billions of dollars in remediation and and even more tons of construction debris. Counter to this approach, the camp, GATOR house, encourages interaction with Louisiana’s natural and dynamic environment and attempts to resist by existing with. Traditionally, the camp typology functioned as a hunting and fishing retreat; minimal, low energy, a little rough, and occupied episodically according to season. Once a rustic shed for storing fishing and hunting gear, this typology has taken on additional uses to become a coveted gathering place for families and friends to enjoy the outdoors – camps are part fish cleaning station, part summer home. As the typology became as much a summer home as hunting blind, its relationship with nature diminished. It became a typical house. GATOR house attempts to reimagine both the historical function and practicality of a camp and more contemporary social gathering demands all while preserving the overarching function as a commune with Cfa1 nature. Sited on a fluctuating Louisiana waterway, an infrastructurally controlled oxbow lake in Ventress, LA, durability and water resistance are critical. First, and foremost, GATOR house is raised 4’ to 8’ above the 500-year flood stage to mitigate inundation. It is also constructed with low-maintenance materials that resist water, rot, and insects including a tough exterior hide of corrugated and v-crimp metal, composite decking, and concrete block and interior finishes of recycled vinyl, reclaimed cypress, and quarry tile. These materials not only withstand the humid conditions of the Cfa but also allow the owners to spray off their camp with a hose. Additionally, nine metal roll-up doors protect the camp while owners are away and in the event of extreme weather. The GATOR House’s communion with nature is more than just material. It is social and spatial with almost all social gathering occurring “outdoors.” The lower-level waterfront porch, angled to capture prevailing breezes, functions as a dining area and the upper-level porch acts as the home’s living room. Industrial-grade fans with flexible controls keep both screened porches cool and comfortable. Adjacent to the waterfront porch are stadium seats and stairs that wrap around a 100-year-old cypress tree. Occupying the interstitial space between “outside” screened porch and “outside” on the waterfront, they provide seating for gathering, barbecuing, cleaning fish, or enjoying the view. Hidden behind the stadium seats lies an outdoor shower for rinsing off after a day on the water. The only spaces that are truly “inside” are the three sleeping rooms, master bath, and small kitchen. Using natural ventilation, fans, and deep shade, heat, humidity, and insects are mitigated to establish human comfort in an infamously uncomfortable environment.

1 Köppen-Geiger climate classification in south eastern United States

Design and Domestic Narratives

Julia Jamrozik
University At Buffalo, SUNY

Thinking of spatial memories defines architecture as an armature that satisfies more than the needs of shelter but is rather an infrastructure for experiences. The relationship between spaces created on the draughting board of the designer and lived experience in space becomes manifest in the personal memories of the inhabitants. If architecture is to be understood through the disciplinary rubrics of history, technology and style, it must also be understood through the more fleeting and the more personal memories it creates. Referring to Gaston Bachelard’s descriptions of his childhood home in “The Poetics of Space,” this paper assumes that the domestic spaces one inhabits become ingrained in conscious or unconscious being.[i] As tactile, kinesthetic and sensorial experiences they form the backbone of our recalled landscapes. Bachelard states: “Memories are motionless, and the more securely they are fixed in space, the sounder they are.”[ii] Thus the more specificity one can embed in a space the more unique value it has in terms of experience and consequently in terms of memory. Referencing Bachelard, but also Claire Cooper Marcus and Rachel Sebba and their writings related to children, this paper elaborates on the themes of experience and memory and their relationships to design based on two projects: “Growing up Modern” and “Sky House.” For the research project “Growing up Modern” we used a methodology based on oral history and spoke with children who were the first to inhabit early Modernist houses and housing. We also revisited the iconic homes themselves to document the spaces through the lens of the childhood recollections. We interviewed the original inhabitants of the row houses by J.J.P.Oud in the Weissenhofsiedlung, the Tugendhat Villa by Mies van der Rohe; the Schminke House by Hans Scharoun; Le Corbusier’s houses in Pessac, and his Unité d’Habitation apartments in Marseille. From the conversations we can draw links between the idiosyncratic moments of the homes and the personal memories of their former inhabitants. While the intensity and emotional attachment to the childhood spaces varied from narrator to narrator, there were several significant moments of discovery from the scale of the neighborhood to that of the architectural detail. The research project influenced the subsequent design of “Sky House.” We were certain to include the clients’ daughter’s desires and opinions along with those of her parents in the process. Beyond an unusual massing which relates to the topography of the site, playful idiosyncratic elements are placed throughout the home from a glazed brick socle for the wood stove, to scattered colourful coat-hooks and a custom undercroft swing-bench. “Sky House” is rooted in a desire to accommodate and elicit personal domestic narratives as much as it is driven by a careful understanding of the site, and associated massing, programmatic, environmental and material strategies.

[i] Bachelard, G. (1958). The poetics of space. Boston: Beacon. Bachelard speaks of “the house where one is born” but we want to expand that here to include childhood homes more broadly.

[ii] Bachelard, G. (1958). The poetics of space. Boston: Beacon. p9

ORA House – An ecosystemic approach to design of a net zero house for the middle east

Shameel Muhammed
Heriot Watt University

A net zero residential unit for a harsh climate condition as that of the middle east is a challenging goal. With temperatures rising up to 50 degrees during peak summer in addition to occasional dust storms and high humidity levels, achieving a desirable indoor comfort conditions require architects and engineers to break away from the conventional design strategies and look for innovations in spatial planning, materials and building technology. ORA house is a net zero residential project that was designed and built for the first ever Solar Decathlon Middle East 2018 (SDME). SDME 2018 – an international design competition was organized by Dubai Electricity and Water Authority of United Arab Emirates in collaboration with Department of Energy – United States. The ORA House project was led by a multi-disciplinary team of undergraduate students and faculty. The project was developed over a period of one and half years in collaboration with key industry partners. One of the successful design strategy for the ORA House was the conception of its own name. Inspired by the model of natural ecosystems, ‘ORA’ an acronym of ‘Organic’, ‘Resilient’ and ‘Adaptive’ represents three separate ecologies that come together forming a synergy whereby the independent systems operates in a symbiotic relationship. While the ‘Organic’ ecology comprises of all the passive design strategies, ‘Resilient’ ecosystems addresses the active design systems employed in the ORA House. ‘Adaptive’ ecosystems recognizes and facilitates the requirements of a multi-cultural and diverse population of UAE. The adoption of a diversified ecosystem as its driving design concept, helped the multi-disciplinary team to align their individual design components to a holistic integrated system. This increased the efficiency and performance of the ORA house in comparison to the conventional residential models that prevails in the region.   This project presentation shall give insights into the strategies and systems of each of the independent ecologies that contributes to the overall ecosystem of the ORA House.

Two Houses: A Case Study in Hubris and Stewardship

Chris Cosper
Ferris State University

In 2015 and 2016, two very different houses were torn down: Ray Bradbury’s house in the Cheviot Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles, and the Bavinger House, designed by Bruce Goff, outside Norman, Oklahoma.  At first examination, these two houses had little in common: Ray Bradbury’s house dated from 1937 and was conventional for L.A. houses of its time, notable only for its bright yellow color—and its resident, a 20th century literary master.  Meanwhile, the Bavinger House, built between 1951 and 1955, was known for its singular quality, arguably the masterpiece of a master architect. Despite the differences in the houses, the stories of their demolition have many overlapping qualities.  Specifically, the destruction of these houses was the result of a lack of stewardship and an excess of hubris.  In the case of the Bradbury House, the house was ultimately judged on its architectural merits alone, isolated from its notability as the residence of an important author and screenwriter.  The final owners of the Bradbury House—who purchased the house with the explicit intent of demolishing it—showed utter contempt for the home’s cultural significance.  In the case of the Bavinger House, the owner—who inherited the property—showed no regard for or even understanding of the house’s architectural value.  In both cases, significant heritage was lost because people acted as property owners, not cultural stewards.  In neither case was the idea of an obligation to others paramount or, arguably, even present. Notably, the stories of the demolitions played out in the media, but perhaps more dramatically on social media, where premature obituaries of the Bavinger House may have helped seal its fate.  In both cases, concerned citizens used social media to voice their desire that the houses be preserved, but in both cases, those citizens were ignored. More than just an interesting tale of two demolished houses, the stories of the Bradbury House and the Bavinger House provide an opportunity to explore aspects of conservation, cultural heritage, ethics, and professional judgement.  As an impromptu classroom discussion led by this author suggests, the parallel stories of the Bradbury House and the Bavinger House provide a valuable entry point to classroom discussions of the above-listed issues because of—not despite—the contrasting nature of the houses: a house important for non-architectural reasons, and a masterpiece of 20th century architecture.

4:30pm
Salon D

Special Focus Session

Other Borders

Moderator: Rubén Garnica Monroy, Tecnologico de Monterrey

Session Description

This session will be exploring the concept of border beside the political or administrative conception. The presentations will explore how borders are created or perceived within the limits of an urban area or the urban-rural fringe, as well as how the idea of border can be applied at different scales: from micro to macro.

Emanuele Giorgi
Tecnologico de Monterrey
Aleksandra Krstikj
Tecnologico de Monterrey
Lucía Martín López
Tecnologico de Monterrey

4:30pm
Salon E

Special Focus Session

New Ideas in Professional Practice Education

Moderator: Harry Falconer, National Council of Architectural Registration Boards

Session Description

NCARB will highlight its Professional Practice Scholars program, sharing strategies to freshen professional practice courses and integrate content on current and future modes of practice into studio and other areas of the curriculum. Topics will range from teaching methods and student engagement to hiring practices and firm needs, ethical decision making, and the future of academia and practice. Examples from NCARB Scholars participants will be shared, and participants will be invited to contribute to the discussion about needs and opportunities in professional practice education.

Jeremy Fretts
National Council of Architectural Registration Boards

Catherine Roussel
Woodbury University

Greg Wynn
California Polytechnic State University

4:30pm
Balboa 1

Private Meeting

College of Distinguished Professors (DPACSA) Meeting

Moderator: Christine O. Theodoropoulos, California Polytechnic State University

6:00pm
4th Floor Foyer

Reception

Awards Reception

Conference attendees are invited to toast to the 2020 Architecture Education Award Winners.

7:00pm
Grand Ballroom

Opening Keynote | 2020 Tau Sigma Delta, Gold Medal

Tatiana Bilbao

2020 Tau Sigma Delta, Gold Medal

Tatiana Bilbao is the recipients of the 2020 Tau Sigma Delta (TSD) Honor Society in Architecture and Allied Arts, Gold Medal.

Questions
ACSA Conferences

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Director of Operations and Programs
202-785-2324
eellis@acsa-arch.org

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Programs Manager
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asmith@acsa-arch.org

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