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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.

+ Read the full notice.

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
SATURDAY, MARCH 14, 2020

9:00am
Gaslamp 3

Ecological Futures

Moderator: John Quale, University of New Mexico

PEMEX Urban Park: Water as the Vision for the Future

Jose Herrera
University of Texas at San Antonio

Genesis Eng
University of Texas at San Antonio

Angela Lombardi
University of Texas at San Antonio

This study aims to raise a discourse on the unfolding future of a vacant former oil refinery and a natural lagoon located in the city of Reynosa, Tamaulipas, Mexico. Reynosa is a paradigm of border geographies, laying along the Rio Grande, the city’s major source of water and natural-political border between the United States and Mexico. The urban landscape of Reynosa features the Rio Grande, man-made canals, and a natural lagoon, the “Laguna La Escondida”, physically connected to the vacant oil refinery “PEMEX” where the project is located. PEMEX is a nationalized Mexican Petroleum company founded in 1938.  After the energy reform passed in 2013, PEMEX was privatized. The PEMEX oil refinery in Reynosa was inaugurated in 1950 and had the capacity of 10,000 oil barrels. The refinery produced in the ethanol plant 27,210 metric tons per year for 67 years, until its shutdown in 2004. The 65-hectares vacant oil refinery site was donated to the state of Tamaulipas in 2017 by PEMEX, becoming public land. The site is strategically located in the middle of the city, however the presence of the oil refinery generated dystopic neighborhoods, some neglecting the responsibility to provide public spaces, others creating inadequate conditions for the success of sustainable community engagement. In addition to the high levels of air and water pollutants in the city. The natural lagoon, the “Laguna La Escondida” is a 152-hectare body of water, contaminated by toxic metals and chemicals produced by the refinery and by the uncontrolled rapid growth of the city. The lagoon, however, is a strategic resource for many local floras and migrating species of fauna. This project describes possible future scenarios of urban regeneration: the remediation of the brownfield site of Pemex and the “Laguna La Escondida”. Phytoremediation strategies are analyzed as a way to clean the toxins in the soil and the water. While purification of the water is the focus of this water urbanistic proposal, the research proposes other strategies that will reverse the damage without compromising the well-being of future generations. The project seeks to respect the history of the place by keeping the refinery infrastructure untouched as a memory of the past. The city features a chronic lack of public spaces, PEMEX refinery site will be transformed to an urban park weaved into the urban fabric. The urban park will act as a catalyst for living and social activities, where the community can reconnect as a civic society. A new urban-ecological paradigm emerges from the desire to revive and reintegrate nature into the city. The proposal enhances the inherent values of the site such as history, culture and nature. While re-mediating the contaminated water, PEMEX urban park will imagine the future of the area as a social condenser, as a response to capitalism as form of urbanization.

An Evolution in Design Education: A 10 Year Experiment in Alternative Teaching and Learning in the Anthropocene

Robert Fleming
Jefferson University

Today we find ourselves in the Anthropocene, the first human made climatic period, an existential threat to the future of our species. Knowledge of climate change and the effect of fossil fuels upon the environment has ushered in the sustainable design movement. To train the next generation of architects, new types of built environment design degrees offer the opportunity to prepare future designers to be leaders in the fight against climate change. This, in turn, has led to the emergence of new evolutionary models of design education. This paper will outline a ten-year experiment in finding transformative teaching and learning methods for the design of the sustainable built environment. It will candidly share failures and successes of the experiment and discuss the ramifications for mainstream architectural design education. Here is a snapshot of the topics that will be covered in the paper: Guiding principles replace the concept as the primary driver of design projects; Intentional transdisciplinary collaboration replaces the often contentious interdisciplinary design process; Social equity replaces privilege as the undercurrent of education which requires a new set of policies and procedures for staffing and recruitment; The studio space itself moves from rows of individual desks to specifically designed collaboration spaces; Stakeholder-driven design charrettes at the start of projects replaces inequitable and arbitrary final juries; On-line education is used liberally to expand opportunities for everyone to become a sustainability leader; Design accountability becomes the norm as students set and meet their own sets of goals in a reflective “validation” process; and, finally, The role of beauty becomes subservient to change agency as the primary metric for defining a successful design student.   In conclusion, the 10 year experiment in alternative design education has been a rich and rewarding experience and it is hoped that the lessons learned and examples shared will provide a useful basis for other design programs to undergo their own transformations so that we may finally elevate the imperative of fighting climate change and restoring the natural world to the forefront of design education.

The Blind Nurse: Considering Decay as Generator

Marc Swackhamer
University of Minnesota

Blair Satterfield
University of British Columbia

“Buildings will inevitably decay, and there is nothing architects or those charged with a building’s upkeep can do about it. So, what is an architect to think or do about it? The most common thing is to forget about it. Or, to put it in psychological terms, to deny it, much as we put out of our thoughts our own inevitable decay and extinction.” “There is a tougher, more critical edge to the acceptance of the decay of buildings and their inevitable ruin that places architecture in a unique position to inform our understanding of the human condition and enhance its experience. Chiefly, this is to include in design a degree of complexity, even of contradiction embodied in the simultaneous processes of growth and decay in our buildings, that heightens and intensifies our humanity.” – Lebbeus Woods, “Inevitable Architecture”

The Blind Nurse explores new ways for architecture to behave at a phase when architects have long abandoned it: its decay. When architects consider this phase as important as the design and construction of a building, they accept that a building is fundamentally part of our larger natural ecosystem, that it is not distinct from nature, but part of it. The Blind Nurse project points to a scenario in which architecture can participate more fundamentally in the natural cycles it often ignores. A building’s obsolescence can be as thoughtfully considered as its construction. Modeled after two unique precedents (“blind box” packaged Japanese toys and sacrificial “nurse logs”), the Blind Nurse is a thirty-inch cube of soil and cellulose enriched with tree seeds and delivered in a thin paper wrapper. When placed outside in the elements, the cube erodes, gradually revealing a hidden object inside. Produced in multiples, each object in the Blind Nurse series is a unique, three-dimensionally printed object made of a mixture of wood pulp and plant nutrients to anticipate the growing needs of the tree species in the soil. Its carefully tuned shape and properties, which we developed from researching the unique characteristics of nurse logs, encourage a sapling to take root in it. Blind Nurse models how architects might expand their agency. It points to a strategy in which they might consider decay as a seed for future growth, with the same thoughtfulness as they consider the initial conceptualization of their work. It positions materials as nutrients for future growth. It acknowledges that buildings are rooted in a broad ecosystem, not distinct from it. It offers a scenario in which architecture can participate more fundamentally in the ecological cycles it often ignores. It asks questions like: If a building’s obsolescence can be as thoughtfully considered as its construction, what might this mean for that building’s conceptualization? What might it mean for its detailing and material selection? How might it lead to a deeper and broader engagement with its users? Blind Nurse offers surprise, puzzle, delight, and even sadness to viewers as it evolves over time. We design most objects to last forever. Once produced, they exist statically in the world, unresponsive until we throw them away. Blind Nurse is purposefully temporal. Like any biological organism, it evolves and changes, from its birth to its death. It catalyzes and then yields to future growth. Its full purpose is revealed slowly and its narrative only understood through repeated viewing and continuous monitoring. It is a dynamic, surprising, and ultimately emotional proposition, to which we can uniquely relate because, like architecture and like all of us, it will eventually wilt away.

Emergent Coastal Territories: A Typological Case Study

Tyler Gaeth
University of Minnesota – Twin Cities

In a world increasingly threatened by global sea level rise and the ramifications of climate change, what role does coastal reclamation play in the future development of coastal regions? This question formed the root of my ongoing inquiry into reclamation practices globally and remains central to the study I am proposing through the CRIT Scholar Program. Through the format of essays and other scholarly writings, I have begun to develop an expanded lens through which to understand the complex relationships coastal cities have with their waterbodies. The themes which have emerged from this ongoing project have lead me to reconsider the original scope of my study, expanding the investigation from reclamation alone to three key emerging coastal territories: new territory constructed from the sea, most closely associated with conventional reclamation; climate change driven response, places forced into coastal manipulation by the threats of sea level rise; and floating and overwater expansion, human settlement beyond land directly in aqueous territory. For this study, I would like to begin a typological investigation of several specific projects which are recent examples of these emerging territories. Specifically, I aim to understand how each is responding to the threat of sea level rise and the particular pressures imposed by surrounding urban development. Through my ongoing study, I have begun to identify sources and projects which will create the foundation for this investigation and expand upon the body of work I am developing on the subject. While not sufficient to exhaust the topic, the research support and mentorship provided by the CRIT Scholar program will drive the study towards a new depth of exploration. By the end of the grant term, I will produce an initial set of case studies which allow for meaningful comparisons and instigate additional questions to establish future research direction.

How Much Does Zero Energy Building Cost?

Ming Hu
University of Maryland

Developers, building owners, and design teams often point to initial capital costs as the primary obstacle hindering the uptake of net-zero buildings. In-depth research and an understanding of whether net-zero buildings cost more to design and construct are still scattered and non-systemic. Accordingly, this study provides the first comprehensive investigation into actual net-zero building construction costs in the United States, based on qualitative and quantitative research. The aims of this research are to: (1) provide a comprehensive survey of the existing body of literature to aggregate the findings and identify the consensus and pattern, (2) compare the results and analyze the evidence with a focus on quantitative studies, and (3) conduct a quantitative comparative analysis of twelve built zero energy buildings (ZEB) in order to understand whether there is enough evidence of cost differences between ZEB, conventional building (CB) and green building (GB). Statistical tests were performed, with the results showing no significant differences between actual ZEB costs and modeled CB costs. Further details investigated the cost difference between actual ZEB and modeled GB. This study provides the first in-depth investigation into actual ZEB costs in the United States based on detailed information. With higher initial costs being perceived as major barriers to the uptake of ZEB, the findings from this research project could be critical to further understanding whether ZEB cost more. Based on the comparison of actual and modeled costs of twelve built and verified ZEBs, it can be concluded that, in general, there is no significance between actual ZEB costs and modeled CB costs. Although the data shows several net-zero buildings as having substantially higher costs than the modeled costs, a sizable portion of net-zero buildings have been found to be below the modeled cost. Interestingly, the study also shows a significant difference between actual ZEB costs and modeled GB costs. The magnitude of difference between those two are primarily affected by the size of the building.

9:00am
Gaslamp 2

Body and Perception

Moderator: Saundra Weddle, Drury University

Positive Psychology as a New Lens for Architecture

Phillip Mead
University of Idaho

Since 2006, four books claim architecture’s ability to increase our happiness or well-being: The Architecture of Happiness in 2006, Happy City in 2013, The Blue Zones of Happiness in 2017, and A Place to be Happy in 2018.  One is written by a philosopher and one by an architect practitioner, but none by academic architectural theorists or environmental psychologists.  None of these books meaningfully reference key concepts of happiness found in philosophy, or the recent academic movement of Positive Psychology.   What is missing from these books, and the architectural profession’s writings about well-being, is a more rigorous academic framework drawn from Positive Psychology’s findings on well-being/happiness.  In particular, the conditions laid out by the movement’s founder, Martin Seligman of Penn, who between 2002-2011 laid out five pillars of well-being and flourishing: Positive Emotions, Engagement/Flow, Relationships, Meaning/Purpose, and Achievement.  These conditions along with other psychological concepts such as Resilience and Strengths appear to resonate well with classic architectural texts.  This paper takes stock of architectural texts since the 1800’s that claim that architecture can deliver pleasure, happiness, meaning, etc.  The paper also takes stock of the limited evidence that supports their assertions.  Here the writings of Ruskin, Le Corbusier, Norberg Schultz, Alexander, and Pallasmaa among others are examined for how well they resonate with Positive Psychology’s findings and principles.

The Taxonomy of Spatial Typologies: A Proposal for an Analytical Language

Benjamin Bross
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

As the phenomenon of globalization permeates across political and socio-cultural boundaries, one of its major effects is an increasingly homogenized spatial landscape. Lefebvre noted spatial production is “secreted” cultural production, so globalization is tantamount to an increasingly homogenized world culture.  Designers who push back on spatial globalization eschew Modernism’s break from the past or Post-Modernism’s poly-narrative but literal u-topic emphasis, utilizing a design approach based on site-specific contextual and historic factors ranging from climate to socio-culturally produced typologies. Spatial typologies are synchronous with human spatial production: their emergence, evolution and extinction exemplify a society’s material culture at specific places and times. For example, nearly 46 centuries ago, Egyptian pyramids emerged as the salient funerary typology; thousands of years later, department stores typified the logic of capital, as the Industrial Revolution produced spaces that addressed the consumer demands of a growing bourgeoisie class. Typologies were so important that designers, such as Vitruvius or Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand, proposed normative design treatises that codified “appropriate” building types in response to contextual, socio-cultural, political, and economic factors. The emergence of Post-Modernism in arts and social sciences in the 1960s signaled a more liberating design approach because it embraced alternative design directions, including the reincorporation of traditional praxes of spatial production such as typologies. Rudofsky, in Architecture without Architects, reminded us that spatial production was not the exclusive domain of the formally trained designer but, more importantly, that vernacular space itself was a legible representation of a society’s values; typologies were once again important and merited documenting. Later, Pevsner noted in A History of Building Types “there is…no history of building types in existence.” While the research recognizes that Kostof, Trachtenberg, New Urbanists, et.al., have since chronicled specific spatial typologies -landscapes, urbanscapes and buildings-, the conference paper builds on Pevsner’s work not by recording typologies but by developing and proposing a vocabulary that standardizes the classification of spatial production. Emulating the science of taxonomy, the paper proposes systematic criteria for identifying and categorizing typologies. In this approach, emphasis is placed on tracing changes in spatial morphologies over time, such that spatial relationships are revealed between earlier antecedent typologies and their contemporary iterations. This is possible because, like genetics, typologies reveal qualifying components that may illustrate iterative mutations, revealing “evolutionary drifts” or “selection processes” away from initial spatial typological precedents as they adapted to emerging historic and contextual circumstances. Each taxonomic rank is classed by defined components, whereby a spatial taxon (spatial type) share properties, i.e.: functions, siting, arrangement, materiality etc. Following taxonomy, the research uses a deductive approach to classify types: from generalized conditions, to time and location-specific spatial “specimens.” For example, we can trace the spatial evolution of Byzantine dome architecture into its prevalent use in Islamic architecture -and onto a specific mosque in a particular city. Ultimately, the goal of the paper is to provide designers with a taxonomic language that enables production of contemporary typologies that respond to a site’s unique historic and contextual factors, thus helping to reverse globalization’s spatial homogeneity.

From Flâneurs to Navetteurs: Perceptions of Urban Space through the Commuter of the Contemporary City

Ke Sun
University of Florida

The flâneurs of the twentieth-century Paris traversed the city subconsciously through spontaneous walks, who perceived urban space as a mnemonic mechanism that provoked sensational experiences charged with intimate imagination. Oppositely, the urbanites of the twenty-first century Shanghai navigate the city by rapid underground transportation with a sense of immediacy and intentionality that dissimulate subconscious urban experiences. To identify this contemporary counterpart to the flâneur, I have adapted the French word navette, which extrapolates the meaning “shuttle” to describe a transportation method between locations with singularity and rapidity. In contrast to the flâneur’s invocation of strolling, the word navetteur captures the eidetic experience of directionality and intentionality by commuting with underground metros. This paper investigates Parisian flâneurs and Shanghai’s navetteurs’ perceptions of urban space through a surrealist theoretical framework and finds that the Parisian flâneurs craft a surrealist phenomenon in urban space with the city opening up as a mnemonic mechanism that evokes dreams and imagination; whereas the navetteurs of Shanghai recollect the city with fragmented metro stations covered with signage and perceive the city with a sense of estranged exteriority that confines their urban perceptions with detached conformity. This paper further compares the changing and transformative urban perceptions between flâneurs and navetteurs and investigates the enigmatic relationship between navetteurs of Shanghai and
flâneurs of Paris, specifically with the cases of Tadao Ando’s Shanghai bookstore and Hector Guimard’s Paris Métro entrances, and generally with its implications to contemporary cities to understand urban space through human movements and imagination. Consequently, this paper argues for the return of the flâneur as a method of reminiscing perceptions of urban space in surrealist experiences through which we can revisit our intimate relationship with the twenty-first
century contemporary cities and ruminate on the predicament of the contemporary urban life.

Atmospheric Pressures

Susanneh Bieber
Texas A&M University

American architect Victor Lundy designed an inflatable pavilion to house the traveling Atoms for Peace exhibition in 1960. This pavilion constituted a literal atmosphere because the difference between its internal and external air pressure functioned as the structural element.

The pavilion also produced an experiential atmosphere that, like the exhibition within, used technological progress to suggest a better world to come. In this paper, I recover the little-known history of Lundy’s pavilion to expand its atmospheric dimensions to include not only the literal and experiential but also the sociopolitical. Such an expansion reveals the ideological pressures that shaped the pavilion and, more generally, the changing meanings of inflatable architecture during the postwar period.

9:00am
Gaslamp 5

Bridging to Practice

Moderator: Chris Trumble, University of Arizona

Theory and Practice: The Formulation and Delivery of Teaching Professional Practice

Jessica Garcia Fritz
South Dakota State University

Federico Garcia Lammers
South Dakota State University

Charles MacBride
University of Texas at Arlington

“Theory’s promise is to make up for what practice lacks: to confer unity on the disparate procedures of design and construction…It is of little use to see theory and practice as competing abstractions, and to argue for one over the other. Intelligent, creative practices – the writing of theory included – are always more than the habitual exercise of rules defined elsewhere.” [i]

This paper will describe the pedagogy, development, and delivery of an ongoing professional practice course sequence, as both a critique of traditional pro-practice coursework, and within the unique context of a recently formed architecture program in an underserved region. Among many of the challenges in starting a new degree program from scratch is the approach to pedagogy and curriculum. Student exposure to a range of voices and instructors is a significant challenge and one that has been addressed through a curriculum of interrelated course sequences, including studio, media, history, technology, and perhaps most successfully, professional practice.  Delivered across the final four semesters of the program, the professional practice sequence has been consciously developed to teach to an inseparable condition of practice and theory, avoiding the “fiction” and abstraction that Allen argues against. In addition, the courses have been conceived within the unique and place-specific lessons of a small program with little architectural tradition. Practice has its own narrowly defined lane in the region, and as such, any theory surrounding it has only now been proposed or verbalized by the emerging faculty. Though traditional professional-practice courses typically exist as a single-semester offering, spreading content across four courses has allowed the department to connect diverse theoretical and practical positions, while exceeding the narrow requirements for accreditation. Legal responsibilities in the profession, financial practices, environmental ethics, and the management of practice unfold respectively through Regulation, Economics, Stewardship, and Management courses. These themes are theoretically framed by rooting architectural practices through their historical emergence, intersection with small urban places, and as a critique of normative models. Simultaneously, they are framed as theoretical extensions of the studio and other curricular course sequences (figure attached). It has been found that this four-course sequence has established a popular and successful teaching methodology that both supports departmental pedagogy and has introduced a platform for wider investigation and dialogue in this professional context.  The challenge by Allen has been adopted with success. “There is no theory, there is no practice.There are only practices, which coexist in action and agency.” [ii]The diversity across four individual courses provides a plurality that reinforces the quality in teaching and content. Indeed, it has opened the formerly unquestioned and narrow condition of practice in the region, accurately described by Furjan in that “practice, as the format or terrain of architectural intervention and invention, is no longer singular but plural, no longer about propriety (the proper place of the architect or the proper rules of the game): practices are tactical operations, multiple, diverse, and competititve, operations that transform, deform, contest, and define the discipline and its spaces of effects.” [iii]

[i]Stan Allen, “Introduction: Practice vs. Project,” from Practice: Architecture, Technique + Representation, Second Edition (Routledge, 2009) pp. XII-XIII.

[ii]Ibid, p. XIII.

[iii]Helene Furjan, “Practice,” fromCrib Sheets: Notes on the Contemporary Architectural Conversation, ed. Sylvia Lavin, Helene Furjan, and Penelope Dean (Monacelli Press, 2005) p. 30.

From “Figure-Ground” to “Figure-in-Ground”: Relevance and Outcomes of Critical Service-Learning for the Design Field_ the Detroit Case Study

Claudia Bernasconi
University of Detroit Mercy

Education in the design field can be viewed as a path towards the development not merely of the ability to solve problems, but more importantly the capability to actively engage in the creative process of problem definition. Furthermore, the recognition of pressing complex societal, environmental and ethical issues calls for the creation of new types of knowledge that encompass the ability to involve people affected by design and planning decisions, to protect the built heritage and the environment, and to deal with problems associated with under-represented populations (Salama, 2005). Within this framework, what is the relevance of critical service-learning? A thorough analysis of overarching themes from current transformative pedagogical approaches, critical service-learning theories, and findings from a recurring service-learning project in Detroit will be presented to delineate outcomes of a pedagogical approach that centers on the intimate personal growth of students, and gradually enables them to see themselves as part of a larger context, in which critical issues become a personal call for action. Freely borrowing from the definition of “Architecture” as an articulation of the experience of “being in the world”, that directs “our consciousness back to the world and towards our own sense of self and being” (Pallasmaa, 2005, p.11), this paper argues that students involved in critical service-learning, not only gain a deeper sense of self and being, but become capable of expanded conceptualizations of interpersonal identities, such as self+other and self+society. Students reported that service-learning is “[…] reflective, and sets you up with an opportunity to intimately view yourself as part of a whole” , and that they saw themselves “[…] more clearly as a player in dialogue and not just the main character.” Through the project students overcame what could be defined as a figure-ground paradigm in education, a decontextualized self-centered learning model, and shifted towards a holistic “figure-in-ground” relationship, a self+XXX paradigm, in consistency with the philosophical foundations of service-learning1. The questioning of neutrality of the educational process, i.e the openness of such process to be used either as a tool for conformity to the established status quo or one for disruption and transformation put forth by Freire in the 1970s, highlights the inalienable social responsibility educators and administrators have while defining priorities for educational strategies and curricular content. Within the recognition of this illusionary neutrality of the process, service-learning can operate as a process that either “[…] reinforces or disrupts particular unarticulated norms of being and thinking” (Butin, 2003, p.1683). This paper will discuss traits of critical service-learning that ensure the promotion of core abilities, including the ability to understand social contexts and broad patterns, i.e. sociological imagination (Astin et al., 2000), to acknowledge the continuum in which one thinks and operates, to recognize needs as systemic versus individual, to question teaching and learning roles, and to overcome the framing of service-learning as a transaction between those serving and those being served (Mitchell & Humpries, 2007), towards an authentic embracement of social justice aims and a more accurate interpretation of learning outcomes. 1 This relative, versus absolute, paradigm is consistent with the philosophical foundations of service-learning, such the idea of learning as a by-product of social activities, the importance of experience in education and its connection with ideas of freedom and social norms, first explored by J. Dewey and P. Freire.

Astin, A. W., Vogelgesang, L. J., Ikeda, E., K., & Yee, J.A. (2000). How Service Learning Affects Students. Higher Education. 144.

Butin, D. W. (2003). Of What Use Is It? Multiple Conceptualizations of Service Learning Within Education. Teachers College Record, 105(9), 1674-1692.

Mitchell, C., & Humphries, H., (2007). From notions of charity to social justice in service-learning: The complex experience of communities. Journal of Education as Change, 11(3). 47-58.

Pallasma, J. (2005). The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the senses. Chichester: Wiley-Academy. Salama, A. (2005). Skill-Based/Knowledge-Based Architectural Pedagogies: An Argument for Creating Human Environments. Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Human Habitat, Mumbai, India

From School to Office: Recent Graduates’ Perceptions of Architectural Education and Practice

Elizabeth Grant
Virginia Tech

Peter Ozolins
Hughes Associates Architects & Engineers

Recent graduates of architecture schools who enter the workforce often report a mismatch between their experiences in academia and their experiences in the profession. This paper reports the findings of the first phase of a more extensive exploration that investigates these graduates’ experiences, discerns the nature of the relationship between education and practice, and develops suggestions for bringing the two worlds into closer alignment. The authors, during their time both as licensed architects and educators, have observed a disconnect between the academy and the office. For example, in the schools, they have seen priority given in lectures to so-called “design” architects working on prominent buildings, with less attention paid to “architects of record” who are often responsible for the long and messy process of bringing visions to reality. In practice, they have seen young interns who expected only to design high-profile projects become disillusioned when the reality of the fuller, more complex nature of architectural practice is revealed. Practitioners have expressed their own frustration with the unrealistic expectations and lack of appropriate preparation that they find in recent graduates. Such a disconnect compares unfavorably with the relation between the academy and practice of others in the licensed professions such as medicine, law and accounting. The paper begins with a brief literature review presenting the lines of past and current scholarship on the relationship of education to practice. The methodology of the first phase is then described: an anonymous, web-based, Institutional Review Board-approved survey containing both direct and open-ended questions, administered to alumni from three recent graduating classes with a Bachelor of Architecture degree from a highly ranked, accredited architecture school in the eastern United States. The questionnaire asks these alumni to describe their understanding of practice gained while in school, their sense of preparation when entering the profession, and their observations about the nature and degree of alignment between these two realms. The authors summarize responses from 53 of 224 alumni to whom the questionnaire was sent, and identify emergent themes to be used in the subsequent phase of the research. This next phase will involve a series of qualitative, in-depth interviews with students, educators, employers, and collaborators at accredited schools of architecture and architecture firms both in the United States and abroad. The conclusions drawn from the questionnaire describe the relationship between a theory-based and design-focused architectural education and the obligation of the architect to sustain a viable practice, respond effectively to project needs, and to ensure the health, safety and welfare of society. As these themes are investigated within a larger cohort, and in different populations within academia and the profession, the authors expect to unearth stories that expose to the discipline the nature of the relationship between training and practice, and how these trends impact students’ trajectories. The ultimate goal of the research is to provide students, faculty, and practitioners with a clearer picture of the expectations and obligations of the architectural profession and of those who prepare students to enter it.

UHCDC: Exploring Public Sector Practice

Cathi Ho Schar
University of Hawaii at Manoa

In the past three years, UHCDC’s work has helped to advance numerous projects in my district. Their research and design work has facilitated deeper interagency collaboration, strengthened citizen engagement, and produced visions that explore the potential for projects that will revitalize my district’s rural community. However, UHCDC is doing more than just architecture and design. They are solving problems; they look at issues from different angles and provide options. Their participation offers a new context for conversation because students represent our future; they motivate everyone around them to consider what’s best for them.

Through UHCDC, students learn about the inner-workings of government-how projects are funded, how tax dollars are spent, how bills become laws. They have unique opportunities to engage agencies they might otherwise never encounter. I feel gratified knowing they will enter the workforce with a better understanding of their political world, because Hawai’i needs architects, engineers, and other professionals who are trained to work effectively with government to solve our region’s problems. I truly believe that we need UHCDC now more than ever. It is a promising resource for the state, combining higher education, internship, and employment in a hybrid university-based, government-serving, public­public partnership. 

-Senator Donovan Dela Cruz

9:00am
Salon B

Domesticity Reimagined

Moderator: David Birge, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Hawai’i Housing Lab

Karla Sierralta
University of Hawaii at Manoa

Brian Strawn
University of Hawaii at Manoa

The state of Hawaii is facing a critical shortage of affordable housing. The Hawaii Public Housing Authority (HPHA) is in the unique position to contribute to solutions both through new mixed-use, economically-diverse, TOD-oriented projects, and through redevelopment projects. This paper presents the design of a community engagement process developed to involve future residents in the early phases of the design process of future housing.

In the spring of 2019, the University of Hawaii Community Design Center (UHCDC) was engaged to undertake an exploratory research project for the HPHA titled the “Future of Hawaii’s Housing.” The UHCDC is a teaching practice and outreach initiative led by the School of Architecture that provides a new platform for students, staff, faculty, and partnered professionals to collaborate on interdisciplinary applied research, planning, and design projects that serve the public interest. These projects offer service-learning opportunities for students through academic instruction, internship, and post-graduate employment.

The HPHA is the state’s primary housing agency managing 85 properties spread across five islands with a total of 6,270 housing units. With properties nearing the average age of 48 years old, the HPHA is need of renovating or replacing a large percentage of its portfolio. As the landholder with the largest contiguous sites near the new light rail stations, the HPHA is in the unique position to make a significant contribution towards helping solve Hawaii’s housing problem.

A series of questions activated this inquiry: How should we design housing for all in Hawaii? What attributes should be considered that are unique to our context? How do we provide more housing without compromising mountain vistas, parks, or farmlands? How do we provide density without locals feeling overcrowded? How can future residents become involved in the design process of their communities?

The process began by collecting qualitative data, through a series of in-home interviews, that would allow families to speak broadly and candidly about what home means to them. The findings that emerged from the analysis of these contextual interviews, together with secondary research, informed the development of a community engagement process, a design framework, three co-creation tools, and a mobile research lab.

The results of the first phase of this multi-year research project support the planning and design of future HPHA developments, aligning pre-planning, urban integration, conceptual design, and schematic design with co-creation activities facilitated with the three newly developed tools. This community engagement process supports the discrete steps that form the cognitive foundations of decision-making. User co-creation can take place across multiple community meetings or can be “stacked” into one event.

The Hawaii Housing Lab is scheduled to travel across Oahu, inviting a broader cross-section of citizens and community members to explore and share their preferences.

Countering the Biennialization of Architecture in The Chinese Urban Village in Shenzhen

Jieqiong Wang
University of Michigan

Robert Adams
University of Michigan

Mary-Ann Ray
University of Michigan

From Europe to China, while biennial infrastructure allows global curators, architects, and urban designers to use exhibition tactics for disciplinary promotion, the quick in-and-out exhibition practices nevertheless risk overlooking local complexities and differences. How does expanding architectural collaboratives or activisms through international architecture biennales reclaim “the right to the city” and contribute to the multiplicity and heterogeneity in the city? This paper addresses this question in a Chinese context, by closely examining the 2017 Shenzhen/Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism (UABB) hosted in contested urban villages. In particular, this paper investigates an exhibition/renovation project House 17 within the main site -the Nantou Old Town. This study employs mixed research methods, including archival research, ethnographic research, and spatial analysis, to unravel the mechanisms in initiating, negotiating, and implementing of this international architectural collaborative project in the urban village. By situating the UABB and House 17 in the long history of the socio-spatial transformation of Shenzhen, this paper argues that the international UABB has expanded the capacities of the field of architecture and urban design to mobilize economic and social forces in making urban changes at a new scale. However, architect-curators’ partnership with the local government has put them in a new position that appears close to real estate developers in the process of urban renewal. The in-depth investigation into the exhibition project House 17 further reveals that local politics and complexities tend to be compromised in globalized architectural imagination and collaborative. Through the case study, this paper problematizes the globalization of architectural activism and calls for alternative design pedagogy.

Over Under In Between: Affordable Housing within an Industrial Ecology

Jason Carlow
American University of Sharjah

Affordable housing is a particularly sensitive issue in a country with a large expatriate, working-class population and a large income gap between groups of residents across the socio-economic spectrum. Although developable land is seemingly limitless in the United Arab Emirates, due to tight governmental control over land policies and a relatively high cost of living, the demand for comfortable, affordable housing for working-class expatriates is great. Many working class individuals are forced to live in cramped, corporately owned dormitories or within industrial areas of the city that offer few public amenities or open space. The research and design work presented here represents an effort to identify key issues in the development of affordable housing for the UAE and presents new housing solutions through design iterations. The title of the design studio, Over, Under, In-between, therefore not only refers to the activation and occupation of space for housing within the city, but how affordable housing must work above, below and in spite of obstacles within the global culture and local space of industrial production.

How can architecture move beyond the mere provision of shelter and allow residents opportunities to advance their livelihoods and improve the overall built environment? Design solutions seek opportunities to offer an open system of public amenities to the industrial zones and social and economic mobility to the residents. In a culture where issues of income gap and inequality are politically sensitive and rarely dealt with in an academic setting, this studio has positively impacted students as the future architects and developers of the region to tackle socio-economic issues head-on through design.  Discourse in and around the studio through research and reviews has had a lasting impression on the way that students in this course address societal problems in a rapidly developing region.

New Domesticities New Collectivities

Jonathan Rule
University of Michigan

Kathy Velikov
University of Michigan

The New Domesticities New Collectivities studio was interested in exploring the development of alternative forms of housing for emergent forms of living and working in Detroit. Historically, the arrangement and configuration of plans within the context of domestic space, most often reveals tight allotments of square footage and compartmentalization of spaces with inherent naming conventions that imply single use, inflexible scenarios of inhabitation: Living Room, Kitchen, Bedroom, etc. But, how we live, work and play is continually changing. The nuclear family, which dominated housing design of the 20th century, is disappearing. It is being replaced by diverse typologies of post-familial living arrangements. These include various forms of collectives, cohabitation, and new ways of combining dwelling and working. These urban residents require a rethinking of what housing can be and what it can do.

This paradigmatic shift questions our assumptions for what constitutes a home, how the private and the shared are partitioned, and what new kinds of spatial uses are necessary. In response to these new domesticities, the studio focused on the development of alternative forms of housing for emergent forms of living and working in Detroit’s Eastern Market area. The studio was not interested in the standard kit of parts, but instead sought to explore how these traditional spatial labels can be reframed and recombined at both the unit and building scales to develop scenarios and spatial typologies that experiment with collective forms and combinatory strategies for both domestic arrangements and their architectures.  Collaboration, cooperation, and sharing were not only ideas that students tackled with their designs, but also defined how the work was undertaken in the studio, both through having students work in groups of three, and by collectively producing the overall site and massing plan for the sites. Three of the final projects that emerged from the studio are included in this package.

Team: Sarah Arthur, Brian Baksa, Hannah Cane, Teruaki Hara, Karina Hernandez, Jordan Laurita, Nour Mazjoub, Eric Minton, Samuel Scardefeld

Growing Up Modern – Oral History as Architectural Preservation

Julia Jamrozik
University At Buffalo, SUNY

What was it like to grow up in an early Modernist villa or housing estate? How did this setting impact your attitudes growing up? Has it shaped the way you look at domestic spaces? Were you self-conscious of your avant-garde childhood home or proud of it? Since 2015 Coryn Kempster and I have undertaken a series of interviews with individuals who were, as children, the first inhabitants of radical buildings from the early twentieth century. We asked questions and recorded memories in an effort to understand the impact, or lack thereof, these buildings had on our interlocutors as children and the influence, if any, they continue to have on their adult selves. Called “Growing Up Modern,” this research and documentation project uses the methods of oral history and acknowledges the personal and subjective impact of the interaction between the interviewee and the interviewer in the close reading of the narratives and the material artifacts.

9:00am
Gaslamp 4

Pedagogies of Digital Technology

Moderator: Frank Melendez, City College of New York

Component / Assembly: Pragmatism and Precedent in Digital Fabrication Pedagogy

Adam Marcus
California College of the Arts

Matt Hutchinson
California College of the Arts

This paper discusses a series of academic design studios that explore ways to imbue pedagogies of digital fabrication with a critical sensibility rooted in architectural precedent. The work does so by exploring the architectural detail as a locus for reconsidering contemporary domesticity in the context of new technologies of design, fabrication, and assembly. The research looks to the Case Study House Program spearheaded by John Entenza of Arts & Architecture magazine in Los Angeles (1945-1966) as a model for how architects can re-conceptualize and re-materialize domestic space through an understanding of digital and robotic fabrication processes. Just as the architects of the Case Study House Program crafted new prototypes for domestic living inspired by the postwar (modernist) logics of mass production, this work speculates how contemporary (postmodernist) logics of mass customization can inform new models of domestic space appropriate for today. Rather than accepting the architectural detail as a predetermined assemblage of standardized parts or products, this research speculates on the spatial, programmatic, and social possibilities of customizable, parametric, and bespoke details—and how such a paradigm can relate to emerging forms of domesticity. The work focuses on the domestic component: the guardrails, jambs, sills, stairs, moldings, doors, cabinets, coves, reveals, partitions, wall bases, and other parts that, when assembled together, constitute “architecture.” Each project employs technologies of mass-customized design and production to reconsider the component’s definition, its construction, and its assembly into larger configurations of structure and space. The ambition is to develop new understandings of part/whole relationships that reflect contemporary modes of living at all scales, from the component to the broader architectural organization. The pedagogical structure of the studio relies upon focused analysis of precedent as a way to drive both conceptual and material logics. Each project revisits a domestic component from a seminal architectural case study, typically a stair or other aspect of circulation. This component is then reverse engineered in light of contemporary manufacturing techniques that can process standardized, off-the-shelf material components in customized and bespoke ways. Students explore these processes through large-scale study models and physical prototypes that emphasize tectonic fidelity and the effects produced by customized components. Discoveries made at the scale of the joint and detail scale up to a spatial component, a proto-architectural interior condition not yet at the scale of a building, but large enough to understand ideas of public/private relationships within the space. It is only then—after thorough understanding of tectonic, space, and effect—that the ideas scale up to a sited architectural proposal. The research focuses specifically on readily available industrial manufacturing processes as a way to innovate within existing frameworks of architectural production. By melding computational workflows and advanced fabrication processes with the pragmatics of building and assembly, this work advocates a subtle but nonetheless radical shift in how we design and make architecture. And by grounding the work both conceptually and tectonically in precedent, the studio pedagogy fosters a critical, historically-sensitive ethos that sometimes is lacking in academic approaches to design computation and digital fabrication.

Evaluating the Impact of Immersive Technology on Spatial Ability Development in Beginning Architecture Students

Eric Mainzer
Pennsylvania State University

There is a lack of research about the effects of virtual reality and other forms of immersive environments on the development of spatial abilities in beginning architecture students. The overarching goal of this study is to investigate the relationship between virtual reality and spatial ability development (see Definition of Key Terms for more details) and to determine if the use of training in immersive environments has a significant impact these cognitive processes. The main research question for this study is to investigate the impact spatial cognition training utilizing virtual reality on spatial visualization skills in beginning architecture students. This question will be answered using students’ test scores, questionnaires, and assessments of design studio performance. Students’ spatial visualization development will be evaluated through an experiment which introduces virtual reality training, to a group of architecture students and assesses the changes that occur in their spatial ability. The evaluation method will be a pre- and post-test design to measure changes in students’ rotation, mental transformation, and spatial orientation abilities. To assess these spatial abilities will utilize a computer-based version of the Architectural Spatial Ability Test (Cho, 2012a) and the Purdue Spatial Visualization Tests: Visualization of Rotations (PSVT:R) (see figure5). The findings of this research may improve our understanding of what knowledge and training can be transferred from virtual reality to real-world situations and support further implementation of virtual reality in architecture education.

Soft Mechatronic, Aerodynamic Architecture Studio

Kenneth Joseph Tracy
Singapore University of Technology and Design

Christine Yogiaman
Singapore University of Technology and Design

Stella Loo
Singapore University of Technology and Design

Sachin Gupta
Singapore University of Technology and Design

Emerging technologies promise to change the way buildings perform but the adoption of these innovative solutions must go through a long validation period. Architecture studios equipped with new software and hardware tools are uniquely positioned to collapse this timeframe and create ideas for the future application of developing technologies. Leveraging current research in the engineering fields of soft mechatronics and fluid dynamics a spring 2018 studio along with a group of mentoring researchers speculated on the implications of these developments for buildings in the tropics. Taking on the problem of reduced air movement in dense urban fabric the studio groups proposed 3 strategies for buildings with actuated, soft-mechatronic “skins”. The studio adopted current engineering work in fluid dynamics that investigates active airflow separation control. Airflow separation is the phenomena of airflow separating from a body to create eddies, drag and vorticity. By controlling this phenomenon through actuated soft-robotic surfaces, engineering researchers believe vehicles and buildings could continuously change their aerodynamic profile. This research presents the possibility of manipulating airflow to allow for more breeze or more comfortable patterns of wind around and within buildings. This premise results in a studio workflow that flips the typical scalar development of an architecture studio. The process began with the detailed function of façade components and finally resulted in the speculation of building form and performance at an urban scale. Starting from a study of biological mechanisms used to manage air and water flow, groups created drawings and did research into the mechanisms performance. This work resulted in 3d models that articulated the critical surfaces needed by the mechanisms. These critical surfaces were then translated into the design of scaled, soft, pneumatic actuators. These actuators where designed and tested in iterations to improve their performance. Transient CFD simulations were run in parallel to the development of the actuator design to test their aerodynamic performance. Transient CFD studies were chosen so the effects created through the movement of the actuators could be observed. The CFD data allow group to both gather data and to gain a more intuitive understanding of designing fluid patterns. The development, testing and simulation of the actuators formed the basis for the second half of the studio during which façade systems and a large (10-30 story) building was developed by each group. During this phase of the studio time spent of three areas: fabrication, simulation and speculation/representation, was determined by the groups. This biased allocation of time modulated the character of the final projects modulating the physical production/testing, data and virtuosity of each project. Though varied each proposal developed detailed drawings of their façade systems, final proposed scaled actuators and speculative drawings of their designed airflow. Results from the studio mutually benefit the mentoring team or engineering researchers and the students. The research team gained an embodied sense of several proposed applications of their technology and the students developed a more in-depth knowledge of performance-based design.

Fabricating Customization

Jeremy Ficca
Carnegie Mellon University

Ficca’s field of inquiry is digital workflow – working with a range of digital tools from 3-D modeling at the conceptual stage to building information modeling at the documentation stage to the actual fabrication of architectural components, from scale models to full size objects. His sponsored courses and workshops provide students an opportunity to engage in material and fabrication research by design practices.

The two cycles of his course, Fabricating Customization, received support from Centria and provided an opportunity for an interdisciplinary group of students to conduct hands-on research into novel methods of freeform metal fabrication. Members of Centria’s R&D team engaged the group of students over these two years to offer expertise, while benefitting from the breadth of student research agendas.

-Stephen R. Lee, Carnegie Mellon University

The Iowa State University Computation + Construction Lab (CCL)

Shelby Doyle
Iowa State University

Many programs have developed fabrication laboratories over the last decade, and many have employed the tools in these laboratories for design-build projects, studio support, and individual experimentation. When Shelby was hired, the University recognized the woeful state of our existing fabrication facilities—a few laser cutters, jury-rigged 3-D printers, and an antiquated CNC router—and provided startup funds for Prof. Doyle and two other new faculty members to pursue a laboratory that would reflect the department’s history of broad, integrative approaches and the University’s land grand missions of equality of access and engagement with the community.

From the beginning, Shelby has brought a critical stance to how things are made and who makes them. The CCL has looked for technologies that can connect our department with others on campus—ceramics and fine arts, in particular—and that leverage resources in sustainable and fair ways. Their early purchase of budget-level machines exemplified another strain of ethical thinking, in that this decision guaranteed access to all of our students. Rather than pooling a large sum of money into a single, expensive machine, the CCL could afford dozens of desktop tools that could be easily understood by novice students.

-Thomas Leslie, Iowa State University

9:00am
Gaslamp 1

Interior Design

Moderator: Nichole Wiedemann, University of Texas at Austin

Top Heavy

Andrew Colopy
Rice University

Familiar artifacts in any architecture school, pedestals structure and formalize the act of presentation. Yet their status is secondary, subservient to the work they support. As ancillary objects, they are saddled with the conflicting demands of durability and economy. Most often they are literally heavy, cumbersome, always in the way and seldom interesting. Enter plastic. Top Heavy is a material research project to design and fabricate a set of architectural model pedestals. Necessarily durable and economical, they also endeavor to be light-weight and flexible, exploiting the unique and highly variable qualities of plastic.   The design begins with a regular tessellation of squares and equilateral triangles. Within this pattern, higher order tessellations are identified that can be folded three-dimensionally into a unique set of self-similar forms. The approach permits fabrication from plastic sheet materials with minimal waste. Likewise, the approach is intended inherently to challenge the domain of plastic performance, favoring the structural challenges of flatness and tight curvature (both maximum concentration and even distribution of loading) in contrast to the prevalence of soft curvature in similarly scaled constructions. The design makes use of a flexible interlayer structured by a rigid sequence of panels adhered to either side. The initial prototype utilized a lamination of five different polymers: High-Density Polyethylene (HDPE), Nylon Cloth-Inserted Neoprene (a composite), Acrylic, and 3M Adhesive Transfer Tape (proprietary thermoplastic). Throughout the project’s development, alternative materials were tested and substituted to meet the desired performance criteria. The final prototype makes use of a lighter ballistic nylon membrane interlayer to reduce weight and simplify fabrication through laser cutting. The outer panels were replaced with a thicker, more rigid and UV stable marine-grade HDPE to reduce deflection, increase opacity and prevent discoloration. Kydex (PVC/Acrylic hybrid), lighter in weight and less brittle, was substituted for the inside lamination of grey acrylic. The outer panels are CNC-milled for precision. Custom embedded 3d-printed PLA connectors were also developed which serve as a scaffold for a structural acrylic epoxy to join the final assembly and prevent delamination of the transfer tape. The final assembly makes explicit the unique properties and performative interaction of different polymers that are all too often subjugated to a single class of materials. Each type is used for its inherent flexibility, stiffness, durability, moldability and even adhesive properties, with each layer privileging a particular performance or quality. Supporting this claim is the fact that each material in the initial prototypes was exchanged for another (or tested in multiple) in the course of development. Such a strategy displaces the narrative of plastic as either a single class of materials or as a single, miracle material capable of any feat of performance. The project, in its composition as a set of polymers adhered in laminations and partially mechanically fastened (though cast in situ), also strains our definition of what constitutes a composite material. One questions, if all visible materials were a single color whether we would perceive it as an assembly of materials or simply a single material of variable performance.

Work Pod for an Architecture School

Ammar Kalo
American University of Sharjah

Work environments are witnessing a revolution in terms of how they define space and production, and the ways in which they engage their users. Technological innovation and social change are some of the drivers behind such radical transformations, and continue to shape today’s work culture. Tech companies pioneered a blend of work, rest and play within their office environments. However, while all the attractive features they offer at their offices are designed to incentivize employees and optimize their performance, the nature of the work environment itself it rapidly changing. Recent research suggests that the open plan is not as productive as it was prophesized1. In addition, considering most work is collaborative, what is the nature of collaboration and work in the age of the cloud? And how much does physical space any longer define work and production? The challenges of future work and its accompanying spatial shifts were impetus for this project, a Design-Build studio within an architecture undergraduate curriculum. The studio ran as an atelier with the aim of tackling the challenges of delivering teaching material and concurrently produce a fully functional prototype with the students by the end of the semester. This project narrows its focus to designing a small scale individual work pod, affording students the opportunity to delve deeper into interior and furniture design aspects and fleshing out the smallest of details. In terms of designing the work pod, students were asked first to each individually produce a few design options, which were then iterated on through successive phases with larger student groups until a final design emerged as a synthesized concept. In addition to design work, each student had a number of dedicated tasks which they carried throughout the semester and ranging from documentation, material specifications, digital modeling and drawing, physical prototyping, procurement and coordinating with suppliers, fabrication, to accounting. Conceptually, the final pod is designed as a series semi-enclosed work areas containing a standing desk, bench, and a work desk all of which are sandwiched between two parallel thickened walls. The thickened walls contains a lot of function like hiding the retractable cable reel, housing all electrical wiring, and featuring an acoustic wall and a pin-up wall on each side. The work pod itself is comprised of three separate components: 1. The aluminum structure; 2. A polycarbonate skin; 3. Furniture elements. Colored vinyl graphics on the polycarbonate panels wrap around the structure and change in intensity responding to where users might be, and feathering out toward the edges to help the pod blend in with its surrounding. The overall effect is providing more privacy for the work areas while still allowing for various lighting conditions, in addition to the ambient and task lighting provided inside. Several 1:1 scale cardboard and plywood mockups were built to resolve all the component dimensions including the booth, furniture, and down to the thicknesses of materials. These full-scale mockups were also used to survey other students in the college acquiring hands-on user feedback and refining the design further.   With the prototype built and successfully in use for a months, students will apply the lessons learnt during the process and build a few more updated pods to complete the project. 1. https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/325959

The Mirror Images of All Square

Nicole McIntosh
Syracuse University

Jonathan Louie
Texas A&M University

This project considers the role of architectural form and material as modes of imaging a brand. This project is a collaboration between architectural designer, branding agency, and non-profit to construct the architectural space of a restaurant that conveys a strong mission and influences consumer memory.   The presentation will focus on the translation of slogan (text) and visual advertisement (graphic image) into architectural form, color, and structure.  By focusing on the development of brand image of All Square as the context for the project; the work suggests that the experience of the built environment is significant as a means of communicating the mission and brand of the project.   All Square is a non-profit and restaurant in Minneapolis whose mission aims to employ formerly incarcerated individuals.  The name “All Square” is a reference to the notion that those who have paid their debts to society are square and free to move forward with a clean slate, as well as a nod to the shape of the fast-casual restaurant’s signature dish. To give the non-profit mission and branding of All Square a physical presence, the project uses the name and advertisement motif as the starting point but repeats it at varying dimensions throughout the space.   Specifically, the presentation will focus on three themes: color as environment, framing attention, and directing views, as devices that exaggerate the interior setting and merge the presence of the restaurant with the image of the brand.  The mirror and framed rectangles physically and visually shape the room by encouraging the occupants to do what the branding suggests, “Don’t Judge, Just Eat” by looking closely at the other side.  These elements partition, focus, and unify the interactions between users that are both planned—the point of sales, at the bar, at the entrance—and unplanned.  The branding colors are represented through led lights on the individual frames. The chartreuse, blue, and magenta lights help to distinguish the different scenes in the space.  When seen collectively the mirrors and frames exaggerate the interior setting by directing views inwards, resulting in multiple compounding scenes that extend the room.

9:00am
Salon D

Special Focus Session

Open Access

Open (Re) Source: Access & Inclusion in Architectural Education

Moderators: Robert J. Dermody, Roger Williams University & Rob Whitehead, Iowa State University

Open Education, a philosophy of sharing information and learning practices freely and openly, influences how faculty create and share their research and teaching. Contemporary models of architectural education that embrace open-sourced information and digital access have diminished the use of traditional proprietary resources—but “openness” doesn’t guarantee quality or utility. This special-focus session will discuss the emerging role of open educational practices in architectural pedagogy including: the challenges of developing and integrating new resources, the benefits of increased access for inclusive learning, the opportunities / threats of new research and publishing models, and lessons learned from digital platforms.

The Open Paradox

Moderators: Britt Eversole, Syracuse University & Mireille Roddier, University of Michigan

From the Open Society to the Open Work, from Open Source to Open Access, the open has served as an evocative and efficient postulation. The efficacy of the term, however, does not lay in any objective categories of action or practice, but only in relation to a preexisting body of disciplinary knowledge, a set of social and political protocols, or an accepted model of form or formalism. To deploy the open without context not only deprives it of its critical agency as a counter-practice; it also renders it susceptible to appropriation as an instrumental apparatus of ideological concealment.

9:00am
Salon E

Special Focus Session

Developing Policies and Shifting Operations for Equity, Diversity and Inclusion

Moderator: Samia Rab Kirchner, Morgan State University

Session Description

This panel will share best practices to promote social equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) at schools of architecture. What steps might schools take to develop and assess impactful and measurable EDI policies? What tools can schools and departments use to measure the increased awareness of, access to, retention in, and successful graduation from architecture programs for minority students? Participation in this workshop will jumpstart a program’s efforts to develop an EDI policy and imagine ways to respond to the 2020 National Architectural Accrediting Board (NAAB) Conditions and Procedures.

_mpathic design
Elgin Cleckley
University of Virginia

The Work: USC Architecture’s Diversity and Inclusion Plan
Amy Murphy & Lauren Matchison
University of Southern California

Lesley Lokko
City College of New York

Monique Robinson
Morgan State University

Theresa Hwang
Department of Places

11:00am
Gaslamp 2

Poly-narratives in Architectural History and Theory

Moderator: Benjamin Bross, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The Order of Things in James Fergusson’s Histories of Architecture

Solmaz Kive
University of Oregon

James Fergusson created one of the earliest comprehensive narratives that systematically incorporated non-Western traditions within the history of European architecture. Although it was later overshadowed by Banister Fletcher’s A History of Architecture, Fergusson’s history played a significant role in establishing the common structure of the future global architecture survey books.  Fergusson’s was a working history. In 1849, when his An Historical Inquiry into the True Principles of Beauty was published, he was already an established scholar of Indian architecture and had written on other subjects such as the ancient Jerusalem. However, The Historical Inquiry was dismissed by architects and public readers alike. Six years later, in 1855, Fergusson rearranged the same material into a new structure to publish The Illustrated Handbook of Architecture. Unlike the former, Handbook of Architecture was immensely successful and run into a few editions. However, as his authority was established, Fergusson rejected the “much more popular manner” in which the Handbook was written and eventually rearranged the book in an allegedly more “scientific” manner. This third and best-known version first appeared in 1865 as A History of Architecture in All Countries from the Earliest Times to the Present Day. In fact, Ferguson’s three versions bear many similarities in their material and the underlying theories of race and ethnography. Nevertheless, as he emphasized, they follow different classificatory systems. This paper would discuss Ferguson’s three versions of global history to discuss some strategies that he employed in order to overcome the challenges of creating a comprehensive, yet cohesive narrative. Writing in the nineteenth century, Fergusson was fascinated with classification. Throughout these three versions, he explored different methods of groupings, exclusions, and distortions in order to create a coherent structure. From the first book’s chronological arrangement, he moved to a combination of geographical and religious classifications in the second and eventually established his narrative around a central, Eurocentric narrative in the third. Fergusson considered this arrangement his main contribution to architectural historiography. Nevertheless, this new structure was also supported by a methodological shift from formalism to ethnography. Despite many differences in methods and materials, Fergusson’s work bears many structural similarities to the mainstream approach to surveys of architecture in the twentieth century. Most significantly, the classificatory system that he gradually developed would eventually establish the binary division between Western and non-Western traditions. While the current desire to go beyond the Western canons in history courses and textbooks has faced many practical, pedagogical, and ideological challenges, this paper would discuss some of their roots in the early phases of the global history. In addition, it would review some alternatives that Fergusson had explored in his earlier versions but eventually dismissed in order to create a tidy, linear narrative.

Architecture After Virtue: Questioning the (Inter)Disciplinarity of Ethical and Architectural Theory

Andrew Reed Tripp
Texas A&M University

There is much to indicate that ethics is an important field of inquiry for contemporary architects; and yet there is little evidence that this field has been defined in a way that will support ongoing academic and practical inquiry. One impediment to the formation of this field is the divergence between disciplinary and interdisciplinary understandings of ethics and architecture. Does the conversation on ethics and architecture reflect an interdisciplinary movement? Or is ethical theory already intrinsic to architectural theory? This paper takes up two antithetical positions in order to initiate a line of questioning critical of both. These positions include, on the one hand, the survival/revival of virtue ethics within the phenomenological school of architectural thinking, identified herein with the architectural theorists Joseph Rykwert and Dalibor Vesely, and on the other hand, the interdisciplinary arguments of architect William Taylor and moral philosopher Michael Levine.

The Case for Survey Eclecticism

Steven Lauritano
University of Michigan

Imagine an architectural history survey in which the diversity of interpretive approaches takes precedence over any attempted comprehensiveness of content.  This paper examines the merits, and possible pitfalls, of such a course based on the presenter’s own experience teaching a global survey of architecture at a large public university.  Instead of asking students to work through a single textbook, an “eclectic survey” presents a chapter from a different book every week, each one selected to highlight a distinctive interpretive tradition: Sigfried Giedion on Paleolithic Europe, Vibhuti Sachdev on Ancient Southeast Asia, George Kubler on Ancient America, etc.  Alongside relevant details of buildings and artifacts, the course lectures also unpack the contexts and strategies that shaped each author’s approach to history.  Working through such historiographical variety poses challenges for students and instructors alike, but we seem to have reached a moment in which survey eclecticism is not only plausible, it might also be essential.  Detailed information on previously overlooked buildings is more readily available than ever before.  Yet this positive development has exponentially exacerbated one of the inherit problems of the survey itself: the challenge of selecting single examples to bear the representational burden of entire oeuvres, regions, or epochs.  An “eclectic survey” does not skirt this issue, but attacks it from a new angle.  Making a single chapter representative of an author’s – or at most an intellectual school’s – method is still reductive, but less problematically so.  In effect, the “eclectic” approach charts a middle path between the thematic organization typically preferred in schools of architecture and the chronological presentation still taught in most art history departments.  Themes emerge organically as a consequence of the assigned authors’ methodological specificities.  Reading Spiro Kostof opens up a discussion of urbanism. Liang Sicheng raises questions of climate and morphology.  Isabelle Hyman’s work necessitates a conversation about Orientalism. The difficulties created by this “eclectic” approach are worth embracing – or so this paper argues – to the extent that they escape the expansionist mode of today’s global surveys, many of which are fueled by the misguided belief that an ever-more-granular expertise will one day deliver an all-encompassing picture of historical reality.  If history has taught us anything, it is that its own interpretation remains perpetually in flux.  Historians’ methodologies shift, often seismically, from one generation to the next.  Why not equip architectural students to understand such changes and their underlying motivations?  Ultimately, an architectural survey guided by an ethos of eclecticism creates a better framework to discuss the consequences of choices historians have made and are still making.

Close to the Edge: The Birth of Hip-Hop Architecture

Sekou Cooke
Syracuse University

Hip-Hop, the dominant cultural movement of our time, was established by the Black and Latino youth of New York’s South Bronx neighborhood in the early 1970s. Over the last five decades, hip-hop’s primary means of expression—deejaying, emceeing, b-boying, and graffiti—have become globally recognized creative practices in their own right, and each has significantly impacted the urban built environment Hip-Hop Architecture is a design movement that embodies the collective creative energies native to young denizens of urban neighborhoods. Its designers produce spaces, buildings, and environments that translate hip-hop’s energy and spirit into built form. Some 25 years in the making, Hip-Hop Architecture is finally receiving widespread attention within the discipline of architecture thanks to a series of influential essays, lectures, and presentations.

During this period of emergence, the movement’s ideals have primarily been tested by a loosely organized group of pioneering individuals, each using hip-hop as a lens through which to provoke and evoke architectural form. Close to the Edge: The Birth of Hip-Hop Architecture exhibits the work of these pioneers—students, academics, and practitioners—at the center of this emerging architectural revolution.  The exhibition, on display at the AIANY Center for Architecture from October 1, 2018 to January 12, 2019, included work by 21 participants representing five countries, with projects ranging across a variety of media and forms of expression: from experimental visualization formats and installation strategies, to façade studies, building designs, and urban development proposals. In aggregate, these projects reveal a collective vision for alternative forms of expression and practice, and serve to formalize work created over the past 25 years into an emerging canon of Hip-Hop Architecture.

11:00am
Gaslamp 4

Design, Visualisation + Making

Moderator: Branko Kolarevic, New Jersey Institute of Technology

Pre-Design Visualization: The Prospect of Real-Time Evaluative Methods in the Design Process

Fang Xu
South Dakota State University

The advent and popularity of computer-generated imagery have upgraded the products of architectural visualization, with manually illustrated renderings supplanted by 3D digital renderings. However, the digital turn brings little transformation to the role of visualization in the architectural design process. Visualization is typically absent in the fuzzy, early design stages regarding problem framing and prototyping. In other design stages, visualization takes place as a post-design move after the designer develops a design iteration. This paper advocates the development and adoption of pre-design visualization methods. Pre-design visualization redefined the relationship between architectural visualization and design, transforming visualization from a discrete and post-design task into a ubiquitous presentation process that structures design thinking and precedes all design actions. Pre-design visualization brings many unique values. It provides real-time quantitative and qualitative evaluation-in-design capabilities. It also augments the dialogue between the architectural designer and the formal scheme under development as well as the dialogue between architects and non-architects. Moreover, it promotes user-centered design by simulating users’ potential sensual and behavioral experiences in designed spaces. The paper first reviews the evolution of 3D graphics technologies concerning architectural visualization, positing that technological conditions have matured to incorporate pre-design visualization in architectural design. The assimilation of gaming technologies has established standards such as global illumination (GI) and physically based rendering (PBR). The availability of real-time raytracing (RTX) methods makes possible the instantaneous visualization of physically accurate shadows, materials, and lighting. Abundant commercialized and script-based digital assets (including textures, materials, meshes, light sources, and environments) minimize the resource challenges of developing pre-design visualization tools, not least the availability of 3D programming platforms such as gaming engines featuring visual scripting systems. The paper then moves on to demonstrate the strengths of pre-design visualization through three real-time design games that the author developed. All games allow the architectural designers to initiate, operate on, and evaluate design schemes in an interactive 3D environment that features fully visualized physical contexts, adaptable weather and daylight systems, human or vehicle character capable of simulating multiple human gestures and visual perceptions, real-time on-screen quantitative assessments, and various evaluative gadgets for temporal or spatial measurements. Each game exemplifies a distinct situation where pre-design visualization may enhance design productivity: (1) massing studies of an urban infill project that improves the street environment’s static and dynamic visual qualities; (2) modular design explorations of a multi-family housing development project that is concerned with real estate feasibility and neighborhood walkability; (3) parametric studies of a solid wall façade for optimizing its visual perception with altering levels of details in different viewing distances.

The paper further addresses the immediate research directions of pre-design visualization: for example, greater user interactivity, more scripted-based actors for better procedural adaptivity, and better interoperability of design games with common design programs in a data-driven design workflow. There is also an extended discussion about the different usages of pre-design visualization for students, professional designers, and non-architect stakeholders in varied design scenarios such as simulation-based design research, inclusive design, and participatory design.

Embracing a Material Turn in Software-Embedded Design

Maya Przybylski
University of Waterloo

J. Cameron Parkin
University of Waterloo

Architects are increasingly bundling digital components together with physical assemblies in their pursuit of responsive (or sentient, adaptive, interactive,… or even smart) architecture where hardware and software work together with physical assemblies to mediate the physical environment in real time. Given that architects are responsible for creating built environments capable of enhancing certain values while downplaying or rejecting others[1] and also that digital components, such as software and data, have spatial, social and cultural in-and-off themselves[2], this practice, labelled here as software-embedded design (SED), calls for a new set of obligations and methods for understanding and supporting architects’ engagement with their projects’ computational elements, their soft materials. This paper advances efforts to build critical computational literacy for SED designers by introducing and testing an analytical framework which offers a new lens through which to consider the digital components used in SED projects. As soft materials become part of an architect’s toolkit, it is imperative that the values and objectives embedded in computational components of a project and the critical practice around their use match those projected and exhibited towards its physical elements. The first section of the paper situates the proposed framework in relation to materialist accounts of digital technology, from media scholars such as Paul Dourish[3] and Rob Kitchin[2] and Yanni Alexander Loukissas[4], which offer perspectives on the usefulness of resisting dematerialized readings of digital technologies but rather engaging them in terms of their materialities. For us, the code/data bundles are not decoupled, through their perceived immateriality, from a project’s physical dimension and instead thought of as soft materials, materials in and of themselves, and thus constituting part of a project’s material assembly. This recoupling brings the computational elements back into the domain of the designer and explicitly managing their effects becomes part of the design solution. The second section proposes and a newly developed black-box/white-box analytical framework designed to simultaneously examine a project’s soft and hard materials in order to better grasp the relationship between computational components and real-world, physical outcomes. The framework, which combines user-centred (including both human and non-human actors) and materially-oriented approaches, is discussed in terms of its capacity to support critical expositions of SED projects through its values, objectives, evaluation methods and representation strategies (in-progress sample attached). The third section reports on outcomes of applying the framework to a range of SED case-study projects (titles withheld for blind review). The resultant collection of case studies elucidates SED work from a variety of perspectives including user agency, social impact and soft/hard material anatomies and other contexts. Finally, a reflection on the analytical tool is offered which foregrounds the unique position of SED designers, through their evolving expertise in both soft and hard materials, to find new purchase on materially-oriented, socially-minded engagements with the computational components increasingly proliferating in our built environment.

Notes

1. Taylor, William M. and Michael P. Levine. 2012. Prospects for an Ethics of Architecture. New York: Routledge.

2. Kitchin, Rob and Martin Dodge. 2011. Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life. Cambridge Massachusetts: MIT Press.

3. Dourish, Paul. 2017.The Stuff of Bits: An Essay on the Materialities of Information. Cambridge Massachusetts: MIT Press.

4. Loukissas, Yanni Alexander. 2019.All Data Are Local: Thinking Critically in a Data-Driven Society. Cambridge Massachusetts: MIT Press.

Imperfection as Quality or Art in the Age of Digital Enactment

Emily Mohr
University of Southern California

Drawing (v.) Drawings (n.) is the performance of a series of ‘as-built drawings’ exhibited as they are drawn in situ. Neither digitally fabricated nor hand-crafted, the exhibition employs a series of custom-built CNC drawing robots to draw nine drawings framed perspectivally and literally by nine frames. Composed of recompositions of site-specific ornament, the framed drawings are suspended from four ijoists, mismatched from the gallery’s three existing structural channels to produce a series of collaged views of the collaged frames. Modeled on open-source Arduino-based systems, the two types of drawing robots are exhibited as integrated components of each frame. The performance of each drawing, its wobbly lines, misalignments and glitches are as important as the resultant drawing. Rejecting the translation from digitally drafted architectural drawings to ink-jet plotted artifacts, Drawing (v.) Drawings (n.) seeks to produce architectural drawings with the unexpected tactile qualities typically found only in physical models. The exhibition questions the marriage between hand drafting and singular quality; digital drawings are output as a series of unique plots, co-authored by the machine and the architect. Like Andy Warhol’s silkscreens, the robot-drawn drawings are a serial set; even from the same digital file, every drawing is unique. Installed in a non-neutral, formally unusual and materially rich space, the linework and geometry of Drawing (v.) Drawings (n.) are composed of mis-compositions of found gallery and site geometry. Like the rows of acanthus leaves that ornament the Corinthian column, site-specific decorative masonry and exposed structural members are collaged at full scale to create a series of large-format ornamented frames. Considered space-making objects, the frames are decoupled from the gallery walls and three-dimensionally collaged to create layered views of other frames and drawings of layered views of other frames.

D4: Data-Driven Design Decisions

Madlen Simon
University of Maryland

Ming Hu
University of Maryland

What would it mean if data management were at the core of our discipline? Data gives insights into users’ emotional responses to environments. The more data, the richer the insights, promoting a better fit of environment to people. How can the design process be informed by data on human response to space and place? Stakeholder preference of one alternative over another plays an important role in design process, especially in dealing with multi-objective design problems in which designers juggle competing objectives. Current tools for design evaluation are surveys, scorecards, and verbal comments. The goal of this research project is to develop, test, and validate a data-driven approach for design decision-making. The research method is based on the event-related potential (ERP) neuroscience approach and cognitive architecture (CA) theory. ERP studies brain activity in response to visual stimuli (Picton et al., 2000). More specifically, it compares the neural signal (brainwave) during different conditions to determine whether and how the brain responds to different stimuli. Using this method, studies showed that room size could influence cognitive function (Luo et al., 2018) and that subjective thermal sensation instead of room temperature plays a significant role in stimulating occupancy emotion changes (Kim et al., 2017). CA was proposed by Herbert Simon, a pioneer in artificial intelligence, in 1960 (Simon, 1960). CA has since then been explained, expanded, and further developed by researchers, mainly from the psychology and computer science domains. It has also been applied to research on design thinking. We apply CA theory to modeling physiological response to a series of events within an environment. This paper presents an experiment combining an immersive virtual environment (VR) and electroencephalogram (EEG) as a promising tool to evaluate alternative options during the early design stage of a project. More precisely, the objective is to (a) develop a data-driven approach for design evaluation and (b) understand the correlation between end users’ preference and emotional state. In our research we compared user responses on a questionnaire to physiological responses within simulated environments. The preliminary testing results suggest that the overall positive or negative emotional state does not directly affect or correlate with how participants answered the design evaluation. Depending on the importance of design attributes, the preferred design solution might stimulate a negative emotion, and the less preferred design might stimulate a more positive emotion, such as interest and engagement. We will refine the research methodology in future iterations, enhancing the virtual environment to add the ability to link user response to specific locations and adding other types of sensors along with EEG to provide additional user response data. This type of framework for identifying and quantifying specific user responses to specific design attributes would offer insights into the architectural design process, facilitating data-driven participation and action by multiple decision-makers and stakeholders.

References:

Picton, T.W.; van Roon, P.; Armilio, M.I.; Berg, P.; Ille, N.; and Sherg, M. (2000) The correction of ocular artifacts; a topographic perspective” Clin. Neurophysiol. 111, 53-65.

Luo, Chengwen; Christopoulos, Georgios I.; Roberts, Adam; Pillay, Arunika; and Soh, Chee Kiong, “The Influence of Room Size on Error Monitoring: Evidence from Event-Related Potential Responses,” Proceedings of the 20th Congress of the International Ergonomics Association, 386-391.

Kim, Minjung; Chong, Sang Chul; Chun, Chungyoon; Choi, Yoorim, “Effect of thermal sensation on emotional responses as measured through brain waves,” Building and Environment, 118 (2017) 32-39.

Simon, Herbert A., The New Science of Management Decision, New York: Harper and Row, 1960.

11:00am
Gaslamp 1

Drawing Image

Moderator: Nicole McIntosh, Texas A&M University

The Unstable Image

Kelly Bair
University of Illinois at Chicago

Kristy Balliet
Southern California Institute of Architecture

According to a 2018 Microsoft study, the attention span of human beings shrunk from 12 seconds in 2000 (the approximate start of the digital revolution) to 8 seconds. If we now officially have a lower attention span than a goldfish then how is architecture, a profession that literally casts in place physical material with mortar, silicone and welds, to even compete for the attention of its subjects when other visual information can be altered with the swipe of a finger? While our attention may be waning our ability to multi-task has increased as our lives become increasingly digitized. This Darwinian adaptation of our brains and subsequently our eyes to our multi-image laden screens suggests that there may be alternatives to architecture’s perceived stasis. The Unstable Image project interrogates the ways in which images are destabilized through the various image-based platforms in which we consume them (social media, news outlets, etc.). It explores the spatial constructs that are lurking within the plethora of two – dimensional images that we engage daily, in rapid succession. Multi-screening, swiping and scrolling increases the quantity and impact of the images we consume, resulting in new media altogether. We consume images quickly and with limited attention. We swipe in all directions and in our haste to see the next image glitches occur. Sometimes these glitches merge two discrete photos into a singular Frankenstein image, Instagram stalling out between story transitions is one example of this. This unintentional temporality results in new images altogether as images are composited and hybridized three-dimensionally (Instagram Feed & Story Transitions), grafted and scaled (Wayfair & Houzz), and split into multiple frames (Living Spaces Virtual Room Design). The Unstable Image analyzes and intentionally hacks these destabilized images towards the production of new spatial constructions that are in direct dialog with the digital platforms they reference while proposing alternative scenarios for a new type of architecture that materializes itself in the physical world. The Unstable Image stakes a claim on the image’s potential to produce spatial propositions in an age of ubiquitous image-making. If a current mode of operation is to either post work designed specifically for a particular image-sharing platform or to build work in the physical world that is literally an image than The Unstable Image offers an alternative to the current image problem. Pairing digital reproductions of stable images from canonical architectural interiors with now commonplace image-sharing platforms (Image 1/2), The Unstable Image liberates the two-dimensional image from its inherent flatness, designing spatial depth and layering results in the form of new exterior facades (Image 3/4) and interior scenes (Image 5). Focusing specifically on the “Split Screen” type adapted from “before and after” virtual room design platforms, rendered reproductions are spliced with original photographs of the same scene. These new split screens are further developed into moving images that propose new interior depths, augmented elements, framed views and subjective experiences that extend beyond the single objective lens of the original photographs.

From Diagrams to Fictions: Populated Plans and Their Buildings

Stewart Hicks
University of Illinois at Chicago

This essay explores how narrative is conveyed within architectural drawings and renderings. It dissects how certain practices construct a fictional context through drawing and pays particular attention to the role of and relationship between text, the abstraction/projection of a building in 2D space, and human figures. The examination of these variables will afford the differentiation between the various roles narrative can serve within the design process: whether it precedes, coexists with, or follows the act of design and to understand how drawings are used differently in each scenario. In a certain way, this essay is a reaction to Dora Epstein Jones’ “Populated Plans” published in Log 45. In it, she identifies the emergence of a ubiquitous (in schools of architecture at least) “new” form of drawing that looks like an architectural plan but isn’t due to the inclusion of human figures. For her, this type of drawing is distinct from a traditional plan because it isn’t strictly “architectural notation – data received from the object,” nor a universalized geometric abstraction best suited for describing a building’s organization. The introduction of human figures disrupts the universal and particularizes it. This subversive act should not be undertaken lightly, according to Jones, and she offers some bits of advice for how to discipline plans littered with depictions of human forms. Jones’ essay was troubling for a number of reasons, but, at the very least, it signifies the need to re-examine the role traditional architecture representations play in conveying stories and thus express authorial control today. This is especially true due to the imprecision of the discourse and sometimes the outright dismissal of the narratives which accompany architectural production. Populated plans are not a new form of drawing, but the act of designing buildings is increasingly understood within a complex field of human interactions and the inclusion of figures allows designers to explore scenarios without fixity. In a certain way, I see the inclusion of human figures within a plan as akin to the construction lines of hand drawn plans. They underpin the evolution of the drawing. They aren’t the plan but give rise to it, like a diagram in the Deleuzian sense. They reveal the forces which shape it while still being loose. Sure, you can erase them but they were there and give vitality to the drawing even though they are ultimately superfluous to the conveyance of information for a building’s construction. Anway, using case study scenarios and a trained eye, this essay will plot a matrix of relationships between drawing and story using the variables mentioned previously. Ultimately, the goal is to define some design techniques which remain ill-defined and chart a course for those interested in the subject but have yet to find a coherent analysis.

The Surrogate

Thena Tak
University of British Columbia

Sophie Maguire
University of British Columbia

Primeval forests, necklaced mountains, sheets of endless watery shores; a place of uncommon, natural beauty, British Columbia’s brand is ‘Super, Natural British Columbia’ (Destination BC Branding Package, 2015).  Yet this thorough campaign is rendered surficial amid the province’s rapid and seemingly relentless state of construction. With catch phrases like “Green Vancouver”, it is a region that continues to uphold a curated symbology rather than deepening any authentic sense of being; identity is branding, branding is mantra, mantra is commodity. Limitless glass towers, Brazilian ipe furnishings… where are we? This doesn’t feel green. BC’s landscape joins the province’s long list of resource exports as the backdrop for Hollywood blockbuster films. Under the guise of its generic architecture and diverse geography, British Columbia never plays itself; it plays New York, Seattle, San Francisco, China. To facilitate the market and position itself as the attractive filming city, BC Creative (a merger of the BC film Commission and BC Film and Media) runs an online catalogue catering to Hollywood, where industry folk can pick and choose backdrops like ordering towels from Crate & Barrel. This catalogue, called ‘A World of Looks’, is conveniently organized into six major categories – ‘Town’, ‘Forests’, ‘Mountains’, ‘Ocean’, ‘Landscapes’, and ‘Urban’(see attached imagery of the BC Creative website) – all being sold as contextless sites of topical attraction: this alleyway can ‘Double As’ the East Coast… or China (see attached imagery).   By offering cheap labor and robust tax incentives, BC has cornered an economy that ironically leaves it culturally invisible: BC provides raw goods – filming locations – only to later import and consume the processed product – films and tv programs – from Hollywood. Void of any people, locations listed in the catalogue become place-less spaces waiting to be assigned American imaginations through the use of the most rudimentary forms of architecture and landscape.   Admittedly, BC has not been built for the American imagination, but it is willingly hijacked and Frankensteined into cuts, angles and proper lighting to make the province appear as anything but itself. BC is a region that exists in several, diverse, overlapping zones rendering it an ecological confluence.  It’s a multifaceted actor that can throw its hat into many rings: the West Coast, the Pacific Northwest, the Pacific Rim, the edge of Canadian Hinterlands, and the inbetween of continental US and Alaska.  By playing surrogate to American landscapes, BC undermines its unique geographic position and with that, the opportunity to discover how its multifaceted Natures can rethink notions of place and being. Beyond film, this ecological patchwork is not currently represented in the built environment; generic condos are as easily found in desert townships as they are in coastal cities, exposing a blanket treatment of development and imaginations. What if the catalogue was rethought, reorganized as one of curiosity rather than consumption, one of multi-sensorial experience: embracing diversity, language, myth, histories, labor and material. When generic typological categories are cast aside and BC is alternatively organized, can nuances that are truly representative of the province come to the fore? Through drawing and collage we will embark on an investigation that reimagines the ‘World of Looks’ platform.

two-and-a-half-dimensional

Abigail Coover
Pratt Institute

Flickering lines dance in constant motion above, below, around and through the richly textured fields of the multilayered drawings of architecture. This proposal seeks to investigate the interplay of geometry, materiality, color, and perception to create unique spatial and volumetric experiences that oscillate in the area between drawing, installation and permanent structures.. Through the transition from the speculative two-dimensional architectural project to that of the realized in three dimensions, exists a middle ground for investigation. This is the space of the two-and-a-half-dimensional or 2.5D. In the disciplines of gaming and machining, 2.5D is used as a term to describe a two-dimensional projection in three-dimensional space. The result is an object or space that is simultaneously flat and round – both simulated and real. In gaming, 2.5D literally refers to the construction of three-dimensional space from layers of two-dimensional projections. In milling, it is about the axes – full range of motion in the x and y, but only unidirectional in the z. Similar to the plane of the screen in gaming and the material blank on the bed of the mill, the page in architectural representation is the platform for three-dimensional projection. From this platform, a project emerges as speculation and is then translated into three-dimensions, but what could emerge if it was possible to capture the energy and potential of the inbetween. This project will use the visual representational techniques of printmaking, bokeh and moire as translational architectural devices. In this context, printmaking – from etching, to screen printing, to offset printing, to ubiquitous LED screens – uses a surface or plate that is not fully either two- or three-dimensional. In the case of etching, a plate is manipulated beyond a flat plane to a two-and-a-half-dimensional surface in the creation of an image. It demands an intensity, density and layering of line. The blurred condition of the layered effects of the bokeh, or the out-of-focus areas of an image, creates a field of depth and implied spatial movement within static compositions. Stationary lines possess the ability to moire and create shifting surfaces that oscillate, almost imperceptibly, between two and three dimensions. All three of these techniques in the architectural context serve to create not only another potential dimension, but also the next step in movement within architecture beyond Greg Lynn’s animated digital interpretations of Francis Bacon’s Nude Descending a Staircase in the paperless space of the nineties. Through the lenses of these techniques, this project will take both original and reference drawings through two-and-a-half-dimensional space and render its presence visible. In so doing, point will become line, line will become plane, plane will become surface and surface will become volume. Their identities and relationships within architectural representation and construction will be challenged and reassessed in the search for new spatial potentials.

Open House: Large-Scale Architectural Drawing as a Medium for Engaging Public Space

Adam Modesitt
Tulane University

Carrie Elizabeth Norman
Tulane University

There exists ample precedent for artists engaging architectural subject matter in public work, often at the scale of buildings. The artist Richard Haas, for example, executed a series of large-scale murals illustrating architectural facades and interiors. [1] It is far less common however, for architects to deploy drawing as a medium for engaging public space. Since the era of Leon Battista Alberti, in which architectural labor divorced from construction labor, the dissemination of drawings by architects has been primarily restricted to private commissions or internal trade publications. As Robin Evans famously elaborated, architects’ drawings are not a direct medium, but instruments in service of anther medium to be executed by others. [2] Despite renewed attention to drawing among architects recently, architectural drawing still rarely engages the public realm directly. [3, 4, 5] This text presents OPEN HOUSE, a project that explores the possibilities of large-scale architectural drawing as a medium for public engagement. OPEN HOUSE is a 85’ x 17’ scale orthographic section drawn on freestanding brick wall in downtown New Orleans. A winning entry to a competition commissioned by ______, OPEN HOUSE is an ongoing project currently in the final phases of completion. OPEN HOUSE depicts a 1:1 section through the interior of a typical late 19th century New Orleans home. An unadulterated depiction of daily life, the drawing includes fixtures, furniture, and domestic accoutrements such as tote bags, house plants, and headphones. The drawing also depicts typical as-built construction details such as (now unused) coal-burning fireplaces and pocket-head (“jib-head”) windows. These features present an intimate picture of domestic life and interiority. Like an open house in real estate, from which the project borrows its title, OPEN HOUSE transforms the private home into a public space. The floor of the house is drawn level with the sidewalk, creating a two-dimensional stage set replete with domestic props. The drawing becomes a set piece that invites passersby to become actors on a stage. The “scale figures” that occupy the drawing, rather than representing the bias of the authors, become inclusive of the full diversity of the community.  The execution of an 80-foot long orthographic drawing on a worn, irregular brick wall presented an an array of challenges not typically associated with acts of drawing. The scale of viewing area required a rethinking of line weights and levels of detail. But most significantly, making the drawing became much more similar to an act of construction than what is typically considered an act of drawing. To locate stencils and other implication devices, standard grid lines, dimensioned construction drawings, and other technical drawings were necessary. Line weights were drawn explicitly for larger-scale lines and developed into CNC fabricated stencils. Despite substantial application of digital technologies, the last final in the production remained, like building construction, an act of manual labor: painting and physically drawing on the brick surface.  The intertwined display of public and hidden elements in OPEN HOUSE—of domestic life, of construction details, of technical drawing conventions—is a prompt to reconsider our relationship with buildings, drawings, and domesticity. The medium of large-scale drawing offers opportunity for new relationships between architecture and public space.

1.  Author(s): Siah Armajani, Niki Logis, Nathaniel Lieberman, Christopher Sproat, Robert Guillot, Richard Haas and Vito Acconci. The Exuviae of Visions: Architecture as a Subject for Art. Perspecta, Vol. 18 (1982): 66-107.

2.  Evans, Robin. Translations from Drawing to Building and Other Essays. AA Publications, 1997.

3.  Meredith, Michael, and Hilary Sample, eds. An Unfinished Encyclopedia of Scale Figures Without Architecture. MIT Press, 2018;

4.  Lewis, Paul, Marc Tsutumaki, and David J. Lewis. Manual of section. Chronicle Books, 2016.

5.  Bow-Wow, Atelier, and Yoshiharu Tsukamoto. Graphic anatomy. TOTO Publ., 2014.

11:00am
Gaslamp 3

Ecological Landscapes

Moderator: John Folan, University of Arkansas

Supply Chain Materialism

Brent Sturlaugson
University of Kentucky

The goal of this paper is to challenge prevailing assumptions of sustainability in architecture by analyzing the supply chain of building materials. By closely following the production process, the tangible effects of design become more apparent (e.g. material extraction, environmental pollution, waste streams), and the intangible forces become more visible (e.g. economic incentives, labor abuses, political spending). Of particular concern in this paper are the intangible forces, as they often escape scrutiny in conversations about sustainable design. The paper begins by outlining trends in supply chain analysis and critical sustainability studies, followed by an example of how these ideas can be applied in teaching and in practice. Methods of analyzing supply chains fall into two categories. The first category documents supply chains in abstract or distanced representations, in what Donna Haraway might call “a view from nowhere.” These often take the form of maps, diagrams, or explanatory text that attempt to communicate the networked topology of material production. However, the comprehensive ambition of these representations often compromises their affective appeal. The second category adopts a momentary or situated representational strategy, often in the form of installations, images, or narrative text. These representations aim to highlight specific spaces or embodied relationships that speak to the character of the process, what Haraway might consider the “partial perspectives” that offer a more visceral understanding. These types of representations, however, often risk underselling the extent to which architecture affects distributed sites and relationships. To better grasp the impacts of design, this paper argues for hybrid approaches that draw from both methodological categories. It explores these ideas by describing the format and content of a graduate seminar called “Supply Chain Materialism.” The course is structured as a speculative supply chain, and at the beginning of the semester, students select an everyday construction material and document its production alongside the weekly theme. Paired with this independent research, the course offers a range of theories that help frame a more critical understanding of sustainability, drawing on texts in architecture, landscape architecture, urban studies, media studies, science and technology studies, geography, and anthropology. The course also presents a catalog of critical spatial practices that align with different stages in the supply chain. These include art installations, activist demonstrations, architectural projects, curated exhibitions, and performances. At the end of the semester, students demonstrate their understanding of the course content in two ways. First, they create a visual presentation and a written narrative that documents specific activities involved in each stage of production. Second, students design a folly that highlights unseen aspects of the supply chain. By expanding the scope of sustainability discourses in architecture to include both tangible and intangible forces involved in the supply chain of material production, this paper enrolls more actors, more sites, and more effects into the process of design. Following Bruno Latour, it seeks “to multiply the sources of revolt against injustice,” thereby rendering the pursuit of sustainable design an eminently political project.

Transformation in the Age of Climate Change: Reflecting on the Gulf Coast DesignLab

Sarah Pollard Gamble
University of Florida

The power of good design is its ability to change lives. This transformation begins with the designers themselves, as the creative process and its outcomes become a record of altering perspectives and priorities. The [redacted] Program at [redacted] School of Architecture seeks to awaken students to the world around them and instill a thoughtfulness in their work. The Program is the first long-running, ecologically-based design / build studio that fosters environmental education within the field of design and for the public. Nested within this hands-on approach of civic engagement, the needs of coastal communities are addressed by students designing and building places that inspire and awake others to the wonder of their world.  This paper studies the approach and successes of this Program using design / build education as a vehicle to engage the climate crisis and environmental education for architectural design student participants and the public. The Program explores the most pressing issue of our time, the climate crisis, and asserts that instead of greener buildings, cheaper housing, or bigger technological fixes, designers need a new ethos that reimagines our relationship to the world. As Einstein recognized, “The world will not evolve past its current state of crisis by using the same thinking that created the situation in the first place.” With inevitable change on a scale we’ve never faced, the Program guides students to gain a deep respect for our environment and create new ways to express the beautiful.   The paper is written from the perspective of a colleague / mentee studying the Program, while working collaboratively with the Program’s Director to publish a Program monograph. The Millennial author will explore the development and successes of the Program and the perspective of its Baby Boomer faculty director with over 30 years of experience in teaching and practice. Completed projects will be highlighted, showcasing how design students provide spaces for biologists, ecologists, and environmental educators to teach and research – and the public to learn how to become better stewards of their environment. The author will highlight lessons learned and pedagogical intent, celebrating the intricate nesting of ideas and educational techniques utilized by the experienced and innovative educator.

The Accidental Beauty of the Productive Landscape

Kelley Murphy
Washington University in St. Louis

The Midwestern agricultural landscape is a tapestry shaped by natural and artificial forces. From above, patterns of use manifest through grids, infrastructural lines, and irriga­tion circles, superimposed with other natural or manmade features. These patterns can be seen as expressions of our cultural values: layered compositions of regulation, agri­cultural production, and environmental conditions. Aerial imagery captures the complex interaction of natural and human logics by taking these patterns, formed without com­positional intention, and presents them as cultural artifacts.

This paper seeks to probe these accidental compositions as objects of reflection through the investigation of the produc­tion of aerial imagery, the adoption of landscape patterns in both art and architecture, and the exploration of these super­impositional techniques. Of particular interest are art and architectural practices that explore the tense relationship between man and environment through a reinterpretation of the captured landscape.

Works by artist Andrea Zittel, photographer David Thomas Smith, and visual effects artist Aydin Buyuktas are consid­ered as case studies that provide a critical context for the author’s public art installation, 36.9°, -89.6°. This project reinterprets the forms and patterns of the Midwestern agricultural landscape as a field of play. This installation, comprised of portions of discarded carpet, is inhabitable as drawing, surface, and representation of the landscape of Southeast Missouri. Here, the aerial landscape is a compo­sition of values, and, applied to a vertical surface presents those values in a new light.

Finding Inspiration in Nature: A Living Campus Design for OSMP

Katelyn Sector
University of Colorado Boulder

In a time of extreme weather events, rising sea levels, atmospheric carbon dioxide as high as 400 ppm, and
unsustainable population growth, the world faces many daunting climate challenges that need to be addressed
immediately (IPCC 2018). Currently, architecture is responsible for 39% of energy consumed making buildings
one of the leading influencers of climate change (IPCC, 2014) (Chinowsky n.d.) (Radwan and Osama 2016).
Designs inspired by nature, also known as biomimicry, living building, or bio-inspired designs, offers an
alternative approach to where we find inspiration to address architectures influence in Climate change. Designs
inspired by nature allows us to search for innovative solutions to architecture that have been around for 3.8 billion
years and give back to our communities through net-plus design that is regenerative and embraces symbiotic
engagement with our surroundings.

Very few architecture programs and practicing professionals use nature consciously as an inspiration to their
design. However, one group that is trying to design through nature inspired solutions is the City of Boulders Open
Space & Mountain Parks Department (OSMP). The building that currently houses OSMP does not provide the
essentials the department needs nor has the sustainable features they find essential to sustainable design (see
attached documents). OSMP is looking to create a campus that houses not only their offices and facilities but to
serve as an icon for Boulder by also being education center regarding open space and sustainability.
In order to design a net-plus campus for OSMP I will be looking to nature-inspired design methods addressed by
both the Biomimicry Institute and Living Future Institute. The Biomimicry Institute serves as a great resource for
nature-inspired design methodology, was the Living Future Institute has great case studies that show the power.

Building an Ecosystem: Integrating Rooftop Aquaponics with a Brewery to Advance the Circular Economy

Gundula Proksch
University of Washington

Erin Horn
University of Washington

By 2050, two-thirds of the world’s population will live in cities and consume 80% of the global food supply. As the changing climate exacerbates pressure on all sectors of the economy, new frameworks for resource management in urban areas have been introduced. The food-water-energy nexus and the circular economy are two prominent examples; these conceptual frameworks recognize that resources consumed by cities are finite and intricately interdependent. In alignment with these ideas, professionals in the built environments shoulder a significant responsibility to design future buildings, neighborhoods, and cities that can sustain themselves while exerting minimal impact on the surrounding environment. The supply and consumption of food, water, and energy in future cities have, therefore become an architectural problem – and an opportunity for designers to contribute to a more significant societal shift.

In response to the strain that the current food system places on freshwater and fossil fuel supplies, urban agriculture projects that depend on technological innovation and an ecosystem approach are becoming more common. Aquaponics and other closed loop systems particularly aligned with the food-water-energy nexus and circular economy. To be implemented in cities, aquaponics must be examined from the built environment perspective – most commercial-scale aquaponic farms require climate control to produce food year-round. Additionally, aquaponic farms have the potential to interact with other urban programs, as illustrated by The Plant in Chicago, IL and the BIGH Ferme Abattoir which provide adjacent spaces for growing, processing, and selling food as well as hosting community and education events (see Figure 1 and Figure 2). In the interest of achieving a fully circular urban economy, aquaponic farms’ inputs and outputs can be integrated with inputs and outputs of other urban facilities.

This paper investigates the potential integration of aquaponic greenhouses with brewery spaces, to make use of the circular nature of this growing system. In the case of integrated greenhouses, careful design and a wide range of innovative technologies can be used to recycle growing and brewing process byproducts and reduce the overall energy and water demand while producing fish, crops, and beer. The key in this examination is to evaluate the potential of each process byproduct and describe how it can be captured and reused. (see Figure 3) Potential resources that can be linked between aquaponic growing and brewing by thoughtful architectural design include:

  1. Water (rainwater collected on site and wastewater generated by each process)

  2. Heat and energy (excess process heat and solar energy capture)

  3. Organic matter (captured CO2, spent grain, yeast and hops and diatomaceous earth

The goal is to link as many resource inputs and outputs as possible to create a productive ecosystem for a circular economy. As cities transform to manage the food-water-energy nexus sustainably, architectural design that is intimately involved with the industrial processes that buildings host can play a crucial role in closing the urban resource loop.

11:00am
Gaslamp 5

Teaching the Intangibles

Moderator: Rafael Beneytez-Duran, University of Houston

Influence of Color: Luis Barragán and Josef Albers

Patricia Morgado
North Carolina State University

“[Luis Barragán’s gardens] are the best of the new landscape architecture that we have seen,” Josef Albers wrote to Jean Charlot on September 9, 1947 after visiting them during his six-month period in Mexico. He was most likely referring to the gardens of El Cabrío and Las Fuentes, both from 1943-44, where Barragán experimented new ideas prior to developing Jardines del Pedregal in 1945. At the time, the project was well under construction, as was Casa Prieto-López (1948-1950), where he introduced his signature use of color. For his part, Albers was beginning his first series exploring the interaction of color—Variants on a theme—that led to his renowned oeuvre, the series Homage to the Square.  The Alberses’s fourteen visits to Mexico (1936-1967) has led many scholars to believe that they probably met Barragán in the 1950’s and that the painter’s use of color was influential to the architect. This belief dismisses other possible influences, such as the muralist-painter JoséClemente Orozco, a close friend of Barragán since 1931, who inspired him to consider planes to represent the “flow of time and evoke a different reality,”[i]  rather than Mexican history like other compatriot muralists. Likewise, it disregards the influence that Mesoamerican aesthetics had on Albers’s work. Except for a photograph from 1967, and an exchange of letters between 1967 and 1968, there is no evidence that can help date when they met. However, they likely knew, and admired each other’s work from the late 1940s. This explains Anni Albers’s reference to Barragán as “a kind of Mexican Mies” when she brought forth the idea for an exhibition of his work to the director of the MoMA in 1967. Similarly, Barragán’s appreciation for Albers’s work is revealed in the letter he wrote to thank him for the copy of his book, Interaction of Color, in 1967 when he had already completed most of his projects. He wrote: “[I have profound] respect for your work, a lifelong process from which many people, now so bound to improvisation, would learn the steadiness of a profound insight.” Rather than Albers influencing Barragán, I propose that Barragán attempted to produce a new form of mural art that used colors and textures from vernacular architecture and folk art, two aspects of Mexican culture Albers admired. These facts set the premise for the semester long assignment for my seminar “Luis Barragán: Light, Color, and Water.” Since perception of color is central to understanding Barragán’s work, the seminar begins with a brief color course using Albers’s pedagogy as well as research on his work. In regards to Barragán, students analyze a project and the carefully composed—sometimes abstract—photographs that he commissioned for publications. Colors are identified from Albers’s Color Aid, to later calculate the percentages of color used versus those perceived.  This paper studies the relationships between the work of Albers and Barragán, the possible influences and inspirations, and Barragán’s contributions to understanding “interaction of color” in architecture, based on the work of my students.

[i]Antonio Riggen Martínez. Luis Barragán. Mexico’s Modern Master, 1902-1988. (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1996), 126.

The Architecture Writing Program: Multidimensionality and Becoming

Jeffrey Hogrefe
Pratt Institute

The Architecture Writing Program: Multidimensionality and Becoming The innovative Architecture Writing Program engages the disciplines of humanities and architecture to introduce a writing curriculum in aesthetics and politics that encourages new ways of becoming among a diverse cohort of students. In scale and scope, the program is arguably the only curriculum of its kind in a five-year undergraduate professional program in architecture. Based on concepts of architecture writing derived from Aristotle’s definitions of poetics and techne and informed by contemporary philosophy, we linked writing courses to the architecture studio and discovered that, metaphorically, they operate like acupuncture points by opening neural pathways between the disciplines. In this way, they create a metacognitive orientation to the interpretation of knowledge as a written performance in multiple media. Through exercises in motivational rhetoric, literary figuration, situational plays of genre, and expanded media, students learned how to write into their architecture design and their humanities course in a doubly operative exchange. In this way, the student emerges as a unique interpreter of architecture: an interpreter who is able to refer inwardly to architecture itself as an autonomous aesthetic system, even as the built environment overlaps and interacts with language systems that are coming from lived experience and real pressures of economies. Students learn how to write as a performance of becoming. Instead of mimicking prescribed language in their professional courses, the curriculum encourages students to develop language from the inside of a project and deepen their own experiences in architecture set into conversation with literature, philosophy and theory. Because one discipline informs the other, the program shifts responsibility from the faculty to the students who, in turn, find that the writing exercises enable them to become self-critical and expansive in their thought processes. In keeping with advancements in humanities and architecture, the cross-disciplinary instruction works from the edges of the disciplines to present gender/able studies and critical race theory at a time when the student body incorporates the welcome and ever expanding degrees of difference in a profession that is redefining itself.

Timbre Spaces - Interdisciplinary Education between Architecture and Composition

Mara Helmuth, Aaron Tkac, Brendan Girten, Xinlei Liu, Christoph Klemmt, Carl Jacobson, Yunze Mu, Zhixin Xu, Joel Garza, Grace Choi, & Rugui Xie
University of Cincinnati

Although music and architecture utilize different mediums for their manifestation, various theorists and creatives have proposed close relationships between the two. Projects from one field have been used as inspiration for the other, or work in both disciplines has been developed in close relation [1, 2]. In their verbal descriptions the disciplines share a multitude of terms, and philosophers and theorists attempted to formulate their connections [3]. Various educators tried to connect music and architecture, and studios at different institutions have attempted an approach based on music or sound. The projects often use a single composition as the inspiration or data that define an architectural design [4, 5, 6]. Instead of this one-directional approach, we attempted an interdisciplinary collaborative studio of both architecture and composition students, working in groups of two architects and one composer. This exploration included the analysis of a composition, leading to a generative method for the creation of both architecture and music so that the design processes can influence each other. Rather than using one discipline as the inspiration for the other, the goal was the creation of a singular spatial and sonic experience unable to exist without the other. Evaluation Notable was the difference in working between the disciplines. Architectural questions of structural stability, sustainability or social relevance may not apply to composition so much. Where the architectural process sees a constant revision or complete withdrawal of existing material, the composition process on the contrary is often more aimed at generating new complementary material that extends the already existing. Group work, as usual, sometimes leads to great collaborations, but may suffer from interpersonal difficulties. We observed groups that interacted intensely, groups in which mostly one discipline attempted to take and learn from the other, as well as groups where the collaboration was limited to the joint presentation of the works. The unfamiliarity with the other’s subjects in some cases led to a questioning of working methods and even isolated disrespect, while also new friendships formed between students. Through the student’s projects we were able to identify, non-exhaustively, different categories of connections between the two disciplines: – An inspirational concept the work deals with that does not form a methodology (such as ‘traffic’ or ‘nature’). – As set out in the syllabus, the utilization of a common methodology for the generation of raw geometric and sonic material. – The arrangement of material on the local and global scale by borrowing proportions from the other discipline, a common theme observed in some of the other musical studios [4, 5, 6]. – The experiential emotional level of being in a space or listening to a piece. Interestingly, ‘style’ does not appear to be one of those categories. While bound by various constraints through the collaboration, these were not able to direct the students in terms of analogue vs. digital, straight vs. curvy, harmonic vs. dissonant, or even ornamental vs. minimal. The actual choice of style of each work therefore remained within the domain of each discipline.

Bibliography

[1] Kanach, S., 2008. Music and architecture by Iannis Xenakis. Nova Iorque: Pendragon Press.

[2] Holl, S., 2017. The Architectonics of Music. PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 39(2), pp.49-64.

[3] Pascha, K. S. 2004. ‘Gefrorene Musik’ – Das Verhältnis von Architektur und Musik in der ästhetischen Theorie. Thesis. Berlin.

[4] Story, J.K. 2017. The Pedagogy of the Cigar Box. Texas Architect Magazine.

[5] Gur, M. and Sen, E., 2019. Visualizing Music as a Basic Design Assignment in Architectural Education. European Journal of Educational Research, 8(1), pp.123-139.

[6] Martin, E. ed., 1994. Pamphlet Architecture 16: Architecture as a translation of music (No. 16). Princeton Architectural Press.

Representing Authenticity: Drawing an Aesthetic Pedagogy

Benjamin Smith
Tulane University

Carrie Elizabeth Norman
Tulane University

At one time, authorship was derivative. From Quatremere de Quincy’s theories on type, to Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand’s study of morphology, some of the earliest theoretical texts on architecture propose imitation as the common starting point for any process of artistic production. The following paper elaborates on a course co-taught by an architect and an historian on design’s relationship to the aesthetics of architectural production. The motive of the course was twofold: introduce architecture students to digital media and address concepts that influence representation, including intellectual foundations and rules of drawing. Conceived of as a series of six drawing assignments, the course problematized fundamental elements of architecture—not doors, windows, walls, balconies, and toilets, but form, image, and representation became the lens for production. Through these lenses, students tackled the stakes of architectural image-making to imagine the craft of drawing through methods of visualization. Students reconstituted plans, sections, and renderings of given source materials that included fifteen precedents spanning 2000 years of architecture’s history. While the conventions specific to architectural graphic standards remained intact, assignment objectives aimed to leverage composition, configuration, and copy as sites of invention to transform source materials. Weekly lectures addressing the aesthetics of drawing, supplemented by texts by architects and theorists, including Massimo Scolari, Robin Evans, Sonit Bafna, Sam Jacob, and John May, among others, situated students’ efforts within a discursive context focused on mobilizing drawings as communicative artifacts that reveal qualities of architecture. One of the exercises asked students to create a “game plan” by proposing an architectural riddle as the generative tool for constructing a fictional plan that combined fragments from at least five precedents. Fusing a medley of recognizable and iconic fragments, results questioned parts and their respective wholes. The deliberate and disciplined act of the unfaithful copy presented opportunities to critique the inexact without losing precision. This strategy would play out five more times targeting inventive derivations through specified architectural projections. Viewing architectural history as an open-source canon, students proposed alternatives by confronting architecture’s past. Hovering between autographic and allographic subjects, architectural representation challenged the ethic of authorship as an artifact tethered, in equal parts, to repeatability and reproduction, as well as uniqueness and autonomy. Building off of discourse from aesthetic philosophy surrounding the copy and the fake, architectural drawings can be evaluated as devices to question intention and invention through pedagogy. The drawings from the class performed as both visioning and re-visioning tools, redrawing history, mobilizing referents, to make something new. Today, authorship is contingent.

Constructing Mystery

Yael Erel
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

In order to create an atmosphere, architecture and light must interact; they are intimately linked. As architects we consider light as a mysterious substance, about which we are not necessarily experts.

This paper presents a pedagogy to teach the construction of such mystery, while understanding the physical and phenomenological mechanisms at play and the literary dimensions they hold. By constructing light installations students learn to design immersive environments that test various theses on projection.

11:00am
Salon D

Special Focus Session

Emerging Urbanisms in Latin America and the Borderlands

Moderator: Pablo Meninato, Temple U. & Gregory Marinic, U. of Cincinnati

Session Description

Confronted with transnational concerns surrounding migration, globalization, economic instability, political turmoil, ecology, and social justice, this panel will discuss modes of engagement via critical spatial practices. The panel is comprised of theorists and practitioners in architecture, urbanism, and planning who examine emerging conditions across Latin America and the US-Mexico Borderlands. Themes include informal settlements, tactical urbanism, migrant geographies, participatory practices, sustainability, and related topics. Which issues are transforming cities in the region? How do emerging urbanisms shift our expectations for design practice? Who are the stakeholders and how do they collaborate? Can critical spatial practices shape more inclusive metropolitan futures?

Rafael Longoria
University of Houston

Reina Loredo-Cansino
Universidad Autónoma de Tamaulipas

Dietmar Froehlich
University of Houston

Cecilia Giusti
Texas A&M University

11:00am
Salon E

Special Focus Session

Imploding Studio: Can we OPEN the Black Box?

Moderator: Nadia Anderson, University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Session Description

What would happen if architecture schools imploded studios? Would the discipline crumble? Would educators weep in the halls? Or… Could architectural education be more accessible to more diverse students, make new learning cultures into realities? Could it more equitably engage critical current issues such as climate change, poverty, and globalization? Could it help architecture as a discipline become more accessible to diverse faculty, practice models, and clients/partners? Could it once and for all destroy the Black Box?

If these questions make you excited, angry, curious, please join the ACSA Education Committee for this interactive session where we will creatively, actively engage whether or not the architectural studio has become an ossified remnant of an elitist discipline and how we can remake or replace the Black Box with an Open Horizon.

Adam Fogel
American Institute of Architecture Students

Alexis Gregory
Mississippi State University

Beth Lundell Garver
Boston Architectural College

Amy Larimer
Stanford University

Mark Pearson
College of DuPage

Ikhlas Sabouni
Prairie View A&M University

11:00am
Salon B

Design Engagement

Moderator: Claudia Bernasconi, University of Detroit Mercy

Contemporary Forms of Social Justice Activism in Architecture

Shawhin Roudbari
The University of Colorado Boulder

Joris Gjata
The University of Colorado Boulder

Matthew Rowe
The University of Colorado Boulder

The goal of this paper is to share a sociological framework for understanding social justice activism with the intention of improving efficacy of architects’ efforts in addressing contentious social issues. The paper draws on recent sociological scholarship on professions and social movements, which give us new ways of thinking about our agency in affecting social change within and beyond the profession. The paper presents emerging themes based on participant observation and unstructured interviews conducted over the past two years, focused on contemporary activism in architecture. We highlight how professionals use their material resources (design expertise and practice) and their symbolic resources (status in socio-economic, political, and cultural systems) in different forms of contentious political engagement. We offer a sociological framework for distinguishing between ways architects use their work and status in their efforts to achieve social and professional change. The analysis offered in this paper is intended to offer politically-engaged architects (professionals, educators, and students) a framework to assist in their efforts toward shaping equity and justice outcomes for the field and for society.

Participatory Design: Tools for Engagement

Nilou Vakil
University of Kansas

In the mid-1960’s Brazilian educational theorist Paolo Freire revolutionized the country’s educational system by going into communities and teaching the illiterate poor how to read. He equated literacy with an improved life, linked knowledge to power, and wrote of his experiences in his seminal work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed(1968).  Freire’s ideas developed into a social movement and became the foundation for what we today refer to as Critical Pedagogy. His work with communities was groundbreaking and viewed as dangerous by the authorities and also the factory and farm owners who feared that educated citizens would rise up and demand better wages and increased rights. His teaching methods, based on participatory engagement rather than the common practice of outside experts dictating the “what” and “how” of a curriculum were extremely effective. So effective, they eventually landed Freire in jail and later exile from his country. Freire’s potent process for teaching one to read utilized visual markers to stimulate engaged conversation. He collaborated with Brazilian artist Francisco Brennand who painted a series of scenes on clay tiles. These scenes, familiar to working communities, depicted humans farming, hunting, and interacting so as to draw out distinctions between nature and culture, various social structures, and the potential for education to empower. By refusing to use coded or professional language he introduced the phrase “democratization of culture” and allowed communities a way to identify and express what they wanted for themselves rather than what they were told they should want. Do analogies exist to participatory design? Are there lessons to be learned from Freire’s process? And, can Brennand’s tiles serve as an example of how to convey the needs and goals of a user to the design team when both may communicate in distinct professional jargon?  This paper will investigate these questions through an analysis of the use of graphic cards developed by an interdisciplinary team of architects and educators for engaging school teachers and administrators in the design process for educational environments. These cards, called the Learning Spaces Idea Tool Kit, provide a common language for educators, architects and designers to more effectively engage in the design or renovation of their schools. They present a number of phrases describing teaching concepts as spatial relationships such as: faculty “scrum space”, library as kitchen vs. library as grocery store, develop self-regulated learners. The flip side of the card presents photographs depicting learning environments that support the learning concepts. The designers are then able to effectively translate the conversations spurred by the cards into floor plan configurations.  This process of engagement through a common language leverages the expertise of educators and recognizes that only those affected by an environment have any right to its determination. Participatory design, like Freire’s literacy workshops, empowers the user to be active shapers of  the world around us.

Expanding Women’s Agency in the Built Environment: Understanding how Employment has Impacted Women’s Access to Space in Rural Andean Ecuador

Heather Rule
University of Texas at Austin

For centuries women’s agency in the built environment of their homes, communities and workplace was limited by an absence of ownership and control of these spaces. Even as women gained equal rights to land ownership, their capacity to develop that land was limited by social and cultural structures. Access to employment changed for women living in rural areas when the rose industry developed, especially around Cayambe and Cotopaxi, creating jobs near their home communities. Over fifty-one percent of current industry jobs are held by women, with higher number in the early years.

Using participatory research methods, women employed at four rose farms in Andean Ecuador were invited to take photographs from a list of questions. These prompts centered on themes of home, community and workplace. The photographs served as a springboard to in depth interviews to study the participant’s levels of agency at home, in their communities and at work.

The research builds a picture of the impact employment in the formal job market has created for women. Beginning with access to credit lines, training and education at work, these women have been able to break cycles of gender violence. The photographs, taken by participants, and narrative interviews give us a unique perspective into these women’s agency in their built environment. Most significantly perhaps, is the impact of hearing their experiences recounted and documented from their perspectives.  This paper will record and disseminate those experiences to a greater audience.

New Materials in Architecture. A Pedagogical Approach to Materials by Design

Josh Draper
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Daniel Rosenberg
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Alexandros Tsamis
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

In recent years, materials have emerged as a focus of architectural pedagogy. Beyond teaching students to think of materials in architecture as part of the design process, the ambition here is bolder: to design architecture means to design materials. Conversely, materials in architecture should not be thought of as a matter of choice, as from a catalog, but rather as an explicit design objective. This paper examines a Framework for a pedagogical approach to Materials by Design. In Materials Science, the term Materials by Design refers to “computational materials prediction approaches, corresponding advanced synthesis and characterization methods”[1] for the purpose of accelerating material innovation. However, this approach is limited to optimization at small scales. Here we expand the term to approach the design of materials through a multi-scalar evaluation framed by their structural, energetic, ecological, social and cultural performances   Composite materials have caught the attention of designers and scientists alike as a paradigmatic counter-example to industrial production of assemblies for the built environment. The efficiency in the use of materials, economy of production and the reduction of CO2 emissions have become common place discussions among practitioners of architecture. Composites seem to promise a viable way forward.  Composites also present unique formal and performative potentials for architecture. Moreover, they tend to require design of new fabrication methods.  As such, composites are the focal, but not the exclusive, effort of the framework.   The Materials by Design Framework is taught through our Materials Systems and Production class. Five successive engagements with materials, from their cultural positioning, to their ecological and scientific characterization, culminate in the design and fabrication of functional composites for architecture. Material Cultures: Beginning with the history of materials, students develop timelines exploring the feedback loop of culture and materials. Material Selections Using CES EduPack software, students encounter a vast expansion of materials available to architecture paired with workflows to select specific materials for given functions. The phase concludes with the physical testing of materials. Material Ecologies Circular economies and the emerging role of waste in design are presented. Students develop lifecycle and embodied energy analyses of emerging materials. Materials by Design. Students develop a parametric sensibility of materials, providing inspiration and precedent for later invention.  A literature review of existing technological and biological composites is performed. Students design material library “cards” for all researched examples generating their own taxonomic system and a basis for their own designs. Then, through the virtual “cross breeding” of material properties, students rigorously evaluate materials by compatibility and difference. The pairings of performances such as opacity and transparency, structure and insulation pose challenges and opportunities for fabrication and design.  Material Fabrications composites are fabricated using the results of the previous phase.  A combined approach of scientific characterization and fabrication invention is supported by simulation efforts in Grasshopper. The work culminates in the production of standard material samples, an analysis of their properties and design applications.   The Materials by Design Framework is elaborated with student examples and the implications for architectural pedagogy are discussed. In a period where ecological, cultural and scientific concerns are deeply intertwined in the practice of architecture, teaching architecture through materials offers a synthetic and interdisciplinary approach.

[1] Alberi, Kirstin, et al. “The 2019 Materials by Design Roadmap.” Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics, vol. 52, no. 1, Oct. 2018, p. 3. Institute of Physics, doi:10.1088/1361-6463/aad926.

Buoyant Ecologies Float Lab

Adam Marcus
California College of the Arts

Margaret Ikeda
California College of the Arts

Evan Jones
California College of the Arts

The Buoyant Ecologies Float Lab is a prototype for a new kind of resilient coastal architecture. It merges expertise from design, advanced composites manufacturing, and marine ecology to imagine a floating architecture of the future that can exist productively with its surrounding environment. The project has developed at the Architectural Ecologies Lab at California College of the Arts through a multi-year partnership between academia and industry that serves as a model for expanding architectural agency beyond architecture’s traditional disciplinary limits. Central to the project is a belief that architects and architecture schools must begin to develop these kinds of extra-disciplinary capacities in order to address the pressing ecological challenges of our time. The Float Lab is a floating breakwater structure that incorporates a digitally fabricated, ecologically optimized fiber-reinforced polymer composite substrate with variable topographies that perform both above and below the water.

On the top, the topography is engineered to channel rainwater and produce watershed pools for intertidal or terrestrial habitats. Underwater, the hull’s peaks and valleys vary in size to provide habitats for different types of invertebrates. The project challenges conventional notions of “biofouling”—the unwanted accumulation of marine life on the underside of floating structures—and instead proposes controlled upside-down habitats as an ecological resource and as a floating breakwater. In large masses, the biological growth can help attenuate wave action and reduce coastal erosion, one of the primary impacts of climate change and sea level rise. The Float Lab was launched in Oakland, California in August 2019 for a three-year deployment to serve as both a public ecological demonstration project and a floating research platform. It is the first prototype of its kind to be permitted by state and federal regulatory agencies for deployment in San Francisco Bay.

12:30pm

Educational Tour
Ticketed Event

Lunch Tour

+ Casa Familiar in San Ysidro Tour: Social Impact Design Initiatives II

2:30pm
Gaslamp 1

Global Urbanism

Moderator: Chris Ford, Stanford University

Urbanization and Scales of Architecture: Quaroni’s Project for Venice Mestre (1959)

Tulay Atak
Pratt Institute

What role does architecture play at the scale of the city and what are its limits? These questions have been asked several times throughout modernism and its aftermath. This paper contributes to the history of large scale urban projects in the second half of the 20th century by considering Ludovico Quaroni’s project for Quartiere Cepalle Barene di San Giuliano of 1959. Quartiere Cepalle Barene di San Giuliano project was for a competition for the marshlands across from Venice. An ecological and urban endeavor, the competition envisioned the drying of the marshlands in order to build a new satellite city that could at once accommodate the residential population and the tourists. Quaroni and his team employed circular forms whose foci were existing cities and towns in the Venetian Lagoon like Venice, Mestre, Murano, Lido. The project tackled with the introduction of a new center into an expanding city-region. For Alan Colquhoun, the project conceived the new city as two parts: one fixed and symbolic, the other continuously changing and essentially uncontrollable. For Manfredo Tafuri, the project signaled that a new discipline was in the works, a discipline that was finding its footing between architecture and urban planning. It was an architecture that went beyond the sociology of the neighborhood (the focus of Italian Neorealism of the fifties) in order to address the city region. If the overall forms of the cylindrical blocks were to contain and give form to the swelling of the entire city region, the internal fabric was left to develop along guidelines established by Quaroni’s team for types of housing settlements. The reference for the overall form was geography and the existing cities’ distribution on land and water as can be seen in the aerial perspectives and the iconic elevation of the project. The perspectives located the city and its inhabitants in relation to the geography of the lagoon, while the elevation, with the silhouette of the city reflected in the water, demonstrated the desire to mark this landscape. Quoaroni’s team’s proposal attempted to organize the city, and therefore the society, in an alternative way by introducing elevational devices through architecture. According to Tafuri, “[the project’s] origin was Quaroni’s reflection on the American metropolis as well as his critique of–much more profound than that of [Christopher] Alexander– all theories of urban development based on ‘conforming additions’. . . It appeared, in fact, at a moment when Italian intellectuals were becoming aware of a new reality: convulsive urbanization and the diffusion of mass communication had effected profound transformations in society and individual behavior . . . ” Considering this project along with other projects in the Italian and international context and bringing together archival material on the competition and Quaroni’s work, this paper will explore the landscape of urbanization in Italy along with its ecological and environmental aspects. Taking Quaroni’s project as a case study, the paper will articulate the role that the city and large scale urban projects have played in architecture in the second half of the 20th century.

Re-defining the Rural-urban: Discovering Spatial Patterns of Chinese Rural Development

Leslie Lok
Cornell University

The perception of the rural in China has been incarnated with various urbanization narratives and policies since the founding of the People’s Republic of China. The rural transformation was initially driven by industrialization and the incessant development of megacities. Reaching 53.7% of urban population in 2013 and with the goal to continually urbanize its population[1], the growth of rural villages and small towns emerged as the predominant context for urbanization under the 2005 New Socialist Countryside policy. The role of the rural and the ambiguous zones of rural-urban, have shifted to the focal point of urbanization. With much at stake on their transformation, there lacks clear spatial characterizations and definitions for the multivalent context. The paper seeks to identify a set of spatial and qualitative parameters as design metrics through the case studies rural villages and agriculture landscape in relation to urban development. The paper identifies the changing narratives of the Chinese rural in four phases. The ideal rural utopia occupied the pre-1978 period when agricultural communes thrived. Phase 2 Industrialized Countryside witnessed the emergence of rural-urban with the growth of industrial production. Phase 3 Integrated City and Countryside was highlighted by intense urban migration and the integration of cities with rural fringes. Phase 4 New Socialist Countryside gestured a significant departure from megacities to the development of rural areas to curb urban migration. The policy driven evolution limited the classification of rural-urban to solely based on the ratio of rural and urban residency [2]. Various approaches were proposed to define urban and fringe boundaries,[3]however, these methods lack the critical spatial, typological, and qualitative definitions which are crucial to the design of physical materialization of rural-urban environment. The paper seeks to capture the architectural and urbanization patterns of the rural landscape through three strategic lenses: Characteristics of edge conditions which mediate the urban (planned infrastructure and housing), agricultural (bottom-up housing and productive landscape), and natural landscape. Transformation of the spatial structure and fabric of villages at the territorial scale. Mapping housing transition from local typologies to hybrids of the urban generic and the local-specific. By unpacking the DNA of building systems, spatial and formal morphologies in the dispersed spectrum of sites and demographics, the paper attempts to reveal collaged, emerged, and mutated architectural and urban narratives of rural-urban context, thus, to provide a relevant tool set to design for better rural-urban integration.

[1] The Central Committee of the Communist Party of China and the State Council. “National New-Type Urbanization Plan (2014-2020)”. Beijing: Xinhua News, 2014. http://www.gov.cn/zhengce/2014-03/16/content_2640075.htm (Accessed: 2019.06.19).

[2] The hukou system was established in 1958 as a form of residency designation. It registered Chinese citizens into two categories, the urban hukou and rural hukou.

[3] Methods from data-mapping of construction development and land-use distribution intensity have been used to delineate urban and fringe boundaries. Peng, Jian, Shiquan Zhao, Yanxu Liu, and Lu Tian. 2016. “Identifying the Urban-Rural Fringe Using Wavelet Transform and Kernel Density Estimation: A Case Study in Beijing City, China.” Environmental Modelling and Software 83: 286–302. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.envsoft.2016.06.007.

Waipahu Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) Collaboration

Cathi Ho Schar
University of Hawaii at Manoa

The State of Hawaiʻi is the largest land owner along Oahu’s $20 billion rail line currently under construction. In an effort to optimize this land development opportunity and to promote interagency collaboration on state-led transit oriented development (TOD), the State of Hawaiʻi Office of Planning (OP) contracted the university to produce a proof of concept (PoC) research, planning, and design study aimed at developing a framework applicable to all state-led TOD for 21 station sites. OP selected the Waipahu Pouhala Station as a pilot site for the study, involving six parcels owned by four different state agencies. To accomplish this, the university gathered eight faculty members in the Department of Urban Planning (DURP), Public Policy Center (PPC), School of Architecture, and Sea Grant College, each willing to coordinate and apply their teaching and research expertise to the goals of the project.

The project was integrated into six different academic courses and eight research projects that produced a strategic planning study, planning assessment, ecological hazards study, ecological asset study, infrastructure and transportation study, tree canopy study, flood mitigation guidelines, digital optimization model, housing and block study, and numerous community outreach events and presentations to various city and state agencies and professional organizations. Findings were compiled into a comprehensive report, a State-led Design Considerations booklet, a public private partnership RFP template, and a process framework to be used for future TOD development. The project represents the first large scale university collaboration to impact state government collaboration related to built environments. The collaboration team also presents a replicable model for team teaching, horizontal and vertically integrated coursework, engaged scholarship, community outreach, industry consultation, and the delivery of bottom-up research, planning, and design to top-down decision makers.

UHCDC Waipahu TOD Collaboration Team: Simon Bussiere, Priyam Das, Wendy Meguro, Colin Moore, Hyoung-June Park, Cathi Ho Schar, Suwan Shen, Daniele Spirandelli

Light and Density: Courtyards in New York City Housing

Alex Wong
Columbia University

The term density invokes solid, intensity, and interiority. The term light, on the contrary, invokes void, openness, and exteriority. These two terms often attribute to apparently antithetical things in architecture but are both used simultaneously to think new modes of courtyard housing.

These topics have a particular affiliation with New York City as a site, as the history of innovation in housing has tackled these two apparent opposites with regards to zoning, health, and public policy. From the 19th century Tenement House Act, to the landmark Zoning Resolution of 1916, to “tower-in-a-park” designs spurred by the 1961 revamp of the zoning code, to the 21st century “super-tall” building trend, New York City has been the most vigorous laboratory for vertical development and the front line in facing its consequences. Especially, the perimeter block typology has been fully explored with precedents from tenement houses, to low-rise Parisian inspired courtyard houses, to luxury Astor-developed courtyard buildings. Until recently, breakthroughs in this zero-sum chess game has been achieved with individual projects such as the Via 57 West (2016) by Bjarke Ingles Group, the Mercedes House (2012) by TEN Arquitectos, and Via Verde (2012) by Grimshaw Architects with Dattner Architects.

How do designers nowadays learn from the historicity and contemporality of New York City’s housing, and beyond? With traditional Euro-bloc still prominent in many European cities such as Berlin and Prague, the contemporary New York City seems to be facing its own set of limitations in its unique density-filled urban context.

What is the usefulness of New York City courtyards in the general scheme of housing? New York City courtyard housing threads together issues such as metrics, health, trash management, recycling, POPs, building maintenance and shared spaces from laundry room to ground-floor retail shops, to high-end clubhouses.

2:30pm
Gaslamp 3

Ecological Elements

Moderator: Carmen Trudell, Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo

Manufacturing Weather: The Carrier Igloo in Three Orders of Magnitude

Jia Weng
Yale University

The notion of Anthropocene has inevitably fused natural and cultural processes, architectural and technological environments, as well as worlds and geology. No longer can architectural historians overlook the very small (microbes) and the very large (planets). Although architectural processes have long penetrated domains far beyond human perception, architectural histories have not projected meaning and value to these scales. My paper addresses issues concerning scale with particular attention to the transcultural measurements of interior comfort. The Carrier Igloo of Tomorrow in the 1939 New York World’s Fair is the first architecture dedicated to showcasing the technology of air-conditioning. In the paper, I experiment with a multi-scalar approach that considers the building in three orders of magnitude, which encompass particles, bodies, and worlds. Air-conditioning units, attached to architectural enclosures, penetrate through state boundaries and culture barriers with little resistance. This paper utilizes primary sources such as the NYPL archive of the 1939 New York World’s Fair, historical promotion documents of the Carrier Corporation, and early 20th century periodicals on HVAC, advertising, and architecture. It traces the development of the Carrier Corporation from the 1910s to the 1980s. The history of Carrier Corporation shows how air-conditioning technology reshaped modern architecture, which in turn transformed the homeostasis of the human body, for the sake of economic production. Architects and engineers in the first half of the 20th century depicted architecture as the container of a new environment that helped to redefine the human subject. By recalling the Aristotelian distinction between labor and work, their rhetoric drew a positive correlation between how much one can work and his or her human identity. Tracing the early expansion of the Carrier Corporation in various industries, this paper considers modern architecture as an externalized organ for the new subject. Air-conditioning, like telescope or hearing-aid, extended the scale of the human body to endure longer working hours and heavier workloads. Globalization, along with the neo-liberal economy, has made the Carrier Corporation a global business. The explosion of interior weather control has led to the standardization of the comfort zone of human bodies, which is measured by the humidity and temperature of the interior air. The matrix of comfort manifests through the control panels installed in every air-conditioned building. As the interface between the technological system and the human body, the control panels appear different from country to country.  My paper examines the transcultural variations of the interface at a global scale. In conclusion, my research discusses the distinction and interrelation of environmental control technologies and techniques. I argue that it is not just these panels, but the entire architectural form that constitutes the technique of the weather control system. Though considered as a source of control, through design, architecture can thus recharge air with meaning and reestablish the flow between natural and cultural environments.

The Anthropocene Chamber: A Pedagogic Experiment in Climate Change Communication

Rania Ghosn
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Climate change is not only a crisis of the physical environment but also a predicament of the cultural environment and in turn requires a renewed media strategy to make public such planetary concern. This essay considers the role of architectural media within the context of a pedagogic experiment called Earth on Display. The workshop deployed design research to engage the difficult (and necessary) quest of climate change communication in museums of science and nature. In recent years, natural history museums have introduced climate change to their programming. The scientific language of such climate exhibits remains however inaccessible to most visitors and with little impact on their affective experience or their political actions. How can climate change be imagined, spatialized, and experienced and come to matter? What are the representational worlds –the Anthropocene “cabinet of curiosities” and “wonders”–that move from abstract knowledge to material evidence to render climate change sense-able, and actionable to broader publics? The workshop, taught by the author of this essay, was conducted with the support of the Harvard Museum of Natural History and culminated in the installation of The Chamber of the Anthropocene temporary exhibit in the museum’s Climate Change Gallery. At once a curatorial exercise and a speculative geographic landscape, Earth on Display mediated climate knowledge through the aesthetic and spatial qualities of things.

Ecological Systems Theory as Architectural Design Process: The Diagram that Traces Matter and Energy through Architecture

Meredith Sattler
California Polytechnic State University

During its enclosure missions from 1991-1994, Biosphere 2 [B2], located outside of Oracle, AZ, operated as a closed, eco-technical, coupled human-natural system comprised of 7 synthetic biomes [figure 1, schematic of B2 and its biomes].  This paper unpacks how the Biospherians, and their many collaborators, employed Ecological Systems Diagrams [ESDs] to drive the project’s design process [figure 2, B2 visionary John Allen, presenting B2’s Economic Systems Diagram].  Utilizing archival ESDs generated during Biosphere 2’s design, it analyzes how ESD boundary conditions were translated and materialized into B2’s architectural elements, and unpacks cases of use, adaptation, and mis-use, which deeply implicated life inside the ‘Human Experiment.’ Beginning in 1956, ESDs, the key ontological framework of Ecological Systems Theory [EST], were iterated by ecologists Howard and Eugene Odum.  These bubble and flow diagrams, along with their counterpart graphs and equations, facilitate the description and budgeting of closed-system ecological feedback loops, in the form of energy-matter flows through time.  These diagrams first entered the architectural discipline in 1972, appearing in an A.D. article co-authored by University of Florida Architecture Professor, Larry Peterson, and Howard T. Odum titled “Relationship of Energy and Complexity and Planning.”  The Odum’s consistent interest in urban and ecological design and engineering was furthered through their participation at B2 in the late 1980’s.  Their EST, and its processes of diagramming [ESDs], proved the most suitable design tool for the project’s conceptualization, budgeting, and trans-disciplinary communication [figure 3, B2’s co-architect Margaret Augustine presenting to ecologists and engineers at an interdisciplinary B2 design conference].  Simultaneously, B2’s ESD system boundary became the surrogate for B2’s architectural skin, the container/ tightest building envelope ever constructed, which would house all the molecules that 8 humans needed for 2 years of ecosystem service provisioning life support [figure 4, U of A Environmental Research Laboratory’s ‘Enclosed Life System’ Budget for B2].  Ultimately, ESDs both facilitated the design of, and scripted significant aspects of the enclosure missions, rendering the Biospherians and their almost 4,000 biodiverse co-inhabitants, susceptible to increasingly cyborgian life forms and life ways.On March 29, 2019 the New York Times ran an article authored by Carl Zimmer, titled “The Lost History of One of the World’s Strangest Science Experiments.”  In its conclusion, Zimmer posited that outcomes of B2’s enclosure missions contain “clues waiting for us to find” which might reveal approaches for negotiating climate change today.  This paper argues that the Biospherians’ ‘clues’ resulted from their unique design processes, which not only produced novel eco-technological apparatuses, but were themselves process-based technologies that facilitated the Biospherian designer-user-inhabitants through the day to day realities of their mission.  B2’s entangled mini Anthropocene tightly coupled designers with knowledges and the high-stakes consequences of their designs in instructive ways, which contemporary projects such as Foster’s Masdar City [figure 5, Masdar City boundary with its Master Plan ‘Human Ecology’ systems diagram] and BIG’s Mars Space City and Martian Tectonic, that utilized adapted versions of ESDs in their design processes, are just beginning to explore.

Benchmarking the Embodied Carbon of Buildings

Kathrina Simonen
University of Washington

Barbara X. Rodriguez Droguett
University of Washington

Catherine De Wolf
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Greenhouse gas emissions from extracting and manufacturing building materials, often termed “embodied carbon,” are produced before buildings are occupied and are more critical to meeting global climate targets than commonly assumed. In order to motivate reductions in embodied carbon, we need better data and established benchmarks.

Although Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methods have been used to analyze individual buildings, there has not been an agreed-upon understanding of the order magnitude and range of variation of the embodied carbon of buildings. In order to address this knowledge gap, the largest known database of building embodied carbon was compiled, normalized, and analyzed. In addition to establishing the range of embodied carbon values, this research identified sources of uncertainty and proposed strategies to advance embodied carbon benchmarking practice.

Implications & Implementations of Earthen Construction in Pittsburgh Habitation

Zain Islam-Hashmi
Carnegie Mellon University

This project is intended to investigate the perceptions, implementation, and introduction of earth-based construction in the context of Pittsburgh to further the potentials for earth as a material for sustainable creating in architecture and design. Typically, a material that has always served as the basis for spaces to build upon, earth will now be highlighted as a means for space-making and informing action, living, and mindset. I hope to create an introductory guide to earthen construction that shows the public the advantages, versatility, and simplicity of working with such a material, and proposing different scales of incorporation into one’s life. The communication of this information in a guide accessible to the everyday person is key in this project, as well as the fabrication and prototyping of these ideas to substantiate its claims. By situating the project in Pittsburgh, one can take advantage of its technical and cultural opportunities to help breathe a new life into what we believe earth is capable of and help further the potentials for this traditional building technique in areas around the world. The project works to show students, faculty, and the community of Pittsburgh the role of earth in construction and society as I delve into studies of the history of what is below our feet, and material experimentation and integration at different scales to start a dialogue between architecture, design, history, archaeology, anthropology, and engineering.

2:30pm
Gaslamp 2

Revisionist

Moderator: Sharon Haar, University of Michigan

Hugo Häring’s “Philosophy of Gestalt”: An Alternative Approach to Architectural Design Theory

Liyang Ding
University of Pennsylvania

German architectural historian Julius Posener (1904-1996) maintained that Hugo Häring (1882-1958) was the only early modernist architect who had formulated an entire body of architectural theory of his time.[1] Häring’s thinking and its central argument, however, has received very little attention, especially in the English-speaking world.[2] The author substantially contributed to interpreting Häring’s original ideas and Hans Scharoun (1893-1972)’s later application was Peter Blundell Jones, who wrote the only monograph on Häring in English as well as a number of articles that aimed to promote the “organicist” architectural tradition. Nevertheless, Häring’s design theory still deserves further studies, as Blundell Jones failed to discuss Häring’s fragmented notes on the subject of the “philosophy of Gestalt,” a theme that had occupied his mind since the early 1900s. Thus, this paper will provide a long overdue discussion of Häring’s “philosophy of Gestalt” and its historical, theoretical, and methodological implications. I shall argue that his Gestalt theory—alongside the notion of the “New Building” (Neues Bauen)—can be understood as an “alternative” approach to architectural design for its underlying holistic way of perceiving (Vorstellungsarten) in contrast to the mechanical parallel. I shall also argue that Häring’s view towards building as “living organism” and his focus on the immediate experience of what is “happening” (geschehen) presented an adoption of German romanticist tradition and, more specifically, Goethe’s scientific methods and its reliance on “primal phenomenon” (Urphänomen). Furthermore, I will acknowledge Häring’s role as an “outlier” of the modern movement, while contending that it was the result of, rather than the “discursive limitations” of his theory,[3] the “authority-usurping” of the modern movement right at the moment of its emergence[4] and the dominance of the historiographic narratives that center on heroic figures such as Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe. Indeed, Häring stood in opposition to these influential architects. But this stance became one of the reasons for the current resurfacing of Häring’s theory as well as Scharoun’s development, which poses renewed issues for thinking through contemporary architectural pedagogy.

[1] Peter Blundell Jones, Hugo Häring: The Organic versus Geometric (Stuttgart: Ed. Axel Menges, 1999), 33. Julius Posener stated, “Häring was the one whose written oeuvre has been the most important by far. Not only had he written considerably more than any other leading architect of the time, his theory was more consistent than the occasional manifestoes or essays written by his contemporaries.” See Julius Posener, From Schinkel to the Bauhaus (London: Lund Humphries, 1972), 33.

[2] For books on Häring in languages other than English see Jürgen Joedicke and Heinrich Lauterbach‘s Hugo Häring: Schriften Entwürfe Bauten (1965) (German), Adrian V. Sudhalter’s Hugo Häring: Architect des Neuen Bauens, 1882-1958 (2001) (German), Das Andere Bauen: Gedanken und Zeichnungen(1982) (German), and Sergio Polano’s Hugo Härin, il segreto della forma (1983) (Italian).

[3] David J. Lewis, “Channeling Häring, Mediating Scharoun,” The Cornell Journal of Architecture, Vol. 6 (1999): 54-67.

[4] Colin St. John Wilson, The Other Tradition of Modern Architecture: The Uncompleted Project(London: Academy, 1995), 6.

Searching for Identity through Nostalgia and Modernity–Tendencies in German Architecture after the Re-unification in 1990

Anne-Catrin Schultz
Wentworth Institute of Technology

Architecture has been used to demonstrate political change in many instances throughout history. This research paper explores tendencies in German architecture after West and East Germany unified in 1990 after more than 40 years of separate political systems, economic conditions and architectural development. The main narrative of the research traces the process of defining new identities after the collapse of a strong physical border and a shift in political and economic structure. Practically overnight an area of 1,800 square miles was added to its Western counterpart, joining a lifestyle that seemed to have been driven by consumption and opportunity. Over the next few decades, a building boom unfolded in the former area of Eastern Germany and in the city of Berlin, which had been the macrocosm of the cultural, social and urban consequences of the separation. German architecture had already gone through a re-definition after World War II, a phase of reconstruction and political articulation that in the West resulted in a strong push for transparent, modern and well-engineered buildings, demonstrating an open and ultimately good society. In the East, modernity was one vehicle to show progress and showcase the SED regime (1949-1990). Architecture after 1990, the year of the German re-unification also modeled a set of values aiming at progress, unity and technical ability. It retained a preference for glass curtain walls and stone veneers balancing optimism for a great future with nostalgia for the past. In the former West Germany, the architectural evolution was little impacted, the former East Germany underwent a comprehensive renewal, especially in the realm of infrastructure, civic, commercial and transportation buildings. This paper compares a series of urban interventions such as the Berlin Potsdamer Platz development, Leipzig Hauptbahnhof (Leipzig main train station) and Coutbus Technical University Library aiming at identifying and articulating shared formal principles that signify a united country. Many of the sites signal public places but are part of private (corporate) development; they expand on modernism but nod to the architecture of previous centuries; they communicate serving function but focus on the image. Especially new public and civic projects in former East Germany had to reconcile the duality of different political ideologies, neoliberal capitalism on the one hand and the former ideals of a socialist republic on the other hand. This examination represents an analysis of a series of completed sites and considers the intention formulated in the briefs that initiated them. The study reveals what Emily Pugh calls the process “colonialization of the Eastern part of Germany Western architects.”1After 1990, western architects seized the opportunity and secured numerous commissions along a type of new frontier. The urban and architectural interventions nevertheless carried the role of creating and supporting a new German identity. This paper documents the tendencies and narratives articulated between nostalgia and avantgarde that characterize German architecture of re-unification.

1 Pugh, Emily. Architecture, Politics, & Identity in Divided Berlin, 2014.

Revisionist Approaches to the Historiography of Chinese Architecture

Wenbo Guo
Georgia Institute of Technology

George Johnston
Georgia Institute of Technology

The study of Chinese architectural history by Chinese scholars started quite late as compared to the study of Western architectural history by Western scholars. Influenced by the philosophy of Confucianism, which devalued material artifacts, architecture was not considered to be a scholarly field in pre-Modern China.1  Chinese scholars treated architecture as a technique mastered by craftsmen and excluded it from the domain of fine arts such as painting, calligraphy, sculpture and inscription. The Western idea of architecture as a respected gentleman’s career was not introduced into China until the end of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) with the increasing presence of foreign populations. Once Chinese scholars accepted the idea that architecture was a scholarly discipline, they commenced the study of Chinese architecture through the application of historiographical approaches adapted from non-Chinese sources. Contemporary Chinese scholars are now pursuing revisionist approaches to Chinese architectural historiography that takes account of these complicated lines of influence. In light of these complex cultural genealogies, the objective of this paper is to chart some of the methodological questions to be considered in the development of a critical approach to the historiography of Chinese architecture. This paper is structured in three parts. The first part is an introduction to the writings of significant architectural historians in the period of the late-19th century to mid-20th century, in which the different approaches applied to research in Chinese architectural history are examined. These include writings by Western scholars; writings by traditional Chinese intellectuals; and the writings from the first scholarly organization devoted to researching Chinese architecture, the Society for Research in Chinese Architecture. The second part addresses contemporary scholars’ critical assessments of the different approaches to Chinese architectural history employed by their predecessors. Finally, the paper will outline some methodological questions to be addressed in the development of more critically conscious and culturally nuanced accounts of Chinese architectural history if such histories are to go beyond old preconceptions based in an east-west dialectic.

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1 It is commonly agreed that Modern China starts with the Opium War of 1840 and ends with the establishment of the People’s Republic of China of 1949. Therefore, following this convention, the pre-Modern period can be understood to be the time before 1840s.

Afro-Surrealism: The Abolitionist Landscape Project

Jeffrey Hogrefe
Pratt Institute

In “Surrealism: Thinking About Freedom in New Ways,” Robin D.G. Kelley proposes that the history of the American Civil War could be written not from the perspective of the victors in the past but from the present looking forward to a new future, in a sense to reverse the trauma of the past to realize the power of imagination in Afro-surrealism. The abolition of slavery was the abolition of a huge formation of capital–one of the most radical acts in the history of the commoditization of labor. Each one of the four million slaves who was held captive in 1865 has left a presence in the landscape; and yet the memory of the abolition of slavery and the violence that was perpetrated on those who were caught in the middle has been largely erased in the Potomac River Valley where fighting was concentrated in Harpers Ferry and Antietam Battlefield, as revolutionary and emancipatory sites. This has happened by the reordering of capital formations into new and arguably as insensitive labor bodies in a global space that has been informed by revisionist histories and other processes of knowledge formation that have had the affect of freezing past events in crystalline moments that privilege the position of those with sufficient capital to erect the monuments. Moving a body in and out of history to locate the memory of the past in the present and the future is the project of The Abolitionist Landscape Project. Instead of destroying the Civil War monuments the project moves around them as they fall into ruin in the Anthropocene. This is achieved by focusing on interpretive, self-referential and procedural walking practices in Afro surrealism. The abolitionist landscape of the formerly enslaved African moving into freedom in the dark of winter tended to erase itself as it was being formed; walking in the place where the memory lays is a vital practice. The presentation will introduce an Afro-surrealist interpretation of the Civil War monuments to locate the history in reverse from the perspective of those who set in motion the revolutionary and emancipatary acts through a deliberate reordering of events and the objects that contain the memory of the conflict. As surrealism became a vital force in the undoing of colonialism in the middle of the twentieth century, with the critical work of Edouard Glissant and Aime Cesaire in reimagining new forms of embodiment in the marvelous, so too has Afro surrealist walking practice of deambulation excited the abolitionist landscape with new ways of imagining the past, present and future of the memory of the abolition of slavery and the landscape where it is held. The walking practice introduces a new way of viewing history from the bottom through immersive experiences in the landscape. Critical terms that will be applied in the paper include monument, containment, subsystems, systems, codes, hautology, erasure, nomadic and settled spaces, networks, space and place, rhizome, and Afro-surrealism.

Militant Cartography

Britt Eversole
Syracuse University

The proliferation of live cartographic platforms has only increased the degree to which maps and other forms of data visualization are accepted as documents of factuality. Their seeming precision and concreteness, complemented by the perception that real-time information affords the possibility of mapping constant change, only further conceal their role as instruments of subjection. As Michel Foucault, JB Harley and Denis Woods all write, maps are indeed records of violent acts and active apparatuses of domination: from physical acts of conquest to the imposition of names on places, buildings and landscapes, they structure our identity and our perception of space and reality even before we arrive at a given location. But if every map is a record of and an instrument of violence, what would a map of nonviolence look like? This paper reconsiders the power effects of cartography by reexamining two mid-century artists whose work problematizes the role of the map as a mass medium. It is no surprise that maps were a fruitful medium for Emilio Isgrò and Eugenio Miccini, poets of the Italian neoavanguardia movement Poesia visiva. Cartographic codes and graphic elements had already been interlaced into the “liberated” Futurist poems of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and Carlo Carrà. But whereas mapping techniques fueled the historical avant-garde’s violence against language and the land, giving graphic form to nationalist and irredentist tendencies, for the sixties and seventies neoavanguardia, the poetic recuperation of cartography served an entirely different function. Amidst the “death of the word” brought about by the tyranny of mass media, the found map—appropriated as a popularly understandable image, an apparatus of spatial control and a means of imposing identity—allowed neo-avant-garde poets to work directly on the power structures that organized the contemporary city, the territory and the nation. This paper examines two appropriated cartography projects: Isgrò’s practice of cancellatura, which entailed the careful blotting out of textual information, and Miccini’s opus Il piano regolatore insurrezionale della città di Firenze [The Insurrectional Master Plan for Florence], an ironic, visionary atlas of eighteen maps showing how Florentines could once again seize control of their city. Adopting Lautréamont’s mantra “Poetry must be made by all and not by one,” their techniques encouraged popular emulation: by drawing over or reappropriating cartography’s authority, anyone can reconfigure, or disfigure, the city. During a time of urban terrorism, student and union unrest and the inability of planning initiatives to stem the growth of city peripheries and to protect historical centers, their maps offered an alternative means for seizing control of the image of the Italian city and nation. Between the autonomist slogan “Prendiamoci la città!” [“Let’s take over the city!”] and the militant cry “Distruggiamoci la città!” [“Let’s destroy the city!”], Isgrò and Miccini highlighted cartography’s violence in order to propose new projects of nonviolent political change—or, more provocatively, to ask what kind of nonviolence might bring about a different political reality.

2:30pm
Gaslamp 5

Community Justice and Pedagogy

Moderator: Alexis Gregory, Mississippi State University

-ville: not rural but micropolitan America. The case of East and West Texas.

Sofia Krimizi
Architectural Association

Kyriakos Kyriakou
University of Texas at Austin

Young, instant and radically small, the American town operates as an extreme condition of minimal complexity and minimum urbanity. If America is the original version of modernity, then the extremities of that vast internal territory- understood here as a sequence of Greysvilles, Crossvilles, Maryvilles but also Moscows, Paris, Florences spread out in Tennessee, Texas, Louisiana or Arizona- offer us an insight to an accelerated end state of that modernity. ‘-ville: not rural but micropolitan America’ produces an alternative understanding of urbanism that studies the American town as an instant and autonomous urban setup, one that is simple enough to be broken down in primary and identifiable elements, tools that enable urban function to operate at its very minimum. Such towns are seen through a lens of radical remoteness as sprawled, diluted and scattered nodes of a network that strives to both settle and conquer a vast territory. This project produces a contemporary reading of the internal fringes of the United States by carving a multi-scalar, cross country section through the not exactly rural,  but definitely micropolitan American, radically positioned on only one colour of the post election map.  The “-ville” project attempts an alternative history of the city, in medias res. These relatively young but still centennial aggregations are utilized to tell the story of the city from the middle going both forwards and backwards. The American “-ville” becomes the unit of urbanity that cannot be further subdivided, minimised or simplified. It is conceived as the absolute minimum to be potentially added upon, improved, extended, mored. In its radical smallness  the town presents a version of the city that has purged and/ or actually never acquired further complexities. By examining the -ville we examine the most basic manifestation of a contemporary urban settlement- this inherently American condition that is neither suburb  or countryside. Towns of such scale and type reflect the simplicity and straightforwardness that allows them to be interpreted, as the absolute minimum urban cell. A “-ville” has at least one church, one post office, a town hall, a bar. One building of each main public function.  The trip to the “-villes”, a scan- in other words- of a territory that is rendered continuous through the trajectory of the observer, is an ongoing research project but also pedagogical project that aspires to revisit the origins of the city as a recent archeology of the notion of the settlement through its youngest and less complex manifestation. The constellation of the towns becomes the territory that students are asked to survey, analyse and eventually intervene in through a localised design thesis.  We want to present the work of two advanced studios that took place in the past academic year that explore the latent potential of the Texan towns. Student projects put in question issues of power, production, and scale through design interventions in the texan towns and the territory that lies between them. Initially, each town is coined by the studio on a territorial scale- usually found on an intersection of the jeffersonian grid, wedged in a pinch of the landscape, placed unapologetically on the specific location by forces originating from the industry or as intermediate nodes on larger infrastructural networks: a company town, a water stop, an oil field guardian. Zooming in, the town reveals its own generic or idiosyncratic geometric structure- consistently appearing to be waiting to get filled, to be completed, empty more than emptied. The students travel to the towns, producing close ups of the courthouse, jail, church, corner store, gazebo, school, post office, water-tower and entry sign revealing anonymous yet radical acts of design. The research produced in all stages is considered an open resource within the studio. Students produce collectively a critical iconography of the American town, which is then re-inserted in the imagery of the land.

Bridging the Gap Studio: urban design education for a global community

Madlen Simon
University of Maryland

Shaimaa Hameed Hussein
Al-Nahrain University

Gregory Weaver
University of Maryland

Bridging the Gap studio brings US graduate students together with Iraqi graduate students for a collaborative urban design studio focusing on urban redevelopment proposals for selected commercial districts in the two capital cities of Washington DC and Baghdad. Each group serves as information sources, eyes-on-the-ground, cultural informants, fact-checkers, and design critics for their overseas counterparts. We communicate through multiple digital means including WebEx video-conferences, Google Drive, and Facebook. (figures 1+2) The theoretical basis of the studio draws upon multiple disciplines. Initial motivation was citizen diplomacy, an international relations concept that engages private citizens in “individual endeavors that serve their own interests and diplomacy which includes a framework for cooperation between countries” (Bhandari and Belyavina 2011). The collaboration was built upon such frameworks, including a memorandum of understanding between universities and funding from IREX, an organization that “support(s) individuals and institutions to create change in their own communities – and to create person-to-person bridges between nations” (IREX) A key theoretical underpinning of the studio is globalization, cutting across multiple disciplines, spanning practice and academia (King 1990). Initial support came from a multi-national design firm that viewed the studio as a vehicle for inculcating competencies required for global practice. Interaction with the firm’s architects, including a studio design competition that brought US and Iraqi students to the Washington DC office for internships, shows the students how practitioners put those cultural understandings and skills into action. Globalization has also influenced the discipline of geography, leading to the innovations in the field of comparative urbanism (Robinson 2016, McFarlane and Robinson 2012) to work “across diverse human experiences.” Bridging the Gap Studio produces studies in comparative urbanism as the US and Iraqi students discover both similarity and difference in their focus districts. A particularly vivid graphic comparison of urban scales resulted from the juxtaposition of large-format prints of the commercial corridors under study, Washington DC’s K Street and Baghdad’s Karrada Dakhil (figures 3+4). The pedagogical method draws upon situated learning theory, positing that learning should take place in authentic practice settings and within social communities (Lave and Wenger 1991). While one could argue that every architectural design studio exemplifies situated learning, Bridging the Gap studio offers a particularly robust example, creating a setting that mimics global practice and a social community that includes inhabitants of the urban places under study. The social context of the studio education is particularly interesting, serving as content as well as context. One question on pre- and post-studio surveys of the US students asked, “How well do you know the beliefs, customs, norms, and values of your Iraqi counterparts?” Pre-studio survey results on a four-point scale showed all except one outlier evenly split between “not at all” and “barely.” Post-studio results showed all except one outlier had moved into the “fairly well” and “very well” categories. The greatest challenge for the studio moving forward is to surmount communication barriers – including a nine-hour time difference, drastically different university schedules, and unreliable web conferencing technology – to continue to strengthen the social community.

References:

Bhandari, Rajika and Belyavina, Raisa, Evaluating and Measuring the Impact of Citizen Diplomacy: Current Status and Future Directions, (Institute of International Education, 2011) p.3.

IREX website, www.irex.org/, accessed 6/19/19. King, Anthony. “Architecture, Capital and the Globalization of Culture.” Theory, Culture & Society 7, no. 2–3 (June 1990): 397–411. doi:10.1177/026327690007002023.

Robinson, Jennifer. “Thinking Cities through Elsewhere: Comparative Tactics for a More Global Urban Studies.” Progress in Human Geography 40, no. 1 (February 2016): 3–29. doi:10.1177/0309132515598025.

Colin McFarlane & Jennifer Robinson (2012) Introduction—Experiments in Comparative Urbanism, Urban Geography, 33:6, 765-773, DOI: 10.2747/0272-3638.33.6.765 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.2747/0272-3638.33.6.765.

Lave, Jean, and Etienne Wenger. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive and Computational Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Doi:10.1017/CBO9780511815355.

Other Environmentalisms: Resisting Colonial Legacies in Architecture

Faysal Tabbarah
American University of Sharjah

The paper describes a teaching pedagogy deployed simultaneously in a seminar and design studio, titled Other Environmentalisms. The pedagogy critically examines and re-imagines the production of contemporary architecture in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) by interrogating the relationship between architecture, the environment, and colonial legacies. This has been developed within two ongoing challenges in the MENA: 1. The erasure of nuanced cultural specificities in the architectural imaginary; and 2. Climate crisis. Specifically, the paper problematizes how teaching about the environment in MENA’s architectural institutions, especially those driven by North American curriculum, reproduces a problematic form of Environmental Orientalism1. By Environmental Orientalism I mean the systemic weaponizing of narratives that conceal the heterogeneity of the biophysical environment of the MENA, amplifying narratives around the homogeneity of a hot desert barely able to support a struggling pastoralism. This also permeates contemporary architectural production in the MENA and is made doubly problematic when the majority of the student bodies originate from diverse ends of the MENA. The paper posits that environmental manipulation and protection by colonial is set the stage for an ongoing colonialism, under the guise of environmentalism, which works “to assimilate diverse cultures and spiritual traditions into a homogeneous code.”2 Therefore, resistance can be formed by integrating an environmental history methodology into architectural discourse and design. This enables students to rethinking of the relationship between historical environmental narratives, techno-scientific environmental solutions, as well as their post-colonial context in the Global South. This raises the following questions: What is the relationship between contemporary MENA architecture and colonial legacies vis-à-vis the environment? How do the ideologies and practices of Environmentalism impact MENA architectural practice? And finally, what are non-Western designers to do in the face of ongoing Orientalism and the growing threats of climate change? The paper is structured in three parts. First, I will unpack the theoretical framework and contextual background that enables the integration of orientalist critiques and environmental history methodologies. Second, I will outline the seminar course structure and the narrative logic constructed between the three main components of the course: 1. Orientalism and the wider MENA context; 2. Understanding environmental history within the lens of the built environment; 3. A case study approach (e.g. Algeria), that unpacks the relationship between colonial architectural practices, the construction of an environmental imaginary, and the case study’s actual environmental history. Finally, the paper describes the application of this framework into a design studio environment. This paper will focus on a single studio iteration that examines the architectural potential of the Plan Maroc Vert (Green Morocco Plan), an ambitious plan that aims to tackle current impacts of climate crisis on the Moroccan landscape and economy. Specifically, students responded to the questions raised within the agenda through developing an agri-tourism project that integrates economics, agriculture, infrastructure and architecture, situated in Marrakech, Morocco, on a site adjacent to a dry river. The studio output includes infographics, academic research, architectural drawings, and physical constructs.

Endnotes

1. Diana K. Davis points to the practices by imperial powers in MENA that aimed at othering the environment to facilitate and justify imperial goals. See Davis, Diana k. “Imperialism, Orientalism, and the Environment in the Middle East.” Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa, Ohio University Press, 2011, pp. 1–22. I take this thesis further to suggest that there is a discursive continuity between colonial environmental narratives and contemporary sustainability discourse about the region, overcoming seemingly neutral greening projects. This is irrespective of how supported this discourse might be by scientific knowledge, given the history of colonial actors manipulating scientific knowledge. I also posit is that the limited discourse around environmental orientalism is currently limited in scope to traditional historical narratives and has not yet been researched through the lens of its relationship to the built environment.

2. Huggan, Graham, and Helen Tiffin. “Green Postcolonialism.” Interventions 9, no. 1 (2007): 1-11.

Memory Mapping Storytelling and Climate Justice

Alice Read
Florida International University

“Quando dibujo, lo recuerdo todo“ (When I’m drawing, I remember everything).

Ana, a sixteen-year-old agricultural worker from Guatemala who had emigrated to South Florida, drew her neighborhood back home.  She showed a simple house with a loom in the back yard, a garden with corn and fruit trees, a school with kids playing soccer, a few streets, a market, and her grandmother’s house, all surrounded by mountains and forest.  As she drew and talked about her experience there and her more recent situation working in an orchid nursery, architecture students also made drawings to give visual form to her story. Our project was an interdisciplinary class with English literature majors, to tell local stories on the topic of immigration and climate justice.  This work contributed to a collaborative effort by faculty at 20 universities in the US and Latin America, under the auspices the Humanities Action Lab, an NEH-funded group based at Rutgers University.  We worked with a local non-profit organization, WeCount! in Homestead, Florida to focus on the experience of agricultural workers from Mexico and Central America, who often face unsafe working conditions such as exposure to pesticides and heat stress, both exacerbated by climate change. Through WeCount! we were able to interview six people who had left their countries, often in the aftermath of drought or other environmental disasters, to immigrate to South Florida for work in agriculture. As architects, we approached story-telling visually, and developed memory mapping as a specific technique.  During the interviews, students sketched both maps and images, adding and correcting as the conversation progressed – a valuable architectural skill.  The drawings describe the locus in quo, the place in memory where things happen.  As part of the oral history project, the images offered a counterpoint to the transcribed narratives by giving them a sense of place, which made the environmental reality more tangible.  Most people have vivid spatial memories of their childhood home and neighborhood that often define a sense of normalcy, a baseline against which all other places are measured.  As memory and as drawing, they do not succumb to accuracy.  The maps combine plan and view, and have no consistent scale, or shift scales as needed. They are necessarily sketchy and incomplete. The drawings that our students made reveal primarily their emotional connection with the stories being told – what they heard and envisioned, as perhaps distinct from what happened or what was said.  This they could share in conversation and set down in drawing.  The images, whether warm and wistful or harsh and horrifying, reveal a human connection in an imagined experience of place.

Between Neighbors: Staging Domesticity in Multifamily Housing

Katie MacDonald
University of Tennessee-Knoxville

Between Neighbors: Staging Domesticity in Multifamily Housing leveraged film as a vehicle for the study of multifamily housing design. The building program emphasized a study of part to whole relationships and the dynamics of communal life, bringing together private units and shared spaces. As urban populations grow, many cities are experiencing booms in multifamily housing, a phenomenon compounded by aging postwar housing stock and declining rates of home ownership. Developers have taken the reigns on housing design, privileging the unit over the whole. Furthermore, ubiquitous technology has resulted in the social isolation of residents and the decline of communal social structures. In response, students examined the relationship between neighbors and shared spaces, studying examples from film in which multifamily housing becomes a character within the drama. Building on the relationships revealed between human interaction and physical space, students created new models of residential living that preference the design of interstitial space in the vitality of the whole.

The project site was a generic corner lot within a low density urban fabric, and each student designed a nine unit complex. After drafting, modeling, and analyzing the shared spaces from his or her assigned film, each student designed a communal space as the seed of a larger building. These designs concentrated on mediating between unit entry and public space. Next, students scaled up to design the larger whole. During the final two weeks of the course, students made films that staged their designs, using both analog techniques and animation software. Building designs served as the setting, the protagonist, and the narrative. This one man show was not a trailer, but a full narrative, albeit short: one to three minutes in length. The resulting films convey both conceptual frameworks for living and the physical spaces that might house them.

2:30pm
Gaslamp 4

Material + Digital Methodologies

Moderator: Corey Griffin, Pennsylvania State University

Cast Stereotomy: A Material-Based Investigation of Stereotomic Modules

Niloufar Emami
Louisiana State University

Paul Holmquist
Louisiana State University

Stereotomy is a traditional construction technique that allows for building architectural structures from discrete stone elements. With the advancement of computational design methods, material properties, and fabrication techniques, the discipline has been reborn. In particular, stereotomy can be reinvestigated using materials other than stone, such as concrete, or the liquid stone. Concrete has many advantages over stone. Fiber reinforced concrete can perform in both compression and tension, as opposed to stone which only performs in compression. In addition, the weight of concrete modules can be reduced by using optimized mixes, as well as by designing molds that create hollow spaces in the modules. Concrete is less expensive than stone, and the equipment for its fabrication is widely accessible. Other advantages include the lower cost of concrete compared to stone, and the general economy of material use. In this paper, we present research investigating the design and fabrication of stereotomic modules and assemblies made of concrete that comprise a topological, interlocking structural system wherein variability is present but controlled. Topological interlocking modules are mortarless assemblies that exclusively constrain their elements through inherent geometrical and topological properties. This research demonstrates the growing potentials of 3D printing for creating formwork. 3D printing allows making formworks for creating complex voussoirs. In particular, stereolithography (SLA) 3D printers are employed where elastic resin is used. Using an elastic resin allows creating flexible formworks which can be easily released. Digital tools such as Rhino and Grasshopper are employed to push the boundaries of form generation in the design of an arch. The primary experiments of 3D printing have been conducted, and a small-scale assembly of the arch is in process. The main limitation of the current method is the small bed size of the printer  (5.7” by 5.7” by 6.9″). However, there is great potential for the material and the process that needs to be investigated using the current method before scaling up.

LOG KNOT: Robotically Fabricated Roundwood Timber Structure

Sasa Zivkovic
Cornell University

Christopher Battaglia
Ball State University

Brian Havener
Cornell University

LOG KNOT is a robotically fabricated architectural installation which aims to expand and optimize the use of full trees and irregular timber geometries in construction. LOG KNOT creates an infinite singular and three-dimensionally bent loop of roundwood, borrowing strategies from traditional wood building and manufacturing. (1) Only about 35% of the wood of a tree is estimated to be used in construction (2), focusing mainly on the straight tree trunk and generally omitting smaller roundwood members altogether. By utilizing robotic fabrication processes and 3D scanning technology to create complex timber curvature that requires minimal formwork for assembly, this project aims to make better use of valuable timber construction resources, expanding on research projects such as the Wood Chip Barn (3) at Hooke Park (4), Limb at University of Michigan (5), or industry applications developed by companies such as Whole Tree Structures (6). The process and design methodology shared by these projects constitutes a paradigm shift in the design and construction of wood structures: rather than first mass-standardizing an irregular product (a tree) to subsequently mass-customize a design from the standardized components (plywood, 2x4s, etc.), each project starts with the available natural timber geometry working with, and capitalizing on its idiosyncrasies. This reciprocal design process fosters synergies and feedback between material, fabrication, digital form, and full-scale construction. In three sections, this paper will outline processes and methodologies for robotic fabrication, variable complex-curvature creation, joinery detailing, geometric and structural optimization, the reduction of moisture-related material failures, and on-site assembly. First, the research team developed a design method to create curvature from roundwood pieces, both regular and irregular. Components are computationally processed to form a spatially complex figure-eight knot (Savoy knot). Based on initial 3D models, a number of irregularly shaped trees and small roundwood members that cannot be processed by traditional sawmills are selected and harvested from a local forest. To complete the design process from form-to-log towards log-to-form, the trees are 3D scanned and the 3D model is adjusted to fit the available timber stock inventory. Second, the structure is computationally optimized and fabrication protocols are developed for the available robotic system, a KUKA KR200/2 with a 5hp CNC spindle. Custom computational solvers locally optimize the structure for bending and tension at each tri-fold mortise and tenon joint and custom fabrication protocols improve the positioning of a work piece in relation to the robotic end effector. Each wood component is treated with Pentacryl, a non-hygroscopic and non-toxic wood stabilizer, to prevent checking and shaking which can compromise connections. Third, a series of full-scale prototypes are constructed to develop connections and structural details, further improving the design and fabrication protocols. Due to the unique joint design, LOG KNOT requires only minimal formwork for assembly and can be built without heavy machinery. The main research contributions of this architectural installation are in the area of minimal formwork assembly, bending and tension force optimization of mortise and tenon joints, as well as variable 3D compound curvature creation for regular and irregular roundwood geometries.

————————————–

(1) Blondeau, Etienne-Nicolas, and Honoré-Sébastien Vial Du Clairbois. Encyclopédie méthodique, marine. Vol. 160. Chez Panckoucke, 1783.

(2) Ramage, Burridge, Busse-Wicher, ereday, Reynolds, Shah, Wu et al. “The wood from the trees: The use of timber in construction.” In Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 68 (2017): 333-359.

(3) Mollica, Zachary, and Martin Self. “Tree Fork Truss.” Advances in architectural geometry 2016 (2016): 138-153.

(4) Self, Martin. “Hooke Park: application for timber in its Natural Form”. In Advancing Wood Architecture: A Computational Approach. Edited by Menges, Schwinn, and Krieg, Routledge, 2016.

(5) Von Buelow, Torghabehi, Mankouche, and Vliet. “Combining parametric form generation and design exploration to produce a wooden reticulated shell using natural tree crotches.” In Proceedings of IASS Annual Symposia, vol. 2018, no. 20, pp. 1-8. International Association for Shell and Spatial Structures (IASS), 2018.

(6) “Research and Development,” WholeTrees, accessed June 18, 2019, https://www.google.com/policies/privacy/.https://wholetrees.com/technology/

A New Method of Shape Clustering Using K-Medoids for an Organized Design Space: Evaluation

Shermeen Yousif
Florida Atlantic University

Wei Yan
Texas A&M University

Architectural design is a creative and complex activity, still performed by architects; when simplifying it to computational performance-based design optimization, it becomes problematic. Considering it as merely optimization can lead to an ill-defined design problem and thus misleading solutions. Available generative design and optimization systems lack organizational methods that support examining the design space by designers. Facilitating architects’ successful interaction and their assessment of produced designs within generative systems has motivated this work. This paper is part of an ongoing research project to develop, test, and validate a new articulation method to organize the design set in generative design systems, based on geometric similarities/differences. The objective is to support design review by organizing the design space with the similar shapes clustered and the representative shape of each cluster highlighted. This helps architects in a broad understanding of the design space and in-depth examination of particular subsets. In a prior work, a method of Shape Clustering using K-Medoids (SC-KM) was developed. The method involves developing a new approach to shape difference finding for grid-based shapes and implementing the K-Medoids clustering algorithm. In this paper, the objectives are (1) to apply the SC-KM method to a new set of shapes, (2) to utilize clustering evaluation metrics to test the resulted clusterings, and (3) to compare the results with an existing study for external validation. The results show coherence and homogeneity in the clustering subsets, with enhanced clustering performance, compared to the examined study. Collectively, the experiments proved the need for the SC-KM method for articulating the design space.

Digitizing Wood | Analyzing Wood Grain in 2x4s Using Facial Recognition Software Strategies.

Blair Satterfield
University of British Columbia

Alexander Preiss
University of British Columbia

Derek Mavis
University of British Columbia

Zippered Wood is our novel take on wood joinery and deformation. Digitally generated formally specific joint patterns are cut into boards that are joined to produce predictably precise bends. This paper presents research done in support of the Zippered Wood system. The Digitizing Wood project is a software and tool hack that reads the surfaces of boards to identify ideal 2x4s for production in the Zippered Wood process. The objective is to maximize the strength of the composite members by avoiding defects (knots and holes). The Zippered Wood process involves the bending of found 2x4s pulled from waste streams. This means the team must address challenges that are not encountered when 2x4s are deployed conventionally (as in light frame construction). Knots and holes created by nails and screws are liabilities that can be detrimental when bending and twisting forces are applied. Imperfections are especially problematic where the material is thinnest (at the point of the bend). This is because the veneer left between each rendered tooth acts as the main tensile and compressive component for zippered members. These thin veneers are simultaneously the critical lines of inflection and weak points in the assembly, and are thus prone to cracking during the forming and gluing process. To counter this problem, we are developing a simulation algorithm to virtually map the zippered tooth pattern onto any given 2×4. Our goal is to determine the optimal tooth placement in relation to any defects identified within the grain of each 2×4. The process involves scanning the face grain of each board using the sensor from an XBOX Kinect. Once scanned, grain is fed into a computer and analyzed to find the optimal relationship between teeth, each possible member’s unique grain patterns, and any imperfections. The tooth geometry of the zipper leaves large areas of material in place. This means only the face grain that corresponds to each 3mm thin veneer need be analyzed. These veneers are the only areas that deform when milled components are joined. The tooth is therefore the ideal location for knots and defects. Once scanned, the image is input into a Grasshopper script that analyses the grain to locate knots and holes. The script then runs an optimization routine through Galapagos, testing the ‘goal regions’ from the zippered tooth surface against the locations of the knots and holes. The software is rewarded for missing blemishes, and works to achieve the best score. The output is then translated into the machining process of the final Zippered Wood component. Preliminary testing has been done on 2x4s with encouraging results. Refinement of the process is ongoing and will be tested further during the construction of Zippered Wood projects. We believe the Digitizing Wood project is novel, will optimize our Zippered Wood members, and increase confidence when using scavenged materials. The productive misuse of facial recognition strategies also points to novel ways that designers can leverage computation to further design and production processes.

Advancing Sustainable Wood Design and Technologies through Interdisciplinary Collaboration

Tahar Messadi, Kim Furlong, Frank Jacobus, Michelle Lee-Barry, Richard Welcher, John Pijanowski, & Angela Carpenter
University of Arkansas

Wood is an age-old craft which has evolved into the widespread use of the typical balloon frame structure in low-rise residential buildings, but the recent technological shifts are signaling the need for a different approach to expand the application of new wood derived materials to commercial, institutional and industrial buildings.  This paper describes the first cluster of a design studio and a companion seminar course to be test-run prior to the launch of a Master in Integrated Wood Design at Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design, the University of Arkansas which is located in a state that is 60% covered with forests.  The cluster’s emphasis is to explore the nexus between mass timber and the built environment.  These courses brought together teams of students from the departments of architecture, interior design and civil engineering, and challenged them to examine the design potential in making mass timber gain the legitimacy it deserves, to the extent of rivaling other materials like concrete or steel.  The overall pedagogy rested on collaborative interdisciplinary teaching and learning respectively between faculty and students.  The approach method applied in these courses does not, however, follow the typical process applied in architectural design, for the simple reason of keeping the student constantly focused on working and designing with wood in informing the making of space.  Rather than starting with the site and massing, the process is reversed, beginning with the very small: the detail connection. In this studio-seminar cluster, a series of phases were established.  The first phase started from the tree, and by extension immersed students into the forest to explore wood’s ecological and productive lifecycle including sustainably managed forestry, timber harvesting and milling through production of engineered wood products.  Traditional and contemporary applications in product development were first explored through readings, industrial wood processing and production sites.  The second phase acquainted students with traditional machine tools by working on an assigned formal object.  The third phase was shifted to the utilization of digital tools to further understand the transformational logics in wood design.  Students were, therefore, challenged to postulate the generation of a tectonic connection assembly or joint located at the intersection of floor-wall and/or roof-wall.  In this exercise, they were given the freedom to design their own assembly through both traditional and computer numerical control (CNC) machine tools to establish elegant assemblies/joineries, based on perceived qualities and properties.  This active-learning empowered students to design, build, and physically test their own ideas through wood constructs.  In the fourth phase, the developed connection is then construed with other elements to form the specific envelope with its opacity and transparency and tectonic language. Students were led into prototyping elements such as building assemblies/connections and enclosure fragments, which became the building blocks towards the design of a Ski Pavilion, through which the teams synthesized the knowledge gained from previous assignments.  The approach to wood design through collaboration was highly successful, as students directly connected with the potentials of this renewable material in the built environment.

2:30pm
Salon D

Special Focus Session

JAE 75:1 – “Built”

Moderator: Carolina Dayer, Aarhus School of Architecture; Jacob Mans, U. of Minnesota; & Ivan Rupnik, Northeastern U.

Session Description

This panel will focus on the Journal of Architectural Education’s upcoming theme issue “BUILT”. As outlined in the call:

Is there any room left for the rare and precious artifice that the built may possess? Sarcastic as it may sound, the question denotes a crisis. Architectural design faculty are increasingly turning away from the activity of building toward other modes of work that fulfill the requirements of academic promotion. Articles, books, installations and exhibitions have become more secure routes to produce research, yielding the ironic question: why build? At the same time, architectural practices have less time and fewer resources for research and speculation. The academy and the profession seem to both share the lack of time to construct scholarship from buildings…
…. With this issue we make room for knowledge and questions that emerge from the built. What are the particular and critical discoveries that can be garnered from a close relationship with the edifice and its conception? Does engagement with the social, cultural and economic forces actualized outside of the studio space, through the act of building, generate particular forms of scholarship? Can we simulate this mode of working in the academy? How does pedagogy consider the contingencies of building?

The panel will unpack the theme and the underlying methodologies of JAE 75:1. Editors from this theme issue will expand on the call and will moderate a discussion with panelists from both academia and the professional practice sectors on how ideas and questions embedded in built projects inform their ongoing design and research.

2:30pm
Salon E

Special Focus Session

Research, Modes of Engagement

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

Session Description

A panel of 4 or 5 researchers each present a research project that illustrates one of the research engagement areas: Design Practice; Design-Build; Community Engagement; Teaching; Building Science Technology Research; Social Sciences Research; or Humanities Research. They will present and explain the strategy for expression and dissemination, as well as the criteria for peer review and evaluation. Followed by discussion of how to establish research criteria in the field of architecture.

Marc Neveu
Arizona State University

Marci Uihlein
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Erin Moore
University of Oregon

Joongsub Kim
Lawrence Technological University

Steffen Lehmann
University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Anne Bordeleau
University of Waterloo

Jeffrey Day
University of Nebraska-Lincoln

2:30pm
Balboa 1

Special Focus Session

Gender Matters. Beyond Equity Organized by The Plan Journal

Moderator: Lynne Dearborn, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Session Description

What are the most important contributions by women architects, designers and urbanists still to be duly investigated and recognized? Will gender mainstreaming continue to challenge contemporary design issues? Beyond the long overdue claim for equity, how can gender diversity affect and enrich our discourse and perspectives on architecture, design and urbanism for more sustainable, ecological, and inclusive cities and habitats?
This session offers a conversation among TPJ contributors and scholars on a sample of perspectives presented by the journal’s themed issue on “Gender Matters.”

Presenters:
Noemí Gómez Lobo
Tokyo Institute of Technology

Diego Martín Sánchez
Tokyo Institute of Technology

Annelise Pitts
Bohlin Cywinski Jackson

Shelby Doyle
Iowa State University

Respondents:
Lynne Dearborn
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

4:30pm
Grand Ballroom

Plenary

Closing Panel Discussion

Moderator: Ersela Kripa, Texas Tech U. & Antje Steinmuller, California College of the Arts

Merve Bedir

Land and Civilization Compositions

Jason De León

University of California, Los Angeles / Undocumented Migration Project (UMP)

Ronald Rael & Virginia San Fratello

Rael San Fratello

5:30pm
Palm Court

Reception

Closing Reception

Drinks and hors d’oeuvres; open to all attendees

Questions
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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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