MARCH 24-26, 2021 | Virtual Conference

109th Annual Meeting

Expanding the View: Prospect(s) for Architectural Education Futures

Schedule

July 1, 2020

Abstract Deadline

July 1, 2020

Special Session Deadline

September 2020

Author Notification

November 18, 2020

Full Paper Deadline

January 2021

Final Presenter Notification

Schedule + Abstracts: Thursday

This year’s 109th Annual Meeting will be held virtually from March 24 – 26, 2021. The virtual conference is designed for educators, practitioners, researchers, and students to explore and discuss the latest research, ideas, and practices in architecture, education, and allied disciplines.

Schedule with Abstracts

Below read full session descriptions and research abstracts. Plan what session you don’t want to miss.

Obtain Continuing Education Credits (CES) / Learning Units (LU), including Health, Safety and Welfare (HSW). Registered conference attendees will be able to submit session attended for Continuing Education Credits (CES). Register for the conference today to gain access to all the AIA/CES credit sessions.

Thursday, March 25, 2021

10:30am-11:00pm EDT /
7:30am-8:00am PDT

Plenary

Morning Discussion

Join us for a Q&A session about peer review in the Annual Meeting and the discipline hosted by members of the Annual Meeting Committee.

11:00am-12:00pm EDT /
8:00am-9:00am PDT

Special Focus Session
1 AIA/CES LU

Encountering Architecture: The Future of Fieldwork in Architecture Education

Moderator: Eric Olsen, Woodbury University
Jeff Balmer, University of North Carolina
Mireille Roddier, University of Michigan
Paulette Singley, Woodbury University

Session Description

The three major crises of Covid-19, social injustice, and economic inequality have come to characterize the current academic year. While campuses and classrooms are adjusting to these relevant and significant pressures, unanswered questions about the future status of fieldwork in the context of architecture education remain. How may inventive new models of online learning, increased demand for understanding social equity, and economic pressures of affordability impact study away learning opportunities? This moderated panel seeks to explicate the evolving role of fieldwork in relation to these three emphases and present new modalities for engaging travel as a site for architecture education.

11:00am-12:00pm EDT /
8:00am-9:00am PDT

Special Focus Session
1 AIA/CES LU

Speculative Practice in Pedagogy

Moderator: Constance Vale, Washington University in St. Louis
Chandler Ahrens, Washington University in St. Louis
Manuel Jimenez Garcia, University College London
Ryan Tyler Martinez, Woodbury University
Zachary Tate Porter, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
M. Casey Rehm, Southern California Institute of Architecture
Kelley Van Dyck Murphy, Washington University in St. Louis

Session Description

Architects cannot merely speculate about the future; we must also speculate about our role in it. There is a pressing need for architectural education to create an expanded field of operation beyond what is typically considered the domain of architectural practice. This panel will explore pedagogical models that embrace modes of speculative practice‚Äîcuration, fabrication, and visualization‚Äîand promote interdisciplinarity, entrepreneurship, and advanced research in emerging technology and media theory. While navigating through a continually changing set of parameters, tools, and media, blurring disciplinary boundaries will allow us to address the design challenges of our world and propose that world’s evolution.

11:00am-12:00pm EDT /
8:00am-9:00am PDT

Special Focus Session
1 AIA/CES LU

Federal and State Advocacy: Bringing it to the Studio

Moderator: Cindy Schwartz, American Institute of Architects
Kara Kempski, American Institute of Architects
Anne Law, American Institute of Architects
Richard Mohler, University of Washington
Emilie Taylor Welty, Tulane University

Session Description

With all that is taking place in the world, what is the forecast for legislative issues impacting our climate, economy, architects, and communities? Why is engaging in these issues important to the profession? How can you (and your students) make a positive impact on sustainability, resilience, affordable housing, student debt, infrastructure, and other issues? In this session, AIA leadership will share their legislative agenda and what is happening at the Federal level with infrastructure funding, climate legislation; as well as emerging legislative trends coming out of our nation’s statehouses. Faculty will discuss how engaging with local governments has impacted their courses, students, and career. Along with sharing hands-on advice for motivating and engaging students. Join us and learn how to bring activism into your studio as you deepen your own knowledge about public policy and the legislative issues of the day.

11:00am-12:00pm EDT /
8:00am-9:00am PDT

Special Focus Session
1 AIA/CES LU

Careers in Architectural Education: ACSA Distinguished Professor

Moderator: Francisco Rodriguez, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Julio Bermudez, Catholic University of America
Renee Chow, University of California, Berkeley
Bradford Grant, Howard University
Alison Kwok, University of Oregon
Kenneth Schwartz, Tulane University

Session Description

The ACSA Distinguished Professor Award recognizes individuals that have had a positive, stimulating, and nurturing influence upon students over an extended period of time and/or teaching which inspired a generation of students who themselves have contributed to the advancement of architecture.

11:00am-12:00pm EDT /
8:00am-9:00am PDT

Special Focus Session
1 AIA/CES LU

Advancing Scholarship on Equity and Justice in Built Environment

Moderator: Christine Theodoropoulos, California Polytechnic State University
Nora Wendl, University of New Mexico
Andrzej Zarzycki, New Jersey Institute of Technology
Evan Richardson, Morgan State University
Sharon Haar, University of Michigan
Gundula Proksch, University of Washington
June Williamson, City College of New York
Victor Rubin, PolicyLink
Kendall A. Nicholson, Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture

Session Description

This self-study documents the ACSA’s contributions to the past decade of research and creative practice that advances scholarship on equity and justice in built environments. A panel of ACSA Research & Scholarship Committee members will present findings from its review of ACSA publications, activities, and a survey of ACSA members, followed by dialog among participants that address the following:

How should we communicate self-study findings to make the information useful to ACSA members and partners?
During the next three years, how might the ACSA promote scholarship on equity and justice across the built environments?

30-minute

Coffee Break

12:30pm-2:00pm EDT /
9:30am-11:00am PDT

Research Session
1.5 AIA/CES LU

Beyond Normative in Design

Moderator: Kai Mah, Laurentian University

Theorizing Empathy: The Anthropology of a Girl’s Toilet
Adnan Morshed, Catholic University of America
S.M. Shafaiet Mahmud, BRAC University

Abstract

Focusing on our recently completed design-build project—a prototype toilet for adolescent school girls in rural Bangladesh—this paper offers an anthropological analysis of the intersection of poverty, architectural research, menstrual hygiene, and women’s empowerment. Our project was theoretically driven by the 1998 Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen’s insight that ethically driven social programs empower marginalized people most effectively—an idea he developed drawing on his study of Mary Wollstonecraft’s views on the moral nature of human rights, especially the useful distinction that she makes between legislated rights and ethically justified rights. Back in 2017 we had an opportunity to design an experimental toilet in southern Bangladesh with the simple intention of helping adolescent girls in a rural school who had no real toilet to avail. Here, only 11 percent of schools have separate toilets for girls with water facilities, 3 percent have the facility to dispose sanitary products, and 69 percent of school girls never change sanitary napkins during school time. To ameliorate these problems at a micro-scale, we designed a cost-efficient, environment-friendly, safe, and sanitary toilet for school girls to access easily and to improve their menstrual hygiene. We also wanted to help them change their common perception of a toilet from a dark, dingy, and stigmatized space to a positive, light-filled, ventilated, and gender-friendly facility. Furthermore, a gender-friendly toilet would improve the self-esteem of girls, enabling them to become more conscious and productive citizens. We came to the realization that inadequate access to a comfortable, convenient, and secure toilet at schools is one of the most common forms of gender discrimination, experienced regularly by girls across rural Bangladesh. We recently completed the construction of the toilet. A core concept of our toilet design was “no girl alone.” Often times girls feel reluctant to go to the solitary toilet facility at school because they are afraid that they would be harassed on the way to or once inside the toilet. Our solution for this particular problem was to provide three functions—toilets, ablution space, and handwashing—so that multiple girls can be inside the facility at the same time as mutual protection. Furthermore, our design proposes to use waste water for the adjacent community vegetable garden that the girls will be responsible for maintaining. This way they will take ownership of the toilet, thereby feeling inspired to sustain it. We recognize that the toilet may change neither the misogynist culture of a rural school nor the shy world of adolescent girls. To stop that from happening, we thought it would be important to tie the idea of toilet hygiene with curricular reform in such subjects as civic responsibility, environmental sustainability, gender studies, and conscientious use of water. These ideas are intimately related to the nation’s broader interests because school girls will emerge as better human beings and, as mothers, also enlighten their progeny. We also believe that our small project can spur local initiatives for not just public health and wellbeing, but also social justice.

Shared Beds
David Costanza, University of North Carolina Charlotte
Piergianna Mazzocca, University of Texas at Austin

Abstract

Shared Beds is a collaborative project for the 2019 Ragdale Ring Competition. The project challenges the role of the individual vis-à-vis the collective by reconsidering the seemingly inanimate quality of everyday objects such as beds. Our proposal puts forward the notion that architectural elements and objects have the impact to change the way we think and conceive of the spaces we occupy. Often manifest as unquestioned disciplinary technologies, configuring and standardizing all aspects of everyday life, the objects that occupy and shape architectural space are embedded with aesthetic, technical, and cultural histories. The bed, too often treated as banal or fixed, is a technology of every day, that speaks of the creation and mediation with other objects. Thus, the project seeks to explore a form that synthesizes the relationship between the things that we make and the things that make us. The installation is composed of three interactive communal beds, constructed and installed on the grounds of the Ragdale Foundation. The beds act as a communal form of architecture that challenges the role of the individual and the collective and how these two engage in coordinated play. Two of the objects are described by a circle of 15 ft in diameter. Resting on a tipping axis, these objects teeter back and forth depending on the movement inflicted by each occupant. Instead of the upright position of seating in a bench or a chair, the bed allows for horizontal occupation. Moreover, the horizontal surface at the top, in its most abstract sense, defines a space of rest avoiding the two-sidedness of a traditional orthogonal bed by making all the possible places of rest equidistant to each other. The largest of the 3 objects, described by a circle of 21 ft in diameter, has an asymmetrical tipping axis that produces a primary face that is always in contact with the ground. If the smaller beds change and tip depending on the motion of its occupants, the largest bed conditions the occupants to reimagine their movements and performances with the top oblique surface. Thus, the activation of these objects, whether by movement or applied motion, challenges the inherent biases regarding our claims to possess the places where we rest in and with whom we share them with. The vulnerability experienced by laying horizontally is highlighted when conducted in public, exposing rest as a desired collective respite instead of an individualized secluded activity. The larger bed, which operates as a center stage, is first positioned tangentially to the 80 ft circumscribed boundary of the site. The axis of the stage parallels the axis of approach from the main entrance and the road. Concerning the stage, the two smaller beds are positioned towards the stage with their tipping axis allowing for an amphitheater-like performance space. This overall configuration of the objects allows multiple uses without being fixed to a single occupation. From a traditional performance space to a playground, the installation changes according to the presence of bodies in the space.

Between Function and Environment, a Day Care Center for People with Alzheimer’s Disease
Rubén García Rubio & Sonsoles Vela Navarro, Tulane University

Abstract

The Day Care Center for People with Alzheimer’s Disease arises from the aging of its region’s population. When designed, there was no proven scheme for this typology. Therefore, the first task was to understand the logic of this typology and crystallize it into an architectural scheme. The design began with the analysis of pioneering treatments about Alzheimer’s disease. These were confronted then with different experts in the sector (doctors, psychologists, users…) and opted for a “person-centered approach” model. Once the general model was established, a second investigation was started on the architecture related to Alzheimer’s in general, and on Day Centers in particular, both theoretical and practical. Many active Centers and the National Research Center of Spain were visited, although none responded to the necessary architectural model -an ad-hoc design for Day Center-. Also, the author promoted and chaired the 1st Conference “Architecture and Alzheimer,” where architects and staff from different Day Centers in the country discussed architectural models and therapies. Another important starting point was the location of the building within a double boundary situation (territorial and urban). This situation allowed the building to have a strong relationship not only with the exterior spaces but with the place, and this became a crucial element in the design when designed for users deeply rooted in their land. Both characteristics shaped the final design. First, to place the building at the top of the plot to facilitate the horizontal movement of the user -motor coordination- and relate it to the landscape -form and spaces-. Later, the scheme was divided into four large zones according to cognitive, use and privacy aspects. The private spaces (those for the users) were articulated around two wide corridors (as main spaces) and sponged with courtyards (as open classrooms). Thus, the architecture shapes the sequence of use of the Center and helps guide the user, in addition to allowing simultaneous and independent use of the building to take advantage of its resources. All the interior spaces have been designed according to the specific needs of the Alzheimer’s patient and to help in therapy. Two examples: the courtyards and the main classrooms. Both reinforce therapy by assisting in orientation -cognitive-, allowing direct contact with the outside -motor-, and fostering memories and exercises through the landscape -cognitive-. Thus, architecture is used as yet another tool in the therapy of the Day Center, as has been demonstrated since the beginning of its activity. In addition, there are other examples of specific designs, such as the continuity of the railings, differentiation of colors and textures… After the first year of use, the design hypotheses have been confirmed positively by the users. This initial evaluation has highlighted the specific design as a significant element for their new therapy and, in general, the design has allowed “to carry out the different processes of care and stimulation of the patients, more comfortably and efficiently.”

All Access
John Folan, University of Arkansas & Urban Design Build Studio

Abstract

ALL ACCESS is a retail garden nursery operated by a local non-profit entrepreneur in the Hazelwood Neighborhood of Pittsburgh. In the fall of 2015, the non-profit organization, Floriated Interpretation, engaged a public interest design build entity to develop accessory use structures to fulfill fundamental programmatic needs: 1) storage of dry goods in the spring; 2) shading of sun-sensitive plants in the summer; and 3) protection of plants from freezing over the winter. The design objectives for ALL ACCESS were to use vernacular strategies for the passive control of air, light and water; demonstrate what can be done with reused/recycled materials; and employ construction strategies that could be completed by people with knowledge bases and skills still in development. The site lease prohibited installation of permanent structures, so the design employs principles of component-based pre-fabrication and Design for Deconstruction. The entrepreneur aspires to expand her business and utilize the demountable built elements on a larger site in the future.

Predicated on systems for mass production, the structure developed for ALL ACCESS demonstrates how universal components from the ALL ACCESS system can be integrated in the creation of a site-specific design. Components were pre-fabricated and delivered to site to ensure quality and decrease on-site construction time. Construction was completed by carpentry and welding apprentices who gained job training and elevated their earning potential while contributing to their community. The near vertical southern roof plane provides a canvas for artwork to promote Floriated Interpretation. A community event was held where local youth, artists, trade apprentices, and university students came together to paint the graphic. Materials harvested from deconstruction projects and source overstock divert waste from landfills. Completed in September 2016, the tailored features of ALL ACCESS 02 are intended to help Floriated Interpretation operate more effectively while promoting community unity, empowering youth.

12:30pm-2:00pm EDT /
9:30am-11:00am PDT

Research Session
1.5 AIA/CES LU

Teaching Ecological Matters

Moderator: Caryn Brause, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Entangled: A Studio Project Building Ecology
Laura Garofalo, University At Buffalo, SUNY

Abstract

Our identity as architects is still very much bound up with the image of nature left to us by Romanticism. This image places architecture and other human constructs strictly outside of a “wild” nature that is pure, vibrant and untamed. The reality of climate change should enlighten us to the fact that human influence has had global reach, and no piece of nature is immune from it. Unfortunately, this has resulted in nostalgic eco-narratives that attempt to retrieve a loss that never was and to which architects are outsiders viewing in from their technology bubbles. To retrieve some ground for the architectural imagination we need to understand our role as part of this evolving ecology. Coexisting as interdependent entities (both physical and conceptual), landscape and technology can define built form that imagines productive and healthy infrastructures for a collective ecology. The studio presented here explored how to formulate an eco-centric identity through small scale architectural interventions, garden follies that literally and figuratively entwine themselves with the local ecology of a site that is at once a burgeoning “urban wild” and a monument to the city’s post-industrial heritage. This apparently wild site is in fact a garden. Maintained and curated by the site’s Director of Ecology, it highlights the effort it takes to maintain a “natural” environment in the highly synthetic context of our cities, suburbs, and countryside. Historian Robert Pogue Harrison, through his analysis of gardens in Western literature, argues that “gardens do not bring order to nature; rather, they give order to our relation to nature”. The architecture of the garden makes it into an interface where the boundaries between nature and the man-made are perpetually negotiated providing a pedagogical model that proposes alternative ideologies about our ecosystems-both environmental and socio-political. The paper describes the collaboration between the studio, its local industry partner and the site’s Director of Ecology. Within this garden, the studio designed and proposed to build an ecovention that provides space for active community engagement with the processes of growth and decomposition. This is not figurative, part of the design is a program for community engagement and education that involves control of adventive species, composting, planting and willow training. Working with an industry partner that produces highly engineered metal components the studios proposal is a combined structure and landscape regeneration system that literally entwines architecture earth and vegetation. Emulating the the work of the site’s environmental stewart the growing infrastructure aims to suggest ecological solutions for the future of cities by pushing the boundaries of architecture itself as a provider of ecosystem services and social stewardship. The proposal envisions that in a post-nature environment architecture can play a role not only in societal enlightenment but also in the intentional cultivation and stewardship of biological ecologies.

Transforming the Design Studio to Achieve Net-Zero Ready Buildings
Robert Fleming, Thomas Jefferson University

Abstract

The architectural design studio has remained essentially unchanged for generations. Incremental improvements to the architectural design studio are no longer sufficient to meet the need for comprehensive responses to the problem of climate change. The traditional studio model, which features a master/apprentice relationship, is well suited to generating “good” design solutions. However, this self-driven discovery-based learning process leaves little time or focus for achieving specific high-performance design strategies. More specifically, the traditional design studio features a distinct lack of accountability for performance-based metrics, a lack of time to pursue performance-based goals, a lack of prioritization of building performance, a lack of clarity for what constitutes a successful sustainable design process; and a lack of examples on “how to” perform simple design steps. As a response, a new studio pedagogy is proposed to assist students to achieve net-zero performance within the typical 15-week semester. A structured collection of sustainable design approaches specifically organized by a pyramid helps professors and students adopt an overarching framework for sustainable design (Fig. 1). This paper will focus more on the studio methodology itself (Fig. 2). This new design methodology formalizes activities already used in the design studio and leads students to reach higher levels of building performance for their projects. Specifically, this paper will focus on the following innovative teaching techniques: How to place “accountability” into the design studio through early and often against well-established benchmarks; How to prioritize building performance by front-loading sustainable design techniques; How to accelerate the design process through the use of “how-to” videos; and How to develop and use well-developed rubrics with learning objectives to keep students focused on both net-zero energy AND design resolution. In conclusion, this paper will spark a much-needed conversation on design studio pedagogy itself to train students to design high-performance projects in the short-term and ultimately to mitigate the impacts of climate change.

New Faculty Teaching
Omar Al-Hassawi, Washington State University

Abstract

Omar Al-Hassawi has been teaching at the School of Design and Construction at WSU since 2015 and has taught a total of 20 courses between 2015 and 2020. Previously, Omar practiced architecture in the Middle East for nearly seven years. Omar’s research which focuses on advancing passive environmental control systems coupled with his professional experience allows him to teach students how to properly integrate sustainable principles into their designs while developing the imperative skills of architecture. This was demonstrated in the high-quality work from Omar’s graduate studios during the 2018 – 2019 academic year where one student team won the AIA COTE Top Ten Design Competition and one student won honorable mention in the Timber in the City Design Competition. Omar is popular among the students and was awarded the 2020 Tenure Line Teacher of the Year Award for the SDC.

Recently, Omar and a colleague of his were awarded the SDC Seed Grant and the VentureWell Faculty Grant. The latter is being used to redesign two existing courses to advance student skills in sustainability and entrepreneurship principles. Promising student teams will receive funds over two years to design innovative sustainable systems and potentially transfer their proposed systems to the market. Omar has been serving as the Graduate Program Head for Architecture since Fall 2019. His duties include recruitment, admissions, curriculum development, and coordinating the graduate summer studio program. Finally, Omar served as faculty advisor for AIAS between 2017 and 2020. One notable project with AIAS and Freedom by Design was the memorial that will be built at the Eaker Air Force Base in Arkansas honoring a WSU alum of the Architecture program and his crew who died when their plane crashed during the first Gulf War.

Waste Matters
Nikole Bouchard, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Abstract

Piles of polluting plastics, industrial by-products, obsolete electronics, construction offcuts, demolition debris, paper products, food scraps and other consumer castaways have been amassing around us at alarming and steadily increasing rates since humans first became sedentary beings. The EPA estimates that in 2015, 262.4 million tons of municipal solid waste was generated in the United States alone, equaling approximately 4.5 pounds of generated waste per person, per day.1 Despite the perceived drive to reduce, reuse and recycle, municipal solid-waste generation in America rose by nearly 3.5 million tons between the years 2014 and 2015, continuing a seemingly ever-increasing climb toward a waste-filled world. The majority of this domestic offal is recyclable, but “a human being’s first inclination is always to dump,” 2 as demonstrated so clearly in Gregg Segal’s photo essay 7 Days of Garbage.3 “The United States is the world’s number one producer of garbage: we consume 30 percent of the planet’s resources and produce 30 percent of all its wastes.

But we are home to just 4 percent of the global population.” 4 As the archaeologist, anthropologist and garbologist William Rathje stated in his seminal book Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage, waste “as an issue will enjoy astonishing longevity—it won’t go away until people themselves do. … There is a garbage angle to every human activity.” 5 The modernist desire of working with an unobstructed tabula rasa is unrealistic and outright irresponsible. Instead, the work presented here—spanning the years of 2017-2020 and the realms of SERVICE, TEACHING and DESIGN/SCHOLARSHIP/RESEARCH—argues that we must work with what’s at hand and take on the tabula scripta—a “landscape that keeps rewriting its memories the more it ages” 6—allowing us to excavate our built environments as ever-changing palimpsests of piled pieces that reference and respect past, present and future civilizations.

12:30pm-2:00pm EDT /
9:30am-11:00am PDT

Research Session
1.5 AIA/CES LU

Culture & Heritage

Heritage as Narratives: A Case Study on Tourism Development in Longji Rice Terraces, China
Wei Zhao, Louisiana Tech University

Abstract

Longji (Dragon Bone) Rice Terraces, largely constructed in the last five hundred years, are located in Guangxi Province, China. For centuries, a system of trails, connecting about two dozen settlements in Longji, was the only access that could take the residents to the outside world hours away. Since the 1990s, the decision to develop tourism has significantly changed local residents’ lives, as well as the cultural landscape of Longji. Drawing upon archival research and limited fieldwork, this paper first examines the cultural landscape of Longji. It then scrutinizes the local heritage management and tourism development approach since the turn of the twentieth century, and their impacts on the cultural landscape and local people’s lives. Although recognizing the benefits from developing tourism, this paper challenges the current approach on heritage management, which presents heritage as many destinations, each being rather complete and independent, and overlooks the integrity of the cultural landscape. As a result, many segments of the rice terraces are abandoned, and the trails deserted. More importantly, the memories and stories attached to these places are forgotten. This paper argues that heritage should be viewed as narratives, connecting events and places both in space and in time. In this case, the trails, in addition to being the gateway to the outside world, not only connect the past and the present and the residents from all the villages, but also provides access to the rice terraces and the entire landscape. Based on this understanding, this paper advocates an alternative approach on heritage management, which not only emphasizes the integrity of the cultural landscape by using the trails as the axis and the access, but also celebrates and promotes the narratives that construct and connect the cultural landscape in space and in time.

Cross Cultural Currents in Early 20th Century Chinese Architectural Practice
Wenbo Guo & George Johnston, Georgia Institute of Technology

Abstract

This paper considers the transplantation of the Western concept of architecture to China set against the backdrop of Western colonization from the mid-19^th century. With the increasing presence of foreign populations, the urgent demand for a considerable number of new building types greatly spurred the Chinese construction market. Beyond consideration of the physical artifacts, this paper focuses upon the story behind the scenes, the mode of architectural production, and particularly how the intricate relationships among different professionals helped to shape the physical world. The West China Union University, constructed from 1915 through 1940s in Chengdu, Sichuan Province, serves as an apt case study to exemplify this process. A cooperative product of five missionary organizations from the United States, Britain and Canada, this project was designed by a British architect whose practice was based in England, superintended on-site by an American architect, and constructed by local Chinese workmen. How were these professionals able to communicate and cooperate over such a long distance and across huge cultural gaps in architectural and building practice? This case study demonstrates that the relations among different actors in the field of architecture, specifically the tripartite interactions among client, architect and builder, were far more complex and nuanced than we might otherwise assume. This paper offers critical insights into the dramatic changes in the system of Chinese architectural practice under the sway of Western influence during the first half of 20^th century.

Improvised Making: new analytical practices towards an uncertain future
Nicholas Frayne, University of Waterloo

Abstract

The impacts of spatial experience on social dynamics are complex. They happen through the totality of experience, which we cannot always name, describe, or explain. In light of the urgent challenges of social justice, systemic exploitation, and unsustainable practices that are characterizing this century, we need to reassess how we analyze architecture’s relationship with societal change. This article argues that new analytical practices must include exploratory, improvisational expressions that can help our understandings of architecture include a more expansive definition of experience. Such creative expressions make the bodily, unnameable aspects of experience sensible, thereby able to be incorporated into our broader analyses of architecture’s operation in social life. These improvisational practices are fundamentally uncertain, resisting explanation and the ethical perils of certainty in knowledge-making. Employed in an examination of the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Cambodia, these practices helped to create an analysis grounded in the textural expressions and incomplete forces that characterize bodily experience. Taking the form of a charcoal drawing, the improvised expression entered into the analytical process as a framing mediator for the analyst’s response to their encounter with the architecture. By grounding analysis in bodily experience, we are able to expand our ‘analytical toolbox’ and can come to unexpected conclusions about how architecture shapes the way we understand the world. Proposing that an analysis of an architectural project should take shape between improvisational making and thinking, this paper positions architectural analysis as an agent of change; in expanding our practices for understanding architecture, we can better design spaces that support a more connective, open, and just future.

12:30pm-2:00pm EDT /
9:30am-11:00am PDT

Research Session
1.5 AIA/CES LU

Mediations

Moderator: Jean Jaminet, Kent State University

Image Fictions: Fabricating Worlds
Constance Vale, Washington University in St. Louis

Abstract

The boundaries between “real” or virtual, fact or fiction, are blurring. Simultaneously, images are fundamentally restructuring our understanding of vision; artificial intelligence (AI) turns a machinic gaze toward a vast repository of images that are collected, analyzed, and capitalized.[1] The movement of images is the gravity of our time, and it is crucial that architects understand, control, and engineer their political forces.[2] Photorealistic techniques and “objective” image types can be deployed not to represent reality or truth but to throw those into question and reveal all the nuanced states of information and strangeness in the everyday. This paper examines a pedagogical case study framed around image-based narratives that critically examine social, political, economic, or ecological issues within an urban territory. Each project addresses how the territory might interface with a chosen emerging technology, including AI, autonomous vehicles (AVs), drones, automation, and augmented reality. Image types relate to the selected technology, with one of each of the following chosen—(1) “objective” informational images like construction documents, patent drawings, and diagrams, and (2) electronic images like satellite imaging, video games, LiDAR, and photogrammetry. The course wrestles with the questions: How does architecture, a field tasked with confronting the “real,” contend with the complex overlap of virtual and physical realms? How might our projections of future “realities” take on political positions rather than respond to the desires of capital?

[1]Trevor Paglen, “Invisible Images (Your Pictures Are Looking at You).” The New Inquiry (December 8, 2016), accessed November 01, 2020, https://thenewinquiry.com/invisible-images-your-pictures-are-looking-at-you/.

[2] Steyerl, Hito. “In Defense of the Poor Image.” The Wretched of the Screen. Berlin: Sternberg Press, p. 32-45.

Exquisite Scrolls: Collaborative drawing in the space time of post-digital representation
Cheng-Chun Patrick Hwang, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Abstract

What is the function of architectural drawings, those drawn by architecture students that are conducive to learning? This paper discusses a pedagogical experiment generated from a series of collaborative drawings. The end goal seeks for a new agency, through a didactic platform and process exploring the visuality of the productive observation instead of the optical graphics of realism. Through the intermediary of the drawing in the present, the retrospective and prospective character of the design process can be explored. By reintroducing drawing as a medium of thought, its power to project a clear and intentional inquiry can be revealed. Inspired by the Chinese scroll painting and the spirit of public drawing from the west, Exquisite Scroll is a collaborative hand-drawing exercise with a working method akin to the Surrealist game exquisite corpse. It is corporeal in nature and requires intellectual exchange between a multiplicity of authors. It is a negotiated act showing beyond what is observed. The thematic topics of urban historiography and architectural conservation are further explored through a ‘multi-temporal’ perspective, to look into the past and future in both space and time.

Reverse Diagrammatic Processing, or Who Do We Diagram About When We Diagram About Architecture?
Mark Blumberg, Auburn University

Abstract

“Architecture is not a language. Rather, architecture summons into appearance ways of thinking about the world that are otherwise unavailable; it is a particular mode of thought, one irreducible to other ways of thinking. And its images of thought have no lesser claim on the world than those of philosophy. This mode is not representation, but emanation – a showing forth of a world that exists but is not yet actualized.” [1] Typically, diagrams used in design processes exclusively serve the resultant object of the work. In this sense, diagrams are a means to an objective that is distant from, and external to, the designer, architect, or student. This paper proposes that diagrams can be used as a means to an objective that is internal to the designer, architect, or student. We often understand diagrams in terms of how they might serve the discipline within which they are intended to function. In architecture we dichotomously oscillate between the explanatory and generative. Stan Allen establishes the artifacts of architects’ processes as “impure, or unclassifiable” [2] in his explorations of autographic and allographic representational devices, and further surmises that architecture is actualized “at a distance from the author”. [3] Sanford Kwinter posits that the “[T]he diagram – or the topologized schema – represents the plastic aspect of reality: subject and object can virtually masquerade as one another,” exclaims diagrams as active rather than passive, and invokes the abstract machines of Gilles Deleuze used in pages of theory to reiterate the “agencies of assemblage, organization, and deployment” that are used in the service of architectural thought production. [4] All of these, and more, are ultimately in the architect’s/diagrammer’s service of architecture. In a description of work he planned to pursue, Shusaku Arakawa stated that he “want(s) to make diagrams on canvas of our imagination which is itself diagrammatic.” [5] His resultant paintings exemplify the pivot from diagramming in servitude of an externalization to diagramming in service to one’s own cognizance. Arakawa’s work supplants representational mimesis for emanant process of cognition; the irreducible modality K. Michael Hays refers to in the quotation above. What occurs if we reverse our focus from the diagram’s service to architecture to the diagram’s service to the architect? How does the diagrammatic process serve the architect? How does diagramming develop understanding of architecture by shaping cognitive utility towards its concepts? How can we fold this into pedagogy and knowledge production to ultimately establish methods towards expansion of architectural cognition? This author proposes to expound upon previous seminar and continue exploration through future-seminar coursework to extend studies into pedagogical methods of internalizing the diagrammatic process into architectural students’ cognitive process. By pulling from previous research in cognitive science that directly studies the operations architects utilize in externalizing cognition, diagrammatic cultures, reasoning, and processes, cognition through graphic interaction, and the problem solving benefits of drawing further pedagogical points of departure and criteria will be established towards the benefits of diagrams in expanding the capacity for architects to cognize architecture.

Kinesthetic Montage Hong Kong
Esther Lorenz, University of Virginia

Abstract

This submission presents a set of advanced design studios that explore the creative use of film within architectural pedagogy, facilitating and intensifying students’ learning experience on several levels at once: the immersive approach to a foreign cultural context, the intuitive deciphering of a complex, highly dense urban environment, and architectural design with a particular focus on space perception from the perspective of the human body in motion. Film, as an early form of technological mediation of space, and in its contemporary, readily available form, digital video, lends itself as a productive tool to examine fundamental principles of space perception, as well as to experiment with time-based approaches to architectural design. Hong Kong through its high density, morphology and particular organization of human flows, presents an incredibly rich testing ground to put this tool to use.

Over the course of two iterations of a design research studio entitled “Kinesthetic Montage,” the city and its spaces were investigated through their representation in movies, and through actual experience and field work during studio trips to Hong Kong, with the aim to deduct spatial concepts and architectural design principles that were further explored through experimentation with film, model making and drawing, and application in architectural design. Film was utilized and proved to be highly productive as a tool of analysis, as a conceptual tool, as well as a tool for representation throughout these investigations and in combination with architectural drawing and physical models. The outcomes contribute to an understanding of complex, hybrid, high-density urban environments and the aesthetic experience thereof, to an expansion of architectural means of expression, as well as to a rediscovery of architectural fundamentals such as dimension, direction, composition, light, material, sequence, and their impact on human space perception, in architectural design and education.

12:30pm-2:00pm EDT /
9:30am-11:00am PDT

Research Session
1.5 AIA/CES LU

Justice, Memory, and Design

Moderator: Derek Ham, North Carolina State University

Emmett Till Memorial: A Community Engaged Studio Project
Silvina Lopez Barrera, John Ross, & Simon Powney, Mississippi State University

Abstract

In 1955, Emmett Till was 14-year-old when he was kidnaped and brutally murdered by two white men in the Mississippi Delta. This racist incident was one of the key events that galvanized the Civil Rights Movement’s work. Through a community engagement project to design a memorial dedicated to Emmett Till, this essay explores a studio pedagogy that aimed to introduce social justice in architecture studios. The “Emmett Till Memorial” community engaged project took place in Spring 2020 in the first-year architecture studio of the School of Architecture at Mississippi State University. In this project, we partnered with the Emmett Till Memorial Commission (ETMC) to design a memorial at the Graball Landing site where it is believed Emmett’s body was found. Since April 2008, the ETMC attempts to commemorate this site and it has become a nationally recognized memory site. Unfortunately, the site has been subjected to repeated vandalism. This paper describes the different stages of this community engaged project in a contested site that aimed to embrace transformative service-learning ideas and critical reflection. The service-learning design project integrated field experiences, including visits to historic sites related to Emmett Till’s history and an immersive experience with activists and community organizers from the ETMC. Using critical reflection as a pedagogical approach, discussions among students and community members centered on how the design outcome of this community engaged project would contribute to community conversations about the future development of the Graball Landing site as well as design vision and values that could be included in the new memorial and its restorative narrative. Students’ design proposals exhibited a wide range of design intentions and sources of inspiration. Employing symbolic and educational features, the diverse design proposals responded to specific environmental conditions of the place and explored how to engage visitors with Emmett Till’s history, the civil rights movement, and the future of racial reconciliation. Finally, this paper discusses how African-American historical sites have intentionally been ignored and marginalized and how architecture educators, students, and community members can partner to preserve sites of memory and to dismantle systematic racism in urban design and architecture.

Camp Barker Memorial: From Object to Urban Mediator
Katie MacDonald & Kyle Schumann, University of Virginia

Abstract

Located in Washington D.C., the Camp Barker Memorial responds to the landscape of American monuments that valorize performance in battle, instead taking form as a series of spatial markers which convey a traumatic history—in particular, a site’s role in providing shelter to those escaping slavery. The project’s development corresponds with a period in which the role of Civil War monuments is being reconsidered: it was designed and commissioned in early 2017, before the white sumprematist rally in Charlottesville heightened national attention to the sustained symbolism of Confederate Civil War monuments, and completed in mid 2019, before the global Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. L’Enfant’s plan for Washington D.C. extends a longstanding model of heroic memory, propagated in cities and public spaces worldwide. Recently, public historical markers have begun a shift from heroic war monuments that inspire pride to markers which shed light on and address injustice and erasures, including Höweler + Yoon and Mabel O. Wilson’s Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia and Kehinde Wiley’s Rumors of War, sited at the end of Monument Avenue in Richmond. The Camp Barker Memorial answers a brief for the design of three entry gateways to an elementary school by framing and revealing the site’s history as a Civil War-era contraband camp. In the aftermath of the war, the site gave birth to a longstanding African-American community just blocks from the heart of the Capital. The Camp Barker Memorial takes shape as a series of thresholds integrated into the fenced perimeter of public elementary school grounds which double as public park. In contrast to the white marble landmarks that define Washington D.C. and the nearby General John Logan equestrian figure at Logan Circle, the exterior surfaces of each portal are clad in charred wood, a material that is made more durable and resilient through its burning. The material narrative is augmented by a figural one: artist [blinded for peer review] developed a series of narrative bas relief sculptures to more overtly convey the site’s themes. The project responds to Adrian Parr’s charge that memorials might leverage the tension between past and present. It germinates the site’s contradictions for emotional impact: the memorial beacons the elementary school, abstract space frames narrative sculpture, charred wood folds over a thin brass liner. Realities that might not readily coexist are forced to do so—the daily diversions of contemporary school children play out on a site where people once sheltered from captivity. It is contrast that makes the memorial a critical part of the elementary school campus. Present day students may daydream of the children that learned on these grounds a century and a half prior: confronting the promise of emancipation but a long road to equity ahead. In the context of 2020, that fight is visibly ongoing, and the memorial, a reminder of what is at stake.

Cities in Protest
Stewart Hicks, Geoffrey Goldberg, & Allison Newmeyer, University of Illinois at Chicago

Abstract

This paper explores a collaborative project to map, archive, and narrate the spaces of protests from 1968 within five cities from Europe and the United States. These protest events have been widely chronicled in photographs, news articles, and narrative accounts, however they have never been mapped together in a way that creates a comprehensive overview of the urban and architectural forces at play. The investigation into this began with a seminar course that divided students into groups dedicated to a single city — Prague, Paris, London, Chicago, and Detroit, respectively. Students then worked to gather evidence and sort important events by mapping them at both the macro and micro scale within five categories: Locational, Behavioral Typologies, Cultural Backdrop, Cultural Investigations, and Propositional. These categories represent a continuum of lenses through which to view the events through specific objective and factual data to the contributing broad speculative and cultural milieu. The products take the format of heat maps of activity at the scale of the city, meticulously crafted plans of configurations of people and objects at the scale of a city block, timelines at various scales of months/days/hours, photographic essays, and moodboard collections of ephemera. After the conclusion of the seminar, a faculty collaboration formed around disseminating the content and data within a medium that ensures its accessibility, comprehensivity, and continued usefulness. The faculty members explored a number of options, including how-to-manuals, films, and archives before deciding on a multifunctional website. The design for the website is currently in development and will advance significantly after the submission of this abstract. However, its initial driving goals include: finding new audiences for the data who are interested in how Urban Design and Architecture participates in urban protests, providing the content in a currently relevant format, conveying the information in a visually compelling way, allowing the audience to discover new connections within the data, documenting crowd movement and gathering relative to physical space, using the data to distinguish between protest and riots, comparing and contrasting digital vs analog crowd gatherings, and establishing a template for adding additional cities. The paper presents the methodology and outcomes of the seminar work and then expands to outline strategies for disseminating its content to a broader audience within the website format. Much of the paper is dedicated to why and how design decisions were made with the website in order to align with our initial goals. Overall, this project (and paper) is particularly timely and relevant given the vast number of parallels between the events of 1968 and today. The two eras are certainly not the same but reexamining the past in a contemporary and architectural way can empower people to question and recalibrate our spaces to provide more just and equitable opportunities for occupation, ownership, and governance. With COVID-19 isolation fundamentally challenging how we gather in physical space, and demonstrations motivated by racial inequality punctuating our confinement, now is the time to closely examine our public space and to propose alternatives.

From Settler Colonies to Black Utopias: The Dialectics of American Architecture in Black and White
Charles Davis, University At Buffalo, SUNY

Abstract

2:00pm-3:30pm EDT /
11:00am-12:30pm PDT

90-minute

Networking & Exhibit Lounge

Please join one of the lounge tables to mingle with other attendees. Check-out our conference exhibitors & publishers in the Exhibitors Lounge.

Workshop

Cultural Preservation as Community Development: Workshop with 4theVille
Moderator: Kristen Chin, Hester Street
Aaron Williams, 4theVille + Northside Community Housing
Melisa Sanders, BlackArc
Julia Allen, 4theVille
Laura Hughes, Fleur De Lis Development Corp.

2:00pm-3:30pm EDT /
11:00am-12:30pm PDT

Workshop
1.5 AIA/CES LU

Tour Description

This session invites participants to experience The Ville, a historic African-American neighborhood in St. Louis where local efforts are contributing to community development rooted in cultural preservation and community ownership. The session will kick off with a self-guided video tour of notable sites – created by 4theVille – highlighting local landmarks and opportunities to leverage cultural assets for neighborhood reinvigoration. Following the online tour, participants will hear from neighborhood leaders and join an interactive design workshop focused on plans for a cultural trail and building retrofit at the foundation of the community development efforts. Bring your stylus and plan for some virtual sketching! *This session is brought to you by 4theVille and the AIA Housing & Community Development Knowledge Community

3:30pm-5:00pm EDT /
12:30pm-2:00pm PDT

Research Session
1.5 AIA/CES LU

Scales of Urbanity

Moderator: Francis Lyn, Florida Atlantic University

Manual of Suburban Subversion
Zachary Tate Porter, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Abstract

The discourse on American suburbia has reached an impasse. For many Americans, owning a single-family house on a suburban cul-de-sac remains an aspirational ideal. Others–especially academics–have offered damning critiques of suburban development, pointing to its problematic social, environmental, and spatial consequences.1 Yet, both of these oppositional perspectives flatten suburbia, rendering it as an emblem of our collective prosperity or, conversely, of our collective demise. In reality, suburbs are complex places that transcend the various clichés circulating in media and academic discourse.2 Therefore, to engage with suburban buildings and the architectural possibilities they offer, it is productive to bracket off the polarized politics that have brought us to our current impasse. By choosing to look beyond the epithets hurled against sprawl and beyond the clichéd postulations of the “American Dream,” one finds a stock of architectural typologies that offer potential value to the discipline–an untapped inventory of ideas and tectonics that could be potentially be directed towards more deserving ends than the excess and waste of American consumption. At the very least, such a thought experiment forces one to see these familiar, everyday landscapes with a heightened level of criticality and rigor. The Manual of Suburban Subversion presented here is a speculative series of design experiments that playfully manipulate and misuse the tectonic composition of big boxes, gas stations, and strip malls to develop alternative visions for these familiar building types. While numerous postmodern architects–from Robert Venturi to James Wines to Charles Moore–ventured into suburbia and proposed their own variations on these typologies, their projects largely accepted the basic premises of American consumption and, therefore, only engaged in a superficial “dressing up” of these suburban forms.3 By contrast, the subversive exercises catalogued within this manual disregard the intended use of these suburban typologies and, instead, focus on their underlying compositional structures. Thus, this project offers neither an endorsement nor a condemnation of suburbia, but instead, a playful dissection of its formal character. Among the resulting typological transformations are big box stores that imitate abstract paintings, assemblages made from gas station parts, and strip malls that wiggle. While these playful experiments are not intended to be read as literal proposals for buildings, they nonetheless offer a critical commentary. Eschewing the discipline’s implicit reverence for “canonical” works of architecture, these subversive forays into the oft-maligned landscapes of suburban sprawl demonstrate the poetic potential of quotidian form.

Impact Lufkin – Scalable Solutions for Micropolitan Housing
James Tate, Texas A&M University

Abstract

The project explores relationships among houses as a small settlement. The strategy challenges the suburban subdivision approach that micropolitan communities across Texas have adopted. Specifically, the project works toward a place-based response to the creation of affordable supportive housing for working-poor households in the North Lufkin neighborhood of Lufkin, Texas. Architecturally, the project takes a multi-scalar approach, from locally sourced wood resources and construction processes to the arrangement of units into clusters with shared outdoor resources. The residential buildings are modest yet generous unit typologies. Aesthetically, the project draws upon silhouettes and standard building elements common to the region, an architectural vocabulary that flickers between foreground and background. Lufkin presents a set of affordable housing challenges that are common to micropolitan communities. Limited housing options prevent community members from having a voice in shaping housing as decent shelter and social infrastructure. The Impact Lufkin proposal offers an alternative, one that considers both the house and the settlement as a way toward social equity and justice.

24FT3 | Prototype for Compact Living
Dennis Chiessa, University of Texas at Arlington

Abstract

24FT3 (24-Foot Cube) is part of an ongoing experiment on constructing affordable houses through opportunistic interventions on a rural landscape outside of Dallas, Texas. The context is a rural town scattered with trailer homes, barns, ranches and an increasing number of rural McMansions. Ultimately, 24FT3 is a prototype for affordable infill accessory dwelling units and infill houses that would fit typical single-family residential lots in the Dallas – Fort Worth Metroplex, the 4th largest and fastest growing metropolitan area in the country [1] that also lacks affordable housing and density. The house is a simple, compact and plain cube on the outside with the footprint of a two-car garage and a light filled space on the inside. Designed for a family of three, it is small, yet pragmatic. The only enclosed rooms are the bathrooms. It has no bedrooms, only sleeping areas. It is a 4-square grid exercise with a post at the center and beams that support floating objects – sleeping area, office and a bridge. The cube has a total of 915sf of walkable space. The building is clad in standing seam metal and is built using industry conventional framing and construction practices. One goal was to endow the small object with the sensation of extended space through windows and skylights positioned to bring light into the living area from all directions at once. The design minimizes the number of interior walls and eliminates hallways in favor of efficiency, economy and spatial ambiguity. The building has been completed on a construction budget of $100,000 (not including cost of the land) using standard residential construction and systems.

Hospitable City: a new life for an abandoned neoclassical hospital. A radical design experience between research and pedagogy
Pier Francesco Cherchi, Marco Lecis, & Caterina Giannattasio, University of Cagliari

Abstract

Hospitable City is a radical design experience between research and pedagogy that addresses the theme of the reuse of large historic buildings. Hospitable City is not merely intended to be a way to adapt old buildings for new purposes. Rather, it is an opportunity to develop new strategies that might link the city and its citizens to abandoned or underused spaces committed to health, well-being, and improved sociality. Hospitable City tackles these issues, focusing on the case study of a late neoclassical nineteenth-century hospital in Cagliari, the principal city of Sardinia. The Hospitable City strategy assumes that buildings like old hospitals, prisons, courts, markets, and other civic types of the nineteenth-century bourgeois city, generally separated from the host context, might be integrated with the city on a symbolic and functional level. They might be reimagined open and in continuity with their surroundings, not as cities within cities, introverted complex nuclei, but extensions of the urban realm, permeable, welcoming hospitable civitas. Two main actions summarize the strategy. The first one is opening the building to the city, creating new physical connections and routes, and reconfiguring uses calibrated to the urban environment’s current needs. The second action strictly depends on the first one. It involves reading the hospital as an organism with urban characteristics—in some ways a mirror and extension of the city—composed of parts with partial autonomy. With this approach, it is possible to study and implement the reuse in separate phases, programmatically defined and activated at different times. In the Cagliari hospital case, we worked with students in the last year of their master’s university career to experiment with new possibilities for redefining spatiality on the ground floor. This paper presents the ideas emerging from the teaching activity and outlines a position discussing cultural and theoretical implications of adaptive reuse of historic underused buildings.

Crisiscity: Combinatorial Adaptive Reuse to localize production in an era of Climate and Pandemic Crisis
Alexandra Barker, Pratt Institute

Abstract

On May 28th, 2019 scientists voted in favor of classifying the age we live in as a new geological epoch—the Anthropocene, to mark the profound ways in which humans have altered the planet and has effectively brought further validation to the assertion that we are living in a time of climate crisis. In the Anthropocene thesis, there is no distinction between natural and man-made. Human activity has affected all ecologic, geologic and biological systems and has eroded the boundary between human and non-human life, between nature and culture. Nature is partly a human creation. Human pollution of world’s ecosystem is responsible for global warming and the threat of rising waters as well as damage to the earth’s atmosphere. This crisis has also exposed the wastefulness of the building industry, where structures fall into disuse and are demolished and dumped into landfills at astonishing rates. The 2020 Covid-19 crisis is another example of the negative effects of human activity. A meat market purportedly unleashes a novel virus that puts the entire world at a grave health risk. This crisis has also exposed weaknesses in our global supply chain network for consumer goods. Localizing food production and storage for easy distribution is a key strategy of urban resilience in times of crisis. This project proposes an adaptive reuse of existing urban infrastructure to locally situate small-scale food production and storage facilities squarely within the dense urban fabric of major metropolitan areas as a retrofit embedded inside existing building fabric within the public realm. Seafood aquaculture, aquaponics, hydroponics, and algae farming processes produce high yields in relatively compact environments without the necessary access to light and space that typical crops require. Hard grains and legumes can be stored for use as emergency food supply. Seeds are stored to preserve species against depletion or destruction from natural disasters and as libraries of genetic resources. Oyster aquaculture can produce food as well as seed for filtering oyster beds that are critical for the cleansing of polluted waterways. Our test site for this project is an existing abandoned grain terminal in Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood. This building has been sitting vacant for almost 100 years. Over the course of that time, the neighborhood of Red Hook has shifted from being the busiest freight port in the world to being abandoned in the 1960’s once containerization changed the processes and distribution networks for shipping goods. In the past decade, Red Hook has been revitalized and redeveloped as a residential and shopping district. Where the terminal building was once in the heart of a manufacturing zone, it is now embedded in an urban fabric of mixed residential and light industrial sites. This approach to develop industrial mixed use buildings has the potential to keep food and supplies locally available for citizens in disaster scenarios like covid-19. Adapting the terminal building to new uses that combine storage, production and public space is the focus of these investigations.

3:30pm-5:00pm EDT /
12:30pm-2:00pm PDT

Research Session
1.5 AIA/CES LU

Tracing Resources

Moderator: Kate Wingert-Playdon, Temple University

Archive of Lost Mountains
Brent Sturlaugson, University of Kentucky

Abstract

Despite the steady decline of coal consumption in recent years, the effects of its extraction and combustion are persistent and widespread.1 And despite the rhetoric of sustainability and climate change resilience in architecture, the field is yoked to coal insofar as buildings use electricity and is built using steel, concrete, aluminum, and countless other byproducts. To understand architecture as a material process constituted by its variegated supply chains, then, requires a thorough accounting of its production, including the territories impacted by the extraction of coal. The Archive of Lost Mountains contributes to this accounting by establishing a repository for enshrining the memory of the more than 500 mountains destroyed by mining in Appalachia. In the late nineteenth century, mining rights in Appalachia were predominantly covered by broad form deeds, which “gave the mineral owner…access to the minerals in any manner ‘deemed necessary or convenient.’”2 At the time, mining methods involved an elaborate system of tunneling beneath mountains to access seams of coal, impacting the surface only at points of ingress and egress. As demand rose and technology advanced, however, these methods began affecting the landscape in increasingly violent ways, culminating in what is known as mountaintop removal. True to its name, mountaintop removal describes the process of blasting away peaks to access buried coal, what the poet Frank X. Walker has called “dime store mastectomies.”3 Combined with the protections to use any means ‘deemed necessary or convenient’ with the fact that hundreds of miners could be replaced with “a few men armed with explosives and bulldozers,” mountaintop removal gained widespread popularity in the mid-twentieth century.4 As the Appalachian landscape was being systematically flattened, the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977 sought to regulate these practices; however, mining industry influence and weak enforcement mechanisms meant that many of the mines continued to operate unabated. Perhaps more pernicious than what historian Elizabeth Catte attributes to rendering “both mountains and miners into abstract and disposable commodities” is that mountaintop removal has kept this exploitation largely invisible.5 The Archive of Lost Mountains is an ongoing project to preserve the memory of landscapes destroyed by mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia. The archive consists of both drawings and models. Plan and section drawings show the relative scale and volume of what had been removed by mining. Much like ghosts, the drawings offer a fleeting glimpse of something once existent, now erased from view. The physical models in the archive offer an additional layer of association with the lost mountains, seeking to activate the landscape in ways two-dimensional representations cannot. Tinted with the fly ash remnants of a coal-fired power plant, the models take on the qualities of the commodity for which they were destroyed. Together, these records reveal the damages caused by coal extraction and the complicity of architecture in the process. Part public history, part geological specimen, the Archive of Lost Mountains seeks to expose the scars of mountaintop removal and to establish tangible relics for the preservation of place.

How Can Architecture Improve the Health of Honeybees?
Kimberly Drennan, The University of Colorado Boulder
Chelsea Cook, Marquette University

Abstract

This project weaves together architectural design, evolutionary biology, and information technology with the intention of improving the health of our most vital pollination workforce, the honeybee. Conceptually, the project explores niche construction, a theoretical model borrowed from evolutionary biology, to set design criteria for a domestic environment constructed by the interactions of several types of organisms. In this case, interaction between humans, honeybees, the flora and fauna of the inhabited landscape become the objects of architectural design. The notion of ecological inheritance frames a discussion about the potential of architecture to influence existing and future selection pressures on organisms and their descendants. The project is a modular, mobile, climate controlled apiary (MICA). It is the result of hypothesis based field experiments, participatory design, and a data-driven process. In our phase one study, we achieved a 72% increase in honeybee survival rates. Building atop initial results, we have designed, built and are testing a commercial scale prototype. This prototype is a data collection tool, a seasonal experiment, and the embodiment of a new trajectory for architects interested working in ecological design.

School’s Out: Reimagining Vacant Public School Buildings in Pittsburgh
Chitika Vasudeva, Independent Researcher

Abstract

“School’s Out: Reimagining Vacant Public School Buildings in Pittsburgh” examines the community engagement and adaptive reuse potentialities of disused Pittsburgh Public School (PPS) buildings. Once a major part of the city’s architectural identity, a number of Pittsburgh’s public school buildings remain abandoned since their closure in the late 2000’s, with many on the market without buyers. This is especially concerning in a neighborhood-driven city like Pittsburgh, as school closures lead to the loss of social and cultural nexuses, often accelerating trends of decline and disinvestment in the affected neighborhood.

Using the former Fort Pitt Elementary School building in Garfield as a case study, this proposal outlines a design and planning strategy for the conversion of the facility into a new, mixed-use development which will provide spaces for education, events and entrepreneurship in the neighborhood. The goal is to create a ‘neighborhood building’ that would serve as a social and cultural nexus — a community landmark — making the case for preserving and repurposing out-of-use PPS infrastructure. Ultimately, this project engages with issues of holistic approaches to sustainability and resource optimization by contending that we have enough buildings; the way forward is to rebuild, repurpose, and revitalize existing structures.

Neonomads
Patrick Rhodes, Gregory Spaw, & Lamya Alqassimi, American University of Sharjah

Abstract

Neonomads is an ongoing series of projects to design and build prototypical, off-the-grid desert survival shelters to be deployed into the Arabian desert and used as research stations by two environmental scientists. The motivation for the studio was an interest in the disappearing Bedouin culture, nomads who have preserved their way of life for thousands of years in one of the most isolated places on earth, and their relationship with the rapidly developing culture of the region. As the institution’s first design-build project to be constructed and sited permanently off-campus for a client, we challenged the more than thirty-five participating students, including thirty-three women, to critically reimagine the nature of architecture and to foster citizenship, advocacy, and empathy for the environment. In opposition to their preconceptions of how architecture is constructed and inhabited in the desert, they were asked due to environmental restrictions to design for unenclosed, unconditioned structures that require no maintenance and must be carried by hand and walked to site on foot across the desert floor.

Faced with one of the harshest landscapes on earth where there are few sources of water, temperatures can surpass one-hundred and twenty degrees Fahrenheit, and blowing sands can strip the paint from metal, students were forced to fundamentally reconsider how architecture and nature intersect. Building on and advancing a curricular two-semester model of prototyping followed by final construction, the process was organized as a sequence of short-term, distinct yet interconnected explorations, giving students the rare opportunity in design-build to reflect and iterate. We established an atypical approach that allowed students to speculate, take risks through the design process, and accept failure while developing an unconventional attitude toward design-build that included both unprogrammed material/tectonic investigations and permanently sited, programmed constructions driven by community engagement.

3:30pm-5:00pm EDT /
12:30pm-2:00pm PDT

Research Session
1.5 AIA/CES LU

Criticism

Moderator: Gabriel Fries-Briggs, University of New Mexico

What Would Donald Judd Do?
Judith Birdsong, University of Texas at Austin

Abstract

Architects as diverse as Frank Gehry and Peter Zumthor have responded powerfully to the elemental lessons they perceive in the artwork and architectural projects of the artist Donald Judd. Not surprisingly, John Pawson, the “minimalist” architect perhaps most strongly aligned with the style that takes its name (if not its ideology) from the arts movement that Judd unwittingly helped father, has acknowledged many debts to Judd’s work. From Eduardo Sota de Moura to a new generation of architects that includes David Adjaye, Claesson Koivisto Rune, Brad Cloepfil, and Johnston and Mark Lee – all attest to Judd’s influence on their architecture, and often for reasons that don’t share any immediately apparent common ground. Query: What form would the minimalist artist’s own architecture have taken had he not died just as he was beginning to receive commissions? Early in his career as an art critic, Judd worked ruthlessly to expose the hollow core of the post-Expressionist art world while simultaneously producing works that would eventually demonstrate the merits of his counter position – and thus radically alter the course of contemporary art. Judd would later direct his critical attention toward the then-pervasive superficiality of post-Modern architecture, laboring in his writings to articulate an antidote to the status quo by stating the negative case: before we can assert what architecture should be, it must first be stated what it should not be. Unfortunately, Judd died before he was able to realize a single major autonomously designed work; unlike his art, we are left with only a few sketches and drawings of unbuilt projects against which to assess his alternative position. In 1992, Judd began design work on an administrative building to be built adjacent to Zumthor’s Kunsthaus Museum in Bregenz, Switzerland. This paper proposes that it represents the most succinctly articulated exposition of Judd’s architectural thinking and terminates a line of investigation that began eight years earlier with three projects intended to house artwork at his properties in Marfa, Texas. It illustrates in praxis the case Judd elaborated in his writing and substantiates a surprisingly prescient architectural perspective that remains valid for the profession to this day.

Cloud as an Alternative Architecture
Ruo Jia, Princeton University

Abstract

In A Theory of /Cloud/ (1972), the cloud, or rather, the graph of cloud, served as the entry point of the French art historian and theorist Hubert Damisch (1928-2017) in his understanding of the limits of Western art and art history as framed since the Renaissance. Here he initiated another possibility of painting—a “theory” of painting, which he simultaneously termed “a history of painting”—by concluding the book with a look at the Far East, at Chinese landscape painting, during the period of French intellectual sinophilia that accompanied the Chinese Cultural Revolution launched by Mao. Damisch’s different approach to painting was, in fact, a philosophical initiative to reflect on and shift away from Western metaphysics, especially from the negative dialectics of Hegel, towards a different architecture based on a harmonious and positive materialist dialectic inspired by Chinese Taoist and Chan Buddhist philosophy. Here, in Damisch’s reinvention of Chinese painting, the cloud not only literally enters paintings to negotiate the intertextuality of mountain and water, ink and brush, even painter and painting, but also to fill the role of the materialist body in a different perspective of world formation—as the breath, the one movement that sustains or constitutes all life. Eventually, such a cloud leads to a different kind of architecture, one that counters the philosophical metaphor of architecture as the stability of the arche, the subject, the essence, or any anchored center. The cloud and its philosophical architectural alternative also contribute to a reflection on the literally physical architecture, leading to the formation of an architecture in absentia, to which Damisch was to return in 2003 when discussing Diller+Scofidio’s Blur Building (2002), as well as the Chinese architecture of the Ming Dynasty.

The Problematic Nature Between Architectural Pleasure and Well-Being
Phillip Mead, University of Idaho

Abstract

This paper focuses on the problematic relationship between architectural pleasure and well-being or happiness. It attempts to update the ancient philosophical debate on the conflict between the pleasures promoted by hedonism, and the pleasures and virtues of well-being promoted by eudemonia in terms of architectural design through the lens of today’s positive psychology movement.1 This emerging field has identified, to a limited extent, when pleasure and well-being can conflict resulting in addiction, while at other times pleasure serves as a pump to the higher echelons of well-being, or what Aristotle calls eudaimonia. This paper attempts to identify the same for architecture. Since Vitruvius, architects have written on our preferences which appear to bring pleasure – some with empirical evidence. By taking stock of architectural writings and program elements that aim to deliver pleasure,2, 3, 4 this paper asks which of these resonate with philosophical and positive psychology findings on higher pleasures. Particularly relevant are the findings of psychologist Barbra Fredrickson’s broaden and build theory of positive emotions5 which sheds light on how design delight may lead to positive psychology’s promotion of higher forms of well-being such as: engagement, relationships or sense of community, meaning and achievement.6 The programming and design of Helsinki’s new central library by ALA Architects illustrates virtuous pleasures that serve a higher purpose in a city and country that ranks first in Gallup’s 2019 and 2020 World Happiness Reports.

Watering Architectural Historiography
Adnan Morshed, Catholic University of America

Abstract

This paper first examines how architectural history surveys ignore the hydro-ecological roots of the built environment and then what the “absence” of water in historiography means for epistemology. This absence has not been accidental but rather deeply rooted in the Enlightenment ideals that, paraphrasing John Locke, identified “land-nature” matrix as a stable foundation on which to enshrine human progress and property rights, while keeping water outside the historiographic proper as a strange, unpredictable, and inscrutable other. The Greek thinker Pherecydes of Syros imagined Chaos, the mythical Greek figure, as water. From Greek mythologies to the Abrahamic religions to vedic texts, the orderly cosmos emerged from the primordial water, represented as a void. The modern world inherited this intellectual legacy. Analyzing the conspicuous absence of the spatiality of water in Egyptian, Greek, and Roman architecture in history textbooks, the paper probes the disciplinary production of “land-centrism” that gave rise to epistemological taxonomies of what constitutes “architecture.” While revisionist histories since the advent of postmodernism in the 1980s have ushered in a host of multidisciplinary, canon-debunking, expansive, and inclusive readings of architectural history, entrenched binaries of what architecture is and isn’t continue to persist. Building on the philosopher and social critic Ivan Illich’s notion of “waters of forgetfulness,” the paper argues that the birth of modern historiography in the 19th century was tied to the double denial of water from modern consciousness. First, architectural history has essentially been conceived as a telluric narrative that took precedence over water ecology as an architectural constituent. Second, as Jamie Linton argues in What is Water? (2010), the scientific abstraction of water—a quantitative and utilitarian view—in the modern era led to the reification of water as a resource to be harnessed for human use, robbing it of its multiple ontological and social significance.

Belief in the Age of Disbelief. Form, Utopia and Assemblage
Stefano Corbo, Rhode Island School of Design

Abstract

The erosion of the Modern message – symbolically crystalized in the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe complex in 1972 – has represented, to the architectural discourse, the end of a systematic and comprehensive reflection on the future, in favour of a fragmentation of individual positions that have charac- terized the last three decades. This shift has contributed to a progressive disinterest in form as a vehicle of societal needs too. Since centuries, in fact, the definition of alternative scenarios has been informed by social and political demands but, also, by specific formal articulations – whether those applied to the design of an entire city or just to a single building. From Sforzinda to Hilberseimer’s Vertical City, utopian ambitions have always translated into precise spatial schemes. Starting from the late 1970s, the dialectics between utopia and form has evaporated. This paper attempts to unfold the intricate relation between architecture, the discourse around utopia, and the form of utopia itself with a specific focus on recent phenomena. In the so-called age of Hyperobjects – a term introduced by Timothy Morton in 2013 to describe the overwhelming impact of human activities on earth – urgent issues such as climate change have forced to rethink the role of architecture. This essay suggests the form these current issues to be elaborated can gravitate around the idea of assemblage. By integrating Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s contributions with Fernand Braudel’s focus on economic organizations, philosopher Manuel DeLanda offers a suggestive interpretation. Assemblages, for DeLanda, are multiple and unique at the same time: each assemblage is an individual identity –“an individual person, an individual commu- nity, an individual organization, an individual city” [1]. Theoretical and operative consequences of assemblages in the territory of architecture will be explored, as well as their contribution in the definition of a unified yet composite project of future.

3:30pm-5:00pm EDT /
12:30pm-2:00pm PDT

Research Session
1.5 AIA/CES LU

Inclusive Pedagogies

Moderator: Samia Kirchner, Morgan State University

Intentional Inclusion in Teaching Place and Health
Christina Bollo, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Abstract

In the spring of 2020, we were awarded funding to diversify the voices in our students’ required Place and Health course. This paper presents the first results from this pedagogical project. The design and implementation of this endeavour relies on culturally inclusive pedagogy (Yu 2018) in which students use cultural anchors to connect themselves to unfamiliar subjects or contexts. We commissioned seven, original videos from architects working in the Global South, and curated 17 additional, pre-made videos. We then used short essay reflective responses to reinforce the cross-cultural learning. When evaluating these responses, we found that the students were the most articulate about their cultural understanding of people, material, form, and program when they could compare multiple contexts with their own. This demonstrates the importance of extensive inclusion of resources from a many cultural and geographic contexts.

Inclusive Mindset: Remote Professional Summer Experience
David Karle & Lindsey Bahe-Ellsworth, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Abstract

In response to the realities of the COVID-19 pandemic, a new pilot program was established in partnership with local design professionals by identifying opportunities to engage a diverse student population inclusively. Due to the reduction in internships, the pilot program provided an equitable educational experience to all students regardless of academic level, academic performance, previous work experience, financial ability, or geographic location while allowing them to maintain their academic paths to graduation. The partnership provided students a three-week remote professional summer experience through a series of three one-credit sessions, including eleven sub-themes. The pilot program was established for two student groups. The first is upper-level students who are required to obtain internship experience before graduation but could not get these internships due to COVID-19. Another target group was students early in their educational careers who were interested in getting a firsthand look into practice by engaging with a multi-disciplinary professional design office. The course structure employs inclusive strategies for students at various academic levels and physical locations to participate in the class and with professionals remotely. As a result, the course experienced rapid interest and enrollment within a brief timeframe, suggesting strong student interest in having access to and engagement with professionals they previously lacked. This emerging professional participation model for accessible learning in diverse student groups cultivated inclusive excellence, providing impactful learning experiences for students about design practice with professional design communities that otherwise have limited engagement opportunities and access for student populations.

Actions to Reset Studio Culture: A Case Study
Cesar Lopez & Alaa Quraishi, University of New Mexico

Abstract

The [Affiliated Institution] is one of the most affordable institutions in the country. This means the student population typically comes from the exact communities that need architectural agency the most. As architectural education continues during the COVID-19 pandemic—the confronting realizations about systemic racism, inequalities, and exclusions in academia, presents an opportunity to effectively use these conversations as a catalyst for long-lasting, structural change. Identifying actionable objectives from an awareness of the embedded privileges that actively disenfranchise socioeconomically challenged Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) students. The architectural discourse and profession responsible for shaping the spaces we live, work, and gather requires a renewed dedication to social values. In Fall 2020, the [Affiliated Institution], School of Architecture and Planning selected a team of fellows to participate in the Student Experience Project, a cohort of the College Transition Collaborative that seeks to increase degree attainment through creating equitable learning environments and fostering a sense of belonging on campus; by exploring new methods of inclusion through language.1 In addition to retooling syllabi for active de-stigmatization of available resources and adhering to a ‘growth’ mindset, the fellows will also use the same breath of energy to restructure studio formats and policies. These methods seek to decolonize unproductive hierarchies and the dynamics of exclusion that have gone unchallenged. Can more inclusive pedagogies be employed to reverse the (racist, exclusive, toxic) culture of the architectural studio and collectively build towards an inclusive and equitable studio culture that produces greater student success and ultimately a more diverse architectural discourse and profession? The challenges architectural education faces today will require instructors to learn how to teach online and require students to learn how to learn online. This case study leverages the drastic change in platforms of learning to challenge traditional pedagogical models of architectural studios. This study’s chosen site is a third-year undergraduate architectural studio that intersects university and junior college transfer students that often requires a pedagogy reconciling varying skill-sets and educational backgrounds while delivering critical NAAB objectives. The school’s unique geographical setting and rich cultural groups offer an optimal testing ground to address disparities in social experiences and learning outcomes for BIPOC and economically challenged students.

Becoming Credible: Developing Pedagogies for Inclusive Design Futures
Elgin Cleckley, University of Virginia

Abstract

The current amplified racial justice movement has produced BIPOC student-led demand documents to leadership, faculty, and staff of many North American schools of architecture and design. For example, Notes on Credibility, by the Harvard Graduate School of Design’s African American Student Union and AfricaGSD, demands that the GSD “institutionalize anti-racism and acknowledge that pedagogy has a cultural obligation”.[1] Similar Calls for Action echo Notes throughout North American architectural institutions, supported by hundreds of signatures of fellow students, alumni, faculty, staff, and community. Such directed efforts require a critical rethinking of architectural pedagogy from existing Beaux-Arts models and image-making practices. This shift requires architectural education to focus on a new core foundation of inclusionary design – where ethics and aesthetics are aligned to develop social change. This paper shares an example, of a fall 2020 design research studio based on The Great Northern Migration (part of REDACTED, and initiative, design practice, and pedagogy), currently integrated into the curriculum at the REDACTED School of Architecture.[2] The Great Northern Migration, defined by journalist and author of The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson, is the outpouring of six million African Americans from the Jim Crow South to cities in the North and West between World War I and the 1970s. According to Wilkerson, the Migration marks the “first time in American history that the lowest caste people signaled they had options and were willing to take them – and the first time they had a chance to choose for themselves what they would do with their innate talents.”[3] Such work was directly referred to by the REDACTED School of Architecture BIPOC students in the school’s Call to Action (and resulting listening sessions) as an aspired model integrating identity, culture, history, memory, and place. The paper provides a targeted perspective – as the methods are self-formulated from an African American architect, designer, and educator. The paper covers the process of the studio’s six Modules: Module 1: Empathy Exercises / Collaboration Methods / Feedback Mechanism Development / Empathic Design Thinking Methods / Student Identity Building. Module 2: Data Visualization Techniques for creating an Inclusive Timeline (setting context, socio-cultural, and historical facts from 1619 to 2020). Module 3: Mapping Jim Crow (Uncovering Design Thinking from regional references). Module 4: Design exercises based on Jacob Lawrence’s The Migration Series[4]. Module 5: Data Visualization – The Pathway from South to North. Module 6: Designing an Architectural Response in Vanderbilt Hall of Grand Central Station, NYC for an inclusive audience. The work is supported by the action items of the REDACTED Inclusion and Equity Plan – incorporating inclusionary processes from architectural education and professional experience, providing a sharable template for obtaining the credibility required for our time.

[1].https://notesoncredibility.cargo.site

[2] REDACTED is a winner of the 2020 ACSA REDACTED Award.

[3]https://www.ted.com/talks/isabel_wilkerson_the_great_migration_and_the_power_of_a_single_decision/up-next?language=en [4] https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2015/onewayticket/panel/1/

Effective Interdisciplinarity is like Alchemy
Trudy Watt, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Abstract

This paper describes a theoretical framework for conducting design research with students based on early anecdotal evidence from an academic design research team that weaves a strengths-based approach to developing self-knowledge into open-ended and non-hierarchical project investigation environment that explores inherently interdisciplinary ‘wicked’ problems. Key factors in this approach include: encouraging students’ self-knowledge using a legible system that increases comprehension of individual strengths collectively examining the interrelationship of strengths across the cohort to understand where the team is likely to function with ease continuous assessment with a growth or progression mindset by both peers and faculty non-hierarchical structure in which students participate in co-designing the investigative or learning tactics and can shape project goals The benefits of this approach are likely derived from its ability to effectively increase self-efficacy and social connection in highly trusting group work settings where psychological safety is paramount and continuous growth-oriented assessment places value on process as well as product. Weaving this approach into architectural research and studio pedagogy will be likely not only to produce more resilient interdisciplinary-minded professionals ready to tackle complex contemporary issues such as climate change and social injustice in collaborative settings but also make architecture school a more responsive and inclusive place that welcomes inputs from a more diverse array of aspirants, not only those who arrive with the requisite resources and devotion to succeed in prevailing architecture culture in hand.

Conflicting Spaces: Exploring Consciousness and Reaction through Architecture
Isaac Mangual, Akil Webster, & Jalena Washington, Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University

Abstract

Conflicting Spaces is the title of the final, two-week design project given to beginning studio students at the School of Architecture and Engineering Technology at [redacted] University during the summer of 2020. All students involved in the project were Black. It is important to make this distinction, as they were asked to choose a current social topic, and seven out of eight participants selected the Black Lives Matters movement. This project intends to open up the conversation and allow students to question the roles architecture played in the realities of our BIPOC and underrepresented communities. This assignment was divided into two main phases. The first phase was titled SPACE(s) & SELF. Its focus is on introspection. They are to ask: can architecture be conscious? Students were given the task of designing two 15’ x 15’ spaces, each one meant to be inhabited by an individual. The spaces were required to be opposite, conflicting, and/or contradictory in nature from one another. The second phase of the project was titled SPACE(s) & SITE. They were to answer the question: How can architecture react? They would place their designed spaces in a blank site and create a composition that would reflect on the possible dynamics between the spaces with one another, with the site, and with users. Conflicting Spaces was more than a final studio project, it became a cathartic conversation on the conflictive realities our Black student population face in their everyday. It demonstrates the importance of architecture as a political act and how in academia, we have failed multiple times in listening and giving voice to our BIPOC students. It sets conflict in the forefront, challenging everyone to question, reflect and act in changing the biases and exclusionary discourses that Architecture has been complicit of for far too long.

3:30pm-5:00pm EDT /
12:30pm-2:00pm PDT

Research Session
1.5 AIA/CES LU

Building Bridges, Building Community

Moderator: Kiwana T McClung, University of Louisiana – Lafayette

Pandemic and Gentrification: An Interdisciplinary Pedagogy to Engage the Messiness of Urban Spatial Justice
Mackenzie Waller & Ariana Cantu, University of Washington

Abstract

In the environment of heightened neighborhood shifts, sparked by the pandemic and underlying social injustice, interdisciplinary approaches towards urban challenges are in dire need. Built environment professionals and Social Work practitioners have a unique opportunity to address these challenges through collaboration. This article highlights how educators in these fields can leverage existing best practices in collaboration and apply it to curricular design solutions focused on spatial justice.

Visualizing Health Equity: Toward Spatial Justice in the Jade District
Karen Kubey, University of Oregon

Abstract

Visualizing Health Equity contributes visions for an equitable future, where everyone in the Portland Jade District has the opportunity to lead a healthier life. With Jade District community environmental justice frameworks as a starting point, the studio explored connections between the built environment and racial and socio-economic health inequities, examining the full role that architecture and urban design can play in reducing those inequities. This presentation will analyze simultaneous attempts to produce more equitable architectures and a more just studio pedagogy. Students developed design proposals centered on affordable housing and community spaces, on a site in one of the most diverse neighborhoods in Oregon, synthesizing lessons from a local Asian American environmental justice group’s community advocate, a healthy buildings expert, and spatial justice theorists. They were asked to design for resident priorities and the community group’s intersectional approach to climate, health, and housing. One project, Community Through Cooking, put culturally specific communal kitchens at the center of its affordable housing scheme — building on the Jade’s vibrant Asian restaurant scene and contributing to healthy eating and social cohesion — while submerging a main thoroughfare to mitigate the health inequities of the high-crash corridor. Studio prompts emphasized relational visualization skills and empathic design approaches outside of normative architectural practice. Presenting final projects through short videos helped students to focus on the narrative aspects of their proposals and encouraged a synthetic presentation of research and design. The experimental studio produced thoughtful results while also exposing limits of imagination and empathy. This studio originally centered on a partnership with the local environmental justice group, in-person site visits, and community engagement sessions. As Covid hit, our would-be community partner cancelled our formal collaboration in order to focus on supporting its constituents during the pandemic, at the same time imploring us not to contact neighborhood residents too traumatized by current events to engage with architecture students and possible futures. Overnight, we reconceived the studio as an online offering reliant almost exclusively on secondary sources, together exploring ways to develop place-based, culturally aware interventions based on the tools available. The community group remained our inspiration, but was no longer our client. This presentation will include a retroactive analysis of pedagogical lessons from what became an accidental experiment in internal community engagement. Turning engagement practices inward, we invited students to develop their own frameworks for collaboration and conflict resolution and facilitated exchanges between students with a range of lived experience with housing insecurity and immigration. During the term, students faced abrupt moves, job loss, and, days before the final, as protests broke out, tear gas wafting into some of their apartments. Focusing on student wellbeing as a measure of studio success, rather than traditional metrics of production, resulted in happier students and arguably higher quality work, offering lessons to take forward into “normal” studios to come.

New Faculty Teaching
Cathi Ho Schar, University of Hawaii At Manoa

Abstract

Cathi Ho Schar is an Assistant Professor at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa School of Architecture, and the inaugural director of the University of Hawaiʻi Community Design Center (UHCDC). In 2016, after twelve years of experience as a co-founding principal of a woman-owned architectural practice and ten years of service as a part-time studio instructor, Cathi joined the School of Architecture faculty full time, tasked with teaching design studios, professional practice seminars, and establishing a community design center for the school. The school founded the center in close consultation with a state senator and positioned it to operate at the intersection of university, government, and community stakeholders. This novel alignment led to 51 UHCDC contracts with twelve public agencies and four non-profit organizations, supporting engagement, research, planning, and design inquiry by faculty, staff, and students across six university departments, addressing some of our most pressing urban and environmental challenges. UHCDC’s public sector practice model and collective body of work earned the 2020 AIA/ACSA Practice and Leadership Award and a 2020 ACSA Collaborative Practice Award, for the UHCDC Waipahu TOD Collaboration Team. Cathi applies the principles of public sector practice to all aspects of her teaching and pedagogy. Her courses explore integrated, inclusive, and applied methodologies that connect top-down and bottom-up approaches to the design of more livable and equitable environments. Cathi’s work is fundamentally collaborative, engaging university and professional colleagues, and government and community partners, in ways that promote student agency and system-wide benefits. Cathi was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi. She earned her B.A. at Stanford University and M.Arch from the University of California at Berkeley.

Women’s Reunion + Symposium
Sara Bartumeus Ferre, Marci Uihlein & Andrea Melgarejo De Berry, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Abstract

On September 26, 2019, alumnae, faculty, and students of the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign came together for the Women’s Reunion + Symposium including nearly 200 of the 2400 living female graduates. Over the next two and a half days, fifteen alumnae engaged the audience with their architectural and professional practices through panels and keynote lectures. Designed to accompany the symposium, the Revealing Presence: Women in Architecture at the University of Illinois, 1874-2019 exhibit opened at the Krannert Art Museum the same weekend with 170 alumnae contributors. With five thousand square feet, the exhibit illuminated the breadth of architectural work by women, their contribution to the built environment, and the architectural education community to which they belong. The goal of the two events was to examine, celebrate, and recognize our alumnae role in architecture. When we started talking about this event, we asked: where are the women in Architecture? Still struggling to be seen, to be engaged, to be equally recognized. This symposium called women to come together, share their trajectories, and demonstrate the varied paths in architecture. While there were fifteen invited speakers, the audience was filled with outstanding practitioners, each with significant experiences to share. Over coffee or in the hallways, these women shared, connected, and validated each other’s presence within architecture. Perhaps the most powerful validation of the event, however, came from the students who attended. As organizers, we sought to demonstrate a more expansive version of the architectural discipline, one where women; all women; were included and integrated into architectural education and the profession. That vision of architecture came alive over the span of the Symposium, resonated with our students and alumnae, and is not easily forgotten, even today. As educators we could ask for no greater reward.

Negotiation Tables
John Folan, University of Arkansas & Urban Design Build Studio UDBS

Abstract

The term CONCENTRATED POVERTY describes census tracts where 40% or more of the residents fall below the poverty line. 13.8 million Americans (poor and non-poor) live in the 6.1% of all census tracts that have concentrations of poverty. The picture is worse for minorities groups; the poverty rate is 25.2% among black Americans and 17.4% among Hispanics, compared to 7.5% for white Americans. Pittsburgh neighborhoods were impacted significantly by urban renewal efforts that led to the loss of 30% of the building stock over a 20 year period. Today, after the implementation of a community master plan in 1999, East Liberty is home to a diverse population from a large range of socioeconomic backgrounds, but that diversity is being threatened by gentrification and displacement. Recent development has perpetuated racial and economic tensions despite strong NGO advocacy and stabilization programs targeted at helping long-time residents. Housing is being constructed for all income levels, but inclusivity remains elusive. There is a well- established culture of suspicion and lack of trust extant in the community. This situation is not unique to Pittsburgh. The Housing Crisis is complex, and the mechanisms of failure vary greatly. Political perspectives influence perceptions. Information is often communicated poorly. Generalizations divide further. WHERE IS THERE AN OPPORTUNITY TO COMMUNICATE OPENLY? SHOULD THE COMMUNICATION HAPPEN WHERE ISSUES PERSIST? HOW CAN PEOPLE BE HEARD? THERE MUST BE A PLACE FOR NEGOTIATION. This mobile outreach unit executed as a collateral design project to a broader housing initiative provides a set of Negotiation Tables to enhance understanding and knowledge building that aspires to aid in addressing these challenging issues. The project is the product of a semester long effort by a public interest design, build, and implementation studio and employs VR/AR technologies cloaked in an armature made from 100% recycled waste material.

30-minute

Coffee Break

5:30pm-7:00pm EDT /
2:30pm-4:00pm PDT

Plenary
1.5 AIA/CES LU

Awards Toast & Topaz Keynote

2021 Architectural Education Awards

Please join us to celebrate the 2021 Architectural Education Award winners. At the virtual celebration: toast the winners and hear from Kathryn Anthony, 2021 Topaz Laureate. To end the session, we will have the opportunity to join an awards open house to mingle with the award winners.

2021 TOPAZ LAUREATE
Kathryn H. Anthony, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

For more than four decades, ACSA Distinguished Professor Kathryn Anthony, PhD, has been one of the profession’s most prominent guiding forces, long urging architects and the public to embrace the importance of designing spaces for people and designing for diversity. Having influenced a long list of distinguished architects and educators around the world, Anthony is widely recognized for placing diversity, inclusion, and social justice at the forefront of her pedagogy.

“In a time where the Black Lives Matter movement is challenging us to act with agency and thoughtfulness, with respect and responsiveness, her profound work underscores the importance of social justice in all fields, especially ours,” Frances Bronet, president of the Pratt Institute, wrote in support of Anthony’s nomination. “She built on a legacy of architecture to make more vital and engaging public places that reflect the diversity of the American people.”

View all of the 2021 AWARD WINNERS

Conference Partners

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Founded in 1912 by 10 charter members, ACSA is an international association of architecture schools preparing future architects, designers, and change agents. Our membership includes all of the accredited professional degree programs in the United States and Canada, as well as international schools and 2- and 4-year programs. Together ACSA schools represent some 7,000 faculty educating more than 40,000 students.

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109th Annual Meeting

Expanding the View: Prospect(s) for Architectural Education Futures

Schedule

July 1, 2020

July 1, 2020

September 2020

November 18, 2020

January 2021

Schedule + Abstracts: Thursday

This year’s 109th Annual Meeting will be held virtually from March 24 – 26, 2021. The virtual conference is designed for educators, practitioners, researchers, and students to explore and discuss the latest research, ideas, and practices in architecture, education, and allied disciplines.

Schedule with Abstracts

Thursday, March 25, 2021

Morning Discussion

Encountering Architecture: The Future of Fieldwork in Architecture Education

Speculative Practice in Pedagogy

Federal and State Advocacy: Bringing it to the Studio

Careers in Architectural Education: ACSA Distinguished Professor

Advancing Scholarship on Equity and Justice in Built Environment

Coffee Break

Beyond Normative in Design

Teaching Ecological Matters

Culture & Heritage

Mediations

Justice, Memory, and Design

Networking & Exhibit Lounge

Workshop

Scales of Urbanity

Tracing Resources

Criticism

Inclusive Pedagogies

Building Bridges, Building Community

Coffee Break

Awards Toast & Topaz Keynote

Conference Partners

Questions

Stay in Touch