March 12-14, 2020 | San Diego, CA

108th ACSA Annual Meeting

OPEN: Reinvented Annual Meeting

Conference Notice: COVID-19

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

+ Read the full notice.

Schedule

June 5, 2019

Paper/Project Submission Deadline

September 25, 2019

Call for Special Sessions Deadline

December 2019

Presenters Notified

January 2019

Registration deadline for presenters

SCHEDULE WITH ABSTRACTS
FRIDAY, MARCH 13, 2020

9:00am
Salon B

Scaled Interventions

Moderator: TBD

One Light, Two Light, Red Light, Blue Light: A Responsive Environment in an Urban Context

Jason Scroggin
University of Kentucky

One Light, Two Light, Red Light, Blue Light (1L2LRLBL) is an interactive LED installation situated in a downtown bus station. It was designed and fabricated by architectural students as part of an academic elective course focusing on the development of full-scale installations that present new ways to interact with built form. 1L2LRLBL emerged from a prompt by the local Downtown Development Authority to enhance a derelict urban condition within the waiting area of the main bus terminal. The proposal utilizes an existing glass block wall on the façade of an adjacent parking garage as a canvas for an interactive light installation to enhance the space and create a playful environment for children (and adults) waiting with their families for the buses. The glass blocks are lit from behind by a grid of LED’s arrayed on milled Plexiglas sheets and are activated by a series of Arduinos controlled by a Rhino/Grasshopper interface with two Xbox Kinects. These Kinects are mounted on the facade of the building and receive video data of people who step into an area demarcated by painted tiles on the ground. As moving bodies occupy the frame, their images transmitted are converted to simple pixelated shapes that turn the LED’s on and off in real time and change their color based on proximity of the bodies (near and far) effectually mirroring the passers-by with a colorful “8-bit” version of themselves. The project is a full-scale prototype seen as proof of concept that could lead to future funding to expand on this site and future sites. The script running the software in its current state is also limited to a simple array of colors and commands to activate the lights and this can be modified to generate an infinite array of colors and scripted patterns to further enhance the public space through color, light, and information. 1L2LRLBL was funded through a grant from an American non-profit organization that helps communities build playgrounds for children. The project was executed in collaboration with The Downtown Development Authority, The Parking Authority and The Transit Authority to develop a permanent interactive installation in the downtown Transit Center.

Small Dimensions, Big Impact: Transformative-Furniture as a Platform for Community Cooperation and Learning

Cheng-Chun Patrick Hwang
The Chinese University of Hong Kong

The compact city development policy of Hong Kong has, for the most part, supported the city’s economic growth over the past decades. It has created envious figures on various indices, from low carbon emission and high GDP per capita to an effective and low-cost public transportation system. However, such policy also contributed to a dismal dwelling area accompanied by an unprecedented soar in real-estate price. The pressurized condition caused homeowners to partition apartments into Sub-Divided Units (SDUs) profiting on those living on the fringe, and indirectly propelled the issue of housing injustice into the public discourse. Hong Kong Census and Statistics Department estimates around 3% of its total population reside in SDUs, with at least 18% that are school-aged children under 15. Due to the lack of space, improper lighting condition, and the absence of means to organize supplies and books, even the basic task of studying and doing homework is a difficult routine. One study found, such a challenge has impeded the academic performance of the children, directly contributing to a perpetual cycle of impoverishment. In response to this phenomenon, academics and professionals from the design community have begun studying and proposing various ways to improve and combat this issue. We are proposing a platform — through the design and making of a Transformative-furniture prototype — for engaging with the community. The transformative-furniture carries three unique characteristics: it is small in stature, multi-functional in use, and modular for the ease of transportation. These are features born out of the confined living spaces of the SDUs, and the nomadic nature of the residents due to their unstable job status. The platform serves to encourage a self-reliant attitude through craft and cooperation. It aims to incorporate a participatory/ self-aid process into the making and assembly of transformative-furniture for strengthening community bonding. An approach similar to a project undertaken by the Austrian design practice of EOOS, which developed the “Social Furniture” to allow for interaction and workshop between the community and the refugees living in the temporary shelters. In lieu of an immediate and actionable plan to address the shortage of housing supply in Hong Kong. The transformative-furniture as a targeted, viable and low-cost project is an immediate vehicle for community cooperation and home improvement. In spite of the small dimensional footprint of the transformative-furniture, it carries a significant potential to transform the lives of those living in Hong Kong’s fringe urban communities.

Salvage Swings

Jessica Colangelo
University of Arkansas

Charles Sharpless
University of Arkansas

Salvage Swings is a cross-laminated timber pavilion built in Lighthouse Park on Roosevelt Island. The project was the winner of the 2019 City of Dreams international design competition and served as the center piece of the FigmentNYC arts festival. The pavilion consists of 12 repetitive modules that frame individual swings and views of the park and surrounding city. The swings are organized collectively in a triangular form to create a new communal space within the park. The open framework of the pavilion can host a variety of activities including community swinging, picnicking, outdoor concerts, and hide-and-seek games. The swing seats come from the window cut-outs between modules and activate a large-scale peg game for kids. Integrated LED lighting in the swing windows transforms the pavilion at night into a beacon from the banks of the East River in Manhattan and Queens. The pavilion is constructed from cross-laminated timber that was salvaged from the shipping palettes of a dormitory construction project. The 7’ by 30’ three-ply spruce palettes were processed and machined in the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design fabrication lab with the support from the staff and students. The project proposes how a temporary pavilion design can utilize construction waste and also avoid ending up in the landfill after its initial period of use. The swings are designed to be easily assembled and disassembled with a small group of volunteers. Prefabricated finger joint connections and manageable piece sizes allows for the project to be flat-packed, shipped, and site assembled in a matter of days. The modular design allows the pavilion to live beyond the summer activities in new places and configurations. Salvage Swings was installed on Roosevelt Island for the summer of 2019, and since has been re-installed in Fayetteville, Arkansas in a new configuration, fulfilling the project’s core concept for re-use. Plans for successive installations are underway.

City Thread

Molly Hunker
Syracuse University

Gregory Corso
Syracuse University

City Thread is the winner of an international design competition to transform a formerly unused and blighted alley in downtown Chattanooga, TN into a vibrant public space and help catalyze a revitalization of this part of the city. Situated in a city that understands how contemporary infrastructure can enhance urban life (Chattanooga is famous for investing in the first public 1-gig fiber Internet in the USA to help foster economic development), the idea of the design is to operate as an element of social infrastructure. The project serves as a social connector where the different actors of the city can come together for both unique public programming and informal hangout. Consisting of a 500ft continuous linear steel tube and painted graphic surfaces, the project physically connects visitors and local tenants with a single gesture while also supporting numerous programmatic possibilities and activities. Further, the zig-zagging linear structure and graphics imply a variety
of smaller spaces within the alley, breaking down the overall space into a series of more intimate spaces, or “urban rooms”.

While the project has a precise design calibrated to the contingencies and clearances of the alley, it is designed specifically to instigate discovery and exploration. By virtue of its form and geometry as well as its relationship to the adjacent buildings and pedestrian access points on either side of the alley, the project supports a variety of programmatic possibilities and including informal lounging/sitting, mini-stages, and movie screenings, festivals, among others. The design is intended to allow visitors, local tenants, and those in charge of programming activities to interpret the functionality and discover different ways to utilize the alley. In so doing, the project can be used widely by a diverse range of users over the years in Chattanooga, maintaining the alley as a vibrantly activated space as community and tenant needs change over time.

City Thread explores the potential for small-scale, small budget, urban interventions when designed in accordance with community feedback, resourcefulness, and high economy design gestures. The large alley site was formerly a dingy, unused and disconnected space in the downtown area. Now, the site is a visually and socially vibrant space that serves the downtown community and provides a renewed sense of place, urban excitement, and engagement between the numerous parties downtown.

Cultivating a Community Legacy Through Public Interest Design

Leah Kemp
Mississippi State University

Upon realizing that the impoverished Mississippi Delta community of Marks had lost touch with its historical role in the Civil Rights Movement, local officials reached out to an architecture school’s community design center to engage the community in telling their town’s story. The goal of the project was to commemorate the historical event, while bringing economic development to the area through cultural tourism. With funding from an NEA Our Town grant, the design center and students employed a variety of community engagement techniques to stitch together the events of the Mule Train, a pivotal part of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s 1968 Poor People’s Campaign. Architecture students gathered oral histories and helped facilitate design workshops in the racially divided community throughout the project’s process. Rather than commemorate the event through the creation of a museum, the team creatively addressed the community’s needs by designing a multi-modal cultural trail. The “Marking the Mule” trail helps Marks promote its history as a means of boosting community pride, while encouraging biking and walking in an obesity-ridden region. The team creatively maximized limited grant funds to tackle multiple community needs, including the design and construction of wayfinding and trail signage. The team also master planned a trailhead park and provided in depth analysis of infrastructure improvements to execute the trail. These efforts were leveraged to fund phase two of the project, which consisted of temporary trail markers, just in time for Dr. King’s son’s visit to the trail in 2018. The success of phases one and two of the project have recently secured significant funding awards from the National Park Service to realize phase three of the project, the design and installation of the permanent trail markers. And most recently, the project caught the attention of a national consortium to help facilitate further community engagement and installation of infrastructure elements along the trail. 2018 marked the 50th anniversary of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Poor People’s Campaign, which was a topic of national news then and now. The presentation will not only share the story of a small Mississippi Delta community in the context of a larger national history, but will also serve as an inspiration for other public interest designers. The project demonstrates successful engagement and design processes that public interest designers can execute in any community, as well as creative and cost-effective installations that can leverage further momentum and funding. Public interest designers can also learn how to identify and promote their unique sense of place, catalyze their local economy by preserving local culture and promoting cultural tourism, and how to maximize benefits from limited funding to achieve multiple objectives.

9:00am
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Urban Strategies and Tactics

Moderator: Georgeen Theodore, New Jersey Institute of Technology

How to Begin to A Critical Look at Tactical Urbanism

B.D. Wortham-Galvin
Clemson University

In reaction to large scaled strategies that serve the city’s economic bottom line, but not individual residents, more decentralized and informal methods of city building have emerged at the turn of the 21st century. These informal city design initiatives seek to combat urban stagnation through the collaborative action of local stakeholders who are affected by such circumstances and seek to reverse or alter them. In the past decade, these actions often fall under the moniker of Tactical Urbanism. In the same manner that open-source software code is available to anyone who wishes to contribute, alter or customize a program, tactical urbanism begins with the initiative of public participants rather than from officially sanctioned protocols. Purposes served by tactical urbanism that are commonly asserted by its proponents include: (1) increasing the diversity of people participating in the process; (2) creating opportunities for new directions and for challenging the status quo; (3) attracting interest to a site; and, (4) creating employment or entrepreneurial opportunities. Currently literature focuses on methods and case studies for the implementation of the “informal” city; they are basically how-to guides aimed at the academy, professionals and activists. However, there is scant study of the efficacy of these practices. What happens after the project is done (and perhaps gone)? This paper will attempt to fill that knowledge gap through researching outcomes based on stakeholder interviews and published reviews/commentary. The case studies under examination will include those touted at the MOMA exhibit “Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanism for Expanding Megacities” with a focus on Hong Kong, Istanbul, Mumbai and New York, in addition to other work happening in North America.. Initial questions will include: • What factors help or hinder the implementation of temporary reactivation projects from having longer term outcomes and impacts? • Which stakeholders are affected positively and/or negatively from such efforts and how are they involved in their implementation? • What are some best practices in the effective operation of tactical urbanism programs in terms of producing tangible outcomes and effective demonstrative changes? More than a decade has passed since Tactical Urbanism’s emergence in 2005; now is the time for a critical evaluation of the work.

One Thing (Alongside) Another: Piggybacking Practices in Contemporary Urbanism

Brian Holland
University of Arkansas

This paper identifies and examines a range of experimental hybrid land-use tactics, or “piggybackings,” that are emerging in response to the intensifying pressures of contemporary market logics. Piggybacking practices, as defined here, are innovative multiple-use propositions for anchoring socially or economically marginal activities alongside dominant ones. Rooftop farms, student-senior home shares, restaurants doubling as coworking spaces, luxury apartments supporting artist residencies, and public pavilions incorporating repurposed construction mock-ups: these and other examples of piggybacking are shown to utilize a common set of tactics to offset one program’s disadvantaged position in relation to other more traditional—and more fully capitalized—forms of urban development. Piggybacking practices are clearly distinguished from the temporary, interim, or provisional bottom-up approaches that feature prominently in the scholarship around vacancy, temporary use, and “everyday” or “tactical” urbanism, even as they share certain sensibilities. Differences between “weak” and “strong” forms of piggybacking are also outlined. Unlike the exclusionary effects of zoning and gentrification, piggybackings are seen to create surprising entanglements that provoke novel forms and programs of social exchange capable of promoting greater equity and resiliency in the built environment. It is argued that architects and planners must understand the practical challenges posed by this work, while simultaneously recognizing piggybacking’s wide-ranging potential as a tool for public advocacy of the commons—for social and ecological functions whose inherent value lie beyond those that are typically recognized by market-oriented development schemes.

Triple Standard

James Tate
Texas A&M University

The paper discusses three projective design proposals that negotiate the opportunities and challenges of private houses and collective dwelling. The work is situated within the Texas Urban Triangle, in three areas experiencing the pressures of a population and economic boom, where demand is straining affordability and resource consumption habits are unsustainable. We’re positioning the megaregion as a territorial city, recognizing that each local geographic community has specific needs and a social identity. Fair-market and supportive housing are part of all investigations. The work considers the integration of architecture, infrastructure, and landscape. Promoting social and domestic settings for groups and individuals’, this design research aims to spark a public conversation about pressing issues related to the future of housing in Texas. 1 – Houston Grand Parkway Loop. Our work focuses on typological reorganization, exploring density through low-rise aggregation and commoning strategy arrangements. This region is regularly impacted by hurricanes and flooding. Texas SH-99 Grand Parkway is the third vehicular traffic outer loop of Houston. As the 170-mile highway is constructed along the edge of the metropolitan area, vast open land is being transformed into custom-homebuilder residential developments. In the past five years, within three miles of the road, more than 50,000 acres are being platted. Project delivery methods are a critical input to this investigation. 2 –Southeast Austin. Our work is a heterogeneous combination of living arrangements and programs ranging in scale from one to five stories, small to extra-large. The investigation speculates on technology and automation as enabling and reshaping the social interface between urban and domestic life. The sharing economy is integral to the study and proposal, pursuing opportunities for residents to engage and exchange with one another in meaningful ways. The site is located in the rapidly expanding Southeast corner of Austin. Major ongoing infrastructural projects serve this area including the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport, proposed rail, SH71, and SH130. The Colorado River flows through this part of the city. Many speculate this area will become a new satellite center in close proximity to downtown. 3 – Bryan – College Station (BCS). Our work considers the development of a “Residential Learning Village” that includes micro units and triplex houses. We’re working with a local non-profit and city officials. The co-living community intends to be inclusive of a wide range of the BCS population, but is primarily focused on addressing two groups. One, the shortage of housing and services available to university support staff employees and working wage households who contribute to the vitality of BCS in different capacities. Two, the seventy thousand plus transient student population that makes up one third of those living in BCS. Project partners intend the development to promote different scales and types of sharing, incorporating access to spatial amenities to improve the physical and mental health of residents. An emphasis is placed on integrating opportunities for residents to interact with one another in ways that dissolve the perceived hierarchies that exist among BCS residents.

Urban Acupuncture for Community Forge

Stefan Gruber
Carnegie Mellon University

In Spring 2019, the Urban Collaboratory Studio at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Architecture worked with Community Forge, a citizen-led initiative that is transforming Wilkinsburg’s former vacant school into a community and youth center. Community Forge is committed to youth empowerment, community collaboration, organizational incubation and neighborhood wellbeing. Together with community members, both young and old, the studio began transforming the former school yard into a shared resource for the wider neighborhood. In weekly participatory design workshops with Community Forge’s youth throughout the semester the studio supported the development of ideas and their translation into a coherent design
strategy.

The resulting urban design framework proposes an archipelago of islands programmed for diverse activities. The islands will be implemented incrementally over time, depending on funding and volunteer work. Aiming at setting the transformation in motion, the studio realized the first island “the field” that integrates games and sports in an educational landscape, as well as furniture elements sprinkled across the site. Here design-build is not primarily concerned with delivering a final product—but in fact explores design as a tactical and performative tool for encouraging community engagement and setting in motion an incremental transformation process.

Overall, the studio offers fourth and fifth year BArch students an opportunity to see a very small project through from conception to realization within only 15 weeks, and combine abstract systemic thinking with very concrete and hands-on action. In a collaborative setting, students go from exploring and analyzing the urban milieu of Wilkinsburg, to facilitating participatory design workshops with the community, to developing and implementing a strategic design intervention that promises to act as an urban catalyst for the neighborhood revitalization—in short Acupuncture Urbanism.

Shaped Places of Carroll County, New Hampshire

McLain Clutter
University of Michigan

Cyrus Penarroyo
University of Michigan

Shaped Places of Carroll County New Hampshire speculates on the complex reciprocity between who we are and the shape of where we live. The project culminates in the design of three linear cities in Carroll County, New Hampshire. Within each, shape and content form a complex reciprocity, geometrically organizing population at a geographic scale to carefully prescribed ends. The project draws upon a seemingly unlikely set of protagonists and sources from Frank Stella to Mikhail Aleksandrovich Okhitovich, and from American formalism to critical geography. Forced to co-exist, this melange
informs strategies for co-existence that urbanize the rural while ruralizing the urban.

9:00am
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Material and Construction Technology

Moderator: Ulrich Dangel, University of Texas at Austin

Contents under Pressure: Using Architecture and Forestry with Fire-Retardant-Treated Wood to Construct Better Connections between the Built and the Natural Environments

Michael Eckhoff
Hoover Treated Wood Products, Inc.

The United States is undergoing a national wood revival. This wood revival’s nascent emergence suggests that architects are (again) becoming more familiar and comfortable with the advantages associated with wood-based construction, albeit slowly and in a piecemeal fashion. What appears to be missing from the wood revival, however, is not the sense of aesthetics or utility but rather the sense of urgency. After years spent teaching seminars to practicing architects, engineers, building/fire inspectors and officials (including in the wildland-urban interface or WUI) and teaching forest policy and wood products classes to university students, including about fire-retardant-treated wood (FRTW), class participants seemingly lack awareness of the connections between wood utilization and forest health based on questions they ask of the instructor during class.

This paper will strengthen the case for building (stronger) connections between architecture university programs and forestry/wood products academic programs in the United States. First, this paper will review recent data concerning both the current housing crisis as well as the current forest health/wildfire crisis in the United States, suggesting that addressing the forest health/wildfire crisis sustainably could help address the housing crisis simultaneously. Next, this paper will briefly qualitatively review professional architectural and forestry/wood product-focused organization accreditation schemes. Finally, the paper will suggest ways to adopt simple and inexpensive changes in pedagogy to help build those stronger connections in the absence of support from accreditation guidelines, with an emphasis on building with wood in the WUI.

Acoustical Panel Ceilings: Origins

Keith Peiffer
Oklahoma State University

Acoustical panel ceilings (APCs) are a mainstay in contemporary architecture. As a flexible, modular system of cross-T frames and solid panels suspended from the structure above, the APC provides the enclosure above many of the spaces we inhabit everyday: schools, offices, hospitals, and retail stores. It is a humble system, functional yet inexpensive, and it is everywhere. If “the secret ambition of design is to become invisible” as Bruce Mau asserts, then the APC has achieved this hallowed place within design as an assembly that performs effortlessly while often receding into the background, ubiquitous and taken for granted.

Its current status as a background material, however, belies its revolutionary beginnings. Although certainly not limited to this lineage, the contemporary APC was birthed as an innovative materialization of the aspirations, conflicts, and contradictions within Modernism, and is particularly indebted to the slab-style office buildings of the 1950s. To establish this context I will explore Modernism’s interests in standardization and industrialization of building components, clear-span universal space, and the integration of new technology through the following precedents: Mies van der Rohe’s clear-span pavilions, architectural magazines, product advertisements featuring renderings by Helmut Jacoby, and three 1950s high-rise office buildings. The confluence of these interests, explored in architectural practice, spurred more than a decade of focused development of the suspended ceiling in the 1950s, resulting in the Acoustical Fire Guard product that closely resembles the APC still installed broadly today.

Although architectural history and theory has not often mentioned the APC specifically, we can trace broader disciplinary influences to their manifestation in the APC. My interest is not in arguing for a newer or better alternative ceiling system, but in placing the APC at the center of the story, synthesizing various theoretical, historical, and technical developments to return to its beginnings with fresh eyes.

The Use of Agricultural Fiber in "an Economy that is Restorative and Regenerative by Design"

Mark Taylor
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

This paper presents the findings of an investigation into agricultural “waste” fibers and how they can be used in “an economy that is restorative and regenerative by design”, this is the definition the Ellen MacArthur foundation uses to define a Circular Economy. In 2012 with a desire to investigate if a more interconnected form of production could be fostered in the industrialized agricultural landscape of America’s mid-west research got underway to see if mono-crop cultivation could be replaced with a woody perennial poly culture, interspersed with harvested meadow and grazing crops. Initially the meadow grasses were analyzed for there potential as an annual source of fiber for paper production as opposed to the clear-cut felling of trees for pulp. In the early years of the project a number of different native and forage grasses were explored to understand their properties and potential for use in paper manufacture. Following a couple of seasons of hands-on experimentation, the research became a more rigorous form of enquiry in which 10 plant types were studied down to the scale of a micron. In the process a number of preliminary findings related to tensile strength and hydrophobicity were discovered. In 2017 another form of inquiry was initiated to see if various grass fibers could be used in three dimensional constructs. This research focused on three grasses for the following reasons: corn stover, due to its ubiquity across the Midwest, Miscanthus because of its a high yielding perennial rhizomic plant with a high silica content, and the hurd from industrial hemp because it has been used in wall construction since antiquity and provides a good base case for comparative analysis. Testing the thermal resistance properties of these three different grasses began in April 2018 before full-scale mock up wall assemblies were constructed in the Spring of 2019. In addition to the grass fibers which are milled to a somewhat uniform dimension hydrated and hydraulic lime are combined to form a binder that will harden over time and prevent the fiber from being affected by mold or insect attack. Initial results were very similar for the three grasses tested with both miscanthus and corn slightly out performing hemp with an average conductivity of 0.1 W/mK or an R value of 1.3 per inch. This summer, having completed the construction of the full-scale mock up wall. a small shed measuring 20’ x 15’ will be restored and retrofitted with different mixes of the agricultural fiber and lime binder to see how the different grasses perform over time. Following the rehabilitation of the shed a larger installation will take place in the wall of a shed with 12’ tall walls. This prescient research has value both in developed and developing world contexts. As urban centers expand the ability to source rapidly renewable locally sourced building material could provide a valuable highly productive agro-industry that is less demanding on the environment than mining raw materials or being reliant on materials derived from petrochemicals.

Printing Architecture: How Additive Manufacturing Methodologies are Posited to Transform Building Construction?

Jian Zhu
Washington University in St. Louis

Heewoong Yang
Washington University in St. Louis

Hongxi Yin
Washington University in St. Louis

Ming Qu
Purdue University

Wenjun Ge
HIC Architects

By demonstrating an innovative, attractive and sustainable home, the Lotus House aims to explore the technological frontier of 3D printing in both architectural design and construction. Led by a transdisciplinary group of faculty in the departments of: Architecture, Construction Management, Computer Science and Engineering; the project was developed with oversight and partnership with companies leading the industries of construction and composite materials in both the US and China. The Lotus House is a 650 ft2, single-story home that competed in the Solar Decathlon Competition in 2018. The intention of the project is to demonstrate ability of 3D Printing technology to implement the mass customization of complicated organic structures into the housing typological market. The home is composed of 35 refabricated panels, each of which are entirely unique from one another. These panels are separated into twelve parabolic-shape panels for the exterior wall, eight double-curved panels for the pitched roof and fifteen irregular panels for entrance. Each panel consists of an outer shell of glass fiber reinforced concrete (GFRC) and an inner shell of glass fiber reinforced gypsum (GFRG). These shells are connected and supported by a fabricated steel skeleton, insulated with spray foam insulation. The component information for GFRC, GFRG and the steel skeleton were combined in a Revit Dynamo digital model environment and then sent to 3 different construction and composite material factories in China. This was done so that all components could be simultaneously produced. To reduce the deviation of each component before preassembling the GFRC, and steel skeleton together, each component was 3d laser scanned in the factory. This enables the digital comparison of the built components geometry and the true components geometry, which was designed and desired. Students used the high accuracy of prefabricated panels to ensure a compressed on-site construction schedule. The proof of this, is that project was finished on site within an impressive 20 day complete construction schedule with unskilled labor. To develop a quantitative comparative study of the effectiveness and economical differences of form making approaches, three GFRC prefabrication processes were utilized. Each being fully documented by using digital models and 3D laser scanning, these approaches were: traditional wood formworks, CNC foam formworks and 3D Printed formworks composed of 20% carbon fiber reinforced ABS thermal plastic polymer. This project demonstrates that the 3D Printing technology makes it possible to both improve productivity and decrease construction cost harmoniously in the most difficult construction type: the mass customized organic structure. In the future, this study will be the foundation for a cost analysis of 3D printing in other customized building types and situations.

9:00am
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Historiography and Pedagogy

Moderator: George Dodds, University of Tennessee-Knoxville

De-Centering Rome: A Pedagogy of Global Architectural History

Adnan Morshed
Catholic University of America

Teaching history from a global perspective remains contested because, as Sebastian Conrad suggests in What is Global History (2016), global history warrants a fundamental transformation of the disciplinary tactics of knowledge production and new models of grounded research in cross-border phenomena. Even academic bureaucracies like the National Architectural Accrediting Board (NAAB) joined the fray by mandating “History and Global Culture” (2014) as an integrative, global framework for the architecture students’ learning objectives in history. If epistemology, as Edward Said argued in Orientalism (1978), can’t escape its political dimensions, the task of historiography is to reveal the very politics of knowledge. This paper begins here. It first examines how architectural history textbooks frame the Roman Empire as part of the Greco-Roman foundation of “Western civilization” and, then, highlights the ways Rome’s long-distance trade relationships, strategic alliances, taxation policies, and frontier activities render untenable the historical canon’s essentialization of the Roman Empire as a cohesive Mediterranean unit, propelled by its internal dynamics. Analyzing the works of Greek historian Strabo (Geographika), the Greco-Roman geographer Isidore (Stathmoi Parthikoi), and the anonymous author of the Periplus of the Eurythraean Sea, the paper shows how the Roman emperor Augustus’ seizure of Egypt after the Battle of Actium in 30 BCE transformed Rome’s economic and imperial aspirations. Robust agricultural supply from Egypt reduced the grain price in Rome, increasing the Roman public’s purchasing power. As the interest rate plunged from 12 to 4 percent, a thriving real-estate market flourished in Rome. Not only did Augustus fund his public works with the wealth secured from Egypt, he also aspired—as Virgil, Propertius, and Horace rhapsodized—to expand his empire all the way to India and even China. According to Strabo, nearly 200 Roman vessels left for India every year from the Egyptian ports of Myos Hormos and Berenice on the Red Sea. Archaeologists have recently recovered various Roman artifacts in cities and settlements located along the western littoral of India. Southern Indian literary sources from the first century CE refer to the Romans carrying their products, from wine to gold, in their “beautiful large ships.” On the other end of the spectrum, as Grant Parker explains in The Making of Roman India (2008), Roman literary sources also reveal the Roman perception of India, as well as the scope of Roman trading in the East. The fact that the House of Augustus, the primary residence of the Roman emperor, contained interior walls adorned with Egyptian motifs attest to the influence of the Nile valley on Roman imperial aesthetics. Discussing Rome’s “trans-civilizational encounters” with Afro-Eurasian regions, this paper seeks to reveal the ideological roots of such constructs as “West” and “civilization” and how global histories offer students of architecture an insightful understanding of the entangled human experience.

Avant-Garde Architecture in the Rural Hinterlands of China

Wei Zhao
Louisiana Tech University

This paper scrutinizes the exchange of architectural ideas between the West and the hinterlands of southern China in the early twentieth century. It examines the porous and dynamic connections between people, places, and ideas as they were manifested in the construction of residential and commercial spaces in rural landscape. Drawing upon architectural fieldwork, this paper uses four examples from three provinces to illustrate the ways in which the global fluidity of architectural ideas were communicated, valued, and localized. For example, a building might appear to be a traditional house, yet the spatial organization within the house is westernized; the facade of a building can feature certain western architecture elements, yet it is constructed using traditional Chinese materials and methods; a building can be an integration of two sets of architectural ideas with or without any clear spatial or programmatic transitions. This paper argues that when facing the Western influence, people in the rural hinterlands of China had different attitudes and understandings of this new set of ideologies than the people in cities. Rural residents did not simply view these new ideas as exemplars of the canon or the classical and let Western style buildings dominate their vernacular landscape, as in the case of many coastal cities of China. Having various modes of exchange with the West, the local craftsmen of the hinterlands selectively adopted certain aspects of Western architectural ideas and sensitively integrated them into their local building traditions. Meanwhile, the diverse local interpretations of these new ideas not only represent local sociocultural contexts, but also reveal the ways in which ideas were transmitted, deconstructed, and accepted. Moreover, this exchange of ideas between the global and the local challenges the existing categorical analysis of the interaction between the canon and the vernacular by seeking a new identity for the latter.

Architectural History, Version 21.Now

Damon Caldwell
Louisiana Tech University

Pasquale DePaola
Louisiana Tech University

“I shall conduct this course not so much basing it on chronology, that is on a list of facts which follows a certain historical timeline, but according to a methodological process whose aim is to look at the essence and most salient qualities of those facts.” E.N. Rogers, 1964

In his opening lecture to the course History of Modern Architecture, Ernest Nathan Rogers, a pivotal figure in Italian architectural education, questioned the fossilized approach of historical education, which disconnected the historical narrative from its studio counterpart. Rather than separating, Rogers used continuity as pedagogy, both in the design studio and history seminar. His process was based in conducting a critical approach by way of analyzing architectural trends and movements with emphasis on their methodological frameworks/ideas rather than their finalized stylistic or visual outcomes. Fast forwarding to now, this paper attempts to question the current utility of history in architectural education by examining when history cohabitates with what is a predominantly a studio-based structure.

More specifically, this paper analyzes a particular and methodologically integrative way of teaching architectural history so that its pedagogy, outcomes, and expectations are complementary with those of the design studios. Our organizing principle is based on the following questions: should we judge architecture purely on its historical domain? Does architecture progress out of a specific genealogy of forms, or, do architects develop ideas and concepts, which are rooted in particular cultural and social frameworks? What is applicable and useful knowledge derivable from historic analysis? Every design involves historical/theoretical investigations, and architecture can be understood as a practice of concepts and ideas; that practice may precede history as often as history precedes practice. Within this framework, history assumes the role of “repertoire” for applied knowledge, where the analysis of particular buildings does not depend on mnemonic tasks, but centers around cultural and social ideas as well as predisposing constructional techniques. By implementing this method across our history sequence, we are creating an integrative pedagogy in which architectural history is taught by using specific ideological and topical ranges linked to the design studio. This approach emphasizes specific natures of architectural production: composition (i.e. sequencing, ordering systems, geometry, etc.), tectonics (materiality, structure, assemblies), and culture (politics, science, zeitgeist, etc.), which are also analyzed in specific course assignments. Design studios reinforce history’s usefulness by direct analyses of historical precedents, which are not understood as a mere collection of stylistic artifacts, but rather as conceptual, tectonic, and organizing machines. This has created a pedagogical palimpsest where before using something, our students have to understand its essence first. To make architectural history relevant in this modern age, when information is easily accessible from multiple devices, knowledge, as connected and actionable design information, must be the pedagogical target.

A Turning Point in the Study of Eileen Gray’s Modern Architecture

Kathryn Bedette
Kennesaw State University

This paper presents a historiographic sketch of the attribution of Eileen Gray’s architecture, demonstrating a turning point in how her work is credited and in the acknowledgement of its historical importance. Two types of texts form the basis of this sketch: architecture history and theory textbooks and monographs of Gray’s work. Discrepancies between the two sets are noted and both types are examined for word use, attribution, and the extent to which the work is discussed in terms of its design and the design’s relationship to larger discourse within the profession. The turning point in scholarship on Gray’s architecture is signaled by changes in attribution and in the critique of her work offering meaningful conclusions. These shifts take place from one monograph to the next (1-4) and, tied to the ongoing renovation of E.1027, create new criteria in the assessment of texts used for teaching history of architecture and architecture theory courses that cover the development of modern architecture. From this review, what’s the singularly most important thing missing in how we teach Eileen Gray’s contributions to Modern Architecture? Her work in textbooks. A full analysis of Eileen Gray’s approach to architecture—through examples of her built work and design positions taken—is now necessary for any thorough discussion of modern architecture, specifically in architecture history textbooks. This argument is based on three main points. One, Gray’s work was initially omitted from surveys and the modern “canon” because she was a woman. Two, scholarship has reached a turning point in both the attribution of her work and in the discussion of its historical importance. And three, her work provides case studies for student learning that expose key contributions to the discourse on modernity not offered by other architects at the time. While Joseph Rykwert (5) argued for the significance of Gray’s work in 1971, a review of twelve survey texts available thorough 2019 shows only five mentioning Eileen Gray or her work. (6) The number implies a largess that doesn’t actually exist. In one case only her last name is given in a footnote. (7) In another two, her name is only included within a list of other names. (8)(9) Eileen Gray’s projects exist where experience, time and space interact. It’s time to make room for her architecture and design positions in how we talk about modern architecture in our histories, anthologies, surveys and sources: in our textbooks and course readers. What’s at stake is the canon. And it’s time for Eileen Gray.

1. Philippe Garner, Eileen Gray (Taschen, 1993)
2. Peter Adam, Eileen Gray: Her Life and Her Work, 2014 ed. (Schirmer/Mosel, 2008)
3. Caroline Constant, Eileen Gray (Phaidon, 2007)
4. Jennifer Goff, Eileen Gray: Her Work and Her World (Irish Academic Press, 2015)
5. Joseph Rykwert, “Eileen Gray: Two Houses and an Interior, 1926-1933,” Perspecta 13/14 (1971): 66-73.
6. This sample includes: Francis D. K. Ching, Mark Jarzombek, and Vikramaditya Prakash, A Global History of Architecture, 3rd ed.; William J. R. Curtis, Modern Architecture Since 1900, 3rd ed.; Michael Fazio, Marian Moffett, and Lawrence Wodehouse, Buildings Across Time: An Introduction to World Architecture, 5th ed.; Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History, 3rd ed. World of Art.; Abigail Harrison-Moore and Dorothy Rowe, eds., Architecture and Design in Europe and America 1750-2000; Richard Ingersoll and Spiro Kostof, World Architecture: A Cross-cultural History; Hanno-Walter Kruft, A History of Architectural Theory: From Vitruvius to the Present; Harry Francis Mallgrave and Christina Contandriopoulos, eds., Architectural Theory: Volume II: An Anthology from 1871-2005; Marian Moffett, Michael Fazio, and Lawrence Wodehouse, A World History of Architecture; Christian Norberg-Schulz, Meaning in Western Architecture, 1980 ed.; Nikolas Pevsner, An Outline of European Architecture; Marvin Trachtenberg and Isabelle Hyman, Architecture, from Prehistory to Postmodernity, 2nd ed.
7. Harrison-Moore and Rowe, Architecture and Design in Europe and America 1750-2000, 340.
8. Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History, 334. 9. Ching, Jarzombek, and Prakash, A Global History of Architecture, 794.

9:00am
Gaslamp 5

Incorporating Theory and Criticism

Moderator: Yoonjee Koh, Boston Architectural College

A Metate, Micaceous Clay Pottery, and the ATLAS-1 Trestle: Mining the Interior Structures of Objects to Build Architectural Theory

Nora Wendl
University of New Mexico

Julian Maltby
University of New Mexico

Architectural educators are leading a drive to teach history and theory beyond the canon, as evidenced most recently by Theory’s Curriculum, a project by e-flux. It is well understood that the selection of texts for a theory course creates the infrastructure of learning theory. However, this paper extends that concern to the question of the theory assignment. Architectural theory is imbibed textually—and yet, it is precisely our disciplinary emphasis on objects and images that allows the students who are ESL to excel despite language barriers. Architectural theory, even when focused on non-canonical examples, can still be isolating when it reaches students in a non-embodied form, giving an advantage to students for whom English is a first language. I argue that the projects we construct for these theory courses can begin to level the playing field without diluting the rigor of expectations. In a graduate architectural theory course that I teach at a Hispanic-serving institution, I ask each student to select an object (not a building) that brings together the environment and humans. First, they write observations of it—answering questions about its materiality, authorship, use, and lifespan, tracing its materiality back to its origins. This is a study of what Elaine Scarry refers to as the “interior structure” of objects: how objects “internalize within their design an active ‘awareness’ of human beings…that is not limited to their use.” Students then write a thesis statement connecting the interior structure of this object to a larger question within the theory of the built environment—examining architecture as related cultural object. The thesis statement is explored in a 4,000-word paper, and the paper is supplemented by a 3-minute film which seeks to reveal a tangible connection to the object and the theory underpinning it. For a student who chose to study an inherited metate, he observed the materiality of this tool for grinding corn—volcanic stone—proposing that “notions of time that are embedded in the cosmic scale of a metate can provide valuable insight into the way we design and construct buildings,” connecting the physicality of the metate to his own family’s origins, modernism’s avoidance of time, and the “dormant tectonics” of building with volcanic rock, which he’d learned during an internship in Mexico City. The companion film used footage of volcanic eruptions in Mexico, and the student using the metate, combining source and tool across time. This theory class was organized thematically around contemporary architectural topics that were presented in both canonical and non-canonical texts. However, arguably, it was this project that allowed students to locate their own culture within their questioning of an object, and then extend this study to questioning architecture—inevitably, a way around centuries of colonization that have informed our architectural sensibilities. For this session, I propose presenting the structure of this course, and three architectural theory papers it produced: papers whose origins were found in a metate, in the micaceous clay pottery of indigenous Taos Pueblo people, and in the ATLAS-1 Trestle at Kirtland Air Force Base, all objects specific to cultures within this region, and containing within their interior structures—as the students prove—theories applicable to the built environment.

The Detective Stories Studio: The Function of Fiction in Shaping Architectural Education

Angeliki Sioli
Delft University of Technology

Engaging the example of the “Detective-Stories Design Studio,” a master-level course taught in 2018, this paper explores the role of literature and fiction in architectural design education. It sets off tracing the interdisciplinary history between space and literature from Romanticism onwards, and then focuses on the phenomenological work of Paul Ricoeur and Richard Kearney, whose work has paradigmatically drawn connections between fiction, architecture and space. Based on their theoretical positions, the studio argues for the importance of an architectural student’s “literary imagination”; an imaginative capacity which emerges from words and literary descriptions and uniquely leads to the creation of new and original spatial ideas and images. Following the philosophical underpinnings of this pedagogical approach, the paper presents the studio’s overarching structure; a structure based on three selected detective stories by Edgar Allan Poe. Poe’s work is not only the first of the specific literary genre but also a body of work that remains surprisingly relevant nowadays. The conversation moves, through selected student examples, on the three distinct ways the studio employs literature to explore contemporary design issues. Touching on the ongoing conversation on atmosphere, space and emotional reconstruction (Zumthor, 2018) the first method introduces literature as an exploration of a place’s lived experience. It examines fiction’s potential to communication spatial qualities and moods, allowing us to understand how these intangible elements influence our perception and appropriation of a given environment. Based on these characteristics the design work focuses on the creation of a device that allows the students to attune with the specific atmosphere that Poe’s short story “The Masque of Red Death” uniquely captures. The second approach touches on literature’s imaginative power to suggest unexpected and many times overlooked uses of space. Based on “The Purloined Letter” the design-work heavily draws from the spatial investigative techniques analyzed in the short story to proceed with an unconventional site analysis, one that allows the students to find space where they think there is not. In todays overpopulated urban environments literature reminds us of our capacity to fabricate inventive and unexpected conditions of space. The third methodology emerges from literature’s capacity to point towards paramount sociological conditions of space, in a way that allows us to reconsider and reevaluate our own everyday reality. Poe’s “Black Cat” introduces tangibly the issue of domestic violence in the contemporary American society and the design assignment works towards a deep understanding of the conditions that we need to address as architects in related projects. The paper concludes with a contextualization of the suggested methodological approach in relation to the renewed architectural interest in literature, as manifested the last ten years through interdisciplinary conferences and publications both in North America and Europe. The paper places “The Detective-Stories Studio” in this contemporary context and evaluates its significance and uniqueness in the ongoing conversation.

Architectural Caveats: the Pierian Spring

Cynthia Jara
University of Minnesota

A little learning is a dangerous thing; Drink deep or taste not the Pierian Spring…

– Alexander Pope, “An Essay on Criticism” (1711)

During the mid-1980s, two independent scholars – Peter G. Rowe (Rice University/Harvard) and Donald Schön (MIT) – tried to identify processes common to the activity of design. In an effort to discover essential patterns, both researchers gathered data through the observation of student behavior in a studio setting. Although their findings were in many ways similar, ultimately their conclusions differed. Despite intervening developments, the legacy created by their two studies remains embedded in contemporary teaching.

Pursuant to concepts developed by George Pólya, Rowe argued that heuristic methodology – the ability to generate and apply a metaphor or rule in solving a problem – is central to design. A preliminary article summarizing this conclusion appeared in the fall 1982 issue of the Journal of Architectural Education. Rowe subsequently published a full-length book, Design Thinking, in 1987. His formulations were received with enthusiasm, not least because they appeared scientific – a lifeline extended to a profession losing stature among disciplines perceived to be more firmly grounded in tangible knowledge. In retrospect, it seems Rowe may simply have joined a broader trend in post-modern thinking. By the close of the twentieth century, heuristic techniques had become popular across many disciplines. Regardless of the source, they became relevant and have remained prominent in architectural theory and pedagogy. Although some critics view heuristic logic as a reductive, problem-solving approach to design, this assessment does not garner universal agreement.

Schön first published The Reflective Practitioner, How Professionals Think in Action in 1983, followed by Educating the Reflective Practitioner in 1987. Although his observations were in many ways similar to Rowe’s, Schön’s interpretation was more open‑ended, emphasizing the nature of dialog between student and instructor. Schoen’s direction would eventually dovetail with developments in epistemology – specifically, Hans-Georg Gadamer’s arguments with regard to hermeneutic philosophy.

In a contemporary context, a number of elements recognized as essential to the process of design cross into the hermeneutic realm. Among these, dialogue between whole and part, the extent to which words engage visual representation, the importance of iteration generally – all speak to the “hermeneutic circle”. In addition, the creative potential implicit in the process of identifying and refining a set of questions pertains to the Gadamer/Collingwood elaboration of Socratic inquiry known as the “logic of question and answer”. The relevance of structured play likewise falls within the hermeneutic domain.

Assuming the modes of thought Rowe and Schön initiated lie within architecture’s Pierian spring, my paper inquires into the origins of their work and attempts to untangle misunderstandings in the legacy that has followed. My goal in pursuing this inquiry is based on the premise that studio practice encourages heuristic strategies because their singularity is more readily grasped, whereas the complexity of hermeneutic principles renders them less accessible. At issue is the extent to which the oversimplification of design theory – particularly when it becomes embedded in studio curricula – entails consequences that negatively impact students. As Alexander Pope observed in 1711, incomplete knowledge can be a dangerous thing.

Assembly & Sequence

Matthew Celmer
Syracuse University

Assembly & Sequence was an ARC 500 Selected Topics seminar created and taught during the Spring of 2019 at the Syracuse University School of Architecture. This course is a hybrid integrating architectural design, process, theory, and representation. Assembly & Sequence is about disparate, complex, episodic, non sequitur and sometimes confusing architecture. An architecture of multiple forms, ideas and accumulation. The formal investigations touched on heterogeneity, friction, overlap, adjacency, threshold, disintegration, collage, superimposition, juxtaposition, proximity, plurality, fragments, vectors, montage & composites. The course structure is influenced by and borrows strategies from the Exquisite Corpse a well-known surrealist parlor game. The game entails collectively assembling a series of drawings. Each collaborator adds to the composition in sequence and is allowed to see only the end of what the previous person contributed. The game results in distinctly different elements sharing the same space, creating startling associations and combinations. This simple game questions and blurs the idea of individual authorship by producing a collaborative collective artifact. The course was an experiment in the methodology of disintegrated design. We embraced the idea of a building as a collection of autonomous parts and examined their integration as a whole. The course was structured around a series of exercises progressing in scale. Each exercise is linked and are to be understood as a continuous project that was developed for the entire semester. For the initial exercise the students worked as individuals on the design of neatly compartmentalized spaces. Course Structure: The course consists of three primary design exercises, each building upon the last culminating in a team project. Each exercise entailed the production of drawings for review and discussion. After each exercise students were required to ‘pass’ there work on to other students and were not allowed to use what they produced from the previous exercise. Exercise 1: Students worked individually to sample, cut and reassemble architectural elements to create Spatial Primitives. Each student at the end of this exercise designed a small fragment of the final projects. Exercise 2: Students were assigned Spatial Primitives to accumulate, modify, mold, distort, collage and superimpose forming Accumulated Masses. Students were not allowed to use their own Spatial Primitives in this exercise. Exercise 3: Working in teams students assembled the Accumulated Masses into a final Collective Artifact. Each team created a system of constraints that guided the construction of their final artifact. Teams were not allowed to use Accumulated Masses they previously produced. Course Goals To develop an understanding of the term disintegrated design and its manifold applications in architectural design. To understand the history and development of design as assemblage in architecture and associated artistic fields. To become familiar with alternative modes of collaboration and authorship in the architectural design process.

9:00am
Gaslamp 1

Building Pavilion

Moderator: TBD

Droplet Pavilion

Steven Beites
Laurentian University

The pavilion explores the development of a novel hybrid façade system combining the fluid and ornate qualities of Ultra High Performance Concrete (UHPC) with the ephemeral and performative qualities of an Aluminum Composite (ACM) rain screen system. Situated in one of the city’s oldest ravine networks, the project seeks to develop a distinct narrative thread through the commemoration of the area’s local heritage, highlighting the important connections with this site’s history and its natural environment. Within this region, 4 large ravines converge as three tributaries merge into the main river resulting in a series of river streams and undulating topographic conditions. The resulting rivers and creeks had a significant impact on the area’s history, representing an important source of energy for early European settlers and shaping the physical and social fabrics of the region. The development of the pavilion within the urban park, consisting of a reflecting pool in the summer and community ice rink in the winter, further emphasizes this thematic direction. As water is an integral element to the ravine systems, which serves to shape the landscape and the area’s history, it is equally significant within the context of the community park, speaking directly to the importance of engagement, encouraging involvement and activity on the part of residents, visitors and patrons alike. Accordingly, the translation of this idea begins with an abstracted representation of water droplets and ravine conditions. The imagery is reinterpreted and extrapolated to generate a unique set of 3-dimensional sculptural shapes that give abstract expression to the mappings. The result is a series of self-similar modules, symbolic of water droplets that fit together and form intricate, three-dimensional UHPC façade panels. The combinatorial pieces are formally similar yet characteristically different; operating at different scales, the pieces come together to form a varied yet uniform waterscape across the pavilion. A series of openings are introduced into the UHPC modules giving way to a blue anodized aluminum material. As the viewer moves past and around the pavilion, different wavelengths of light are reflected back to the audience. The result is an ever-changing colour gradient with iridescent highlights that create the illusion of light fluttering across water. The pavilion demonstrates a novel ACM-UHPC composite rain screen system that employs a double-wall construction to protect it from the elements through its outer layer and simultaneously providing thermal insulation and preventing air leakage through the inner cavity. It explores the potential of rich material effects that can extend beyond superficiality by addressing structural and performative criteria, all the while producing enhanced architectural spaces. Exploring composite materials, computational tools and digital fabrication within a performative and conceptual framework, the design symbolizes the importance of water to the region, paying tribute to the area’s distinctive ravine system and the community activities in and around the pavilion.

ASHED - The South Sioux City Community Orchard Facility

Jason Griffiths
University of Nebraska-Lincoln

ASHED is a showcase for South Sioux City’s Ash Reclamation program and the first cross-laminated timber building in Nebraska. It was built in response to the growing concern for ash tree depletion by the Emerald Ash Borer Beetle and a need to prepare students with knowledge of engineered lumber construction. ASHED was conceived as a building that would compensate for the loss of ash trees in local parks. It was important that the timber reappeared within the community and that the building’s program would support the growth of trees in the new orchard. ASHED resulted from UNL’s new Design Research Studio curriculum which allows students to deepen individual research agendas. For the Design-Build DR studio these themes included engineered lumber (digital design/site/delivery/assembly procedures), DB pedagogy, American architecture and wood, contemporary craft, and beetle-kill timber reclamation. This period of research resulted in several students getting accepted and presenting papers at the 2017 ACSA conference.

The DR studio also allows students to study for two continuous semesters with one instructor. In some cases, students could refine individual components of the project through Independent studies. This continuity was essential for the completion of the project which lasted over two years. Student research was also conducted in parallel with a grant-aided faculty research (from the USFS) to fund three years of teaching, travel, post occupancy analysis and professional development. As a result of the “Great Plains CLT Market Development through Architectural Education” award provided further impetus to the level of research that was subsequently applied to the ASHED project. In this way ASHED allowed us to speculate on the future of Design-Build pedagogy. It provided students with deep learning in self-selected areas of expertise and produced high levels of craft, CLT fabrication experience and knowledge of local environmental issues.

Tarkeeb Gatehouse + Garden

Michael Hughes
American University of Sharjah

William Sarnecky
American University of Sharjah

Located in a region where service personnel endure long shifts under challenging circumstances this project sought to elevate basic human dignity and comfort while extracting experiential delight from a small-scale design opportunity. In this specific case, security personnel at the university are required to spend 70% of their 12-hour shift outdoors even though the existing gate house provided no shade in an environmental context characterized by excessively high temperatures and extreme humidity. In response the team incorporated lessons from the regional vernacular to mitigate solar gain through passive cooling strategies while also expanding the program to include a shaded observation porch for the guard and a garden space with a Mae Sabeel (public drinking fountain) to serve the larger community of security guards, landscape workers, and janitorial staff as well as students. The steel bar-grate mashrabiya, (vernacular window screen), and tinted roof panels serve as a parasol to reduce solar gain and cooling loads on the interior booth.

Operable windows and porches provide cross ventilation that further reduce the need for air conditioning. In addition to these passive strategies the project has been designed to accommodate rooftop solar panels once the local energy grid is developed to accept net metering in the coming years. Pedagogically the project introduced full-scale learning opportunities in a region increasingly divorced from its traditional material culture. While design-build education has become common in American architecture schools, this project is located in a cultural context that has largely abandoned the act of making. Following the local discovery of oil in the mid-20thcentury regional craft traditions have been in decline resulting in a subsequent shift from self-sustaining subsistence production to the importation and consumption of global goods and material culture. Design-build serves as a point of resistance to the homogenizing effects of this trend.

Groundwork

Adam Modesitt
Tulane University

Groundwork is a multipurpose outdoor classroom, event space, and community facility run by a local nonprofit organization. The project provides a new space for the nonprofit, which educates local grade school students about environmental conservation, water management, and urban agriculture. Groundwork takes cues from the local urban fabric and simultaneously creates a distinctive, vibrant, colorful space befitting the work of the nonprofit. Anchoring the project is a 410 square foot outdoor classroom and gathering space, framed by two 16-foot concrete gable-profile walls, and paved with custom concrete tiling. The walls and pavers are dyed blue with pigment in varying proportions, to create a gradient from dark blue at the ground, to nearly white at the top of the gables. Patterned relief on the surface of the concrete walls was created through the application of a custom set of CNC (computer numerically controlled) form liner.

The surface patterns design evokes a bush hammer concrete finish associated with Brutalist architecture, but brightly-colored concrete takes the place of the somber grays tones typically associated with Brutalism. The outdoor classroom connects multiple adjacent landscaped workspaces and opens up to the street via an operable, wood slat slide gate. In addition to the outdoor classroom, the project scope also includes landscape design, water infrastructure, perimeter fencing, signage, gardening stations, and storage facilities. Groundwork was designed, built, and constructed in a single semester by a team of 14 students. Studio pedagogy integrated research on local vernacular building traditions, and involved working closely with a diverse group of local stakeholders. Throughout, the studio sought to combine, hybridize, and discover new possibilities for architecture at the intersection of advanced digital fabrication technologies and sustainable, vernacular methods.

9:00am
Salon D

Special Focus Session

Process of Design to Realization: TAD Authors Panel

Moderator: Caryn Brause, U. of Massachusetts, Amherst & Julian Wang, Pennsylvania State U.

Session Description

This session features presentations by authors recently published in Technology | Architecture + Design in the issues of OPEN and TRANSLATION. It will include four research works ranging from early-stage generative design explorations employing digital technologies to material and technical experiments that make use of a broad array of strategies to translate design concepts into built realizations. Presentations will feature original research that alters the processes by which design ideas are realized. Diverse research methods from analysis of professional practice archives to case studies, modeling, and mapping consider interdisciplinary issues across various scales of the built environment.

Sekou Cooke
Syracuse University

Jessica Garcia Fritz
South Dakota State University

David Newton
University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Gundula Proksch
University of Washington

9:00am
Salon E

Special Focus Session

ARCHITECT as Designer-Developer-Builder

(City Making one infill project at-a-time)

Moderator: Hector M Perez, Woodbury University & Antje Steinmuller, California College of the Arts

Session Description

While the most widely accepted business model for an Architect’s Practice is to provide professional services in exchange of a fee, in San Diego a small group of entrepreneurial renegades are challenging that old mode of operation.

Over the last 15 years, San Diego has become a ‘hot-bed’ for the alternative Architect-Developer-Builder practice. This ‘movement’ has been spear-headed by Woodbury School of Architecture MS Arch RED Faculty and Alumni and collectively this small band of architectural entrepreneurs have designed innovative housing models and developed sensible and profitable small infill projects throughout San Diego. Students in this most unique studio-centered Real Estate Development Program learn to identify development opportunities, quantify scale and costs, qualify financial viability and most importantly monetize their sweat equity.

Ted Smith
The RED Office

Mike Burnett
Foundation for Form

Matthew Segal
Jonathan Segal Development Co.

9:00am
Balboa 1

Special Focus Session

Unaccredited Undergraduate Architecture Program Discussion

Moderator: Elisa Kim, Smith College & John Barton, Stanford U.

Session Description

This session will offer a chance for unaccredited undergraduate architecture programs to discuss their needs, share best practices and develop community amongst schools. It is hoped that this session is the start of a larger effort of sharing and collaboration.

11:00am
Salon B

Housing Community

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

Urban Housing Development in Western China - Case study of Yinchuan City

Aleksandra Krstikj
Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey

Meng Wang
Zhejiang University of Finance and Economy

Hisako Koura
Kobe Design University

Moises Gerardo Contreras Ruiz Esparza
Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico

Recently, a boom in urban development has been reported in the inland provincial centers of China. Previous studies focused on housing on a national scale or examined the conditions in east costal mega-cities, but very few empirically analyze the housing of inner cities with weaker market economy and less local entrepreneurial skills. Our hypothesis is that in 2-tier Chinese cities with weaker market economy the location of public programs, such as social housing and key facilities, directly influence the commercial housing development pattern, which in turn determines the sustainability of the land consumption. Thus, the aim of this research is to assess the impact of public programs on the pattern of housing from the perspective of density, efficiency and spatial equity management, through an empirical study of Yinchuan City, Western China. The assessment is based on GIS spatial analysis. Moreover, we propose a new method based on Voronoi diagram to assess the spatial equity in allocation of public facilities. The findings are: 1) In the market-oriented period, local governments of inner cities still lead the housing development with allocation of public programs; 2) However, in Yinchuan the distribution of public programs is not consistent with the city´s spatial strategy; 3) Moreover, the distribution of public facilities does not promote horizontal spatial equity in the city. In order to efficiently guide the housing development, the city needs to reconsider its strategy in allocation of public programs based on more integral local context research that will include market mechanisms, historic place significance and spatial equity considerations. In China, where there is a massive number of smaller inland cities with unprecedented urban expansion like Yinchuan, the Voronoi diagram method can be a useful modeling tool for adjusting the distribution of public programs to achieve equitable and sustainable outcomes.

A Typology of Very Small Dwellings: Lessons from 15 years of Permanent Supportive Housing

Christina Bollo
University of Illinois

Amanda Donofrio
Bergsund DeLaney Architects

Skyrocketing land and construction costs in urban North America have created a groundswell of interest in the design of very small dwellings. In response, recent building and zoning code changes in the United States and Canada have significantly reduced the minimum size of a dwelling: from 290 to 220 square feet in San Francisco and from 400 to 300 square feet in New York City. Market-rate developers can react to these new opportunities by turning to examples of well-designed small dwellings from non-profit developers, who have been building such apartments in permanent supportive housing projects for people transitioning from chronic homelessness. This paper presents an analysis of small dwelling units from North American permanent supportive housing (PSH), formulating a set of spatial descriptors within a taxonomical framework.

The chief societal concerns of very small dwellings relate to health and wellbeing for the residents. This paper includes a review of the literature related to single-person households (Chandler, et al 2004) and crowding health outcomes, in particular crowding as it relates to single-person households as compared to larger, shared housing environments (Evans 2002). We also frame the issues of light and air, orientation and view, through literature on residential wellbeing (WHO 2006).

The methods for this study are a close typological study of very small (less than 400 square feet) studio apartments in permanent supportive housing projects. The unit plans from 24 projects are collected, measured and classified. This inventory includes two examples from each building— a unit that is fully accessible and a typical unit. The relationships between spaces in each dwelling are analysed and compared using justified Space Syntax diagrams, an abstraction that allows for cross comparison between dissimilar floor plans.

In addition to accessibility, the classifications understood by this study include: width and depth and width/depth ratio; entry sequence; kitchen type and kitchen location; storage size and allocation; bathroom fixture types and layout; ventilation strategies; window size and operability; and furniture flexibility. The results of the analysis show that even in a very small footprint, small design decisions have large effects on the circulation and spatial arrangement of the unit. The placement of the kitchen and the choice of bathroom entry have a particularly strong effect on downstream design decisions.

These findings have several implications for the field of housing design, as simply shrinking market-rate dwellings for the sake of efficiency is not good design. PSH units are a resource for all human-centered designers, whether developing market rate or subsidized housing units. This research will further benefit designers and developers of housing for formerly homeless individuals, as many new communities throughout the country are recognizing the benefit of PSH when addressing the pervasive spread of homelessness. The patterns noted in this study will allow teams to learn from existing unit designs and focus on drawing from established design goals and guidelines.

Home in the Era of the Platform: Nine Theses on Decentralized Domesticity

Nicole Sylvia
University of British Columbia

Lőrinc Vass
University of British Columbia

Roy Cloutier
University of British Columbia

As the age-old notion of ‘sharing’ passes into contemporary capitalism to become the basis of ‘the sharing economy,’ its character changes fundamentally—taking on deeply aporetic implications. On one hand, the networks of this platform capitalism—from Uber to AirBnB and beyond—allow a distributed, fluid mode of exchange, fostering forms of flux and openness that exceed the comparatively-static models that preceded them. By altering patterns of interaction, consumption, travel, and more, digital sharing platforms are re-shaping the way private and public spaces are conceived and used for work, leisure, and living. On the other hand, this fluidity is too often accompanied by a dissolution of stability and mutual obligation, leading to precarious forms of life. The sharing economy is always in motion, for better or for worse. This inherent aporia of the sharing economy intertwines with similar tensions within architecture itself which, over the past two-plus decades, has come to embrace an ordering logic uncannily similar to that of neoliberalism. Termed managerialism or, following late Deleuze, modulation, this tendency sees designers increasingly working infra- to the everyday. Seeking to define networks that not only foster but reshape and actively harness an entrepreneurial self-organization and emergence, these projects operate in a post-political manner peculiarly similar to the platform-capitalists of Uber or Airbnb. The distributed, immanent forms of power that underlie both sharing platforms and the current preoccupations of architecture raise a host of questions—not least around issues of agency and ethics. How might sharing recapture its heritage in commoning, solidarity, and collective action? Could spatialized counter-platforms form a basis for sharing of both space and agency itself? In turn, what are the architectures—the collective forms—of such a model, and how might they point toward new modes of urban coexistence? In this way, sharing becomes an avatar for our understandings of the city itself, suggesting ways to collectively construct a truly con-vivial city—excavating from the etymological root of the word a generous, ebullient sense of living-with. Drawing upon the work of philosopher Ivan Illich, this paper develops a critical notion of conviviality as both a critique and a further development of the contemporary modulatory position in architectural and urban theory. It uses the history of distributed, platform-based forms of collective housing as a cipher with which to decode the internal contradictions of distributed-agency models—both in architecture and in the sharing platforms of platform capitalism. Taking domesticity as its focus, it builds from precedents both within architecture (Hannes Meyer’s Co-op Zimmer; micro-units; and Baugruppen) and without (the many ‘sharing economy’ interventions in the housing market, as well as historic practices of sharing) to develop a greater understanding of how power, control, and architectural intervention operate within networked models of domesticity. Re-telling these histories draws out the tendencies latent in such models—in turn suggesting new capabilities of the architect within systems and institutions of commoning. In such a reworking of the dominant spatial practices of neoliberalism, architects can open new ways to reclaim sharing from the sharing economy.

Between Living and Consuming the Territory: Apan Social Housing

Marcel Sanchez-Prieto
Woodbury University

Adriana Cuellar
University of San Diego

Apan social Housing is the Research and Experimentation Laboratory Center for Housing by INFONAVIT (Institute of the National Housing Fund for Workers), located in a reserve owned by the Institute “San Miguel del Arco” in Apan, Hidalgo Mexico. The laboratory center will be used as a meeting point for reflection and improvement of housing financed by INFONAVIT. The project is part of the research “From The territory to the Inhabitant” commission by INFONAVIT among 90 proposals to study rural housing in Mexico, the selected 32 built housing prototypes exemplify an approach for different climatic and cultural needs. The participating proposal is for the community Hindu, a population of 4000 inhabitants located on the outskirts of the city of Tecate, Mexico, mostly engaged in the production of materials made with clay and mud, highlighting pottery, pots and bricks. A marginalized community founded more than 20 years were their economic activities carried out remain similar and continue to lack services such as paving, garbage collection and in some sections lack electricity and drinking water. Its location is characterized by being among the three municipalities of greatest impact, east with Mexicali the state capital, west with Tijuana one of the cities with greatest economic boom and south with the port of Ensenada, over time the community has remained to some extent isolated from these three cities, both for its lack of interconnectivity and infrastructure at the state level and internationally with the United States, now the Hindu community is under rapid pressure of densification due to its strategic centralization to its neighboring cities. With little separation between living and working areas, the prototype is an approach to contemporary rural territory. This approach includes a change of interest over focuses merely on densification and more on the different parameters that make up the housing, the proposal therefore seeks social interconnection, prioritizing the interstitial space as patios and voids within the territory, what is fundamental is the integration between architecture, nature and infrastructure. It is an evolving housing prototype and even opportunistic in adapting to the growths between family nuclei and their sources of work. The growth components are modules that can be incorporated in any of the sides of the central nucleus. The system expands the factors of FAR Floor area ratio to TAR, Transformation area ratio and PAR Productivity Area Ratio, evaluating and measuring adaptability in coordination with the use of space, the economy of means and resources of family growth. The house takes the conditions of the Hindu community as a perceiver of contemporary and traditional rural ways of life, where the courtyard and the relationship with the territory is of utmost importance, not as an adjacent space but as the central one in which the location of the house is articulated, this close relationship is emphasized as a space that gathers and frames the chores of the family, both domestic and work, between the production of bricks and family ties.

11:00am
Gaslamp 4

Urban Ecology

Moderator: Nichole Wiedemann, University of Texas at Austin

Beyond the Centralized Paradigm: Retrofitting Cities with Decentralized and Adaptive Infrastructure for Sustainable Success in Transportation, Energy, and Water

Courtney Crosson
University of Arizona

Our cities will increasingly rely on decentralized infrastructure for the collection, storage, and distribution of renewable resources (e.g. rainwater harvesting, photovoltaic micro-grids, electric autonomous vehicle hubs). Existing centralized transportation, energy, and water systems will need to be retrofitted to integrate these new decentralized system technologies. How this will occur is yet to be fully understood. To maximize benefit and minimize disruption, models for the integration of these three systems and coordinated retrofit of existing infrastructure is needed. This paper provides a replicable model for academia to join with practice and local governments to fill this knowledge gap in one mid-sized city toward future policy adoption and implementation. This paper presents three adaptive solutions of how to accomplish new sustainable infrastructure beyond the existing centralized paradigms for transportation, energy, and water. Led through an university upper-level interdisciplinary design studio (MLA and B.Arch), the project used spatial mapping, quantitative analysis, and design inquiry to achieve carbon, energy, and water neutrality for downtown Tucson, Arizona in year 2050 through decentralized system integration. The solution is comprised of five district hubs that served as the points of collection, storage, and effective micro-distribution of resources and technology. This paper outlines the projected population growth and resource use for the study area and the corresponding methods through which year 2050 neutrality is numerically accomplished. Rendered visions of the three infrastructures incorporated into the projected 2050 city fabric are presented. Illustrative narratives on how the new infrastructure and urban design positively contributes to livability are discussed. The paper concludes that by supplying a pathway to realize integrative and adaptive systems that work in tandem with current, dominant centralized grids, long-term city resilience and sustainability (i.e. net zero carbon, energy, water) goals are achieved. The Tucson model has secured multiyear investment from private and public partners as a result of the phase one work and has won awards for education (Arizona Forward’s State Educator Award), design (Arizona AIA State Design Award for Regional and Urban Planning), and leadership (ACSA/AIA National Practice and Leadership Award).

Salty Urbanism: Towards an Adaptive Coastal Urban Design Framework to Address Sea Level Rise

Jeffrey Huber
Florida Atlantic University

Lawrence Scarpa
University of Southern California

Keith Van de Riet
University of Kansas

The coastal zone is home to some of our country’s most valuable ecological and socio-economic assets. Many of these locations are being demonstrably transformed due to large-scale human and biophysical processes such as urban development, climate change, and rapid sea-level rise (SLR). The result is a potential loss of myriad ecosystem services such as storm protection, wildlife habitat, recreation and aesthetics, among others. South Florida, home to the Miami metropolitan area, stretching from West Palm Beach in the north to Key West in the south, is emblematic of such conditions. Its rapidly growing population of ~6.5M, much of which sits below 10 feet NAVD88, is already experiencing a growing flood risk linked with SLR. In an inevitable future of rising seas, south Florida communities will be faced with increased vulnerability due to permanent inundation, frequent heat waves, diminishing precipitation, intensifying hurricanes and catastrophic die-offs. This risk is compounded by rising groundwater tables due to the region’s porous limestone geology that will cause flooding far from coastal shorelines and a complete loss of the regions drinking water supply. Policy and design solutions are not truly considering the necessary transformation that will be required to live and work within a saturated coastal environment. The old paradigm of flood management and control will need to change from prevention, to acceptance. Population will decline as businesses and individuals decide the costs are too high to maintain regional assets and decommissioning of the built environment will prove to be an enormous challenge. These challenges will transform regional tourism, housing, waste management, energy and food production, as well as require more resilient and sustainable modes of living and infrastructure development capable of transitioning with the changes. Nascent economies that emerge from climate change and SLR will form as the only viable response to living in a saturated and salt-laden landscape. South Florida is a floodplain and the various ecotypes and land uses provide a potential set of adaptation responses. The various studies, workshops, and reports developed over the last 20 years have indicated that urban areas must “make room for water” (retreat) by restoring ecosystem services along coastal and inland urban areas. Furthermore, studies regarding what types of engineered living infrastructure would be most effective in south Florida lack integrative design thinking for a salty transition. Ecosystem service modeling, and a place-based landscape palette informed by an understanding of regional ecosystems is essential. The challenge is to develop flood-adaptive urbanism which will require ecological, cultural, social, legal, and political design tools, methodologies and frameworks. HydroSTEADing redesigns the built environment through a framework of strategic decline and resettlement patterns in response to these unique challenges. A framework of resettlement and abandonment (urban decommissioning) across both temporal and spatial scales as it relates to urban and landscape transformation was prepared through design thinking and technological approaches. To stay requires conventional practices of land ownership and management that promote separation from ecological networks to be questioned and translated into a new HydroSTEADing framework. Development of hydro-centric homesteading (amphibious, floating, raised, submerged, etc) strategies were explored and developed with new languages of wetness, buoyancy, tethering, anchorage, hosting (scaffolding), raising and suspension—steading— are considered. Left behind are preconceived notions of environmental control, mitigation, resistance, and permanence for a symbiotic existence, adapting to a dynamic, transitioning and fluid environment.

Biological-Imaginations for the Biscayne Bay Estuary

Alfredo Andia
Florida International University

Thomas Spiegelhalter
Florida International University

Introduction Most of the South Florida region was a subtropical wetland until just 100 years ago. In the land natives called Pa-hay-Okee (grassy river), we build a 20th-century industrial sprawl. This paper we examine how can we reimagine Miami with the advent of major future technologies such as synthetic biology and events such as climate change? Synthetic Biology In this publication we develop a speculative Vision/Plan for the Biscayne Bay estuary. We envision infrastructures in Biscayne Bay that grow by themselves using synthetic biology. Synthetic Biology is the fastest growing technology in human history and is allowing us to edit, rewrite, reassemble, and even create completely new artificial living organisms. DNA reading (DNA sequencing) and DNA writing (DNA synthesis) is the fastest growing technology in human history. Synthetic Biology was born as a field in 2006, but it is growing by factor of 10 every year (compare it to computer technology that is following at a factor of 1.5 per year following the Moore’s law). Growing at a factor of 10 per year Synthetic Technology is creating tools such as CRISPR Cas9 (2013) or base editor (2018) that is transforming all kind of sectors. From changing the color of the eyes of fly in university labs to completely transforming the food industry by creating better crops, lab-grown meat, perfumes, and materials such as lab grown spider silk. It is also in the process of transforming how we develop materials and soils. Biological Biscayne Based on previous research on a gene circuitry that uses bacteria that has the ability to precipitate calcite to solidify sand we envision a series of islands over the shallow Biscayne bay as way to create a “living shoreline” for relocating populations from Miami Beach. The system of islands work like atolls that will create defenses for currents and surges. Projects Synthetic Biology has the possibility of make living matter fully programmable. This seemed very difficult in 2003 or 2005, as it was difficult to do computer programming 70 years ago, However at factor of growth of 10 in just 15 years this is not only possible but as explained above it is beginning to fully transforming all kind of industries. In this project we began to investigate biological processes that makes organisms to develop its shape. Each project we work on is developed based on particularly desirable condition and we study a particular processes of growth. It is a very new field so there are practically no references and no tools. We explore in the paper the problems involved in developing this field. Contemporary architectural processes are inadequate. We explain how we develop tools and working hypothesis to develop these projects.

An Architecture of the Sea: Nationalizing the World’s Maritime Commons, Then and Now: 2009 | 2019

Elisa Kim
Smith College

Though May 12, 2019 marked the 10-year anniversary of the 2009 deadline for countries claiming sovereign territories along the ocean floor, countries around the world continue to file claims to extended sea-bed territories on the ocean floor. In what is the largest land-grab since the colonial project, and in accordance with the provisions of article 76, paragraph 8 of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), 84[1] sovereign territorial claims on the ocean floor have been made for the purposes of resource extraction and exploitation. This exhibition, which opened on the 12th of May 2019, renders visible these new territories in an attempt to establish the space of the sea as a site for design, and to shift the frame of urbanism to the space of the sea. The exhibition specifically undertakes two case studies: the undersea territory claimed by the Republic of Namibia, and the undersea territory claimed by the Republic of Kiritabi. Though often hidden from view, spatial practices at sea are both designed and informal, enabling and shaping life both at sea and on land. In the same way that architecture and urban spaces exist within broad, deeply intertwined conditions—construction logistics, cultural shifts, infrastructures, materials, and political economies—oceanic space can also be described as the manifestation of multiple agendas. In particular, spatial practices at sea can be seen as both tools of cultural empowerment and complicit with forces of globalization and conflict. In the case of Namibia, the project follows current sea-floor diamond mining practices which are expected to expand into Namibia’s deep/extended sea-bed territory upon the acceptance of its claim by the UNCLOS. Namibia’s diamond-mining sector accounts for 12.3 percent of annual GDP. Though terrestrial diamond mines are expected to be exhausted of their yields by 2050, diamonds have been discovered in the sea floor off the coast of Namibia. In a partnership with diamond corporation De Beers, the Namibian Government has been actively mining its shallow coastal waters for gem-quality diamonds. The Republic of Kiribati and the undersea territory it has claimed remain at the center of the global deep sea mining exploratory operations. In advance of what is expected to become a flurry of commercial deep-sea mining enterprises, a handful of mineral exploration contracts have been recognized by the International Seabed Authority—the Republic of Kiribati among them. The two case studies raise questions about the extent of architecture’s hinterlands, and the ways in which productive landscapes figure into the architectural and urban imaginary. In fact, the oceans play a vital role in processes of urbanization and should themselves be described as spaces of urbanization and spatial practice. In making these sites of extraction and exchange visible, this project attempts to establish the ocean floor as a viable site for architectural and urban intervention. Finally, this project additionally renders visible a new oceanic spatial order, one in which vast undersea resources have the potential to create imbalance in the current geopolitical world order. In the largest sovereign territorial expansion since the colonial project, the depths of the ocean and the allocation of resources therein problematize the geopolitics of the Global North/Global South binary, which erases any space that occupies an interstitial position between North and South. In tracing a new world oceanic order, the project demonstrates the urgency of rethinking the world’s oceans at the heart of global urban and spatial connections, rather than separate from them.

[1] As of May 23, 2019.

Assessing the Vulnerability of Coastal Buildings to Storm-surge Flooding: Case Study: Miami Beach (South Beach), Florida

Sonia Chao
University of Miami

Benjamin Ghansah
Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology

Coastal cities such as Miami, Florida, are vulnerable to natural disasters such as coastal flooding. However, not all the infrastructure within a city will be equally affected by damage from flooding. Assessing the vulnerability of each infrastructure to damage is however a complex task due to the complex interdependencies between city infrastructures, as well as the significant uncertainties associated with the impacts of flooding. Based on nascent research method that assessed the vulnerability of individual infrastructure to flooding, the goal of this study was to develop a modified model that can be used to analyze the vulnerability of coastal buildings to flooding in the City of Miami-Florida. A modified form of the Papathoma Tsunami Vulnerability Assessment (or PTVA) model was developed by this study for flood vulnerability assessments of three transect areas in Miami namely Miami Beach, East Little Havana and Sweetwater. The physical and socioeconomic characteristics of these transects reflect the typical built-up areas and their surroundings in the whole of the City of Miami, as well as the Eastern Seaboard (ES) of United States (US). As modifications, this study adjusted the mathematical equations used for computing Buildings Vulnerability (Bv), Protection Factor (Prot), and Structural Vulnerability (Sv) in the original model. The parameters for computing the building vulnerability and protection factor were informed by intensive qualitative and quantitative field and desktop surveys of the topographic, structural and socio-economic characteristics of the chosen areas. Though most of the parameters tend to be generic to the original model, peculiarities of the structure, preservation conditions, construction material, and base elevation of the buildings and the topography of these areas demanded modifications to the original model to suit the ES of US. Expert knowledge of the authors about the study area, and in this fields of research were combined with the data obtained to modify the original model by assigning weights to each individual parameter, and normalizing the parameters by common denominators. These helped in accounting for differences in the contribution of each parameter to vulnerability, as well as standardizing the model across board. The model was then tested in a Geographical Information Systems (GIS) environment to assess the vulnerability of buildings to flood in Miami Beach. As initial result, the model identified the vulnerability of each building, on a scale of minor, moderate, average, high and very high vulnerability. While the research is ongoing, this initial result is a good indication that the model can be used to assess buildings vulnerability to flooding in other area of the city of Miami as well as the ES of US. This result also confirms nascent research that the magnitude of the effect of flooding of buildings differs according to the peculiar characteristics of the individual building, and its immediate socioeconomic and physical environment.

11:00am
Gaslamp 3

Digital Practice

Moderator: TBD

Impact of Louvers Geometry of Windows on Cross-Ventilation in a Generic Isolated Building (Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) Simulation)

Maryam Kouhirostami
University of Florida

Mahtab Kouhirostamkolaei
Noushirvani University

Mahya Sam
University of Florida

Ashish Asutosh
University of Florida

Charles Kibert
University of Florida

Designing an optimum natural ventilation system is not so simple, however, it has a long-lasting effect on human health and economic. There are many different items that have significant impacts on the air flow rate in a building such as windows design. For instance, the design of window louvers can have a considerable influence on the cross-ventilation flow. Many studies on natural ventilation have been released in the past; however, a review of the literature shows that most of them just considered the angle and direction of louvers. The purpose of this research is finding the optimum geometry for the design of a louvered window to improve the quality of natural ventilation in a classroom. This paper presents a Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) simulation in the classroom setting. The study analyses natural ventilation flow with five different geometry of louvers in the generic isolated classroom with the following dimensions: 21’*27’*12′. To make the study valid the geometry and dimension of the wind tunnel is the foundation for this simulation. Hence, dimensions of the domain are 70’*240’*12. The louvers operate in a circular motion about a central pivot and all louvers are at 30-degree. Wind direction is 15-degrees toward the north-west. The results show that aerodynamic geometry, which is a simple wing shape, has the best impact to improve air movement through the louvers. This design would increase the air velocity from 2.6 f/s to 3.9 f/s. Furthermore, it would conduct air to the upper side of the room. This result would be beneficial for designers and industry to design and produce high-performance façade in the future.

X-Maps: A Computational Method for Space Planning Using Multi-Variate Occupant Comfort

Elham Soltani Dehnavi
University of Washington

Christopher Meek
University of Washington

The indoor experience can be affected by several environmental conditions, including visual, thermal and acoustic comfort, Indoor air quality, layout, and location. There are physical metrics for each aspect that are calculating the occupant’s comfort by considering the acceptable ranges defined by widely recognized standards. There are also other factors such as occupant’s characteristics like metabolic rate and clothing insulation, building’s characteristics, and outdoor climate that influence the indoor conditions. Unfortunately, some of these aspects are conflicting with each other, and most of the studies have looked at the comfort metrics in isolation. Also, in most cases, putting the same weight to all factors can result in inappropriate conclusions. So, it is essential to consider all or at least a number of these comfort factors and rank them in order to have a better performance in office indoor environment. The physical factors related to comfort and productivity inside office buildings are location, metabolic rate, clothing level, window-to-wall ratio, glazing type, shading, natural ventilation, and heating and cooling set-points. These parameters can be used as simulation inputs to provide better space planning process. This study suggests two types of analytical prototypes that overlap different comfort factors in office buildings and can give designers an overall and broader perspective on space planning and comparing different zones inside the office from a comfort point of view. Computer simulation is used to provide the information needed. The simulation tools include the Grasshopper and plugins such as Ladybug, Honeybee, and EnergyPlus. In order to produce the X-Maps (experience maps), annualized climate-dependent percent of time-based metrics are selected for comfort evaluation and simulation. The first prototype is zone-based; its purpose is to identify the position relative to the window, and it goes through the Y-axis. For the zone-based simulation, the floor plan is divided into zones parallel with the window that the depth of each zone is 1.5 meter because most of the office workstations are 1.5m by 1.5m. The Thermal Comfort Percentage (TCP), Percentage of People Dissatisfied (PPD), spatial Daylight Autonomy (sDA), and Annual Sunlight Exposure (ASE) is calculated for each zone. The results are overlapped in the charts in order to choose the best zone. So, the effect of metabolic rate, clothing insulation, location, window-to-wall ratio, and improvements such as glazing type, shading, and heating and cooling set-points can be analyzed separately, and the best configuration could be selected. The second prototype is grid-based; its purpose is to find the spatial location in the XY axis and the optimum direction for the desk to be facing. For grid-based simulation, the floor plan is divided into 1.5m by 1.5m grids and the Occupied Thermal Comfort Percentage (OTCP), Daylight Autonomy (DA), and Annual Sunlight Exposure (ASE) is calculated for each grid. The results are overlapped on the graphs to select the best grids for locating the workstations. Also, the desk orientation is done based on the glare potential. These prototypes can be used in several design phases, including conceptual design, design development, post-occupancy, and renovations.

The Real-Time Section: Augmented Construction and Representation

Gabriel Fries-Briggs
University of New Mexico

Technologies guiding building production introduce architectural techniques of vision. Beyond changes in the management of design and construction, BIM, integrated with new hardware such as augmented reality devices, produces new forms of perception and visualization. These shifts in the social-visual order of architectural production are abundant. They can be seen in promotional videos for augmented reality headsets as well as architectural schools and offices. An analysis of images and videos made with augmented reality hardware (integrated with BIM) suggests ways that architects can relate emerging construction technologies to aesthetic and disciplinary forms of knowledge, connecting historical conceptions of representation and abstraction to emerging modes of practice.

Rather than relegate technologies of modeling, managing, and visualizing to presentations and construction administration, this paper examines the way these technologies transform spatial perception, pedagogical methods, and ideologies of representation. With the ubiquitous use of computational imaging technologies and modeling software, the ‘drawing’ as the site of design has been dramatically altered. Section has been tethered to certain ways of working on, understanding, and abstracting architecture. The x-ray, panorama, and information rich environments suggested by recent visual hardware require an addendum to the section drawing as a medium tethered to the social and spatial characteristics of buildings.

These techniques of vision also find historical affinities with spatial vocabulary such as phenomenal transparency. The spatial superimposition, simultaneity, and ‘space-time’ established by Rowe and Slutzky in part presage the optical qualities of augmented construction sites. Computational image environments put forth a version of real-time transparency. Bringing new techniques of vision into the discourse around section is a means to build a foundation for examining their effects and impact. It suggests that these techniques both build on historical formats of representation and are fundamental to new modes of understanding architecture.

Performative Aesthetics: An Exploration into DLT-Ceramic Composite Wall Assemblies

Steven Beites
Laurentian University

The paper presents the early development of a novel mass timber-ceramic wall assembly that speaks to the importance of sustainable, performative and aesthetic potentials within the built environment. The work seeks to broaden the extensive body of research conducted on the robotic additive manufacturing of customized ceramic clay printing for large scale construction, exploring the possibilities of clay for its performative and formal capacity. It employs the use of an industrial robotic platform not as a device for automation, but for its ability to produce unique elements through a craft-based methodology in search of variability and specificity. Recognizing the limitation of ceramics as a load bearing material, it seeks to uncover its potential when combined with mass timber. As a result, dowel-laminated timber (DLT) is explored for its numerous advantages including structural efficiency, low toxic manufacturing processes, its inherent renewability and speed of construction. With the renewed interest in mass timber structures in recent years, we are nonetheless confronted with the realities of this unique natural material. Being both anisotropic and hygroscopic, wood’s inherent moisture-storage capacity makes it susceptible to water and air infiltration, vapor migration and condensation. Whether it be dowel-laminated or cross-laminated, timber’s sensitivity to moisture and its vulnerability to the elements renders itself unsuitable as a cladding application. Responding to this need, traditional cladding solutions for mass timber assemblies generally do not offer sustainable alternatives nor do they provide heightened aesthetic interest. As a result, the paper explores the production of material effects that go beyond superficiality by addressing the shortcomings of exposed mass timber wall assemblies through the development of a protective ceramic ventilated façade system that combines ornamental effects with performative criteria.

Towards Functionally Graded Bio-ceramic Composites in Additive Manufacturing

Alexandros Tsamis
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Ana Cecilia Toledano
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Mohammed Alnaggar
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

With anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions warming up the Earth’s atmosphere and triggering climatic changes around the world, the construction industry faces a challenge: providing a resilient built environment for an increasingly growing population while at the same time reducing the use of cement and the demand for energy use from heating and cooling in an increasingly urbanized world. Construction using Additive Manufacturing (AM) has gained traction in recent years, promising benefits such as: reduction in waste, building time, and need for formwork; customization and fabrication of complex geometries at no extra cost; and the reduction of human labor and on-site hazards. While implementations of AM in construction have mostly used cement[1] as a primary material, alternative technologies have been developed that use earth abundant, low carbon renewable materials, as can be seen in projects such as Gaia by WASP[2], as well as efforts from the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC)[3]. This proposal extends the efforts of building with renewable materials by developing a Functionally Graded Materials (FGM)[4] 3d Printing technology to create a bio-ceramic composite wall using lime, clay and hemp bast fiber. Unlike traditional AM technologies that deploy a singular material, FGMs are a type of composite that use different materials according to where they are needed, with gradient transitioning between them to achieve non-linear interphases. We work under the hypothesis that with FGMs we can achieve better strength to weight ratio than regular ceramics and at the same time allow through the 3d printing process to express in form the functional requirements of material change. While used in fields other than architecture, FGM in AM has been proposed but not yet implemented in construction[5][6]. In this paper we will present advances in 3 areas of inquiry. 1. An envelope-to-structure example has been designed, in which a space-truss interior structure grades into an insulation material, and then grades back into the structural material as the surface. 2. A multi-material extruder for large scale 3d printing has been implemented. We will demonstrate a custom G-code format for design to construction using the designed structural envelope as an example. Unlike typical g-code, here we include the rate of change of material mix as part of the instructions for printing. We will showcase different tests of on-the-fly material mixing achieving gradient transitioning between materials and discuss affordances as well as limitations for the method. 3. We will show experimental results of characterizing different bio ceramic composites as candidate materials for construction. Hemp fibers and shells are chosen as natural reinforcement materials while clay and lime are chosen as matrix materials for their availability and benign carbon footprint. Different mixes are examined for their structural and thermal behavior in a structural envelope, their ecological footprint is analyzed in relation to current materials in AM and their ability to be used as candidate materials for AM is quantified. This type of construction and material logic allows for the use of locally available materials in ways that are customized for optimal material use and environmental performance. FGM for AM allows better mechanical and thermal performance thus becoming a viable alternative to conventional, high embodied-energy materials currently in the main stream of research in AM.

[1] C. Gosselin, R. Duballet, Ph. Roux, N. Gaudillière, J. Dirrenberger, Ph. Morel, Large-scale 3D printing of ultra-high performance concrete – a new processing route for architects and builders, Materials & Design, Volume 100, 2016.

[2] The First 3D Printed House with Earth | Gaia | Stampanti 3D | WASP. https://www.3dwasp.com/en/3d-printed-house-gaia/. Accessed 28 Jan. 2019.

[3] “Pylos – Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia.” IAAC, https://iaac.net/project/pylos/. Accessed 10 June 2019.

[4] Mahamood, Rasheedat Modupe, and Esther Titilayo Akinlabi. Functionally Graded Materials. Springer, 2017

[5] Jorge Duro-Royo, Laia Mogas-Soldevila, Neri Oxman, Flow-based fabrication: An integrated computational workflow for design and digital additive manufacturing of multifunctional heterogeneously structured objects,Computer-Aided Design,Volume 69,2015 [6] Grigoriadis, Kostas. 2014. Mixed Matters: The Problems of Designing with Multi-materials.

11:00am
Gaslamp 2

Modernisms and their Sites

Moderator: Robert Weddle, Drury University

The Mies Mystique: Irreducible Opposites in the Work of Mies van der Rohe

Andrew Gleeson
Iowa State University

“I am a deeply superficial person.” – Andy Warhol

A historiographical chronology of Mies van der Rohe uncovers a constantly transforming reassessment of his work in changing eras. In the 1920s he was an avant-garde revolutionary, in mid-century he was the paragon and fountainhead of minimalist modernism, in the 70’s and 80’s he was faulted for his inhuman aesthetic reductivity, and in the 1990’s he was reassessed as a more complex figure than previously understood. Publications, such as, The Presence of Mies, and, Mies in Berlin/America revealed new ways to conceptualize his work. Today he’s a well-worn symbol of the elite European architect in a necessary, refreshing, and fruitful landscape of broader inclusivity. However, in the canon of Western Modern Architecture Mies is the most mysterious; an architect who conceals multitudes with his silence. Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier are comparative dead-ends, their fruits digestible as products of their individual creative labors.[i] But Mies’s works are like tofu, his buildings act as tabula rasa in which new meanings can be absorbed within the constant, restless, and shifting tastes of architectural scholarship. Mies cultivated this mystery by saying one thing and doing another. Like Andy Warhol he reduced explanations of his design process to the point of rationalist banality. But a closer understanding of Mies’s philosophy betrays a much deeper surface, first suggested in Fritz Neumeyer’s masterful book, The Artless Word. A new English translation[ii] of highlighted passages in Mies’s personal copy of Der Gegensatz (The Opposite), a book by the catholic philosopher Romano Guardini, gives a clue into how mysteries within Mies’s works are cultivated. In a series of highlighted passages there is a thorough rethinking of the nature of paradox. Life exists in a unified oppositeness; in an opposingly constructed unity. It’s about opposites, not contradictions. Life is essentially a paradox… Not “synthesis” of two moments into a third. Neither a totality for which the two sides comprise “parts….” One side of the opposing side cannot be deduced from the other, and cannot be discovered in the other…We are thus constrained to recognize both. For Mies, these passages revised the understanding of dualities as laid out by classic German philosophy. Hegel supported the synthesis of contradiction through a reposed resolution, but this passage declares an irreducible simultaneity present within paradox (This also interrogates a more complex vision than the one laid out by Robert Venturi years later). Architecture is a relevant discipline for exploring dualities because it is a discipline without a true home, one steeped in both the rational and the spiritual, serving immediate and abstract needs. Reframing a transitional period in Mies’s career—the projects for the Ulrich Lange and Hubbe House[iii]—within the context of his meditations on Guardini reveals a new complexity embedded in the work, helping to de-conceal the mystique of Mies. His quest to understand the nature of dualities is the underlying flavor of his work after the 1920s and must be explored further.

[i] There is more quanity than mystery in the works of these masters. Alvar Aalto, on the other hand, is a different kind of mysterious—a figure for another paper.

[ii] Commissioned by myself and translated by Dr. Gerhard Schutte, professor Emeritus of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin.

[iii] These examples are important transitional masterworks that were never built. Eisenman discussed some of the formal contradictions in these houses, but approached them polemically, as a critique of the minimalist Mies. Within the framework of Guardini these formal inconstancies appear as attempts to work through some of the inherent paradoxes Mies was grappling with in architecture and will be explored further in this paper. Eisenman’s reading is reductive in its critical stance and should be built upon. See: Eisenman, Peter. miMiSes READING: does not mean A THING. From, Mies Reconsidered (Chicago, IL.: Art Institute of Chicago, 1986), 86-98.

Ribbon | Exploring Contemporary Form

Nathan Howe
Kansas State University

The history of theorizing over typology in architecture is centuries old. Quartremere de Quincy begins to discuss the idea of typology in the 18th century by classification – tent, cave and hut de (Quincy 1803). Contemporary, Durand codifies architecture within type (Durand 1802). The modernists add with ‘functionalism,’ where form is derived as component and aesthetic efficiencies. The postmodernists weigh in with Adolf Rossi’s reclassification of typologies regarding geometric form and historical archetypes (Rossi 1966). These various theories put into context the contemporary design ideas of their day. However, there appears to be new versions of form currently infiltrating design that have not been classified. They also can not be reduced to codified parts. There is now a plethora of starchitects that are creating formal edifices. These latest sculptural gestures are not steeped in efficiencies, precedent or classification of architype. What they truly are, are buildings whose singular idea of form making directs every decision. They are beholden to the purity of an original form thesis. There is a growing number of morphological formal types percolating in contemporary architectural practice. The author has dubbed these form types tubular, ribbon, peeling, shed and fractal. Each adhere to a geometric construct that is embedded in every major design decision. In the works from Zaha Hadid’s office, BIG, Sir Norma Foster’s office, Diller Scofidio + Renfro and less famous firms Shuhei Endo, Architrend Architecture and Ron Arad Architects, to name but a few, these geometric complexities have left an indelible mark on contemporary design. Within these designs the question is not whether the form fits the building type – a home, a church, a museum. The question is, does the building hold clearly and well to the formal strategy that drives the entire thesis? In Tubular Form Type | understanding design complexity the tubular form type was dissected. Building on this work, this paper will introduce the ribbon form type. The study will use the case studies of the following works: Vagelos Center, Springtecture B, Villa T and Holon Museum by noted architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Shuhei Endo, Architrend Architecture and Ron Arad Architects. These buildings expose new ideas of form making that is based on formal morphological constructs. Within this form generator there is embedded an idea of how to still answer the pragmatic questions of opening/light, architectural program, touching the ground, and termination of form that architecture has always grappled. However, in this new form type the answer to these questions are built around the sculptural motivation of ribbon. Inspired by the work of Anthony di Mari, which uses simple diagrams to discuss complex ideas (di Mari 2014), this paper will also explain the ribbon through diagramming. The diagram will help to make the argument and communicate the principle issues and the opportunity of architectural celebration the ribbon offers. This work endeavors not to provide a stylistic formula for design but to reveal basic principles of contemporary form and develop a critical study to help the next generation of designers understand key design issues within geometric complexity. References Quatremère de Quincy. ( 1803). De l’architecture égyptienne: considérée dans son origine, ses principes et son goût, et comparée sous les mêmes rapports à l’architecture grecque, Paris, 239. JNL Durand. (1802). Précis des leçons d’architecture données à l’École polytechnique, Paris, 5. Rossi, Aldo. (1966) The Architecture of the City. Typological Questions, 35-41 Moneo, Rafael (2014). Oppositions. On Typology, 22-44. Anthony di Mari. (2014) Conditional Design: An introduction to elemental architecture.

Golf in the Desert: Midcentury Modernism and Hydrodiplomacy in the Coachella Valley

Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió
Cornell University

In 2013, the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, whose reservation lies across Palm Springs, California, sued for the rights to a large aquifer under the reservation. The Coachella Valley Groundwater Basin stretches from the north of the Valley to the Salton Sea, and supplies almost all the water which allowed the Valley to become one of the world’s largest golf resort areas—120 golf courses carpet the Colorado Desert, consuming 37 billions gallons of water annually—as well as a key site of midcentury modern architecture. The celebrated homes designed by architects like Albert Frey, William F. Cody, and Donald Wexler, with their legendary framings of the desert and golf landscapes, would have been impossible without a largely invisible infrastructure of water pump stations, storage reservoirs, and associated pipework for human consumption and irrigation. Many of the famed homes and estates, such as Sunnylands, designed by A. Quincy Jones & Frederick Emmons in the early 1960s for Walter and Eleanor Annenberg, were constructed with, and are still supplied by, privately-operated water wells. Since then, however, excessive water pumping and inadequate replenishment have severely depleted the aquifer and led to its progressive contamination—a key reason for the Tribe’s lawsuit. This paper explores the governance history of the Coachella aquifer—what UNESCO calls the necessary “Hydrodiplomacy” of “transborder aquifers”—through an exploration of the ways in which midcentury modern architecture made this resource fungible, for utilitarian and aesthetic uses, and thus also produced certain geopolitical relations between the Tribe and the State. Indeed, one of the first projects to explicitly address the aesthetic and economic potentials of the groundwater basin was the Agua Caliente’s Palm Springs Spa, designed by Cody in collaboration with Wexler and Harrison in the late 1950s. This project was the first in the nation to develop a long-term lease of Native American property, thus establishing a crucial precedent for transborder aquifers. Through the highly complex coordination of myriad technologies and local, state, and federal agencies—from the US Geographical Survey to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Department of the Interior, and the US Congress—Cody and his team effectively produced an allocation of water uses between different geopolitical entities, at an architectural scale. To this day, there exists only one recognized transborder aquifer agreement with allocated volumetric water rights, between France and Switzerland. As Hydrodiplomacy experts argue, the main impediment to developing these complex transborder agreements lies in the technical and political challenges of governing a subterranean resource across different jurisdictions. The history of midcentury modern architecture in relation to the Coachella Valley aquifer provides an early case study of how these geo-technical and geo-political relations are crafted—how territorial and architectural expertise determines the formation of rights to natural resources. As architects and designers ponder how to build more equitable infrastructures for addressing climate change—through initiatives like a “Green New Deal”—the historical perspectives of Native American and Indigenous peoples like the Agua Caliente, centering water use rather than speculation, is key.

Bright Colors Beneath a White Shroud: Scandinavian Postmodernism and The Conservative Imaginary

Ian Erickson
University of California, Berkeley

Modernism lives on in Scandinavia. In most western countries, Modernism’s aesthetic project began to unravel in the 1970s-80s into a more diverse set of experiments that have been termed “Postmodern”, and the Modernist social project more or less died with the failure of Pruitt-Igoe. The Scandinavian countries, however, are typically understood as having a continuous legacy of Modernism that began with luminaries like Aalto and Utzon and was inherited by contemporary retailers like Ikea, whose modernist sensibilities are branded and commodified with terms like “Scandinavian simplicity”. Nonetheless, there was a dynamic Postmodern movement in Scandinavian architecture (1975-1990), with activity primarily concentrated in exhibitions like ARARAT at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet (1976) and journals like Arkitektur (1976-2008). The phenomenon of Scandinavian Postmodernism is obscured by academic historiography, as widely read surveys of both Scandinavian architecture and Postmodern architecture regularly fail to include Scandinavian Postmodernism.[i] Perhaps the only Scandinavian figure present in the canonical discourse of Postmodernism is the phenomenologist Christian Norberg-Schulz[ii], but the colorful and symbolically charged design work of his close friends (and fellow Norwegians) Jan Georg Digerud and Jon Lundberg remains obscured behind the white shroud of Scandavian modernism.[iii] Just as Scandinavian Postmodernism challenged Modernist aesthetic regimes, it also challenged the Modernist model of a functionalist welfare state for universal subjects. The movement of Scandinavian Postmodern architecture coincided with the political shifts such as the Swedish “Third Way Policy”, a government structure based on concepts like “personal freedom” supported by radicals on both the left and right of the political spectrum. In this way, the discourse around Postmodern architecture in Scandinavia became a site where “emancipatory movements like feminists, environmentalists and radical leftwing movements, overlapped (unintentionally) with conservative forces struggling towards a more liberal society.”[iv] Postmodernism’s symbolism and historical grounding captured the Scandinivian conservative imagination. The political contention and overlap in Scandinavian Postmodern discourse is best described through Danish Architect and writer Ernst Lohse’s article “Our Construction Should be Based in the Irrational” (1984; translated into English for the first time for this paper) where, despite Lohse’s own sympathy for the environmental movement, he adopts familiar conservative rhetoric, bemoaning the loss of Western culture and the limitations of the welfare state. Lohse and his contemporaries predicted that in the 1990s Scandinvian architecture would be characterized would by its integration of regional myths and powerful graphic symbolism. This proved only partially true, as the singular architectural image that characterized Scandinavia in the 1990s was historical churches set on fire as tensions between the left and right about architecture, history, symbolism, and politics literally ignited architecture itself.[v] This paper will reconstruct the obscured history of Scandinavian Postmodernism, locating discourse that reveals the movement as a site of contention and overlap between diverging political radicals and its appeal to the conservative imagination. The paper will do this through introducing the first English translations of key texts published in Arkitektur and Kristeligt Dagblad. [i] See: Miller, William Charles. Nordic Modernism: Scandinavian Architecture 1890-2015. Crowood Press, Limited, The, 2015. Farrell, Terry, and Adam Nathaniel. Furman. Revisiting Postmodernism. Newcastle upon Tyne: Royal Institute of British Architects, 2018. [ii] This due largely to the fact that he was a part of the American Academy through his position at Yale and as such wrote primarily in English. [iii] See: Thiis-Evensen, Thomas. The Postmodernists Jan & Jon. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1984. [iv] Mattsson, Helena. “Revisiting Swedish Postmodernism: Gendered Architecture and Other Stories.” Konsthistorisk Tidskrift/Journal of Art History 85, no. 1 (2016): 109-25. doi:10.1080/00233609.2015.1116605. [v] These church burnings were largely pinned on/attributed to youth in the Scandinavian Black Metal Scene, itself a community plagued by contentions between the right and the left

11:00am
Gaslamp 5

Building Science in the Classroom

Moderator: TBD

A Biophilic Approach to Net-Positive Design: Studio Lessons

Mary Guzowski
University of Minnesota

This paper discusses the curricular objectives, exercises, design tools, methods, and outcomes of a 7-week graduate studio that explored a biophilic approach to net-positive design. We may be well aware of the performance and pragmatic aspects of net-positive design, but what are its poetic, atmospheric, and health implications? While the curriculum agenda for this net-positive studio emphasizes energy performance for heating, lighting, cooling, and building operations, students are also challenged to go beyond energy and resource efficient design. Aesthetics, beauty, health, and well-being are as important to net-positive design as are reducing waste, energy consumption, and environmental impacts. Biologist and naturalist E.O. Wilson popularized the term “biophilia” or “love of life” in his 1984 seminal text Biophilia.1 Wilson’s “Biophilia Hypothesis” suggests that there is an “innate emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms.”2 A biophilic approach to net-positive design encourages students to investigate the intersections between regenerative design responses to natural systems, habitat, environmental and bioregional forces, passive strategies (for daylight, natural ventilation, and passive solar), and health and wellbeing. A biophilic approach to net-positive design provides an opportunity to explore experiential and health dimensions of design that may not be readily apparent from a performance-based focus. As a required 7-week graduate design studio in the second year of a three-year M.Arch program, the studio explores the development and assessment of design intentions, strategies, performance metrics, and tools to integrate biophilic and net‐positive goals. Drs. ______ and _____ , the Director and Associate Director of the ____ Center for Spirituality and Healing at the University of ______ acted as clients for the studio, and provided a building program for the future ____ Center for Health and Wellbeing. Terrapin’s 14 Patterns of Biophilic Design provided strategies on the relationship between aesthetic, atmospheric, and healing dimensions of biophilic design to support and foster more sustainable and regenerative approaches to architecture.3 The paper discusses the intersections between biophilic and net-positive design objectives, methods, tools, and outcomes of six sequential exercises that developed over the course of the 7-week design studio. The iterative exercises used physical and digital study models, envelope details, sketching, photography, time-lapse video, and qualitative and quantitative assessments. Poetic, pragmatic, and performance-based design issues, trade-offs, and implications are iteratively considered over the six exercises:

Exercise 1: Biophilic Site and Building Journey (Sense Journey)

Exercise 2: Biophilic Massing & Passive Potential (Nature and Energy Matters)

Exercise 3: Biophilic Section & Envelope (Outside-in & Inside-out)

Exercise 4: Biophilic Structure & Materials (Health, Comfort & Atmosphere)

Exercise 5: Biophilic Materials & Responsive Envelopes (Seasons & Time)

Exercise 6: Biophilic & Net-Positive Integration (Experiencing Place, Room & Section)

The paper provides teaching exercises, methods, and tools to engage students in the simultaneous exploration of net-positive and regenerative design strategies as they intersect and support architectural experience, health, and wellbeing from a biophilic perspective.

ENDNOTES
1. Edward O. Wilson, Biophilia, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984, 1.
2. Stephan R. Kellert and Edward O. Wilson, “Biophilia and the Conservation Ethic,” Biophilia Hypothesis, Washington DC: Island Press, 1993, 31.
3. Terrapin Bright Green, “14 Patterns of Biophilic Design,” Terrapin Report, https://www.terrapinbrightgreen.com/reports/14-patterns/.

Overhaul the Curriculum, Not the Course

Marleen Davis
University of Tennessee-Knoxville

Like many architecture programs, faculty at XXX University perceived a disconnect in the students’ design work that rarely reflected understanding of concepts from their structures, materials, and other technology courses. Since the 1980’s, the school has had a signature “integration studio” pairing a design course with a technology integration course, with faculty teams for every studio. The faculty wondered why this kind of alignment of the design and technology agenda had to wait for the fourth year. After three years of curricular discussion and hundreds of hours of work, the XXX faculty has taken a radical approach to integrating design and technology in a major curriculum overhaul of its B. Arch. Program. The faculty had the following goals in mind: Expose students to technology challenges and issues early in the curriculum, within a design framework. –Interrelate technology course content and design studio goals where possible. –Eliminate stand-alone silos of technological content for single courses, taught by content “experts.” –Utilize diverse faculty expertise in multiple points across the curriculum in collaborative ways. –Invent new pedagogical formats and teaching platforms. –Balance the perspective of the “generalist” while providing short workshops led by content “specialists.” –Provide hands-on learning experiences for students to apply concepts to design. –Respect faculty perspectives and the diversity of experimentation in the design studios. –Leverage and expand the digital agenda of the school. –Avoid technological hegemony and promote design leeway and engagement. The faculty eliminated all of the stand-alone structures, technology, and materials courses. These were replaced with a series of nine short half semester design / technology courses, each generally aligned with the studio sequence and each containing a blended content related to climate, site, enclosure, materials, structures, building systems, design, and performance. The curriculum of XXX University represents a new paradigm for minimizing friction between design and technology categories of courses and faculty. Our experience may be of interest to other programs that face similar challenges.

Surf and Turf; Integrating Resilient Design Early in the Curriculum

Craig Griffen
Jefferson University

Recent reports paint an increasingly grimmer picture about the pace of climate change. While we cannot back off from efforts to reduce the waste of resources and energy, we now must recognize it is too late to stop the coming changes. Therefore, it feels ethically necessary to modify our teaching strategies to train future architects early on not just how to build more sustainably, but also how to deal with harsh environmental conditions they will encounter in coming decades. This paper describes pedagogical revisions that link a second-year studio and a building technology course with the goal of introducing and applying principles of resilient design at both the ocean shore and a rural wooded setting to cover a range of possible strategies. Specific curricular goals of these 2 major parts are summarized in the enclosed chart. (see chart, image 1) Procedure Similar to a lecture/lab format, the tech course serves as a lecture to the studio’s lab, introducing students early on with background in sustainable and resilient design strategies such as highly-insulated envelopes, passive heating and cooling, clean energy, and daylighting. Concurrently in studio, the first project, Resilient Design on the Coast is introduced and precedent studies of coastal resilient building techniques are conducted. Since it’s sited on the ocean, this 5-week project focuses on methods to combat the effects of rising seas, storm surge and hurricane-strength winds on a building; such as a raised concrete structure and impact resistant facades. Additionally, the requirement of a ramp for the elevated floor was an excellent vehicle for introducing principles of ADA/Universal Design. The ACSA Resilience Design Challenge/Concrete competition was a timely fit as the project program. The second 7-week project, Resilient Design in the Woods, was set in a natural site to focus on resilient design issues related to a forested location; such as extreme temperatures, strong storms, drought and forest fire. The program of a Native American archeology center was chosen so students could reflect on how original inhabitants controlled their climate before the advent of mechanical building systems. To support this second project, concurrent lectures in the tech course focus on knowledge of the building envelope; including thermal transfer and insulation, and non-combustible cladding and roofing materials. (see images 2 & 3). To explain how their material choices will create a durable, resilient structure and envelope, each student creates a color rendered wall detail that describes the heavy-duty structure, as well as the thermal, sun-shading, roofing and wall cladding systems. This exercise unites the 2 courses by serving as both a final project for the tech course and as part of the final studio presentation boards.

Strategic Methods for Integrating Building Science and Design

Dahlia Nduom
Howard University

Nea Maloo
Howard University

The design studio has often been considered central to architecture education, while the building science courses are the backbone of architecture. While NAAB accredited programs require a body of structures and buildings science courses, the integration of these courses into design studios has been implemented to varying degrees across NAAB accredited institutions. Some programs tackle this integration through a comprehensive design studio in the upper-class years, while others advocate for this integration at the 1st-year design studio. The debate surrounding integration between building science courses and design studio continues with some questioning how much integration is necessary in the early design studio, while others seeing it as essential to the design studio and pushing for a direct link. This paper aims to add to the conversation by relaying our experiences in proposing a pedagogical symbiotic relationship between the building science courses and the 3rd-year design studios at our university.

This paper questions how can we envision building science and studio courses as a Yin and Yang relationship where one can’t exist without the other? How can the integration lead to more successful understanding of concepts taught in building science courses? How can the work being done in design studio be used as a teaching tool in the building science courses and vice versa? What are the best practices for achieving this integration?

Integration as a teaching tool was tested during the students’ 3rd-year. Subject matter from Environmental Systems and Structures courses were used in the development of discrete exercises to convey specific concepts instead of challenging the students with a complete integration as would occur in a later comprehensive design studio or thesis. The paper presents lessons learned, surveys conducted before and after the exercises and conclusions from the authors on how to improve on this pedagogical approach.

Architecture as Mediator of Environment: A Core Environmental Design Studio

Alex Timmer
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

The façade, or enclosure, is the primary signifier of architecture as a whole. In Rem Koolhaas’s “Elements of Architecture” the introduction to the chapter on facades states that as “a metonym for architecture … the façade is the element most invested with political and cultural meaning.” [1] Throughout history of architecture the façade has taken on and reflected the cultural and political concerns of the day. Nationalism during the renaissance, internationalism during 20’s and 30’s and the current environmentalism have influenced the form and performance of the enclosure. Through each of these periods, the architect has displayed an attraction and obsession with the façade as the location of innovation in architecture. Rather than see this as relinquishing of the agency of the architect, can we reimagine the role of the skin in making innovative space? How can the enclosure influence our experience inside and outside of the building? How can the skin of the building become both mediator of its environment and active produce of it? In this essay I will be demonstrating how these questions and issues are pedagogically addressed within a coordinated undergraduate core studio. Students were asked to reexamine the relationship between enclosure and environment through the design of three small buildings on a single site. Each project asked the students to consider a single environmental actor as its primary focus of the design. The projects leveraged architectural responses to lighting, acoustic, and thermal issues. While each building leveraged a single environmental force students soon realized that many of these systems overlapped and are codependent. The semester starts with the design of an Architecture of Light: a free standing gallery which includes a cafe and various auxiliary functions. The second project was an Architecture of Sound: a performance space that must function as a closed performance space in the winter and an open performance space in the summer. The third and final project was an Architecture of Heat: a spa and boat house that utilized thermal experience and natural ventilation as the primary drivers of design. In this essay I will be discussing how each of these projects related to each other, what the tools used by the students, and where there might be opportunities for further developing this pedagogy. The enclosure’s influence on the space of the building was encouraged to extend well beyond its physical boundary, demonstrating an innovative attitude towards light, temperature, energy and material. In order to do this students were tasked with developing a dialogue between the environment and enclosure at the scale of an entire building that supports spaces of varying scales, orientation, program, and performance. As the enclosure of the building has always been a point of contention and debate for the more intractable issues of architecture: from Loos’s attitude towards ornament to the technocratic facades of the more recent environmental movements this studio sought to have students recognized that the architectural solutions for the enclosure must exist as an integrated system having to tackle performative, aesthetic and cultural issues all at once.

[1] Koolhaas, Rem. Elements of Architecture. Taschen, 2018.

11:00am
Gaslamp 1

Surface

Moderator: TBD

The Phototropic Fiber Composite Structure

Felecia Davis
Pennsylvania State University

Jimi Demi-Ajayi
Pennsylvania State University

Julian Huang
Pennsylvania State University

Karen Kuo
Harvard University

In Pun
University of Pennsylvania

THE RESEARCH QUESTION

Can one make a responsive fiber composite where electronics are embedded into the fabric? A team of landscape architects and architects developed a responsive fiber composite folding structure by embedding conductive yarns into a fiberglass knit fabric. The team presents the materials and design fabrication processes for the construction of a pavilion that acknowledges the presence and absence of light. Their innovation resides in the introduction of simple electronic components to make a computational or e-textile. The team embedded conductive thread to carry current up a length of fiberglass knit that could then carry an electronic signal to a series of LED’s sewn onto the front side of our origami project. These LED’s were connected to a photocell that turned the LED’s on and off according to the level of light. In bright daylight the LED’s are off and as evening arrives the LED’s are on. If conductive and other yarns can be introduced into fiber composites to allow them to carry electricity and communicate information to people, then architects and designers can also use these methods to develop cloth for fiber composites that provide other functions such as energy collection and could be used in lightweight portable structures off grid. The team used origami as a method to make folds in the fabric allowing the structure to collapse and be flat. This process was inspired by Joe Choma and student’s origami structure made at Clemson University (Testado, 2017) and the primary author’s project [Anonymous Project] that was about communication of information through the surface of the origami. (Author, 2000) This team decided to try a smaller, flexible version that they could also add some light sensing capacity. The results are a light responsive, lightweight portable structure that can take on different shapes when clipped and positioned. All materials, fiberglass fabrics and resins were donated to this team by the American Composite Manufacturing Association which also shared its expertise, precedents and composite knowledge with this team. An origami pattern of fold lines was duct taped onto stitched fiberglass tow and resin used to infuse the untapped fabric with resin. When cured the duct tape was removed from the fabric and the fabric folded. The resin permitted the fabric to take compression and gave the structure a stiffness to make a shelter. As a folding structure it can be opened when it is daylight to provide shade and closed in the evening. The team also imagined the structure could offer a background level of light in the evening if opened. While the project was tested inside, the project is being developed for use as a small shelter in the landscape where people could themselves make different shapes to get out of the sun or provide lighting at night outside in a garden.

Notes:

Anonymous Author, 2000. (Reference will be provided after blind review).

Testado, J. “See How Joseph Choma Built the ‘Chakrasana’ Arch using his Fiberglass Folding Technique”,Sept., 2017. https://archinect.com/news/article/150026343/see-how-joseph-choma-built-the-chakrasana-arch-using-his-fiberglass-folding-technique

Where do the Twigs Go?

Faysal Tabbarah
American University of Sharjah

The paper describes the theoretical framework, design and technical processes behind Where do the Twigs Go?, a temporary 3000 ft2 spatial construct in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. The project is made primarily out of scavenged palm fronds, palm leaves and paper pulp from recycled paper. The paper describes how the relationship between the theoretical framework, design and technical processes work to: 1. Integrate painterly attitudes and workflows into contemporary computational design methodologies and highly standardized modes of sustainable design production; 2. Rethink how ideologies and practices of Environmentalism impact architectural practice in the Middle East and North Africa. The brief was to create five 500 ft2 temporary exhibition spaces that operate as a public spatial landscape. Each of the five differentiated spaces is defined by highly textured exterior surfaces constructed through the layering of natural (i.e. Palm fronds and leaves) and synthetic materials (i.e. Paper pulp) to create conditions that challenges the visitors’ assumptions about material, construction, and the environment. The textures recede in the interior spaces, giving primacy to the exhibition material. Ultimately, the spatial composition, materiality and curatorial framework create an activated public space. Materially, the non-linear structuring of textured surfaces with natural and recyclable synthetic materials emerged by asking a child-like question: Where do the twigs go? The question emerged from an attempt at rethinking the life span of materials used in constructing temporary structures. Thus, the project explores the potential second life that plant matter can have between the time they are harvested, and the time they turn to compost? The answer presented here comes in the form a thickened yet porous structural wall. The paper is structured in four parts. First, it describes the theoretical framework that drives the larger body of work. The framework integrates painterly attitudes in design with alternative views towards Western environmentalism. Looking at the shifts in European representational art styles between the Late-Renaissance and the Baroque, art historian Heinrich Wolfflin identifies a material shift from the linear to the painterly. Wolfflin defines the painterly as limitless, receding, open, and lacking in linear hierarchy, eluding to ambiguous part-to-whole relationship deployed in this project and body of work1,2. This parallels the shifts from Western conception of the environment that also drive the project. Second, the paper describes the design process and its relationship to the framework. The project developed through a digital/analogue workflow that moved between scavenging for natural material, 3D scanning, digital simulations, and physical prototyping to produce painterly material systems. Third, the paper maps the alternative modes of material sourcing that have to take place in such a project, and the industry relationships that facilitate these alternative sourcing processes. Finally, the paper describes the construction process. Each space is composed of thickened wall surfaces (7 x 9.8 x 0.2 ft) that include: 1. Scavenged palm fronds and leaves; 2. Paper pulp made from recycled newspapers; 3. White-wood frame; 4. Metal wire-mesh. At the end of its 7 days short life, all elements of the project have been composted or recycled.

Endnotes
1. Wolfflin, Heinrich. 1950. Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art. Dover Publications.
2. A version of this paragraph was written in a previous paper co-authored with another individual. Full credits will be given upon acceptance.

The Constructive Curtain Project

Deborah Schneiderman
Pratt Institute

Annie Coggan
Pratt Institute

The Constructive Curtain Project is a multidisciplinary investigation that intends to work in collaboration with architecture in order to generate better interiors. The curtain, with its inherent transformability, is proving capable of bridging the great schism between architecture and interior design through a capability to generate more habitable environments. The divide between architecture and interior has been recognized since the 18th century when upholsterers and architects diverged in their appreciation for the hard versus the soft and the permanent versus the impermanent. The disciplines eventually grew even further apart with the emergence of the professional interior designer in the 19th century where architects felt that their well-articulated spaces were corrupted by the hand of the upholsterer or decorator.1 This praxis research tests the stance that the curtain, with its inherent transformability, is proving capable of bridging the great schism between architecture and interior design through a capability to generate more habitable environments. Historically curtains have been utilized to block and filter light, provide privacy, and mend construction to minimize drafts.2 However, By the early twentieth century, the curtain had come under attack, particularly by the doyen of decorative arts Edith Wharton. In her manifesto written with Ogden Codman Jr., The Decoration of Houses, the chapter on windows banishes curtains from the well-bred house and promotes shutters as a compromise to filtering light, privacy, and some temperature control.3 Picture windows, popular in American mid-century tract homes, caused a resurgence in the installation of curtains. The windows were situated for exterior symmetry but generated difficult to inhabit imbalanced interiors, wall to wall curtaining was implemented as a correction.4 Contemporary urban glass towers, with floor to ceiling glazing, have further exacerbated this problem. The task of Constructive Curtains, unlike Petra Blaisse’s spatial curtaining for the site-specific and spectacle,5 is to address and rectify quotidian interior issues in multiple settings. Those caused by, irregular interior spatial conditions, large expanses of glass, as well as obstructions created by HVAC elements found in more typical construction. The Constructive Curtain prototypes provide context for window treatment beyond the decorative, adapting to frame views, compressing and expanding to meet changing spatial and climatic conditions. When monitored with a thermal imaging camera, tested Constructive Curtains heightened the interior temperature by 10 degrees. Illuminating Curtaining’s historically performative role also questions issues of home goods consumption. In combining the tasks of decorative objects; lights/curtains, picture frames/curtains, room /curtain these prototypes provide an edited cohesive environment extending the definition of interiority and human habitation. Fabrication methods encompass, hand sewing, machine sewing, smocking, folding, pleating, and embroidery. Materials include various textiles including, woven, knit, and felted as well as conductive thread, thin film photovoltaic and smart textile assemblies. We continue to develop and test a taxonomy of conditions that address the pragmatics of curtains via analog and digital methods. Through the manipulation of prototypes, we test pedestrian ideas of domesticity and create new textile-based interiors.

References
1. Joel, Sanders, Curtain Wars, Harvard Design Magazine, No. 16, (Winter/Spring 2002): 14-20. DOI: http://www.harvarddesignmagazine.org/issues/16/curtain-was
2. Katherine Greer, Culture and Comfort: Parlor Making and Middle-Class Identity 1850-1930, Smithsonian, Washington DC, 2010.
3. Edith Wharton and Ogden Codman, Jr, The Decoration of Houses. Charles Scribner’s Sons, New York, 1897.
4. Margaret Maile Petty, “Curtains and the Soft Architecture of the American Postwar Domestic Environment,” Home Cultures Vol. 9, issue 1(2012): 35-56.
5. Petra Blaise. “Curtain as Architecture: Casa Da Musica, Porto,” in Inside Outside Reveiling, Nai Publishers, Rotterdam

Stone and Steel: Adventures in Detailing

Genevieve Baudoin
Kansas State University

Design-build within the studio setting is an opportunity for students to gain a felt experience with built materials. While many students can boast experience with basic wood framing, either through Habitat for Humanity, summer jobs, or at home, most do not handle more complex materials such as stone or steel. As architects, we typically approach detailing as a concept learned over time, and through experience. For most architects, however, this occurs through the production of built work – it is the place where we learn the most from our mistakes, and the place where learning takes a great deal longer to absorb. Vittorio Gregotti expands this idea, where “…each architectural work annexes particular alignments that are open to experimental risks; in one sense each constructs not only a language but also a specific technique…. Each project must confront the difficulty of giving unique architectural unity to cultures that differ not only technically but also in their specific objectives and modes of representation.”[1] Within the scope of architectural education, how far can we expect a student to go with their knowledge of details? Is it important, and should it be? This paper will explore the strategies and results of a graduate level studio using design-build as a launch platform for an understanding of detailing. The studio was a year-long venture, moving from full scale fabrication studies that culminated in a gallery installation in the fall and progressed into the development of more traditional individual projects in the spring. In the fall, students were asked to explore stone and steel grappling with the challenges created by tools need to shape these materials, as well as the material properties themselves. Their initial research led to the development of screen and canopy prototypes at full scale. The studio also involved the interaction and relationship with AIA ____ as well as the donated stone and input from _____, creating a grounded foundation with practice from which to experiment. The paper will address the methodology of the studio but also the implications of teaching detailing in architecture.

[1] Vittorio Gregotti, Inside Architecture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 53.

New Faculty Teaching Award

Jacob Mans
University of Minnesota

Jacob Mans is an architect and educator focused on understanding the feedback loops between building-scaled technical systems and large-scaled social and ecological systems. As architects and architectural researchers, we often describe these systems, and study them independently from one another. The reality is that architecture collects, channels, and distributes energy and materials across these immense, powerful and interconnected socio-technical systems.

He believes architecture should ask questions and engage in critical inquiries that affect immense change rather than prioritizing research on the incremental improvement of preexisting architectural questions. Within a socio-technical research framework, a building can no longer be the sole scale of response to the question of building. His teaching focuses on helping students understand the increasing complex socio-technical systems that architecture produces/co-produces.

11:00am
Salon D

Special Focus Session

Future Faculty Discussion

Moderator: Jori Erdman, James Madison U. & Mo Zell, U. of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Session Description

The Future Faculty Panel Discussion aims to provide a discussion of the steps that can be taken towards establishing a formal pipeline for building diversity in the faculty cohort, which in turn, will widen the pipeline to the profession of architecture. The Future Faculty Discussion is geared to an audience of faculty seeking to change the culture of schools of architecture in order to promote and maintain diversity. The Discussion will question the fundamentals of a career in academia including credentials, networking, and school and professional culture. Short presentations by panelists will illustrate success stories from within architectural education as well as from other disciplines including the business model of the PhD Project.

Kiwana T McClung
University of Louisiana – Lafayette

Rashida Ng
Temple University

11:00am
Salon E

Special Focus Session

ArchiPrep – we’ve got you covered!

Moderator: Jonathan Tolbert, AIA Emerging Professionals & Nissa Dahlin-Brown, AIA Higher Education

Session Description

Learn about the new ArchiPrep, a resource developed by the AIA to help students and graduates study and pass the ARE exams. We will share an overview of ArchiPrep and our need for your expertise, as subject matter experts and for your insights into what your students need! This will be an informal session with time to ask your questions and share. Join us!

12:30pm

Educational Tours
Ticketed Event

Lunch Tours

+ Rob Quigley’s Downtown East Village Tour

+ Downtown San Diego Housing Tour: Social Impact Design Initiatives I

Tau Sigma Delta, Meeting & Bites (by invitation)

2:30pm
Gaslamp 3

Building Performance

Moderator: TBD

Mind the Gap: Building Performance Simulation in the Architectural Design Studio

Ihab Elzeyadi
University of Oregon

Belal Abboushi
Marywood University

Building modelling and simulation approaches are increasingly being utilized in architectural design studios to guide and inform architectural students and professionals’ design process and offer them evidence-based feedback on their proposed building performance. The development of intuitive and simplified simulation interfaces has greatly contributed to achieving this integration. One aspect that is often overlooked is the workflow that governs and regulates integrated design, which can have significant impacts on final design outcomes. In this paper, we present a taxonomy of these workflows and review key factors that should be considered when selecting one based on an pedagogical experiment and a survey of AIA COTE top 10 architectural awards for the last five years. Currently there are numerous software packages available for environmental building simulations. This makes it challenging to select an appropriate tool that provides accurate results yet allow a designer to make architectural informed decisions with a designer-friendly interface. Further, the workflow utilized to incorporate simulations into the design process was proved to highly impact student’s success. Yet it is not clear what type of workflows are successful to provide an integrated design approach, under what conditions, and/or for which building and site typologies. This paper addresses these questions by first reviewing existing workflows of design-simulation integration processes and highlighting their strengths and weaknesses. Second, an experiment to test three of the most common workflows was conducted for three different integrated design architectural studios at the senior and vertical studios levels. The workflows, processes, and the resultant student projects were further analyzed based on criteria for better integrated design and architectural excellence. The analysis criteria was based on the COTE top 10 awards as well as architectural design quality based on an exit interview protocol. To situate the pedagogical experiment results within a larger context, a survey of the American Institute of Architects Committee on the Environment (AIA COTE) Top 10 student award recipients over the last five years was conducted. The results are categorized into a pedagogical framework that outlines best strategies of the type of workflows, software, design process to be used, methods to achieve desired interaction between design process and analytical feedback, and metrics for educators to evaluate the success of this integration and their learning outcomes in the design studio. The hope is bridge the gap between the building parametric design and simulation with the design studio creative process for a more integrated design outcomes.

A Bibliometric Review of Life Cycle Research of the Built Environment at Different Scales

Ming Hu
University of Maryland

The built environment assists societies in meeting basic needs for shelter and security. Throughout time, it has increasingly developed to provide greater scales of comfort and amenities, albeit with considerable environmental impacts. Life cycle assessment has been used as an analysis tool to help decision-makers plan for mass urbanization and building construction; however, the research to date focuses on either the individual building scale or overall urban scale. Although several methodologies have been applied to both scales, the results have not been reconciled or synchronized. In light of this, this paper first presents a systematic literature review using bibliometric network data to assess state-of-the-art knowledge of the use of LCA at different scales from 1990–2017. Second, the paper identiﬁes the main research foci at the building and urban scales. At the building scale, three research focal points are identified: building materials and products, design solutions, and energy consumption/emissions reduction. At the urban scale, there are three research areas of focus as well: urbanization and infrastructure planning, urban metabolism (water/energy/waste synergy), and complexity of urban issues. Next, the most influential papers and journals are presented. Drawing upon the findings from the literature review, major gaps in current research activities are identified as the building-centric approach, energy performance–centric approach, and lack of consideration for uncertainties. These are critical areas requiring further study and research. Accordingly, a comprehensive LCA framework that integrates different scales of the built environment could play a major role in promoting the reduction of related ecological impacts. Most current LCA studies are confined to their own scale and scope while lacking consideration of other related factors, such as population density, urban density, transportation accessibility, open space, and public parks. It is imperative to synergize LCA at the building and urban scales together, using an integrated framework. The potential to use an integrated framework in both urban planning and a building design context is a relatively new development. At the building scale, early adoption of an integrated framework could help designers, architects, and engineers find optimized solutions through quantitative analyses and evidence. At the urban scale, the planning process is a matter of organizing land use and optimizing resources, materials, and the energy flow within city boundaries. Therefore, a future integrated framework could be used in two ways: either as an analysis tool to aid the decision-making of government officials or as a design tool for urban planners. There is also a need for the planning and design community—specifically, architects, engineers, and planners—to work together as a synchronized unit to set up work for a higher level of LCA integration in the built environment.

External Dynamic Screens for Thermal Delight and Alliesthesia

Niyati Naik
University of Oregon

Ihab Elzeyadi
University of Oregon

Architectural patterned screens–such as Jalis and Mashrabiyas–employed as a façade strategy in vernacular architecture on a global scale, are aesthetically and culturally significant. Several studies have proven their sustainability potential in managing heat gains, daylighting availability, and glare inside the perimeter spaces of building envelopes. These vernacular facade treatments are being used as design inspirations for dynamic and parametric-driven screens of contemporary building envelopes. In contrast to their vernacular counterparts, contemporary external dynamic screens (EDSc) are operable and account for temporal variability in the outdoor environmental factors as well as occupant’s control. The aesthetics of EDSc is found to be the main driver for rising interest in its applications (Attia, 2018). Dynamic shading façade typologies promise significant building energy savings (Elzeyadi, 2017). However, their impacts on indoor environment and occupant comfort is under-researched. Recent studies in occupant thermal and visual comfort advocates design of non-uniform indoor environments for occupant well-being and productivity (Parkinson and de Dear, 2015; Reinhart, 2015). Non-uniform thermal environments are energizing for occupants and have the potential to generate hedonic thermal sensations; termed as “alliesthesia”. This study investigates the potential of EDSc in creating non-uniform thermal environment. Elzeyadi and his research team at University of Oregon found that building envelope shading has the potential to increase about 9 to 13% of occupant comfort hours during summer months in the US Pacific Northwest (Elzeyadi et.al, 2016). To better understand the applicability of EDSc, it is intended to test a full scale EDSc prototype in the US Pacific Northwest. The prototype is conceptualized as operable sliding panels with geometric patterns whose perforation ratio (PR) and depth ratio (DR) can change with time. PR is the percentage of total void area and DR is the ratio of depth to width of a void. This study reports on how results from the computational analysis were used to inform the design of the full-scale prototype. Screens with different combinations of PR and DR were modelled on the east façade of a mid-sized office building. The simulations were conducted for design days of summer months from June to September in ASHRAE Climate Zone, CZ 4C which was represented by the moderate climate of Eugene, OR (44°03′07″N 123°05′12″W). The PR and the DR were assumed to vary within the range of 10% to 90% and 0.1 to 1, respectively. For different combinations of PR and DR, the predicted mean vote value (PMV-value) (ASHRAE-55, 2017) was computed as a measure of thermal comfort performance of the screen. The PMV-values using Fanger’s equation (1970) are obtained with-in the range of (-3) to (+3) indicate a person’s thermal sensation of (-3) as very cold to (+3) as very hot. PMV-value of (0) represents thermal neutrality. Transition of the indoor thermal environment from upper to lower fringes of the thermal comfort zone indicated by PMV values of (+0.5) and (-0.5) represents non-uniformity in the thermal conditions. The objective was to find out geometric parameters of the dynamic screen that could create non-uniform thermal environment within the limits of the thermal comfort zone. Results revealed that the variability in the PMV value due to change in the PR is highest for DR = 0.1. In other words, the sensitivity of thermal comfort to PR is higher for smaller value of DR. This suggests that one way to design dynamic screens to create non-uniform indoor thermal environment on the east facing perimeter space of a building in Eugene is by keeping the DR constant equals to 0.1 and varying the PR between 10 % and 90 %. This study was used as the basis to develop full-scale EDSc prototypes; the impact of which will be investigated on actual indoor environment and human subjects for future studies. This study adds to ways in which architecture is practiced and taught. It shows an approach where architectural design intentions target thermally delightful sensation for occupants in addition to façade aesthetics.

Visual Comfort and Self-Perception of Productivity in an Office Building in Raleigh, North Carolina

Helia Taheri
North Carolina State University

Kristen Ambrose
RATIO Architects

Sarah Wood
RATIO Architects

Traci Rider
North Carolina State University

Decision-making in architectural design is a complex process that includes various factors such as aesthetics, user needs, and environmental considerations etc. (Gercek and Arsan, 2019). Creating a visually comfortable space is one of the main goals for architects in the decision-making process (Konstantzos and Tzempelikos, 2017). ASHRAE Guideline 10P (2014) states four conditions which contribute to create a comfortable space for occupants: thermal, visual, indoor air quality and acoustics. Based on United Nations statistics (2017), the urban population is increasing and will become 60% of the total world population by 2030. The majority of employees will work in office environments (ASHRAE, 1993), and the time spent by employees in the workplace and related stress is increasing (Evans, G.W. and McCoy, J.M., 1998; Poursafar, et al., 2019). This elevates the importance of designing comfortable office space for employees. Since staff (labor) costs are one of the primary costs of an organization, improvements that affect overall comfort have the potential to improve productivity, retention and benefit employers. Studies show that visual comfort can improve productivity in space (Boyss et al. 2003; Heschong, 2003; Aries et al., 2015). The goals of the study are to explore the relationship between visual comfort and the employees perception of their own productivity. The methods used in this study include survey and environmental monitoring. The participants, designer/occupants in a design firm in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA, participated in an online subjective survey asking about their perceived productivity and visual comfort in the space from Aug 19 – Sept 6, 2019. The illuminance was measured by sensors and serve as empirical data for reference. A correlational analysis was conducted between the results of the survey questions (visual comfort and productivity). The results show that there is no statistically significant relationship between visual comfort and employees’ perception of their productivity for the study period. Furthermore, the data collected from sensors showed that the daylight distribution in the open office is unequal.

A Framework to Improve Designers’ Understanding about the Quantitative Results of Daylight Analysis

Kristen Ambrose
RATIO Architects

Helia Taheri
North Carolina State University

Sarah Wood
RATIO Architects

Decision-making in architectural design is a complex process that includes factors such as aesthetics, environmental, and user needs (Gercek and Arsan, 2019). Utilizing computational simulation tools is one way to gather quantitative data efficiently to help architects in this process (Reinhart and Fitz, 2006). Recent literature on decision-making in architectural design states that it is significant for architects to create a link between their professional experience gained from previous work and knowledge provided from simulation tools (Gercek and Arsan, 2019). Daylight simulation tools are regularly accepted in the market, since it is difficult to evaluate the quantity of daylight in a space through a simple equation
(Reinhart and Fitz, 2006). Whether the daylight simulation is done in-house or by a consultant, it is imperative for architects
to have empirical knowledge about how the numerical results relate to the user experience.

In this article, a set of methods is proposed to improve designers’ understanding of daylight simulation results. The study has been conducted in the summer of 2019. The methods used in this study are survey, daylight simulation, and daylight measurement. The participants who are designer/occupants in a design firm in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA, participate in an online survey asking about their productivity and visual comfort in the space. Daylight simulation analyzes the illuminance levels in the office space with Ladybug and Honeybee – plugins of Rhino Grasshopper. Furthermore, the actual illuminance in the space is measured by Omron sensors in certain locations for additional empirical evidence. A correlational analysis is conducted between the questions of the survey, its results shows that there is no statistically significant correlation between visual comfort and emloyees’ perception of productivity in the summer. Also, the data gained from the sensors and survey show that the daylight is not equally distributed across the office. Ultimately, by sharing the findings with the participants in the meeting, while conducting the realtime day-light simulation, they can relate results to their own experience in space. It helps them improving their design knowledge and process for meaningfully integrating daylight in their design.

2:30pm
Gaslamp 2

Form, Function, Material, Space

Moderator: Saundra Weddle, Drury University

Sullivan’s Eagle: Form and Function Artistically Considered

Jonathan Ochshorn
Cornell University

Architectural function in relation to architectural form is inherently ambiguous. Even the Vitruvian functional triad of firmitas, utilitas, and venustas (durability, convenience, and beauty) foreshadows the difficulty that theorists encounter when attempting to classify architecture on the basis of form vs. function. The nature of this relationship was most famously postulated by Louis Sullivan at the end of the nineteenth century, yet the ramifications of “architecture’s double code of beauty and utility”[i] continue to be debated. For while architecture can certainly be understood as having both utilitarian functions and non-utilitarian formal qualities (whether the latter are characterized as “expressive,” “symbolic,” “evocative,” “provocative,” or merely “beautiful”), it is equally true—as Vitruvius implicitly argued by including venustas in his famous list of architectural functions—that those formal qualities also constitute a function of architecture.

Many theories of architecture carry a not-so-hidden agenda: to explain (justify) a formal preference on the basis of an incomplete, selective, and often self-serving functional analysis. In such theories, utilitas/firmitas may well be cited as the source of, or inspiration for, a formal solution, but it is really the a priori pursuit of venustas that motivates the formal outcome: the simplistic distinction between form and function—or between venustas and utilitas/firmitas—becomes hopelessly inadequate when the goal of expressing, symbolizing, evoking, provoking, or creating something beautiful is, itself, the architectural function that, more than any utilitarian consideration, determines a building’s primary formal characteristics.

Sullivan’s specific arguments about function can therefore be profitably revisited, in part because his famous four-word proposition—that “form ever follows function”[ii]—has been too easily dismissed simply on the basis of its explicit claim. But the problem with Sullivan’s formulation is not that it isn’t true (it is, in fact, often true for building elements). Rather, as this paper argues, two related objections can be raised: first, that Sullivan’s defense of his proposition on the basis of biological and inorganic analogies is flawed (Figure 1); and, second, that his writings promote a formal agenda by invoking a few functional considerations while strategically ignoring many others (Figures 2 and 3). Sullivan’s true contribution to architectural theory has little to do with clarifying the relationship between form and function. Rather, his genius was to find a few superficial functional attributes that could be eloquently (and disingenuously) invoked in order to justify an expressive and self-serving formal agenda. That this template has been copied countless times, by architects and critics who feel compelled to provide a seemingly logical (functional) rationale for their formal intuitions or preferences, provides the impetus for this investigation.

[i] “Design decisions are regulated by architecture’s double code of beauty and utility: functional vs dysfunctional (code of beauty), and formally resolved vs formally unresolved (code of utility).” [This is, of course, a typo, since the two codes in parentheses need to be reversed.] Patrik Schumacher, Autopoiesis of Architecture, John Wiley & Sons (Chichester, UK: 2011), p.157

[ii] Louis Sullivan, “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered,” Lippincott’s Magazine 57 (March 1896), pp.403–409 (emphasis added; subsequently reprinted in several other venues), p.408.

Woolen Fibers and Waxy Esters: An Expanded Material History of the Baptistry Doors of San Giovanni

Heather Peterson
Woodbury University

On one of the longest days of 1401, the ambient temperature of the air over Florence may have been warm enough to soften wax. The hot air of the city-state, provided a befitting context for the announcement of a competition—sponsored by the guild of the Arte di Calimala—to design a set of bronze doors for the baptistry of San Giovanni; an event that is widely regarded as one of the establishing marks of the Renaissance. The sanctioned inventory of factors that pressed the aesthetic dimensions of the Quattrocento into service can be accounted for in four sheets of bronze, the demands of a quatrefoil frame measuring thirteen by seventeen inches, the old testament passage of Genesis 22:2-13, The Sacrifice of Isaac, and the constraint of one year. This tabulation is a compressed and precise record of the baptistry doors as bounded elements, but it fails to capture the political economies and material ecologies, that locate the doors as an instance expressed by a broader set of processes. An expanded record of the doors might include the fibers of a sheep’s fleece, and the waxy ester of the honey bee; for it was these two substances on which the circumstances of the competition were staked. A sheep is a division of offerings. The side of its skin facing the interior can be dried and stretched into vellum, or provide sustenance with its organs, muscles, and milk. Its fleece, which addresses the external world of commerce and governance, can clothe a populace and insulate us from the asperities of winter. At the time of the competition, Florentine commercial achievement, and the wealth and reach of the Calimala (wool merchant’s guild) were established by international trade in English wool; a political economy from which the Renaissance was largely written. As was customary, the doors of baptistry were cast in bronze, and dressed in a thin veil of gold leaf, but the material from which the panels of the doors were shaped, the actual substance from which the competitors worked, was in the far humbler, and more fugitive medium of beeswax. The formal terms and subject matter of the competition required a single, agile material to render the various forms and textures of drapery, landform, vegetation, locks of human hair and facial expressions, a ram, a donkey, the feathers of angel wings, an altar, and the blade of Abraham’s knife, all in various degrees of relief. Wax, which is effectively the building material of bees, is uncommonly workable. It can be cast or carved. It is abundant, accessible, and amenable to iterative development. Notably, it is also substitutional, and in the case of this particular history, sacrificial, like its subject. The paper proposed here will use this instance of the baptistry doors to reconsider and expand its position to include material behaviors and histories, and their social and political economies.

Geographic Machines: The Tennessee Valley Authority’s Landscape of Power

Micah Rutenberg
University of Tennessee-Knoxville

In the past, discourse on geographic space and infrastructure has tended to focus largely on the material conditions of geographic space at the expense of a nuanced understanding of the important role immaterial systems also have to play. But increasingly, the immaterial conditions of objects and institutions are being integrated into contemporary discourse on the dynamics of geographic space and infrastructure. As Desmini and Waldheim note: “the trajectory of representation – of concept and context – has moved from the material and physical description of the ground toward the depiction of unseen and often immaterial fields, forces, and flows.” [1] Similarly, Jane Bennett’s theory of “vital materiality” considers the material and immaterial; human and non-human actors that shape a landscape of objects and their “political ecology.”[2] These two discursive trajectories indicate the need to re-evaluate the past of geographic space and infrastructure in order to reflect on the present and future. Accordingly, this essay will examine a part of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s early history, using contemporary theoretical frameworks to reflect on the dynamics of how we inhabit geographic space and infrastructure. Despite addressing specific needs at the outset, The Tennessee Valley Authority Act initiated a vastly complex, geographic machine that eventually integrated all aspects of life within a system of power, infrastructure, environment, politics, and economy. In this context, the seemingly innocuous phrase, “and Other Purposes,”[3] which concludes the opening paragraph of the Act is prophetic: It embodies how seemingly marginal, often-overlooked activities constituted primary mechanisms by which the TVA re-territorialized geographic space and the Valley’s rural subjectivity. To illustrate this point, I will describe the spatial consequences of two inventions that make the TVA’s “Other Purposes” salient: the electrical appliance and the power system map. While electrical appliances foreground the social territory of the home and maps foreground the political realm of geography, their distinct scales are destabilized when one examines them as social and political artifacts within a shared system. For example, both collapsed geographic space in various ways and obliterated the scalar separation between The Authority and its customers. After exploring the nuanced conditions of each invention, I will make the argument that they inhabit a larger “system of objects”[4] that renders intriguing, less-understood geographic epistemologies and conceptual adjacencies that reveal novel trajectories for a discourse on geographic and infrastructural space.

[1] Jil Desimini and Charles Waldheim, Cartographic Grounds : Projecting the Landscape Imaginary (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2016); ibid.

[2] Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke University Press, 2009).

[3] “An Act to Improve the Navigability and to Provide for the Flood Control of the Tennessee River; to Provide for Reforestation and the Proper Use of Marginal Lands in the Tennessee Valley; to Provide for the Agricultural and Industrial Development of Said Valley; to Provide for the National Defense by the Creation of a Corporation for the Operation of Government Properties at and near Muscle Shoals in the State of Alabama, and for Other Purposes.,” in Enrolled Acts and Resolutions of Congress, 1789-1996, ed. U.S. Congress (https://www.ourdocuments.gov/: National Archives, 1933).

[4] J. Baudrillard and J. Benedict, The System of Objects (Verso, 1996).

The Collaboration of B. Henry Latrobe and Giuseppe Franzoni to Create the Nation’s First Statue of Liberty (1807-1814)

Richard Chenoweth
Mississippi State University

When the U. S. Capitol burned on 24 August 1814, its principal chambers were gutted and an early masterpiece of American Neoclassical sculpture, a colossal personification of Liberty in the style of the times, was completely destroyed. The Liberty is not well known because in her brief lifetime, no artist stopped to record her – not even Latrobe himself, a prolific sketcher of his surroundings, investigations, and inspirations. Liberty presided over Latrobe’s majestic Hall of Representatives, a chamber that was, itself, a difficult collaboration of conflicting ideas between its client Thomas Jefferson and the architect Latrobe. Liberty was an integral part of the architecture and of the architectural sequence; upon entry into the chamber, the ten-foot tall sitting Liberty established the chamber’s cross axis within the streaming diffusion of one hundred skylights, proffered entrants a carved copy of the Constitution, cradled a cap of liberty, and was heralded by a bald eagle. Two major sources of historical information lead to the Liberty’s story: (1) a trail of about a dozen letters by Latrobe in which he describes his thinking and his aesthetic concerns for the sculpture as well as details of size, positioning, arm placement, and accoutrements; and (2) a history of early American sculpture and painting (and the shifting of aesthetics from 1780-1800) which lead to several important changes, such as – the evolution of carved wood and marble portraiture, the introduction of Italian sculptors to America, efforts to monumentalize an allegorical Liberty sculpture on a public scale, and popular depictions of Liberty figures from political cartoons to coinage. Latrobe’s drive to create the Liberty was essential to his concept for the famous Hall of Representatives. His collaboration with the artist Franzoni also is essential as it demonstrates the delicate dialectic between architectural concept and executed form in a public project. I will show for the first time a model of the colossal Liberty, carefully reconstructed based on known facts and the known proclivities of the principal designers. I also have diligently reconstructed the entire Hall, with the Liberty, necessarily, being the most formidable aspect of the design of the nearly complete state of Latrobe’s First Campaign at the Capitol. The making of the Liberty represents twenty years of effort by various architects and artists between about 1783 and 1807 to bring to fruition the confluence of a major public work of American architecture and an integral work of monumental American sculpture.

Restoration Values: methodology, historic 1906 masonry structure

Robert Flanagan
University of Colorado Denver

This research reports on a four-year project to restore a 1906 structure designed by architect William Ellsworth Fisher (1871–1937), one of Denver and Colorado’s most prominent architects and builders in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It evaluates three competing decision making process issues and the prioritization of each: restoration values (look and feel), integrated decision matrix (scope & process), and rules of thumb (architect’s methodology). It focuses on infrastructure to provide safety, historical authenticity, and maximum utility in preserving the look and feel of the original architectural design. This two-story masonry house was acquired in a bank foreclosure; it was in derelict condition, condemned by the health/building departments, requiring immediate remedial action to prevent catastrophic collapse. A 1959 renovation compromised the historic character of the interior when the single-family structure was converted into a rooming house. Substantial completion of the restoration was in the summer of 2019. Objective. In historic masonry structures with similar heating degree days and cooling degree days, a streamlined decision-making process can be developed to optimize the outcome. Personal safety is always integral to this process. Standards relating to the treatment of historic properties—preservation, rehabilitation, restoration, and reconstruction should be maintained1. Existing architectural features should be recorded and preserved. False ceilings, chases, and the use of non-period materials and methods are avoided. An in-depth discussion of the systemic implementation of these factors follows. Safety. There is a strong preference to remove and not encapsulate hazards: lead piping, lead-cadmium contaminated paint surfaces, asbestos, free silica (deteriorating plaster), and mold contaminated surfaces. Dangerous levels of radon (an unrecognized cancer agent in 1906) must be remediated. Structural integrity. Masonry structures of the era are most at risk from poorly maintained or implemented moisture control systems. Intact roofs, gutters, and foundation drainage are prioritized. Materials and processes. Using modified mortars or painting of exterior facing, interior plaster walls is not acceptable. Deteriorating plaster removed from the exterior walls should be replaced with the same since it is a sacrificial substrate protecting the masonry. Walls must breathe. Insulation. All floors (including basement slab) should be insulated with thermal/sound insulation. The attic should be insulated to recommended contemporary standards. Note that exterior insulation is aesthetically unacceptable and interior insulation alters the wall’s moisture freeze location, compromising masonry integrity. Heating and cooling. Sub-floor heating with a zoned, HE condensing boiler is the least disruptive process, maintaining the look and feel of the original structure. Ductless cooling is desirable.

Conclusions. The identification and development of means and methods, applicable historical resources, and safety considerations, organized in an integrated decision matrix, conclude this illustrated and documented process.

2:30pm
Gaslamp 5

Teaching and Cultural Context

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

Cultural Influence in the Digital Age

Sarah Ra
Oklahoma State University

Seung K. Ra
Oklahoma State University

How do we study the cultural impact on urban environments in the digital age? In Charles Renfro’s discussion of the influence of film in his work, he notes that, “any film with an edit has a point of view. It can’t simply be an index of a place”(Cimino, 1). The tools that we use to capture impressions, whether of culture or space, put their own unique filter on the message. As a novel approach to our study abroad course, we looked to investigate the exclusive use of digital media as a tool for students to convey their experiences. The diversity of contemporary Asian cities, with their dynamic juxtapositions of ancient and modern, provide an astounding array of influences to explore. The course enabled students to visit the cities of Tokyo, Seoul, and Hong Kong, with excursions to nearby areas. Visiting both historic and contemporary works of architecture and urban space, we engaged local universities and design offices, and exposed students to alternative perspectives. Students unfolded these cultural influences by exploring and analyzing urban spaces and their relationship with the societies in which they exist, using primarily digital media. With the proliferation of digital tools and social media, study of culture reflects the interactive nature of these media. The course, conducted in three parts, consisted of field study and analysis, a research paper, and a retrospective exhibit. After a series of introductory seminars, students were asked to select a specific area of investigation for the travel phase. They chose to explore a variety of issues; topics included social and economic influences on living space, pedestrian and transportation networks, green space, public art, and the influence of eastern philosophies and religions. Utilizing digital analysis tools such as film, photography, and sound recordings, they captured their experiences and observations, ranging from interviews, religious ceremonies, cultural performances, to the movement of transit systems. Through this field study phase, we attempted to investigate the potential benefits of digital work. Students not only had a platform to share their work, but the immediacy in information sharing of film, images, and social media provided a better capacity for communication and collaboration. Conversations were sparked over the day’s discoveries and interactions. Through all of the course elements, we also utilized digital media to give students opportunity to shape their educational focus. In their 2013 book Rethinking Pedagogy for a Digital Age, Helen Beetham and Rhona Sharpe note that “Learning is a set of personal and interpersonal activities, deeply rooted in social and cultural contexts. When those contexts change, how people learn changes also.” (2). Students developed their written work through a final paper, reflecting personal development of their chosen topic. The final component perhaps best highlighted the value of the digital media utilized; students overlaid their digital research (film, photography, and sound recordings) with their peers to map common issues and extrapolate important contemporary themes. The final gallery show exhibits the work of the group through the lens of images and omnibus films revealing contemporary issues.

Cimino, Steve. “The Production of Life: Traversing the Intersection of Real and Cinematic.” AIA Architect, Oct. 2016, p. 61.

Beetham, Helen and Rhona Sharpe. Rethinking Learning for a Digital Age. Routledge, New York, 2013.

Listen Without Prejudice: Ensuring the Design Studio is a Discursive Learning Environment

Mark Olweny
Uganda Martyrs University

Learning how to learn is an essential part of architectural education, and relies on the confluence of a number of elements: effective teaching, knowledge construction, and active engagement with new knowledge in the design studio. It is here that collaboration between learners and educators is fostered, through socialization processes embedded in this discursive environment. Challenges in ensuring constructive engagement are largely twofold: for students, coming into architectural education means having to adopt new learning approaches, and adapt to teaching methods and styles they were previously unaware of; while also having to engage with instructors, whose approach to teaching are at times ritualized, making use of methods and techniques largely derived from their prior experiences as students. This can create an environment that runs counter to the discursive learning environment that we believe the studio to be, and hindering effective learning. How then can architectural education help students develop valuable learning skills, as a core element architectural education? This paper takes the position that listen to students and appreciating their needs is fundamental in aiding their transition into and through architectural education. Listening without prejudice, not being judgemental, and opening ourselves as instructors to further learning forms a key element in helping student learn. Appreciating that any discursive engagement is two-way, therefore allowing the voice of students to emerge is crucial in building not only their confidence, but generating dialogue as a core element of collaboration and sharing. The paper discusses activities undertaken in a school of architecture in East Africa, formulated to allow for discourse in a context where such engagements are not traditionally part of education; a challenge for architectural education whose signature pedagogical approach is premised on the ability to have open discussions. These activities were geared to improve interactions within the design studio, not only between students and instructors, but among students, helping dispelling some of the myths embedded in architectural education, and uncloaking the black box of architectural education for instructors and students alike, and improving the quality of teaching and learning in the process.

Celebrating the Inclusivity of Film

Amy Van Lauwe
Boston Architectural College

With an ever more diverse student body in design education and a profession that still does not fully reflect this evolution, what methods can we call upon to allow this diversity to express itself? Emerging technologies, the fluidity of gender and a more global understanding of ethnicity and religion has changed the way students experience, perceive and represent the world around them. Film as a tool to study space as well as the built environment and to represent this fluid, global and imperfect world can allow students a more robust understanding of reality and their place within it. Walter Benjamin believed film to be contemporary mass movements’ most powerful agent claiming, “Its social significance, particularly in its most positive form, is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic aspect, that is, the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage.”[i] Perhaps Benjamin’s catharsis is needed to push design education forward. Film’s history as a tool of activism, alternative expression and representing minority viewpoints is a potential method of achieving this. One major challenge is increasing diversity and technological connections acting as isolating agents, especially when the design curriculum is based on a less diverse, patriarchal model. Recent statistics show 55% of enrolled students are male with 45% female[ii] yet women only account for 36% of newly licensed architects.[iii] Of enrolled students 44% indicated white ethnicity with 49% indicating non-white ethnicities[iv] yet ethnic minorities account for only 15% of newly licensed architects.[v] Another challenge is the pervasive use of technology such as parametric software, virtual reality and augmented reality leading to a solipsistic view of the world—one where reality becomes secondary to creations that do not accurately represent our diverse environment. Because film has a unique ability to allow a student to simultaneously consider representation and perception, it asks them to move beyond architecture, interiors and landscape exploring how the changing realities of space and the built environment can and should be communicated. As architect/theorist Juhani Pallasmaa states, “Experiential images of space and place are contained in practically all films, and that the most powerful cinematic architecture is usually concealed in the representation of normal events, not in the specific exposition of buildings and spaces of exceptional architectural merit.”[vi] Design and film have historically had strong ties, however many design programs still do not fully utilize film a as method of studying the theoretical and philosophical underpinnings of design as it pertains to a more diverse student body. Film can provide a valuable pedagogy in moving past design’s exclusive history into its inclusive future.

[i] Benjamin, Walter, Hannah Arendt, and Harry Zorn. Illuminations. (London: Bodley Head, 2015), 3.

[ii] National Architecture Accrediting Board, 2015 Annual Report, accessed June 17, 2019, https://www.naab.org/wp-content/uploads/2015-NAAB-Report-on-Accreditation-in-Architecture-part-I.pdf, 10.

[iii] “NBTN 2017 Demographics.” NCARB. July 21, 2017. Accessed June 19, 2019. https://www.ncarb.org/nbtn2017/demographics.

[iv] National Architecture Accrediting Board, 2015 Annual Report, accessed June 17, 2019, https://www.naab.org/wp-content/uploads/2015-NAAB-Report-on-Accreditation-in-Architecture-part-I.pdf, 10.

[v] “NBTN 2017 Demographics.” NCARB. July 21, 2017. Accessed June 19, 2019. https://www.ncarb.org/nbtn2017/demographics. [vi] Pallasmaa, Juhani. The Architecture of Image: Existential Space in Cinema. (Helsinki: Rakennustieto, 2007), 7.

In Motion: Exploring Context within the Design Process

Sarah Pollard Gamble
University of Florida

Engaging and understanding context is an essential facet of architectural design and one that is challenging to instill in students’ process and priorities. This paper explores a range of philosophies and approaches to engaging context and guiding design students into a deeper knowledge of the physical environment, culture, history, and community surrounding their design projects. Exploring rural, urban, and coastal contexts, the paper will highlight innovative approaches, with a focus on movement and physical action, utilized by faculty / students in their design processes to achieve an in-depth awareness and knowledge of the places in which they work. Movement and physical action have long been used by philosophers, designers, artists, and writers to spur creative thinking and engagement with their surroundings. Aristotle led students to harness physical movement and the mind-body connection to spur the flow of creative thinking. (1) In contemporary teaching, Architectural Educator Ben Jacks writes, “In walking, we breathe and encounter persons and things other than self. . . . Perhaps it is our lack of walking that has allowed us to become immersed in the alienating and body-denying aspects of modernity and postmodernity . . .” (2) By revisiting age-old, intuitive knowledge, and new research from the field of psychology (3), the paper will review relevant data and draw connections to contemporary studio teaching practices. Opportunities for growth will be outlined, in efforts to challenge and assist architectural educators to implement new teaching tools. Guiding students into the tangible and intangible facets of context allows them to explore, consider, and critique environments and their preconceptions, many for the first time. This paper highlights recent assignments and projects by multiple faculty paired with the author’s current research on walking as a tool for design process. The examples will include students at multiple levels in their design education, asking questions about when and how to best introduce different facets of place within the studio. Pedagogical intent will be examined, interrogating the educational goals and outcomes of time and effort invested in understanding context at multiple scales and levels of engagement.

Endnotes

(1) Solnit, Rebecca. Wanderlust: A History of Walking. New York: Viking Books, 2000.

(2) Jacks, Ben. “Reimagining Walking: Four Practices.” Journal of Architectural Education. Feb 2004, pp. 5-9.

(3) Tversky, Barbara. Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought. New York: Basic Books, 2019.

Motley Crews: Learning from Interdisciplinary Design Charrettes

Jacklynn Niemiec
Drexel University

William J. Mangold
Drexel University

Mark Brack
Drexel University

Uk Jung
Drexel University

Nicole Koltick
Drexel University

Design problems benefit from collaboration, but collaboration is not automatically understood or practiced. Academic environments can provide opportunities for students to learn collaboration, reveal its benefits and establish a culture of collective problem-solving. While “charrette” has traditionally indicated an individual exercise, [1] over the past decades the term has evolved and been re-imagined as a way of addressing large-scale problems. The 21st-century charrette model involves disciplines outside the fields of design and promotes the sharing of knowledge. The evolution of the charrette follows trends with higher education: collaborative leadership was one of the most commonly cited themes in a survey of Student Learning Outcomes across 25 undergraduate accrediting bodies. [2] This paper will consider the characteristics of successful collaborations by analyzing the development of interdisciplinary student charrettes at our academic institution over the past decade. Our institution is widely known for its co-operative education model, and more recently for its commitment to civic engagement. The pairing of these two core values necessitates unique models for student learning. Our institution’s own student learning priorities highlight critical thinking skills and ethical reasoning, citing “Use divergent and convergent thinking to generate novel and relevant ideas, strategies, approaches or products.” [3] Students at our university are engaged in collaboration and civic engagement in professional settings prior to graduation. This experience is critical, as graduates with work-integrated learning during college have been shown to be more likely to value their degree after college.[4] Similarly, as a shared university value, civic engagement experiences educate students in problem-solving, understanding diversity, good citizenship, and leadership. We see the charrette as a unique academic model to span the needs of professional collaboration and civic engagement. Since 2008, our academic department has conducted six student design charrettes that we believe provide a model for encouraging both civic engagement and participation from a wide variety of disciplines. Envisioned as an intense collaborative activity spanning three days, our charrettes are non-competitive and not given academic credit, but regularly attract the participation of 60-80 students including law, nursing, graphic design, engineering, and interior design majors. The charrettes have sometimes featured renowned guests from outside of the institution, intended to inspire and expose the students to other design perspectives and processes. The charrette projects themselves have ranged from bus shelters and mobile medical units to the redevelopment of streets closed to automobile traffic. We consistently find that students are eager to engage in social and environmental reform projects and are gratified to have developed an activity that some charrette participants describe as the most meaningful experience of their college careers. This paper will examine the evolving methods we employed for each charrette and a variety of issues encountered and resolved. Finally, we will present principles and recommendations that could be successfully applied to other academic settings.

[1] Willis, Dan. “Are Charrettes Old School.” Harvard Design Magazine 33 (2010).

[2] Drechsler Sharp, Marybeth, Susan R. Komives, and Justin Fincher. “Learning outcomes in academic disciplines: Identifying common ground.” Journal of Student Affairs Research and Practice 48, no. 4 (2011): 481-504.

[3] Anonymous Web Site (accessed June 17, 2019). [4] Busteed, Brandon and Auter, Zac. “Why Colleges Should Make Internships a Requirement.” Gallup.com. https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/222497/why-colleges-internships-requirement.aspx (accessed June 17, 2019).

2:30pm
Gaslamp 1

Cultural Artifacts and Intervention

Moderator: TBD

The Lawn Game - Programming the Non-Static View

Jennifer Birkeland
Cornell University

Jonathan Scelsa
Pratt Institute

John Paul Rysavy
And-Either-Or

Two terrains of play emerge from the history of formally ordering the land in architecture. The regulated, demarcated pitch as a venue for programmed games; and the topiary garden as a playful view-oriented expression of character. ‘Lawn Game’ grafts two static spectacle traditions into a new proposal informing a dynamic field of play. ‘Toparius’ – a creator of places, was designated to the gardener who would create sculptural, abstract, and representational forms in the landscape from densely planted trees and shrubs. The creation of these figural worlds created a series of spaces and opportunities for movement throughout the garden. Often these objects would be anthropomorphized within their context, growing larger in presence and form year after year, requiring maintenance and care, and associating with its caretakers. The formal arrangement and overhead vantage point of the parterre is the abstract plan configuration of the topiary. As a means of organizing sections of the garden, these geometries created a tapestry of plant material within an estate as well as spatial configurations for movement and play. Lawn play historically took on a variety of active and passive configurations, often including throwing, rolling, and goals. In Lawn Games, the play pieces first appear from the scenographic elevation and distant view as the historical topiary within a static garden, while the plan and interior occupation makes evident that these topiary objects invite interaction through their construction. The topiary’s are wrapped and sewn with panels of field turf —a material conventionally used as lawn cover on a recreational sports pitch — overlaid on low density geo-foam insulation — typically employed as land form fill. Panels are seamed together through roped stitching akin to the tectonics of play-ball construction. The play pitch, utilizes the artificially colored synthetic astro-turf inscribing the ground with an ordered set of lines, that are rendered with an illusionary drop-shadow to create a deep reverse parterre effect. The project contributes to a history of imagination and public participation in the art of the garden through development of a hybrid landscape typology, as both a formal view oriented – construct and active sport. Over the past century, the landscape architectural discipline has migrated from the historical position associated with the formalization of the land based on the view, towards a new paradigm wherein the planning and organization of land is first conceived via its programmatic demands informed by municipalities, and end users. Lawn games seeks to strike a fluid territory between these two positions, by creating an image of ground and park that is supported by program that can also be adjusted, manicured and curated from the point of the view. By establishing a new ground as a means of interplay between sport and garden, participant and landscape, Lawn games results in a shifting territory of play. Through lifting, stacking, rolling, and knocking, these topiaries demonstrate the active character of landscape absent in both static and pictorial aesthetic of its past and the programmatic nature of the present that defines the contemporary field.

Re-staging Oskar Schlemmer

Joseph Altshuler
School of the Art Institute of Chicago

This project revisits and reinterprets Oskar Schlemmer’s seminal contributions to the Bauhaus exactly 100 years after the school’s establishment. Schlemmer initiated a new vision for the human figure in a rapidly modernizing world after the horrors of the first World War. In the current political and cultural moment, hard lines are being drawn to define and reward ideas of normalcy by spotlighting and punishing an expanding profile of ‘others.’ This project explores how architectural design might transform otherness into a powerful aesthetic—not just for rethinking the status quo, but to become a platform that inspires new ways to construct what is thinkable. Re-staging Schlemmer’s work offers an opportunity to consider a more radically inclusive future that enacts intense and intimate relationships among personhood, otherness, and our built environment. Specifically, the project re-stages Schlemmer’s seminal Triadic Ballet as a scenographic installation and live performance. Like a Shakespearean play re-staged in a contemporary setting, this project adapts the content and reinterprets the aesthetics and tone of voice of the original production. The project was developed as part of a hands-on workshop with high school students at the Elmhurst Art Museum and involves two primary components. First, the project includes the fabrication of a series of stage-pieces and costumes that create a contemporary identity for the iconic costumes and scenery that comprised the Schlemmer’s Triadic Ballet. Like the originals, these costumes suggest geometric abstractions and theatrical enhancements for the body that enable augmented relationships between humans and built things. Second, the project enacts a live performance that animates the costumes and activates public spaces of the museum. The performance consists of three short acts that interrogate, riff upon, and re-position selected segments from the Triadic Ballet. While inspired by the original, the performance specifically engages contemporary issues of bodies and personhood as set within a distinctly American Midwestern, rather than European context. The performance solicits an ongoing mix-up of the animate and the inert, suggesting multiple and overlapping relationships between human and nonhuman charisma. While the costumes and stage-pieces adopt anthropomorphic suggestions, it aims to elicit open-ended animate qualities in order to deny humans of their privileged anthropocentric position and to engage a flat(ter) ontology made up of object-object and subject-subject interactions. The performance stages architecture and design’s capacity to usher the nonhuman into our everyday social space, all while putting on a show that induces entertainment, play, and laughter. Together, the costume installation and the performance explores the following questions: How might we render architecture seriously friendly and companionable when surrounded by the unfriendly conditions of our social and political atmosphere? How might we reinterpret our understanding of the human body to highlight our non-binary identities and shared humanity? How might we articulate new relationships between persons and buildings to initiate more radically joyful relationships among each?

Perforated Horizon: Volumetric Capacities

Peter Goche
Iowa State University

This project is an exploration of material and immaterial practices specific to preservation via installation and performance as fundamental means of knowing and occupying the post-industrial context of Iowa’s agricultural scene. Pursuant this focus, an experimental art installation assembly (Perforated Horizon) and performance (Guardian Spectacular: A Peaceable Kingdom) was developed in situ at a granary site just outside Napier, Iowa. Built in 1929, the metal granary manufactured by The Martin Steel Products in Mansfield, Ohio, is located ¼ mile west of Napier, Iowa. The building made a locally significant contribution to Iowa’s agricultural history as a rare-surviving corn drying facility. The facility is obsolete and has not been used since the 1970’s. Diffuse in structural order and array of apertures, the space is unpredictable in its sensorial effects. The quality of its intricate component parts provided an elusive yet all-encompassing phenomena. The climatic conditions of this service-less facility offered a potent site for the creation of atmospheres and affects. Our goal here is to act on such circumstances with sincere sensitivity and in collaboration with the extant building’s past and material presence in effort to conceive of a new occupation by which we might intensify its environmental scale and complexity and thereby re-occupy and meticulously inter-connect it and ourselves with its contemporary cultural context. The architectural intent is to preserve the historic building envelope and maintain the authenticity and atmospheric quality of this particular space by adopting it and caring for it in all aspects. Our goal for the interior is to the retain character-defining industrial features – concrete auger trench and floors, mono-skin perforated corrugated galvanized steel walls, and exposed structural steel. Into this, we installed a new tabernacle and ascent. Drawing from pre-Columbian granaries, the tabernacle is situated overhead the lower landing of the stair assembly and consists of a shaped cedar wood mantel, piano tuning pins and cast aluminum bladder in which to store grain. The ascent is a suspended 24 inch, wide 7-gauge steel plate stair assembly aligned with the concrete auger trench and the existing structural steel framing. leading to a single aperture through which to obtain a discrete view of the moon at nightfall. The production, Guardian Spectacular: A Peaceable Kingdom, consist of an experimental in situ art performance by Daniel T. Gaitor-Lomack in collaboration with the author. The staging will consist of Gaitor-Lomack performing the ascent while the author atones the tabernacle and a series of Indonesian puppets.

The Middle: On Freedom, Autonomy, and Pleasure

Courtney Coffman
Princeton University

There has been a renewed design interest in the “middle” of America. The shifting landscape of developer projects driven by market forces in metropolitan areas has meant a dry well for emerging practices. The countryside and rural life alternatively afford the necessary space for architectural experimentation and contextual fodder to further explore typology, methodology, and ideology. This recent interest is specific to the American countryside, something that is not lost upon designers amid the shifting political and socio-economic landscape.[1]Within these observations is the subtext that many emerging architects can no longer afford to jumpstart their careers as academics and practitioners within major cities, but rather opt for the fellowships, teaching positions, and competition briefs situated in “fly-over” states permitting architectural freedom, autonomy, and pleasure—a loose reprise in Vitruvian values of “Firmness, Commodity, and Delight” or the American Dream of “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” This design movement is not about recolonizing the country—as a modernist tabula-rasa condition or affluent pastoral fantasies—but rather celebrating the quotidian. This research will, however, briefly touch upon historical precedents of other “returns” to the rural and its cultural context to unpack and situate this moment. Two key texts include Meredith Martin’s Dairy Queens: The Politics of Pastoral Architecture from Catherine de’ Medici to Marie-Antoinette(2011) and Chris Jennings’ Paradise Now: The Story of American Utopianism(2016). Amid rapid change in the 19th century, Jennings highlights how American settlers designed utopia through the grass-roots construction of communities, their subsequent architecture and objects, such as the Oneida Community; whereas Martin’s text not only demonstrates an interest in the rural as the petit bourgeoisie came to predominance in the 18th century but also how the pastoral landscape and its architecture became a site and place controlled by women. In this spirit of rule-bending and misbehaving, this paper will highlight the work of three “young” practices who demonstrate a sophisticated technological knowledge of digital tools, yet site their work within the American countryside as a commentary on rural traditions and craft. Practices and projects include Norman Kelley’s (Carrie Norman and Thomas Kelley) Wrong Chairs and Young Americans, in which the designers look to traditional American furniture—often produced by rural craftsmen, including the Amish—to reimagine the object’s function and the significance of perfection, while calling into order methods of production in hyper-local economies. Endemic Architecture’s (Clark Thenhaus) early proposals for a Belvedere and a Bell Tower are seeming delightful pastoral follies that unearth the hidden history of 200 decommissioned missile sites in Southern Wyoming, the remnant geo-political infrastructure of the Cold War, further exacerbating the rural as the terrain for typological and military experimentation. Dream the Combine’s (Jennifer Newsom Carruthers and Tom Carruthers) kinetic installations in Minnesota, situate architectural effects among the forgotten spaces of tall, grassy fields, grain silos, and empty train cars. [1]Furthermore, architecture events such as the recent “Exhibit Columbus” biennial—a small city in Indiana (44,000 residents) boasting mid-century architectural gems yet surrounded by agriculture —and the Guggenheim’s forthcoming exhibition (2020), “Countryside: Future of the World,” collaboratively curated by Rem Koolhaas and AMO with supporting research work from Harvard GSD, demonstrate that the rural has a certain cultural traction.

Swissness Applied Exhibition

Nicole McIntosh
Texas A&M University

Jonathan Louie
Texas A&M University

Swissness Applied is a transcultural analysis of New Glarus that represents challenges in architecture and urban design as examples of current social transformations in global contexts. It is one of several towns in America founded by European immigrants that adapt the architecture to the image of their heritage. The exhibition questions the translation of the cultural image in architecture and illustrates through representational means the results and potential outcomes of New Glarner Swiss themed building codes. The exhibition consists of (7) 25’ long tables that contain both documentation and original architectural explorations. Filling the tables are packing peanuts, some of which were used in the transportation of the exhibition. Attached to the tables are twelve viewfinders filled with photographs and imagery of the swissified town and its’ photographic precedent. Each viewfinder offers museum viewers glimpses into the imagery in the New Glarus collection.

They include photographs collected from ‘Chapter 118: Building Construction, Article II: Swiss Architectural Theme’ in the New Glarus building code that offers guidelines that require the use of typical elements of the Swiss Chalet style. Using illustrations in seven picture books, and a collection of 41 photographs and postcards as examples, the code references a variety of traditional chalet styles in the cantons of Switzerland. However, in its entirety, the code and its’ collection images work to simplify many very distinct versions of “Swissness” in architecture into one composed style that is recognizable as, simply, Swiss. Swissness Applied is a traveling exhibition currently on view at the Yale Architecture Gallery. From September 21 – November 10, 2019 it was a guest exhibition at the Kunsthaus Glarus Güterschuppen in Switzerland. It was initially presented at SARUP Gallery at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee School of Architecture & Urban Planning from April 12 – May 3, 2019. The exhibition design, research, and curation were done by the architect.

2:30pm
Gaslamp 4

Digital Speculations and Production

Moderator: Alvin Huang, University of Southern California

Computerized Analysis and Simulation of Dynamic Vision in the City: A Cinematic Approach

Fang Xu
South Dakota State University

Dynamic vision refers to the visual perception of the environment when the observer is in motion. Pedestrians in the city always have dynamic visual experiences, the aesthetic qualities of which may motivate or discourage the intention to walk. Despite the significant design relevance of dynamic vision, theoretical explorations concerning this subject have been in dormancy since the groundbreaking studies by Cullen, Appleyard, and Lynch. Existing literature articulates some conceptual aspects but provides few practical research methods for architects and planners to assess the dynamic visual qualities of urban spaces, let alone design tools to evaluate architectural forms for improving pedestrians’ dynamic vision. This paper proposes a computer-aided environmental research and design protocol for analyzing dynamic vision in real-world urban settings and simulating dynamic visual experiences in the design process. The paper first illustrates the methodological difficulty for the research and utilization of dynamic vision. It then moves on to elaborate a computerized cinematic method for dynamic visual assessment and design simulation through a community participatory urban design project at Watertown, South Dakota. The Watertown project incorporated a research stage that collected and analyzed dynamic visual data and a design stage that studied pedestrians’ dynamic visual experiences before and after design interventions. During the research stage, student researchers used wearable video recording devices to collect dynamic visual data from research participants’ immersive, first-person perspectives. Applying digital automation for video data transformation, quantification, and visualization, the researchers performed a computer-aided cinematic analysis that produced timeline-based cinematic diagrams. These diagrams distilled massive dynamic visual contents into a temporal composition of “key views,” static frames of first-person views significantly different from preceding ones in visual sequences. Further examinations and comparisons disclosed the environmental factors that defined “key views” and the characteristic temporal distribution of “key views” concerning the analytic dimensions of tempo, rhythm, and timing. These dimensions formulated an aesthetic assessment of collected dynamic visual data. For the design stage, the researchers reconstructed dynamic visual experiences in an interactive, real-time 3D environment. Digital simulation yielded video data about the dynamic visual experience in the urban environment with or without the proposed design interventions. Cinematic analyses of simulated dynamic vision inspired the researchers to evaluate alternate design iterations. As demonstrated by the Watertown project, the computer-aided research and design protocol for dynamic visual research features several crucial methodological advantages. The protocol significantly diminishes extraneous subjectivity involved in the research process, featuring a methodological rigor and procedural transparency to help generate trustworthy, confirmable, and transferrable environmental design knowledge. The computer-aided method produces cinematic diagrams that help frame qualitative interpretations and comparisons of experiential aesthetics. Conceptual diagramming and real-time simulation also promote interdisciplinary communication and public engagement, enabling a quick utilization of research findings in time-sensitive, community participatory design scenarios. Future development of the protocol will continue to improve the level of digital automation as well as the integration of research and simulation, advocating a data-driven, user-centered design process that introduces delightful dynamic visual experiences through planning and architectural design.

Towards Automation: The Politics of the Discrete

Mollie Claypool
University College London

This paper will look at the historical and theoretical political and economic contexts, and social and technological consequences, of a Discrete approach to architecture and the automation of the built environment. In the last several years the Discrete has emerged as critique of earlier paradigms of digital architecture, asserting “that a digital form of assembly, based on [discrete] parts that are as accessible and versatile as digital data, offers the greatest promise for a complex yet scalable open-ended and distributed architecture” (Retsin, 2019). This paper will argue that Discrete Automation allows for the composition of architecture to be informed by the complex interaction between material, geometry, politics, economy and culture. Discrete Automation can suggest an alternative ontology that suggests a new understanding of the ecology between things, where the relationship between individuals, society and nature (Kohler, 2016) does not require or enforce predetermined hierarchies between parts. Instead relationships, meaning and value emerges through “iterative accumulation”, seriality and “recombination [in] different conditions” (Retsin 2019) utilising automated frameworks for architectural production. Drawing on several projects developed in the last two years around the Discrete and automation in Laboratory Name Omitted at Institution Omitted, the paper will examine the historical and contemporary constraints in the architecture and construction industry preventing or limiting large-scale automation for the production of housing. Housing has always been an important subject of, and context for, the research of Laboratory Name Omitted as it is the most common, banal and politicised architectural typology that is in short supply worldwide. The paper will look at limitations in technological innovation in existing production chains as well as the impact of economic and political policies around land value and ownership. These constraints will include the ways in which automated technologies are adapted for, or integrated into, processes for design and production, and look at how existing communication technologies and network infrastructures have created opaque, fragmented, inefficient and striated production chains for architectural realisation. The paper will draw on work by Pinoncely & Belcher (2018) that problematised current innovations in the construction sector from the perspective of a more efficient and affordable built environment as well as from the “Land for the Many” report that “proposes radical changes in the way land […] is used and governed” (Monbiot et al, 2019) putting the inequalities that result from land ownership and value at the heart of contemporary global concerns such as the housing crisis. On a global scale, the construction industry is evidently among the slowest to adopt process and technology innovations (Agarwal, Chandrasekaran & Sridhar), resulting in high prices, low productivity and outdated methods. “Today, the industry is in a deadlock—to break it will require movement from all players.” (McKinsey Global Institute, 2017) Therefore, this paper will argue for Discrete Automation as a means to shorten production chains, enable transparency, co-production and increase affordability in order to be able to provide communities with more affordable, sustainable housing, and the construction sector with faster, safer and more precise workflows.

References

Agarwal, R., Chandrasekaran, S. & Sridhar, M. (2016). Imagining construction’s digital future. Available from: https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/capital-projects-and-infrastructure/our-insights/imagining-constructions-digital-future [Accessed: 5 June 2019]

Köhler, Daniel. The Mereological City. Verlage: transcript, 2019.

Monbiot, George and Robin Grey, Tom Kenny, Laurie Macfarlane, Anna Powell-Smith, Guy Shrubsole, Beth Stratford. “Land for the Many: changing the way our fundamental asset is used, owned and governed”. A Report to the Labour Party, June 2019. Available from: https://landforthemany.uk/download-pdf/ [Accessed 5 June 2019].

Pinoncely, V. & Belcher, E. (2018). Made for London: Realising the Potential of Modern Methods of Construction. London: Centre for London. Available from: https://www.centreforlondon.org/publication/made-for-london/ [Accessed: 5 June 2019].

Retsin, Gilles. “Bits and Pieces.” Architectural Design, Vol. 89 (2), Discrete: Reappraising the Digital in Architecture. Wiley & Sons, 2019.

“Reinventing construction: a route to higher productivity”, McKinsey Global Institute, McKinsey & Company, February 2017 and “The construction productivity imperative”, McKinsey Global Institute, McKinsey & Company, July 2015.

An Architectural Digital: On the Spatial Politics of Two Early Internets

Curtis Roth
The Ohio State University

In 1971, Murray Turoff, a physicist at the US Office of Emergency Preparedness launched a cybernetic communications network called Party Line, a teletype network that would soon be considered the first digital chat room. Designed to obviate conference calls, Party Line introduced features such as the ability to see other participants in a network, or to toggle their speaking privileges, and relied on a sophisticated series of auditory signals indicating the status of other participants in Turoff’s electric room. Initially considered to be only, “[a] minor accomplishment compared to what else we were doing,” Turoff and his collaborator Starr Roxanne-Hiltz would quickly come to believe that Party Line’s real-time interfacing of geographically distant minds generated forms of cognitive friction between participants that rapidly co-evolved the creative intelligence of the group.[1] Extrapolating this realization from the scale of an electric room to planet earth at large, the two would go on to found the Electronic Information Exchange System (EIES) in 1978 at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Part asynchronous communications network, part interstate collaborative, part electric new world government, EIES was premised on a radical understanding of software’s potential as an interface for collectively engineering our own epigenetic evolution by processing users’ cognition as spatially distributable content. The roughly two-thousand members of EIES, which included figures like Stewart Brand and Alvin Toffler, began referring to this spatial model of software as “Groupware.” Between 1978 and the mid 1980s, EIES members collectively co-engineered their subjectivities as alternative artistic, political, and spiritual aggregates, creating everything from Groupware soap operas to some of the earliest theorizations of online aesthetics. While the preceding three decades of discourse on digital architecture have been preoccupied with the means by which architectural processes might be informed by computational processing, an examination of EIES reveals something like digital architecture’s perfect opposite: an early model of distributed computing that leveraged architecture as a conceptual device for designing a digital that was insistently spatial. The acceleration of group intelligence observed by Turoff in his first Party Line experiments of the early 1970s would be advanced by his EIES collaborators over the following decade through an explicitly architectural imaginary. The vast system was not only assembled via a shared catalog of spatial archetypes such as ‘boundaries’, ‘interiors’ and ‘thresholds’ describing Groupware parameters such as user access, editing hierarchies, or session timeouts; but more importantly, its organization came to rely on specifically architectural techniques for unevenly distributing power across its expanding online community. As these earliest experiments in digital politics have evolved into a now ubiquitous episteme of control that increasingly structures our digital lives, this text locates the conceptual figure of architecture in the work of EIES as one of contemporary power’s enduring precedents.[2] But more importantly, it argues that in imagining their encounters with the digital as a practice of pseudo-architectural occupation, the creative communities of EIES anticipated techniques of collective resistance that only become more pressing as the digital comes to define the limits of contemporary life itself.

[1] Bill Stewart, IRC (Internet Relay Chat) History, 7 January 2000, accessed: 18 June 2018, https://www.livinginternet.com/r/ri_emisari.htm

[2] Theorist Seb Franklin has described the episteme of control as “a set of technical principles having to do with self-regulation, distribution and statistical forecasting…[that] also describes the episteme grounding late capitalism, a worldview that persists beyond any specific device or set of practices.” Seb Franklin, Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015), xv.

This Project Was a Mistake: Tactical Errors in a Protocol for Aleppo’s Reconstruction

Charles Driesler
Pratt Institute

Ahmad Tabbakh
Pratt Institute

This project aims to investigate the impact machine intelligence has on the relationship between the architect, the designed output, and the people who will use it. We use the reconstruction of Aleppo, Syria and its current post-war, ruinous state as the context to explore this issue. The politically charged nature of the site allows us to marry an understanding of “participatory” and “autonomous” design (inherent to ongoing discussions of artificial intelligence) with necessary considerations for preservation, memory, and local culture. We take the theories of Lebbeus Woods as a starting precedent: reconstruction efforts in a post-war environment cannot and should not attempt to exactly replicate the pre-war condition. Although the character of the site has been forever changed by the traumas of war, we believe that the memory of the site persists as data (images, video, stories). We used that data to “teach” machine learning algorithms (specifically, a generative adversarial network) about several cultural motifs of Aleppo (e.g. the dome, the arch, and the minaret). We then interpret the output imagery from these systems as serial sections for built proposals on the site. This is our argument for preservation; the memory of site has been reconfigured, not replaced or removed. Our constraints revolve around coordinating a set of instructions and interactions. As a result, we understand our project as a protocol instead of a final a determined proposal. The game is then to outline a class of potentials and possibilities — not propose what literally gets built. In our simulation of this future Aleppo, citizens are asked to photograph and submit images of sites that they would like to reconstruct to the artificial intelligence “educated” by us, the designers. Bottom-up documentation is like voting. While the machine is trained on a pre-war ideal, its results must be deployed onto a post-war reality. Errors arise from the collision of these two categorically distinct data sets. This led us to our primary conclusion: the possibility for error, whether from the machine or the human input, is a critical and productive constraint. We understand the output of our simulations as a repository of erroneous understandings and recombinations of the site. Our interpretations of the machine learning output accumulated into a pile of mistakes: misreadings by the machine, our misreadings of misreadings by the machine, and so on. We believe that architecture in the era of machine intelligence is the pursuit of maximal error. Conflict born from the necessary synthesis of participation and expertise promises an automated future without expelling the human.

2:30pm
Salon D

Special Focus Session

Rethinking Borders and Boundaries in the Cities along the Mississippi River Watershed

Moderator: Kimberly Zarecor, Iowa State University

Session Description

By 2050, more than 68% of people will live in cities. Although research often focuses on the largest cities, close to half of these residents will live in settlements of fewer than 500,000. This special session will focus on a network of such cities along Mississippi River Watershed (MRW) from Minnesota to Louisiana. The session responds to the open borders theme by proposing an alternative interpretation emphasizing the interconnectedness of multi-state urban systems through hydrology, infrastructure, climate, and environmental quality. The panel highlights interdisciplinary projects bringing new approaches to urgent problems such as flooding, erosion, agricultural runoff, and urban sprawl.

Andy Kitsinger
University of Memphis

Silvina Lopez Barrera
Mississippi State University

Ulrike Passe
Iowa State University

2:30pm
Salon E

Special Focus Session

NAAB Open Forum

Moderator: Barbara A. Sestak, Portland State University / NAAB President

Session Description

Join the NAAB Board leadership and staff for an update on the new Conditions and Procedures, followed by an open forum. Bring your questions to learn more about the accreditation process under the new requirements.

4:30pm
Grand Ballroom

Plenary

ACSA Business Meeting & Topaz Medallion Keynote

President: Rashida Ng, Temple University

David Leatherbarrow

2020 AIA/ACSA Topaz Medallion

The American Institute of Architects and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture have named David Leatherbarrow, the 2020 winner of the AIA/ACSA Topaz Medallion for Excellence in Architectural Education, the highest honor given to educators in architecture.

7:00pm
Balboa Park

Ticketed Event

Early Career Faculty Scholarship Dinner

This year we are holding a dinner, open to all, to raise funds to support early career faculty. This event is hosted by the ACSA College of Distinguished Professors (DPACSA), which was founded in 2010 to identify and disseminate best practices in teaching and support the career development of new faculty. Proceeds from the dinner will be used to support faculty travel to attend the ACSA Annual Meetings.

+ More Details & Tickets

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ACSA Conferences

Eric W. Ellis
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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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108th ACSA Annual Meeting

OPEN: Reinvented Annual Meeting

Schedule

June 5, 2019

September 25, 2019

December 2019

January 2019

SCHEDULE WITH ABSTRACTS FRIDAY, MARCH 13, 2020

Scaled Interventions

Urban Strategies and Tactics

Material and Construction Technology

Historiography and Pedagogy

Incorporating Theory and Criticism

Building Pavilion

Process of Design to Realization: TAD Authors Panel

ARCHITECT as Designer-Developer-Builder

Unaccredited Undergraduate Architecture Program Discussion

Housing Community

Urban Ecology

Digital Practice

Modernisms and their Sites

Building Science in the Classroom

Surface

Future Faculty Discussion

ArchiPrep – we’ve got you covered!

Lunch Tours

Building Performance

Form, Function, Material, Space

Teaching and Cultural Context

Cultural Artifacts and Intervention

Digital Speculations and Production

Rethinking Borders and Boundaries in the Cities along the Mississippi River Watershed

NAAB Open Forum

ACSA Business Meeting & Topaz Medallion Keynote

David Leatherbarrow

Early Career Faculty Scholarship Dinner

Questions

Stay in Touch

SCHEDULE WITH ABSTRACTS
FRIDAY, MARCH 13, 2020