Below is the schedule for Wednesday, May 18, 2022, which includes session descriptions and research abstracts. The conference schedule is subject to change.
Obtain Continuing Education Credits (CES) / Learning Units (LU), including Health, Safety and Welfare (HSW). Registered conference attendees will be able to submit session attended for Continuing Education Credits (CES). Register for the conference today to gain access to all the AIA/CES credit sessions.
11:00am-12:00pm EDT /
8:00am-9:00am PDT
Plenary
1 LU Credit
Speakers:
Milton Curry, University of Southern California
Robert González, University of New Mexico
Lauren Matchison, University of Southern California
Nora Wendl, University of New Mexico
Session Description
With the theme of empowerment we encourage conference attendees to explore how, as architects and educators, we can help uplift disempowered communities, activate and connect with constituencies, and heal and sustain ecologies. We can do this by re-examining power relations within the academy and practice, eliminating barriers to entry into the profession, and disrupting systemic impediments to addressing social inequities. Architects and educators must be better equipped to provide leadership, advocacy and activism in realizing a higher quality of built space for all.
30-minutes
12:30pm-2:00pm EDT /
9:30am-11:00am PDT
Special Focus Session
1.5 LU Credit
Presenters:
Elgin Cleckley, University of Virginia
Adrian Parr, University of Oregon
Charlton Lewis, University of Texas at Austin
Gabriel Diaz Montemayor, University of Arkansas
Edson Cabalfin, Tulane University
Mo Zell, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Catherine Hamel, University of Calgary
Kwesi Daniels, Tuskegee University
Kendall Nicholson, ACSA
Session Description
This workshop highlights the member-wide calls for action to mitigate the grave disparities among faculty, staff, and students based on race and gender in architectural education. Attendees will learn of the responses to the 2022 Progress Survey on Equity in Architectural Education by this year’s Leadership Committee, created to recognize the efforts and monitor progress in DEI administration across architecture programs. Attendees will have the opportunity to participate in smaller conversations, sharing challenges and opportunities in DEI implementation, guided by questions developed by the Leadership Committee’s research findings.
12:30pm-2:00pm EDT /
9:30am-11:00am PDT
Special Focus Session
1.5 LU Credit
Moderators & Presenters:
Cathi Ho Schar, University of Hawaii At Manoa
Ceara O’Leary, University of Detroit Mercy
Ann Yoachim, Tulane University
Session Description
The discourse surrounding community design centers largely focuses on their impacts, awards, pedagogy, and processes, leaving operations and financial models outside of view. Given the economic challenges facing our universities, this business focused conversation is equally important to the future of academic public interest practice. This round table discussion will be led by community design center directors from the Albert and Tina Small Center for Collaborative Design, Detroit Collaborative Design Center, and University of Hawaiʻi Community Design Center, who will share the nuts and bolts of their practices, institutional structures, financial models, challenges, and strategic goals, and invite others to contribute to an informal discussion on the enterprise of engaged scholarship and practice.
12:30pm-2:00pm EDT /
9:30am-11:00am PDT
Special Focus Session
1.5 HSW Credit
Presenters:
Environmental Justice +Health +Decarbonsation
Nea Maloo, Howard University
Decommodifying Ownership: From Extraction to Regeneration
Janette Kim, Brendon Levitt, James Graham, California College of the Arts
Mono-Poly-Dollar
Lindsey Krug, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Sarah Aziz, University of Colorado Denver
Deep Geologies
Brittany Utting, Rice University
Acclimatizing to Heat in a Legacy City: Urban Heat Islands, Segregation and Social Connections in Toledo, Ohio
Yong Huang & Andreas Luescher, Bowling Green State University
Sujata Shetty, University of Toledo
Session Description
2022 Course Development Prize: Architecture, Climate Change, and Society
Columbia University’s Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) announce the winners of the 2022 Course Development Prize in Architecture, Climate Change, and Society. These innovative courses will be taught at architecture schools across North America in the coming years.
Education in architecture and urbanism is well positioned creatively and critically to address the exigencies of climate change. However, pedagogical methods that prioritize immediate applicability can come at the expense of teaching and research that explore the sociocultural and ecopolitical dimensions of the crisis. This, in turn, ultimately limits the range of approaches addressing climate change in professional practice.
12:30pm-2:00pm EDT /
9:30am-11:00am PDT
Special Focus Session
1.5 LU Credit
Presenters:
Ozayr Saloojee, Carleton U. & Associate Editor: Design, JAE
David Theodore, McGill U. & Associate Editor: Reviews, JAE
Yoonjee Koh, BAC & Associate Editor: Social Media, JAE
Cruz Garcia, Iowa State U. & Theme Co-Editor: Reparations!
Igor Marjanovic, Rice U. & Theme Co-Editor: Pedagogies for a Broken World
Session Description
This session invites readers of and contributors to JAE to join this discussion with active members of the editorial board: What is the “post”-pandemic journal? If March 2021 created a space to celebrate and look back on 75 years, March 2022 is an opportunity to look forward.
Over the past year, the JAE has curated its editorial board through our first open call for members, launched JAE Fellows, and created a position for an associate editor of social media—things that would have been unthinkable before the pandemic, but calls to transparency and the rise of social media to create networks of discourse necessitated them. Themes of the journal have also changed—from single-word titles that captured a large swath of ideas to provocations to think along the lines of social justice. This session invites readers of and contributors to JAE to join this discussion: what is the “post”-pandemic peer review academic journal?
30-minutes
2:30pm-4:00pm EDT /
11:30am-1:00pm PDT
Research Session
1.5 LU Credit
Integrating Service-Learning Earlier in Architectural Curriculums through Engaged Design
David Newton, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Abstract
Service-learning provides a variety of benefits for student learning while providing the opportunity to serve local communities. Community design, design-build, and live project represent service-learning models within architectural education that have been the most widely explored and discussed, but the scope of these models often limits their flexibility to connect to multiple-levels of an architectural curriculum. This has led to architectural curriculums where service-learning only occurs at the advanced levels of a curriculum. This research explores the possibility for new service-learning models that can accommodate a greater range of connections with architectural curricula, faculty, and students. The research first presents a brief history of service-learning models. Then an alternative service-learning model described as “engaged-design” is presented through a case study. The work then concludes with a discussion high-lighting how engaged-design models might be used in combination with other service-learning models to create an architectural curriculum centered around community engagement.
Take a Stand: A Foundation for Today’s Citizen-Designer
Zaneta Hong, Cornell University
Abstract
These past few years have challenged and altered every one of us. To recollect the innumerable racial and social injustices, the rise of devastating natural disasters from climate change, and the Covid-19 pandemic and ensuing economic recession is to recognize how much we – as a collective society – have endured and continue to endure in the struggles and hardships issued upon us each day. Nearly every city has taken the brunt of upheaval or revolution, with episodes continually exploding in local townships and municipalities across the country and around the world. Whether one lives in a booming metropolis or a small town, it is evident that communities that implement creative and empathetic interventions – in response to these events and transformations – can catalyze profound effects to the built environment and the human experience. Students in a design studio at Cornell University were asked to take a stand – a stand on their work and position of manifesting ideas from concept development to design intervention, from position to proposition. The studio asked students to answer what is the value of design and what is the role of the designer? Alongside conversations on climate change, social equity, and design empathy, how does conjuring the unknown, speculating upon possibilities, and imagining constructed futures all occur without a voice? How can one hold onto their values and position, while engaging others through the delicate – and sometimes elusive – design process? During the semester, students considered these questions and demonstrated their knowledge through a design process that enabled flexible, and more importantly, self-directed, self-confident positions that allowed for independent visions and a declaration of intents or more fundamental, a series of calls to action. As active participants and citizens in this world, students were encouraged to advocate for positive change; to reinforce what is seen as good and what is necessary to be preserved; to rally against what threatens one’s rights and beliefs; and as a pedagogical objective to the studio, to communicate those values through design.
Unpacking the Archive: Community Engagement and the Research Studio
Elizabeth Keslacy, Miami University
Jeffrey Kruth, Miami University
Abstract
The city is often a place of collective memory, but as the recent conflicts over monuments and memorials have taught us, some memories are prematurely erased while others live on past their shelf life. Although history and memory can sometimes leave their mark upon the city, it is more often incumbent upon later generations to construct physical markers of important, though ephemeral, events. More recently cities have invested in more informative and interactive installations, and architects have created more abstract, experiential structures that convey history in a more emotive mode. As part of this discourse, our teaching project titled “Unpacking the Archive” aims to recuperate the lost histories of those who shaped the city immediately after the Civil Rights era when white flight to the suburbs and an era of austerity shaped cities. In particular, it examines the struggles and actions of the Over-the-Rhine Peoples’ Movement in Cincinnati, Ohio that originated in the early 1970s and continues today. The Peoples’ Movement is a coalition of activists, institutions, and residents who waged a series of campaigns to fight for housing access, schools, parks, and services against hypergentrification and a municipal bureaucracy actively working to eliminate the poor from a picturesque historic neighborhood. A true poor people’s campaign, the Peoples’ Movement unified poor Appalachian and Black residents at a time of continued racial tensions. Building upon the legacy of the research studio, the studio follows the humanistic turn in Urban Studies prompted in part by the recent Mellon Foundation’s “Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities” initiatives. “Unpacking the Archive” diverges from the model inaugurated by Venturi Scott Brown’s work in Las Vegas or Rem Koolhaas’ Harvard Project on the City. Instead, we leverage access to the People’s Movement’s informal, dispersed archive and the urgency of conducting oral histories with its aging leadership to do team-based micro-historical research into five campaigns that culminated in a library of visual materials, a written narrative, and mappings. Students then designed an exhibition that situated those campaigns within larger national trajectories such as desegregation and housing policy, and secondly built empathy through formal, spatial, and graphic design decisions. Revisiting the concept of “memorial,” students were asked to design in a mode that was both informative and celebratory, reinscribing the actions of the city’s marginalized actors into the foreground. The studio’s novelty is threefold: first, it empowers students to become experts in their research and enables them to interact professionally with community members; secondly, it embraces the project of “operative history” and design that proceeds from it, in the sense that the project explicitly recounts events from the perspective of the People’s Movement, reframing the status quo and dominant players as fundamentally oppressive; third, with respect to the relationship between instructor and student, it rejects what Paolo Freire called the “banking model” of education to instead structure a co-learning experience. Ultimately, the course combined the research studio model, community engagement, service learning, and design-build pedagogy to engage students in a real-world project of history writing, exhibition design, and memorialization.
Pedagogical shifts and multi-institutional and interdisciplinary partnerships during the COVID Era to address climate challenges and enable community engagement
Sonia Chao, Madeleine Li, & Camila Zablah-Jimenez, University of Miami
Abstract
As the world locked down in the 2019 Spring term, what seemed like a short-term adjustment to digital synchronous and asynchronous course delivery soon became a longer-term modality, ultimately re-shaping the entire following academic year. Since then, pedagogical shifts to digital platform options facilitated classroom learning for those unable to attend in person. In step and perhaps more so than ever, the past academic year has proven not only that digital teaching can extend far beyond classrooms, but also that community engagement can be successfully accomplished in meaningful ways, despite social distancing measures, to enable students to learn sought-after and up-to-date methodologies and practices that increase student sensibilities and awareness of the web of issues surrounding community design, particularly in the face of climate challenges. In the 2020 Fall term, non-profit ReMain Nantucket began conversations with faculty members from various universities to frame a multi-institutional and interdisciplinary effort to connect community experts and residents to academics and their students to each other, collectively addressing the growing climate challenges facing the town of Nantucket, Massachusetts. Professors from the five participating academic institutions jointly developed a lecture series which highlighted national academic leaders and local professional experts. The interwoven learning experiences allowed students to understand how resilient design, cultural identity, environmental factors, the structural inefficiencies in urban and building codes intersect with climate-related challenges, such as sea-level rise and storm surge, and with social challenges, such as affordable housing. Mid-term and final presentations to local and national experts, and academic leaders, preceded an in-person public forum where students presented their proposals to the community of Nantucket. Through this multi-faceted integrated course delivery format, students had an opportunity to interact directly with residents, government leaders, non-profit groups, and climate and preservation advocates, further nourishing their learning experience. The course outcomes varied—from typological design proposals, to masterplans, policy toolkits, and adaptation action strategies. The cross-pollination that resulted from this interdisciplinary and multi-institutional course format serves as a successful pedagogical precedent, illustrating how commitment to the student learning process, integration of teaching with opportunities for experiential learning through curricular and co-curricular activities, and through guided learning outside of the classroom can result in students developing “practical intelligence.” Such exposure to the practical application of knowledge is integral to ensuring student preparedness for effective and meaningful careers. Educators can collaborate to better connect formal and informal pedagogic methods, which translate theory into knowledge, through coursework and curricular opportunities, incorporating real-world experiences, even during the restraints of the COVID Era. This joint course model allows students to search for innovation and knowledge precisely at the intersections of topics and viewpoints, through engaged discourse and the utilization of traditional and innovative tools; in this manner creating occasions for them to build practical expertise, skills, and know-how, attuned to the climate realities before them, while strengthening their design-thinking and creative practices and community engagement approaches. These acquired skills can yield hyper-localized solutions for communities to complex challenges in the short-term and in the long-term, result in future climate leaders.
2:30pm-4:00pm EDT /
11:30am-1:00pm PDT
Research Session
1.5 LU Credit
A Photocatalytic Building Façade for Improving Urban Air Quality
Chengde Wu, Iowa State University
Dante Gil Rivas, Rice University
Kyoung-Hee Kim & Ok-Kyun Im, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Abstract
Fossil fuel combustion generates various types of air pollutants. Nitrogen dioxide (NO2) is one of the primary sources of air pollution in populated urban areas, especially in developing countries. This study investigates an air pollutant reduction system that utilizes a photocatalytic substance on building facades. Titanium Dioxide (TiO2), one of the most effective photo-induced catalysts, can be excited by UV-A rays with a wavelength shorter than 385nm. Excited TiO2 can then break water vapor molecules in the air to form hydroxyl radicals. Due to its strong oxidation properties, hydroxyl radicals can subsequently react with air pollutants and form harmless substances, e.g., turning NO2 into nitrates. In this study, we conducted experiments to test the effects of photocatalytic facades reducing air pollutants under UV rays. We fabricated a small scale (30cm x 30cm) building façade model and coated it with a thin layer of titanium dioxide. The model is then put into an airtight chamber filled with exhaust gas from an internal combustion engine. Inside the chamber, we installed a set of environmental sensors that measure NO2, UV intensity, temperature, and relative humidity. The sensors were connected to a Raspberry Pi that is used to collect the sensor data. Natural sunlight was used as the UV source to activate the TiO2 on the model. Under sunlight, the concentration of NO2 dropped noticeably over time. In a controlled experiment, on the other hand, the concentration of NO2 monotonically increased without the UV rays. This study shows that photocatalytic facades with titanium dioxide coating can reduce urban air pollutants through photocatalysis. In urban areas with severe air pollution and a large amount of building surface area, photocatalytic facades can be an effective passive system to improve urban air quality.
Balancing Act: Seeking Equilibrium Between Cost and Performance in Housing Affordability
David Hinson, Mackenzie Stagg, Elizabeth Garcia, Bruce Kitchell, & Rusty Smith, Auburn University
Abstract
Sustainable building certification programs and energy modeling have transformed the way design professionals approach the design and construction of high-performance housing. While the impact of these tools has generally been positive, the value of implementation can be more difficult to assess when working in market sectors like affordable single-family housing. In this context, where the cost-benefit question is always front and center, design teams need more detailed information to understand which elements of green certification standards have the greatest impacts with the least added construction costs and to advise their clients accordingly. Implementation requires responsible translation of modeled performance data into realistic expectations for actual operating cost, and common sustainability “best practices” must be reconsidered and recalibrated to variations in building scale and site context. The research study profiled here has been designed to provide the perspective needed to find the balancing point between front-end construction costs of improved performance and back-end performance consequences by studying the predicted and actual energy usage of homes built to specific beyond-code standards: Passive House Institute US (PHIUS) and Department of Energy’s Zero Energy Ready Homes (ZERH). The study is built on a small, detached, single-family prototype home developed for the context of the mixed-humid climate of Alabama. By constructing two identical prototype homes on the same street, with similar orientation, but with differing energy-related assemblies and details, the authors can evaluate the initial cost of construction associated with achieving these two performance standards against the actual energy use in each home. In addition to gaining insights on the costs and benefits of building to beyond-code energy standards, the study also seeks to illustrate the differences between model-predicted energy use and actual energy consumption with the goal of helping housing provider partners understand how to use modelling as a resource when evaluating alternative construction approaches.
Positing Ecology: Mass Material Strategies for Miami-Dade County
Christopher Meyer, University of Miami
Abstract
South Florida communities continue to record steadily increasing growth, with Miami Dade County’s [MDC] population expanding by approximately 3.5% between 2014 and 20181, despite mounting evidence of environmental uncertainty. Currently, any concern of building insurance affordability/availability, long-term financial investment risks and health/safety concerns have not significantly altered the short-term future of the construction and real-estate markets.2 The south Florida community’s commitment to urban development is ever present; but the question on the minds of community leaders, policy makers and the general public is, how do we create urban resilience? The architectural profession must address the agenda–how do buildings and policies anticipate an evolving environment and sustain long-term, safe occupation? And what are they made of? An abundant battery of raw material timber resource, a distributed network of mills, processing plants, and mass timber manufacturing facilities affords an opportunity for the Southeastern United States to focus on implementing wood fibre into the construction ecology. However, a critical hurdle to the successful implementation of mass timber wood products in Florida, and specifically in MDC, is within the policy and permitting process. The required certified product testing by the Florida Administrative Code3 and the Miami-Dade County Product Approvals and Notice of Acceptance4 is one of two jurisdictions in the United States implementing the stringent High Velocity Hurricane Zone [HVHZ]5 as an overlay to the Florida Building Code6-which must be successfully navigated for project realization. The focus of this paper engages the question how do we build as a regional inquiry to Southern Florida through a case study on a partnership forged between academics and practice at the University [name withheld] School of Architecture and [name withheld] architectural practice. This collaboration is established with the shared objective of implementing an innovative path to the design and building permitting of mass timber in MDC, specifically the qualitative and quantitative methods required for CLT case study’s success. Empirical methodologies used to understand building applications of mass timber products, specifically PRG-320 certified Cross Laminated Timber Panels7 in Florida is through the design, engineering and submission of drawings to the Miami-Dade building permitting office for review.
Backyard Carbon Sinks: A prototype for a net-negative carbon accessory dwelling unit
Robert Williams, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Abstract
The Backyard Carbon Sinks project asks whether a design can simultaneously address embodied carbon, operational carbon, and critical social issues such as affordable housing. Specifically, this project explores opportunities for net-negative embodied carbon building through the design of a modest, prototypical accessory dwelling unit (ADU) to be sold as a pre-designed and pre-fabricated residence. ADUs have received growing attention in the last decade as a possible solution to issues of affordable housing, density, and multi-generational housing. Alongside this, due to their size and relative simplicity, ADUs also present a unique opportunity to experiment with de-carbonizing the building sector and to explore residential buildings as potential carbon sinks. Given the potential number of ADUs may be constructed in the near future, this could be a significant opportunity for de-carbonization while also addressing the multivariant housing crises facing many cities and municipalities. This project presentation argues for the importance of shifting focus from operational energy to embodied carbon, outlines the design strategies and proposed key assemblies for net-negative carbon building, and discusses the carbon modelling and proposed hybrid construction methods for delivering this ADU to a wide audience.
2:30pm-4:00pm EDT /
11:30am-1:00pm PDT
Research Session
1.5 LU Credit
Skyroom Pavilion
Kristina Yu, University of New Mexico
Faculty Design Award
Abstract
This project was a conversational outgrowth of many stakeholders in the community. We sat down with city officials, the neighboring university, community college, corporate leasers of large office real estate, and the regional hospital leadership. These stakeholders all are to use this public funded park near to their buildings. Their employees, members of the community and local residents will be visiting this park. To our surprise, it was a memorable moment during the kick off meeting, several whiteboards and notes being taken in all four sides of a larger conference room, they came to consensus about several points of common values: land, people, our overlapping histories and respect. In our state, we start all meetings with a land acknowledgement. We incant the responsibilities of public stewardship of resources and our positions to make lasting decisions. At the end of several days of meetings, written in one of the cardinal directed wall was written (approximate), ‘we value the land and its relationship to the 4 points of the Zia symbol, both in its orientation and its system of value inscribed in its virtues: four sacred obligations we all seek to meet.’ The obligations are “a strong body, clear mind, pure spirit and devotion to the welfare of family and community.” Our design synthesis, over time, honors the three dimensional qualities of the Zia symbol. We these words, and notes, began a 2 year process to find an architecture that embodied the values of this convergence of community. The outcome was the SkyRoom pavilion.
Deconstructing Design Research in Design Studio Pedagogy: Lessons from Action Research
Sara Khorshidifard, Drury University
Abstract
Inclusive, wide-ranging, and rigorous research plays a crucial role in the types and quality of insights and knowledge created by architects’ design creations. Research for, into, and through architectural design appears mystifying and the task seen daunting, especially for architecture learners. This is perpetuated by other misconceptions on design itself that students often carry entering a design studio and into the process of design. What is understood in a more straightforward or intuitive manner by an expert and experienced designer may pose quandaries for a novice and even more confusions for a beginner-level architecture student. Furthermore, in addition to the varied standings, studies acknowledge general definitional ambiguities, confusions of understandings, and an overall immaturity of the field of design research, overall, within architecture (Babbie 2015; Bayazit 2004; Lawson 2002; Frayling 1994; Archer 1981). This paper draws on the process and shares the results of an action research project that was conducted during the 2020-2021 academic year. Supported by XXXX University XXXX’s XXXX program, the study explored teaching research skills in design-centered learning environments. The research examined ways curriculum design and instructional activities can better assist novice architectural learners in making sense of the nuanced complexities of design-research expectations. The need for conducting the study was recognized during the author’s first year at the above institution and based on early reflections on its less STEM-based and less technical curriculum. Two questions guided the study: What pedagogies can help tackle misunderstandings, and help demystify and streamline the process? What effective teaching methods can enable and enhance design-research aptitudes? Inquiries began by highlighting key (mis)perceptions on dissimilarities between the acts of design (as creative and open-ended) and [pure] research (as rigorous and scientific). These premises became the starting points for understanding why/what misconceptions may exist amongst early learners. 70 total students participated in the study over the course of three consecutive semesters. Research design categorized three stages of pre-assessment, content delivery, and post-assessment. Pre-knowledge probe patterns identified (mis)perceptions through pre-assessment surveys, followed by teaching interventions and concept mapping. Post-assessment stage evaluated student responses through decoding, memoing, and mapping identifications of prevalent design-research learning traits. Key strategies included written questionnaires, observational data (fieldnotes and photographs), and learner-generated artifacts (process reflections, concept maps and culminating design outputs). With extreme inequalities and for where the societies’ needs mainly reside nowadays, design research cannot remain oblivious, generic or neutral. When embraced mindfully and critically, akin to virtuous design, design research can also become a means for acting in and transforming the world. Exploring design research possibilities helps better ways and approaches for architectural engagement in societal concerns as part of a larger context in which the political and social issues are foregrounded and for design outputs to embrace the kind of research that is essential in transforming the world.
Emergent Capacity
Bradford Watson, Montana State University
Abstract
Our environment is defined by systems, both natural / physical and human / virtual. Physical and virtual systems are interconnected and inform each other, sometimes resulting in unintended consequences. We can see the unintended consequences of the grid as it relates to water rights and responsibilities. Comparing John Wesley Powell’s map of the western states based on watersheds and the present day delineation of our country, we can see the potential conflicts created between states surrounding access to water. These grid based decisions have significant impact on our economy and political structures. In the end any map identifies a clear agenda shaped by policy. The environment is changed because of the line and the power the policy has to radically change the physical environment and extend back into the virtual systemic network of our globally connected condition. Only by understanding the systemic conditions that shape our environment do we have the potential to intervene and impact these authoritative systems. Through systems analysis we can subvert the traditional role of the architect as one who works for a client, and move to a role where we identify emergent capacity for shaping the built environment. Performative strategies, beyond the scale of physical architecture, must become the priority of architects to shape democratic space. Through this approach, works can be catalysts for bottom-up change. This paper presents the pedagogical framing and student design projects that situate themselves in the world through a systems theory based design seeking mutualistic and emergent capacities of architecture. Utilizing the methodology of synthetic mapping the interconnected systems of the existing conditions, latent potential is revealed. These potentials are then utilized to create a generative performative space of varying scales. The paper evidences design proposals that range from the scale of a pavilion that amplifies public discourse and access to education, to that of engaging the complexities that are the West and how we can continue to sustainably inhabit the place.. The pedagogy empowers the student to understand the implications of their existence in a larger, rapidly changing context and gives agency to the designer who can manage these complexities to create emergent capacity.
How the Psychoanalytic Use of Object Constancy and Internalization Can Inform Our Understanding of the Teacher/Student Relationship
Elizabeth Danze, University of Texas at Austin
Abstract
In looking at the discipline of Psychoanalysis, we might better understand concepts around basic human development such as object constancy and internalization as ways of informing how the mentoring or teaching relationship is focused on the growth and development in the other person – our student. Object constancy and internalization enable an individual to preserve a stable, subjective representation of an object (the psychotherapist, for instance) in the face of complex or contradictory affects. This paper looks at this through the lens of the psychoanalytic dyad – the relationship between psychoanalyst and analysand (patient) – as a vehicle for envisioning how we might better educate our students, especially in the intensive, hours-long design studio. In Hans Loewald’s important paper, “On the Therapeutic Action of Psychoanalysis,” he expounds on the parent-child relationship and how the empathic parent holds a vision of the future child and in various ways mediates this vision to the child. The child, in identification with it, can then grow. By internalizing aspects of the parent, the child also internalizes the parent’s image of the child. While a teacher is not participating in the role of parent or psychoanalyst, a primary concern for an analyst, parent, or teacher is the aiding in the growth and development of another. The idea that the parent/analyst/teacher’s capacity to imagine future growth, anticipate something for the child or patient or student, hold that in mind for them, and offer that vision is a reflective way of expanding possibilities and potentialities for them. Perhaps in this way, the successful, authentic, and autonomous student begins in the mind of the teacher. We understand that the psychoanalyst seeks to understand and “take in” the analysand, to help organize thought processes and mindset. Then, working alongside the analysand, the teacher helps to organize the student’s design approach and process. The teacher then “hands back” organizational and other insight through interpretation to the student, who must bring meaning and understanding to the changing project – and to themselves, the developing designer. In addition to object constancy and internalization, by looking at the writings and clinical work of Winnicott, Ogden, Kohut, and others, we will explore related notions of receptivity, projective identification, concordant transference, and co-construction and ask how they might be understood within the teacher/student paradigm in this context. Lastly, in an analysis, realizations and understandings continue to occur and develop long past the end of treatment. It is a fluid and ongoing process, with multiple mechanisms extending beyond the limits of the analysis. The successful design student may internalize the relationship with her instructor, aiding the student in positive self-constancy long after the design studio is over and the instructor is gone. By understanding how to employ some of these ideas, we might better appreciate our role as teachers in aiding our students in a life-long quest for growth and mastery.
2:30pm-4:00pm EDT /
11:30am-1:00pm PDT
Research Session
1.5 LU Credit
Connecting to the Archive: Counter-gentrification in Central Brooklyn
Jeffrey Hogrefe & Scott Ruff, Pratt Institute
Abstract
“Connecting to the Archive: Counter-gentrification Tactics in Central Brooklyn.” Weeksville was founded in 1838 by formerly enslaved persons and freedmen who sought to create a self-sustaining utopian community in Brooklyn, New York. Distinguished by its urbanity, size, and relative physical and economic stability, the community provided sanctuary for self-emancipated persons from Southern slave plantations, and for free Black people escaping the violence of New York City’s Draft Riots in 1863. The second largest African American community in the U.S. was eventually absorbed by the forces of real estate development in New York City. After almost fifty years of community led persistence and vision, in 2014 the Weeksville Heritage Center (WHC) introduced a new Cultural Arts Building and interpretive landscape on the same campus as the original community. “Connecting to the Archive: Counter-Gentrification Tactics in Central Brooklyn,” presents the efforts to continue to connect with the immediate neighborhood and strengthen its community development activities as a counterforce to gentrification through several processes that center around the ongoing development of archival and oral history collections held by the Center. Through academic partnership, students and faculty work together with the Center’s staff and community members on the ongoing archiving project, which seeks to support the Center’s efforts to preserve and add to the archive, provide access to, and interpret the archival microhistory of community development and documentation activities that led to the formation of the Society and its growth. Historic black nineteenth century self-supporting communities can become a model for empowerment in twenty first century shrinking Black communities with extractive lives rendered apolitical and ahistorical and little hope for a future. To assist in this effort, students and faculty and Weeksville staff engage with local residents in oral history and critical ethnography practices. The goal is to empower residents to utilize the archive through interviewing, self-documentation, storytelling, and appreciation of archival and oral history methodologies. The project connects the Center to its immediate community through the effort to document the memory and experience of the neighborhood in the past, present, and future, to engage with and expand the archival collections held at the Center so as to create a place of refuge, delight and individual and collective history as a counterforce to the forces of global neoliberalism that continue to degrade, marginalize and challenge local community building.
Neighborhood of Hope
Heather E. Lorenzo, Texas A&M University
CRIT Live Student Scholar
Abstract
Stop Design Oppression
Unlearning the norms of our criminal justice system and our Western philoso-phy of punishment and surveillance is a herculean effort. Despite original best intentions, these philosophies have violated human rights since their inception. As of January 2021, the AIA (American Institute of Architects) has banned the designing of spaces for execution and solitary confinement. The application of Evidence-Based Design can help inform design decisions to create spaces and environments that support the rehabilitation and treatment processes for those individuals housed in these correctional facilities. Architecture as a social intervention can aid in ending the design of oppression, objectivity, and dehumaniza-tion.
Catalyst for Change
I read in a textbook once, that a social problem cannot be solved with an architectural solution. I disagree. I believe that architecture can be a catalyst for solutions to many of our social problems. This architectural endeavor asks the following fundamental questions: How can architecture be a catalyst for changing the way jails and prisons are designed by ensuring human rights and positive rehabilitation are the driving design principles? How can a building be designed so it acts as a beacon of hope for those individuals who have been incarcerated and the communities it touches? How can interior spaces be designed to support best practice treatment plans and outpatient services to help reduce recidivism in the Los Angeles County Jails?
An Architectural Intervention
This architectural intervention comes at a time where communities have become overwhelmingly vulnerable to the criminal justice system. Systemic racism is intermingled in our jails and prisons while the men and women inside these facilities continue to suffer from severe mental health illnesses. They live with-out their value as a human being and they live without hope of becoming valued as a human being deserving of dignity and kindness.
This proposal, from an architectural perspective, is to design a housing unit for those individuals under custody as well as those incarcerated in the mental health population at the Men’s Central Jail and the Twin Towers Correctional Fa-cility. Through an evidence-based design approach, a new typology will emerge supporting human rights, dignity, hope, and value. Knowing the depravity of this large scale societal problem, I wanted to be a part of an overarching solution that is so desperately needed. My goal for this final thesis project was to create an architectural impact by way of dignity, hope, and value. By giving dignity back to the patient, you start allowing room for self-respect and self-growth.
Dignity. Hope. Value
If you ever have an opportunity to talk to someone who suffers from a mental health illness and has been incarcerated they speak of hope. In their lapse of a psychotic episode, they are in a dark-ness that you and I will never under-stand. The feelings of hopelessness and despair come upon them wave after wave. The environment of the jails and prisons and the philosophies of those facilities exacerbate those raw emo-tions triggering psychotic episodes that can lead to a violent and hostile environment.
When a person feels valued, there is nothing that can stop them from ac-complishing their goals. Research has shown that being in an environment that is conducive to rehabilitation with proper educational and therapy programs has shown a reduction in recidi-vism by 43%. To feel value as a human being worthy of a human touch can sometimes be the difference of having or not having the will to live.
2:30pm-4:00pm EDT /
11:30am-1:00pm PDT
Research Session
1.5 LU Credit
Digital Tools for Restructuring the Survey Course
Solmaz Kive, University of Oregon
Abstract
Since its advent in the nineteenth century, the genre of world architecture has been Eurocentric in its content, methods, and structure. While claiming a global scope, it is often focused on Euro-American traditions not only as the main component of the core narrative, but also as a master narrative that dictates the criteria of evaluation and the methods of analyses for the rest of the book. This bias is supported by the book’s organizational structure. In a typical late-twentieth-century survey of world architecture, while the stage for the triumphal entrance of the Greek style is often set by chapter(s) on Egypt and Mesopotamia, other non-Western styles like Chinese appear as isolated interruptions to the main narrative. This structure not only marginalizes non-Western traditions as unworthy of attention, but also renders them homogeneous and static. The past few decades have witnessed many criticisms to the way non-western architectural traditions have been classified as the “others.” In response to the criticism, a new direction in the discipline’s pedagogy has adopted an inclusive, global approach, which has enriched the subjects on the architecture beyond Europe. Nevertheless, the additive approach can hardly avoid marginalization of what it classifies as “non-Western.” This paper underlines some potentials of the digital platform to overcome the restrictions of the textbook and the traditional lecture-based courses on architectural history and challenge the fixed directionality of the Eurocentric master narrative. Placing the Western-non-Western binary at the inception of the discipline, the paper discusses some contemporary trends of global architecture history. It then discusses some potentials in the digital media to incorporate a few strategies, such as replacing the mega-narrative of the textbook with a multiplicity of chronological, geographical, and thematic narratives; resisting the effects of uniformity, totality, continuity, and collusion often created by chapters of a textbook; and communicating the shifting scales and units of study (from the global scale to the individual architects or structures).
New Faculty Teaching Award
Aneesha Dharwadker, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
New Faculty Teaching Award
Abstract
Aneesha Dharwadker is an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with a joint appointment in Architecture and Landscape Architecture. Her teaching and scholarship examine globalization, colonialism, social issues in relation to the built environment. At the University of Illinois, her courses cover a wide range of topics, including designing for the opioid epidemic and COVID-19; surveys and critiques of contemporary design practices; colonial resource extraction and its impact on cities; and landscape representation and construction. Her recent essays in Dialectic VII and Places Journal address relationships between colonialism and design pedagogy: she calls for a decolonization of introductory history and theory classes in American architecture programs, and offers an alternative syllabus that juxtaposes “canonical” writings with voices from postcolonial and diasporic studies. She argues that a more comprehensive and honest positioning of global design ideas for architecture students will produce more sensitive and sustainable practitioners in the future. In the classroom, Dharwadker’s teaching merges architectural and landscape architectural thinking through creative assignment design and syllabus content. Dharwadker has practiced architecture at SOM Chicago, CS&P (Toronto), Safdie Architects (Boston), and Booth Hansen (Chicago). In 2017, she founded Chicago Design Office, an architectural design and urbanism practice. Her recent commissions, exhibitions, and competition submissions address social and infrastructural problems in the U.S., tying in with themes from her teaching and research at Illinois. She received an MDesS in History and Philosophy of Design from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and a B.Arch from Cornell University.
Eurocentric Legacies: The Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies and Delaying Change in Architecture in 1970s New York City
Marcelo López-Dinardi, Texas A&M University
Abstract
This paper examines how the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies (IAUS) that existed in New York City between 1967-1984, constructed a space that reinstated a Western epistemology for architecture and created an audience and discourse for an emerging architecture scene in a distressed New York through its events and media during the 1970s. Given their resonance, the paper positions current demands for change in architecture education and the profession concerning their equivalent in the late 1960s when the IAUS was founded. This paper will ask whether a change in architecture and non-Eurocentric educational models following the 1960s struggles and upheavals were delayed with the appearance and success of the IAUS in New York City. The paper argues, through a critical reading of their media apparatus (exhibitions, lectures, classes, journals, and books), notably the ambitious OPEN PLAN series, and their undeniable success, that the IAUS’s reinstated a Eurocentric legacy—delaying change, the reckoning of architecture’s role in racial, social, and political asymmetries, and advanced architectural disciplinary ideas’ marketization in an emerging neoliberal rationale. Finally, this paper discusses existing scholarly work around the IAUS and first-hand research from the IAUS’s collection archived at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal.
30-minutes
4:30pm-6:00pm EDT /
1:30pm-3:00pm PDT
Research Session
1.5 LU Credit
VR Gestural Modeling to Recapture the Human Body in Design
Sara Codarin & Karl Daubmann, Lawrence Technological University
Abstract
Since the arrival of the digital to design, the fear of losing the importance of the physical body continues to increase. However as new VR technologies emerge, these tools can be deployed to recapture the importance of the human body through both input and output design workflows. New VR design tools, like Gravity Sketch, create a direct connection between designers and what they draw because of an ability to capture bodily movements, gestures, and intentions. In The Hand by Frank Wilson, the author highlights the connection that results from gestural organization through “cultivating intelligence” by “uniting, not divorcing, mind and body”. The immersive VR environment allows designers to think with their hands, hybridizing the concept of learning-by-doing and collapsing earlier notions of drawing with modelling. The impact of the human body was the focus in two elective seminars “Digital Bodies” and “Digital Twins” offered at the undergraduate and graduate levels in Spring 2021 and Summer 2021 respectively. The seminars required no previous digital design or software experience foregrounding the intuitive nature of designing with the body and working in a VR collective space. The courses investigated the human body as a biomechanical constraint and aesthetic inspiration. From the technical perspective, while a mouse on a flat surface is effective for navigating a document or webpage, design requires the seamless and simultaneous capture of x,y, and z. This immerse VR design space though hand controllers, allows for the capture and modification of the designer’s direct gesture all while being natively digital and spatial. As humans, we often subconsciously view the origins of form in our own gestures and therefore place aesthetic value on the retention of these gestures regardless of the material and subsequent procedural transformations. Through a series of weekly assignments, students captured their gestures and bodily dimensions as three-dimensional geometric representations. Students worked between input and output, digital and analog, building a deeper understanding of the design process connected to digital workflows testing virtual and physical prototypes for fit to their own body. The geometric outcomes resulted in a negotiation between body constraints, ease of motion, mechanics, and affordances of form. Theoretical technical knowledge and history of the body in design were leveraged to design for the body with the body. Connections were made from the Renaissance through to contemporary artists and designers focused on representations of the human body. Various precedents demonstrated that the evolution of technology resulted in new forms of representation such as Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, the collection of multiflash photographs by Harold Edgerton, and the Gilbreths’ light painting studies documenting labor. This way of working in VR aspires for inclusive, diverse, and custom ergonometric freedom instead of Fordist notions of standardized, uniform, and idealized dimensional constraints. This paper seeks to demonstrate the potential of a gesture-driven digital drawing and how this way of working might result in a more human-centered architectural discourse.
Learning From San Andreas: Gaming’s Future in Architecture
Ryan Scavnicky, Kent State University
Abstract
Architecture and Video Games have a superficially obvious relationship. The cultural and technological development of video games — produced using 3D programs and imaging technology — is congruent with the development of digital space and digital tools as a whole. Since the original paperless studio at Columbia, the discipline of Architecture’s experiments with digital space focus almost exclusively on efforts to discover increased efficiencies via new formal, aesthetic, and scientific technological relationships.1 While fruitful, there have been no models adapted to study and absorb the cultural, experiential, or narrative conditions of digital space — so crucial to the practice of architecture. Video Games are popular with the contemporary student, and are an increasingly motivating factor in the decision to study architecture.2 The NSSE (National Survey of Student Engagement) asked more than 27,000 first-year college students about online gaming, and more than a third of males and a fourth of females reported playing more than 16 hours per week when they were in high school. Studies have found that high video game usage correlates to lower GPAs in college.3 However, curricula and pedagogy have not broadly adapted to take advantage of new modes of learning, punctuated by a lack of online cultural spaces formed — and swiftly abandoned — by architecture schools during the Covid-19 pandemic.4 Contemporary architecture students are spending significant time inside these socio-cultural spaces and their associated platforms.5 These spaces are not passively received.6 Rather than taken as obstacles, this research finds opportunities to bring new ways of learning, unlearning, and imagination to architecture curricula. This research suggests that certain techniques of teaching design studio best suited for distance learning using gaming platforms aren’t merely adequate but possibly more effective for teaching certain aspects of architecture now and into the future. This project showcases tools, methods, and strategies in an effort to expose students to new ways of seeing, new types of body/space relationships, new models of desk critique, and new forms of representation through gaming engines. The resulting learning outcomes showcase a desire for a more social and narrative architecture practice, empowering a new type of architect to engage digital space in a sophisticated and culturally informed way. Gaming engines should be more than a quirky way of hanging out during a global pandemic. As a tool to teach the architects of the future, video games should be a cohesively integrated element of architectural pedagogy, not only for their rendering, physics, and computational interests but also for their sociocultural content.
Design Pedagogy: Adaptive Reuse and the Digital Twin
Rhett Russo, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Abstract
With the increasing demands on integrative thinking, sustainability and analysis how can the core design studios be structured to address concerns related to context, and materiality through the use of a digital twin ?1 What are some of the advantages of using LIDAR scanning and photogrammetry to capture resources and how might they broaden our approach to design education? What are the benefits of using this technology to educate students to reuse buildings and to critically and productively repurpose building materials? How considerable is the cost and time that is required to develop a digital twin, and what are the best practices to seamlessly interface its assets with other platforms? The studio culture promoted design proposals that critically engage, context, adaptive reuse, daylighting, and a heightened awareness when it comes to material finishes, selective demolition and tectonics. A digital 3d scan of St. Mary’s church (1843) in Troy, New York was commissioned and a digital twin was shared with the second year undergraduate cohort, the design studio and an allied daylighting course to examine and modify the existing daylighting conditions inside the church. The scan captured the materiality and ornamentation of the walls and floors, in particular the stone, masonry and wood elements, as they are found in the field, and helped to illustrate the tectonics that are associated with composite nature of the church’s construction.
4:30pm-6:00pm EDT /
1:30pm-3:00pm PDT
Research Session
1.5 LU Credit
Optimized Design and Fabrication of Economical, Double Curved Metal Facades
Susannah Dickinson, University of Arizona
Abstract
While there is an increased desire for complex geometry in the built environment, affordable fabrication processes are still in their infancy (Abdelmohsen and Tarabishy, 2017). Economical workarounds have historically existed including the use of developable surfaces (Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles), rationalization techniques (Mercedes Benz Museum, Stuttgart) and cold bending techniques (Experience Music Project, Seattle). More recently the Dongdaemun Design Park (DDP), designed by Zaha Hadid Architects in Seoul, South Korea utilized a multi stretch forming machine, with two mating dies and high pressure (Lee and Kim, 2012). At researchers have developed an economical technology to manufacture precision, compound-curved aluminum metal sheets for satellite communication dishes, answering a need for increased high speed internet demands. This developed technology has been recently expanded and adapted for economical building facades, in collaboration with the architecture department, giving an opportunity to connect space technology with the built environment, natural forms and systems. This paper disseminates the associated optimized design process, manufacture and installation of a full-scale demonstration project of this technology on the afore mentioned college campus. The fabrication process uses electromagnetic heat, which means less pressure is needed to form computer generated shapes. The singular, adaptable mold consists of a continuous array of segmented tiles, each of which can be positioned by an actuator. By adjusting these actuators, the shape of the mold can change. As this system is adaptable, multiple high-precision panels of different shapes can be formed without costly machining or retooling. This enables rapid, custom complex shaping of thin and lightweight panels that cannot be economically machined by existing fabrication methods. These forms can be shaped to provide performance criteria at an engineering level e.g., minimal surfaces, to provide less heat loss, and can be shaped to self-shade, direct water etc., while also giving the opportunity at a spatial level to provide more continuous forms that allow for more natural flows of air and human movement. “Geometrical complexity remains the precondition for efficient structures in architecture, and this simple paradigm can be observed in nature, beyond time-dependent stylistic and formal discourse.” [1] [1] S. Adriaenssens, F. Gramzio, M. Kohler, A. Menges, M.Pauly, Advances in Architectural Geometry 2016, © 2016 vdf Hochschulverlag AG an der ETH Zürich, DOI 10.3218/3778-4, ISBN 978-3-7281-3778-4 http://vdf.ch/advances-in-architectural-geometry-2016.html
Aspiring Scientific Design: Hannes Meyer and Hans Wittwer’s Petersschule Project and Daylighting Scholarship
Ute Poerschke, Pennsylvania State University
Abstract
This paper looks at the advancement and implementation of daylighting calculations in architectural design during High Modernism. Particularly, it analyzes the engineering and architectural discourses on daylighting in the 1920s with respect to the arguments they delivered for healthy school environments. Using the case study of Hannes Meyer and Hans Wittwer’s famous 1926 project for the Petersschule in Basel, Switzerland, the paper intends to show the modernist stretch between scientific abstraction and design synthesis. In the 1920s, declaring good daylighting design as the first objective for a healthy school was not a new topic. For decades, school regulations had included recommendations for window designs, classroom orientations, window-to-floor ratios, and sky-view angles, among others. With advancements in lighting science, for example the definition and measurement of illuminance, such empirical knowledge was increasingly disapproved in favor of more mathematical approaches to design. Meyer and Wittwer’s use of the “calculation procedure after Higbie and Levin” exemplifies how architects attempted to incorporate the state-of-the-art knowledge of daylighting in design. Henry Harold Higbie and A. Levin published their calculation methods of daylight intensity in the Transactions of the Illuminating Engineering Society in May 1925 and March 1926, only shortly before the Petersschule competition. Analyzing the calculations, this paper tries to retrace how they influenced the design. Since Meyer and Wittwer also referred to several rules of thumb, one can speculate whether the architects’ empirical knowledge had initially helped them developing their design, while calculations served as later verification.
Not All Green Buildings Are Made Equal: Green Building Construction Cost Premium
Ming Hu, University of Maryland
Abstract
This study aims to investigate the cost surcharges of green buildings. In this study, the green construction cost surcharge (GCCS) is defined as the additional capital costs associated with sustainable building features and practices. More specifically, this study intends to (1) identify the green cost surcharge difference on a global scale, (2) identify the green cost surcharge differences across building types, and (3) gain a basic understanding of the causes of cost differences. A literature survey on green building surcharge costs was performed, resulting in a total of more than 1,300 cases from 11 countries. The cases included both residential and non-residential units. The results show that there is a regional difference among green cost surcharges; however, the median and mean green cost surcharges are 7%. Furthermore, there is a cost difference among building types, with school buildings having the highest cost surcharge. Varied cost estimation and collection methods also lead to different green cost surcharge results; the differences between industry findings and academic research are very apparent. Lastly, eleven cost variables are identified as well.
New Faculty Teaching Award
Elizabeth McCormick, University of North Carolina at Charlotte
New Faculty Teaching Award
Abstract
Liz McCormick is an architect, educator and researcher whose work explores climatically sensitive and contextually appropriate building enclosure designs that connect occupants to the outdoors while also reducing the dependence on mechanical conditioning technologies. She uses accessible, low-tech methods to empower students to analyze, explore and communicate the underlying physical principles of advanced building technologies with an emphasis on technical storytelling. This approach relies heavily on ‘learning by doing’, while fostering an environment where a student feels comfortable taking risks and making mistakes. With a strong narrative, Liz believes that students can use basic tools and principles to create groundbreaking research while choreographing human experiences, all while keeping a rapidly changing climate in mind. In addition to her coursework and building technology research, Liz is also working to create a platform for curricular redesign for schools of architecture that better addresses the climate emergency. Liz is a licensed architect, LEED AP and Certified Passive House Consultant. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Architecture and Building Technology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte where she is also a part of the Integrated Design Research Lab. McCormick completed her Master of Science in Building Technology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and received a Bachelor of Fine Art and Bachelor of Architecture from the Rhode Island School of design. In addition to her efforts at UNC Charlotte, Liz is also pursing a doctorate of design at North Carolina State University with a proposed dissertation topic of, ‘Against the All-Glass Archetype: Exploring Low-Tech Strategies for Urban, Low-Carbon Commercial Buildings’.
4:30pm-6:00pm EDT /
1:30pm-3:00pm PDT
Research Session
1.5 LU Credit
New Middles: House-Scale Housing Design in Texas
James Tate, Texas A&M University
Abstract
This studio project occurs during in the fourth semester of our school’s undergraduate sequence. The exercise introduces the topic of housing, focusing on the context of the Texas Triangle Megaregion. Students propose one-acre block strategies in existing neighborhoods that surround campus. In the design exercise they work between room, residential unit, duplex or triplex multi-unit, and urban block configuration scales. The studio aims to tackle a very immediate challenge that exists in metropolitan and micropolitan parts of the Texas Triangle. *Please note the ACSA template would Figure notes would not align to the columns. I apologize for the graphic errors.
A Study in Black and White: Pour Winery in Kayamandi, South Africa empowering local community
Mark Donohue, California College of the Arts
Abstract
The buildings that form Pour Winery in Kayamandi near the town of Stellenbosch in the winegrowing region of South Africa deal with the history of race relations in the country rather than avoid it. They claim with equal pride their origins in Cape Dutch Architecture which predominates in the wealthy regions of the Stellenbosch valley, as well as the Southern African Ndebele people’s bold geometric patterns that cover their homes in the north eastern part of the country. The careful interplay of black and white architectural elements of the winery signify and acknowledge the complex race relationship of the country while the expanded programmatic function of the winery as economic center and social hub empowers the local community. To build in South Africa, one cannot deny the relationship between race and architecture. The relationship between race and architecture is palpable. One could argue that Townships are the architectural manifestation of apartheid. Kayamandi, the site of the winery is one such township located near the town of Stellenbosch home to Stellenbosch University which was the academic seat of the apartheid movement. The predominant image of the wealthy farms and great wine estates in the Stellenbosch valley in South Africa is one of Cape Dutch Architecture – whitewashed mud brick walls with thatched gable-ended roofs. The style is considered by white South Africans to be the vernacular architecture of the region dating back 350 years to early Dutch colonial settlements of the 1670’s. There is though another tradition in the region of indigenous architecture that persists to this day. The Ndebele people painted the homes they were forced to live in with strong geometric designs. The symbols they painted with black lines framing colorful shapes on plain white walls were done unbeknownst to their white rulers as a form of resistance. The formal vocabulary of the winery is an interplay of gable-ended roofs based on the typology of Cape Dutch Architecture integrated with trellis spaces inspired by Ndebele geometric patterns. The vocabulary of Cape Dutch Architecture was reinterpreted as a series of gable-ended roofs that continuously transform in section. Black painted steel is used throughout the winery to denote areas of shelter and gathering. The corrugated steel typically found in Townships is used as the cladding for the roofs. Trellis covered stoops in front of each residence act as intermediary spaces between the public walk way and the private realm of the home. The outdoor living rooms placed throughout the compound act in a similar way to the stoops but for larger groups. Landscape is both a unique and omnipresent feature of this programmatically expanded winery complex that is part farm, part school, part housing, part community center. It is both setting and the actual fabric that weaves together the experience of the complex. By expanding the typical winery program to include housing, a working farm, an education center and gathering spaces for the community, this project hopes to empower the community it serves while providing an economic model for the region.
Co-Designing Wellness: Arctic Indigenous Wellness Centre
Mason White & Kearon Roy Taylor, U. Toronto & Lola Sheppard, U. Waterloo
Faculty Design Award
Abstract
Co-Designing Wellness: Arctic Indigenous Wellness Centre
The traumatic impacts of colonization have had significant impacts on the mental health and wellness of Indigenous peoples all across Canada, and even more so in Arctic territories. Indigenous communities have repeatedly expressed the need to ground wellness programs in community priorities, Indigenous culture, and land-based traditions. In Indigenous worldview, wellness is a holistic relationship between culture, community, and environment, unlike Western perspectives of medical care. Founded in 2016, the Arctic Indigenous Wellness Foundation (AIWF), based in Yellowknife, has the mandate of culturally reviving traditional healing knowledge and practices in Arctic regions. Led by Indigenous leaders, elders and healers, the AIWC offers cultural programming and advocacy with focus on mental wellness, traditional medicine revitalization, and youth skills programming. The AIWC bridges a service gap between informal healing camps and institutionalized Western-oriented medical hospitals. AIWC has developed over three years of sustained community engagement with Indigenous elders, healers, and youth to define program, siting, and form, and ensure it reflected Indigenous priorities and principles. In contrast to the institutional architecture of the Stanton Hospital, the AIWC is de-institutionalized and camp-like in its organization, form, and expression with strong connections to the unique northern environment and landscape. The AIWC is organized into three distinct yet unified volumes—traditional knowledge, gathering, and wellness—each defined in form, views, and materiality. The circulation space that ties them together has various breakout spaces that can be used for informal events and activities. The AIWC is completed with a large outdoor gathering space inscribed on the southeast. AIWC is designed to be closely tuned to the environment, climate, and ground conditions of this northern site. The building uses passive and active environmental strategies in response to the extreme climate, limits disturbance to the ground during construction, and uses regionally sourced timber and stone, minimizing embodied energy expenditure.
Future of Hawaii’s Housing, A Bottom-Up Exploratory Research Collaboration
Karla Sierralta & Brian Strawn, U. Hawaiʻi at Mānoa & U. Hawaiʻi Community Design Center
Collaborative Practice Award
Abstract
Future of Hawai’i’s Housing, A Bottom-Up Exploratory Research Collaboration
The Future of Hawai’i’s Housing is an exploratory research project conducted for the Hawai’i Public Housing Authority (HPHA) aimed at informing future development and redevelopment housing projects. This effort was part of a multi-departmental and multi-disciplinary approach to re-thinking public housing programs and facilities in an effort to support HPHA’s mission and long-term goals. A team of faculty, researchers, students, topic experts, and community members collaborated on this multi-phase project, centered on a spectrum of user populations on distributed sites. Multiple feedback loops between research initiatives, undergraduate architecture studios, graduate thesis investigations, topic-focused events, share-outs with peers, and public pilots generated a series of distinct but interrelated deliverables. A bottom-up approach, rooted in the experience of Hawai’i’s residents, guided this effort. Our team interviewed 30 families in their homes on five Hawaiian islands spanning rural, suburban, and urban contexts. We studied half-mile core samples of urban fabric across the archipelago, zooming-in on typical blocks, analyzed local multi-family housing types, and listened as families talked about their communities, their neighborhoods, and their homes interchangeably. A series of opportunities for planning and designing housing for all in Hawai’i were identified, defined, and illustrated, both within the domestic sphere and at broader realms of inhabitation. In 2020, amidst the global pandemic, our team revisited our findings and re-aligned the investigation with the lens of the ongoing crisis. The project resulted in the development of the Holistic Housing Toolkit intended to inspire future designs, inform redevelopment processes, and support community engagement activities. The Future of Hawai’i’s Housing continues to inform research inquiries and generate proof-of-concept projects. The Hawai’i Housing Lab (www.hawaiihousinglab.org) was created to document, collect, share and communicate all the knowledge derived from this collaboration and serves as an ongoing platform for exploring the design of housing for all in Hawai’i.
Deep Dust / The Killing Dark: Extractive Landscapes and Emancipatory Futures
Ozayr Saloojee, Carleton University
Abstract
The city of Johannesburg rests on the Witwatersrand (“Ridge of White Waters) Basin – known locally as the “Rand” – an almost 60 kilometre long scarp that also forms a continental divide, draining northern waters into the Indian Ocean and southern waters into the Atlantic. The city on this divide was (and still is), the site of many other divisions – with apartheid perhaps, being among the most famous of these, with Johannesburg’s geological history echoing its racial one. This paper reflects on a two year research and studio teaching project that explores the extractive terrains (and its associated ecologies that link labor, capital, wealth, dispossession, power and emancipation) of Johannesburg. It explores ontological readings and re-readings of the ground and the earth, and of our relationships to it. The structures and tools of landscape extraction(s) and representation are myriad and multi-scalar. This studio reflects on the productive and critical role that representation – that is, image making, and architectural and landscape image-making in particular – can embody and carry through the studio structure and assignments, the first of which looks to the work of the seminal South African photographer Santu Mofokeng as a catalyst to engage more local subjectivities. The second shifts to the discursive scale of the map to shift from the intimate photograph to the distant map. The third prompt engages with the multivalencies of mining tool and apparatuses (machines, ideas, vectors, histories, events and capital), and the last to an intital attempt to explore a reconciliatory landscape and architectural future. Together, these serve as a framework for thinking about how we might “un/build” understandings and artefacts that help uncover, identify, and propose a reconciliatory superfluity (to use Achille Mbembés word) of relations in aid of an ethical reclamation of landscapes and terrains in the (un)making.
4:30pm-6:00pm EDT /
1:30pm-3:00pm PDT
Research Session
1.5 LU Credit
Crossing Barriers in Rural India: opportunities and challenges in engaging marginalized divided publics
Alpa Nawre, University of Florida
Astrid Wong, Sasaki
Abstract
Home to the majority of the country’s population, rural India is a land of acute scarcity and socio-cultural complexity. Critical services such as water and waste management or public spaces are non-existent or basic, and deep divisions on the lines of gender, caste, religion, position, and class characterize the numerous isolated agrarian settlements. To explore possible contributions of designers in this context, an interdisciplinary team of architects, engineers and landscape architects (design team), undertook an experimental action research project to address water issues in Dharmori, a small village in central India. The project was unique not only because of the under-explored context, and the critical issue it sought to address, but also because of the participatory methods employed in the design process. Although participatory design and co-construction are established methods of engaging with indigenous communities to gain a better knowledge of sites and practices for designing multi-functional and inclusive spaces, a systematic community engagement approach in design is unprecedented in rural India. Through the documentation of community participation in the Dhamori project, this paper describes the many opportunities and challenges embedded in such work and argues that the defining aspect of stakeholder engagement in such contexts is the constant endeavor to test design limitations in bridging various kinds of socio-cultural divides. The initial project goal for the design team was to create better water management through multifunctional landscape infrastructure. Once the community was involved, the project evolved to consist of a redefined scope addressing issues other than water, expanded site analysis, design, and planning, and implementation of a pilot project. Over a period of two months, the design team conducted different forms of stakeholder engagement ranging from interviews, surveys, and transect walks, to design charrettes, and co-construction, involving elected and appointed leaders, local government officials, and residents with varying success. Interviews with resident stakeholder groups and leadership at the conclusion of the project revealed that after the project there was more consensus on communal issues, and interest in working together with the leadership towards addressing problems. One of the most significant contributions that the design team was able to deliver with the time at hand was the crossing of boundaries and establishing spatial and non-spatial relations between socio-culturally disparate rural publics divided on lines of gender and electoral/bureaucratic power, even as it failed at bridging the divide experienced by the economically weakest caste group. This project also demonstrated that for some marginalized communities that are not adequately organized or aware, the agency of engaged design is critical to motivating and supporting community members into becoming agents of change. This study provides many lessons on engaging divided communities to address issues such as water, waste and public space management while simultaneously raising questions about the lack of disciplinary knowledge on the practice of engaged public interest design that strikes at the heart of basic issues for billions who live in villages in the developing and underdeveloped world.
Participatory anti-racist design: confronting colorblind racism in predominantly white spaces
Shawhin Roudbari & Katelyn Warren, The University of Colorado Boulder
Abstract
Popular cafés are often sites of racial contention and controversy. While notorious examples of racism at the Ink! Cafe in Denver and the Starbucks in Philadelphia gained national attention in 2017 and 2018, there are countless racist interactions at similar cafés around the country that occur daily. Ranging from microaggressions to surveillance to physical and emotional harm, expressions of racism are violent and overwhelming to some, but remain invisible for many others. A collective of owners of a prominent independent café–and longstanding local institution –partnered with the authors of this paper on a community engagement grant to conduct a participatory anti-racist community design exercise. In this paper, the authors present this project as a case study for a methodological framework for confronting racism in predominantly white social institutions such as cafés. Building on sociological framings of white institutions and colorblind racism, this paper reports on the application of these theories and methods in participatory design. The authors present a two-part methodology that includes methods of collaboration and methods of community engagement, in tandem, as means toward acknowledging the political stakes of anti-racist work. This methodology builds on the lineage of slow, intentional, and redistributive community engagement work. The authors show that a necessary part of anti-racist design is cooperative and participatory design. Given the prevalence of colorblind racist ideologies, the predominantly white and affluent community demographic of this case test the limitations and potentials of anti-racist design methods in participatory design work. The paper contributes a timely case study of community-engaged design as well as a methodological framework for anti-racist design justice that can inform design and institutional change in everyday community institutions where colorblind racism remains a powerful force.
In Service of the Public Interest, The Public Design Corps
Irene Hwang, Anya Sirota, María Arquero de Alarcó, & Jacob Comerci, University of Michigan
Abstract
In summer 2020, at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests and our country’s collective reckoning with systemic racism, architecture schools across the nation became electrified sites of political contestation, demanding immediate, action-specific change. At our college, this context, along with additional pressures from the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, faculty, students, and administration came together to face this acute situation by creating the Public Design Corps (PDC). The PDC offers students the opportunity to apply architectural skills in design and spatial intelligence to projects guided by principles of equity and inclusion. The one NCARB-recognized organization of its kind in our jurisdiction, the Public Design Corps aims to connect students in architecture, urban design, and planning with organizations to tackle pressing economic, environmental, social, and spatial challenges. In the process, it seeks to establish new modes of public-interest design in order to advance critical knowledge and methodologies around social impact design and engagement practices. For the 2022 ACSA Annual Meeting (EMPOWER), these authors will present the theoretical framework, development, and in-progress assessments for the Public Design Corps (PDC) Model in Year 1 (pilot) and Year 2 of its operation. Framing the analysis in relation to a broader historical lineage of social impact design initiatives within academic institutions, we hope to share our insights and methods for: – A new, sustainable model of public-interest driven design within a university setting; – The equitable, tripartite partnership between the academic institution + the public engagement center + the mission-driven non-profit partner/client; – Addressing uneven access to collaboration infrastructure across physical and digital space; – Curricular structures (e.g., course credit) working in parallel with advancement of students’ early professional development (e.g., AXP + CPT/OPT); – Co-curricular programming frameworks (workshops, guest speakers); – Inclusive, all-faculty consultancy model in order to create a new mentorship model in project-based learning. Designing for social good, in collaboration with organizations and with pressing community needs in mind, can be a difficult endeavor without proper training and tools. The Public Design Corps (PDC) offers students the opportunity to apply their skills in design and spatial intelligence to projects for underserved communities. Moreover, the PDC grew from our faculty’s work in diversifying not only the topics of architectural education, but also to increase access to and participation in architectural expertise through structures open to everyone, not only those who can afford it. Central to the initiative, is the critical examination of how to address the latent hierarchies in public-interest design to stop these existing norms and structures from perpetuating unjust power relations for both students and community partners.
4:30pm-6:00pm EDT /
1:30pm-3:00pm PDT
Research Session
1.5 LU Credit
Ethnography at the Foundation of Architectural Survey
Solmaz Kive, University of Oregon
Abstract
This paper discusses James Fergusson’s use of ethnography in developing one of the earliest models of a global history of architecture. Fergusson is often credited with writing the first history of architecture that systematically incorporated different traditions around the world within a history of Western architecture. Changes in Fergusson’s narrative of world architecture, which was developed in three main versions between 1849 and 1865, show the significant impact of ethnography on architectural history. His first narrative of world architecture took a universalist tone, which valued many non-European styles as examples of “true architecture.” However, this approach would soon give place to a complex system of hierarchy, which was developed by bringing together notions and methods from different sciences under the umbrella of ethnography. The paper argues for the significant impact of the ethnographic method on the making of the notion of a-historical non-Western architecture. Fergusson uses ethnography at two distinct scales: in the discussion of individual styles; and for structuring his book based on racial theories. Using ethnography, the nascent genre of survey was able to account for difference of styles based on “the leading characteristics” of their associated races. Considering the Aryans as the only people capable of change, Fergusson then arranged his narrative of world architecture as the story of Aryan’s interactions with, and overcoming of, “inferior races.” Presented in a quasi-scientific form, the model thus developed would eventually lead to a binary division of a Western, dynamic core and the non-Western change-less other.
Architectural Agency in Digital Documentation: Realizing Alabama’s Rosenwald Schools
Gorham Bird, Auburn University
Abstract
Architecture, as a cultural and social construction, realizes both the priorities and oppositions of society: what they’re for, as well as what they’re against. Through close observation and analysis, the architecture of the segregated American South reveals these attitudes. Presented here is the impact of the Julius Rosenwald Schools across the Black Belt region of Alabama, shedding light on the past by analyzing the existing conditions of four extant schools and their adaptation over time, with the aid of digital documentation technology. The Rosenwald Schools embody the resilience and self-determination of African American communities across the South that overcame institutional inequities of Jim Crow to empower future generations.
_mpathic design: The Great Migration
Elgin Cleckley, University of Virginia
Creative Achievement Award
Abstract
_mpathic design: The Great Migration was a fall 2020 Advanced Design Research Studio (ARCH 4010_4011_ALAR 8010) led through online instruction at the University of Virginia School of Architecture by Assistant Professor of Architecture and Design Thinking, Education, and Health, Elgin Cleckley. The Studio follows the approaches and methods of _mpathic design, Professor Cleckley’s award-winning initiative, pedagogy, and design practice. The Great Migration, defined by journalist and author of The Warmth of Other Suns, Isabel Wilkerson, is the outpouring of six million African Americans from the Jim Crow South to cities in the North, Central, and West between World War I and the 1970s in response to racial violence, caste systems, and spatial codes, seeking employment opportunities in arrival cities. The Great Migration Studio created space for collective reflection and rethinking origins and focus of architectural education from dominant perspectives. The Studio presented students with a supportive, inspiring, and optimistic space for _mpathic design thinking through a Black lens. The Studio opened with students learning three Black lived accounts during the Migration period, meticulously documented by Isabel Wilkerson. Students engaged foundational and current day experiential understandings of Blackness in Design Research Teams, with visits from designers actively working in social/spatial justice. _mpathic design’s exercises introduced Black creativity (Romare Bearden, Deborah Roberts, and Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series), inspiring student projects to develop a hybrid program (exhibition/community/care/activism), symbolically at the end of the northern Migration route in Grand Central Terminal’s Vanderbilt Hall.
Re-reading the Pedestrian Mall: Race and Urban Landscape in the Memphis Mid-America Mall
Elizabeth Keslacy, Miami University
Abstract
The pedestrian mall became a fixture in declining American cities from the 1960s to the 1980s when landscape architects, municipal officials, and business associations created it as a design strategy to help downtown business districts compete with ascendant suburban malls, importing many of their spatial and programmatic strategies into the fabric of the city.[1] Recent reassessments of pedestrian malls in planning journals have argued that factors such as tourism, climate, and even length contribute significantly to their ultimate success or failure.[2] However, few have situated the mall-building phenomenon explicitly within the context of the civil rights movement, urban renewal, desegregation, and white flight—all factors that underwrote suburbanization and urban decline. This paper reads one pedestrian mall—the Mid-America Mall in Memphis, TN (1976)—within the context of the city’s racial politics. The Mall was one of the longest in the United States at its construction, stretching ten blocks along the city’s Main Street and terminating at the pedestrianized civic center plaza around which the city’s primary municipal buildings were arranged. Utilizing abstract, repetitive forms first popularized by the landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, Memphis architects Gassner, Nathan and Browne designed the mall with a block-long water feature at its center, surrounded by “performance platforms” of varying sizes and heights. In this paper, I propose two readings of the mall. The first focuses on the design and experience of the mall. Using theorists such as Umberto Eco and Nicholas Bourriaud, I articulate the emancipatory potential of its complex, abstract, repetitive forms for the individual visitor. Second, I read the development of the Mid-America Mall against the city’s Civil Rights-era protests and demonstrations, and argue that the design strategy served to disable the collective occupation of the street, discouraging large demonstrations from traversing established routes.
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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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