2014-2015 Architectural Education Awards

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Architectural Education Awards Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture


The Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) is a non profit organization founded in 1912 to enhance the quality of architectural education. School membership in ACSA has grown from ten charter schools to over 250 schools in several membership categories. Through these schools, over 5,000 architecture faculty are represented in ACSA’s membership. In addition, over 500 supporting members composed of architectural firms, product associations, and individuals add to the breadth of ACSA membership. ACSA, unique in its representative role for professional schools of architecture, provides a major forum for ideas on the leading edge of architectural thought. Issues that will affect the architectural profession in the future are being examined today in ACSA member schools.

Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture 1735 New York Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20006 Tel: 202.785.2324 Fax: 202.628.0448 www.acsa-arch.org

Copyright Š 2015 The Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture ISBN 978-0-935502-96-1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the written permission of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture.

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CONTENTS ACSA/AIA Topaz Medallion

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ACSA Distinguished Professor

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ACSA/AIAS New Faculty Teaching

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ACSA Creative Achievement

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ACSA Collaborative Practice

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ACSA Faculty Design

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ACSA/AIA Housing Design Education

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Diversity Achievement

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Design-Build

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Journal of Architectural Education

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Jury

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2014-2015 ACSA Awards

Each year the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture honors architectural educators for exemplary work in areas such as building design, community collaborations, scholarship, and service. The award-winning professors inspire and challenge students, contribute to the profession’s knowledge base, and extend their work beyond the borders of academy into practice and the public sector. 4


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The Topaz Medallion is the highest award given to architectural educators. It honors an individual who has made outstanding contributions to architectural education for at least a decade, whose teaching has influenced a broad range of students, and who has helped shape the minds of students who will shape our environment. The award is given through nominations that are reviewed by a jury of accomplished architects, educators, and students, appointed by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, The American Institute of Architects, and the American Institute of Architecture Students.

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TM

ACSA/AIA Topaz Medallion

Topaz Medallion for Excellence in Architectural Education, a joint award given by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture and The American Institute of Architects.

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Peter Eisenman has been a visiting critic or professor at nearly a dozen schools across the nation, and he has lectured at countless more. “There are probably very few schools of architecture where Peter is yet to have lectured,” wrote Marlon Blackwell, FAIA, in a recommendation letter. After 60 years of teaching, the shadow cast by his tenure looms over generations of architects: Tod Williams, FAIA; Daniel Libeskind, AIA; Shigeru Ban, Hon. FAIA; and another Topaz recipient, Harrison Fraker, Assoc. AIA, all studied under him. Born in Newark, N.J., in 1932, Eisenman graduated from Cornell University with a B.Arch in 1955. He continued his studies at Columbia University, where he received an M. Arch in 1959. He moved to England in 1960 to earn a doctorate in architecture and teach at Cambridge University. He returned to the United States in 1963 to teach at Princeton University, alongside Michael Graves, FAIA. By working with the nation’s most prestigious architecture schools, Eisenman has operated much more like a public intellectual than a workaday professor. He draws from many fields outside of architecture, including linguistics, philosophy, art, and psychoanalysis, to “raise the intellectual credibility of our field,” wrote University of Minnesota School of Architecture College of Design Dean Thomas R. Fisher, Assoc. AIA, in his recommendation letter.

PETER EISENMAN Yale University

ACSA/AIA Topaz Medallion

In 1967, Eisenman began his private practice with a series of houses located in the Northeast. The same year he founded the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York City, which attracted a consortium of liberal arts schools that sent undergraduates to study architecture in a nontraditional environment. Fisher called it “the first architectural think tank.”

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DP

ACSA Distinguished Professor Awards To recognize sustained creative achievement in the advancement of architecture education through teaching, design, scholarship, research, or service.

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JAMES MCLEOD STEELE

University of Southern California

ACSA Distinguished Professor

James Steele is a teacher, author, researcher and architect who has spent his professional career investigating and writing about the key issues that effect global architecture and urban planning. He is a full professor at the University of Southern California School of Architecture, where he has taught since 1991. He received both his Bachelors and Masters degrees in Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania. He taught there for several years, while apprenticing with Louis I. Kahn, Richard Wurman and Vincent Kling. After being licensed in Pennsylvania, he practiced architecture in Philadelphia, relocating to Saudi Arabia for eight years to teach at King Faisal University in Dammam, where he wrote his first book on Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy. He then accepted a position at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, where he received a FulbrightHayes Fellowship in Jordan and established a Foreign Program at University College, London. He became Senior Editor at Academy Editions and a Professor at the Prince of Wales Institute of Architecture before being recruited by the University of Southern California School of Architecture in 1991. He received his Doctorate in Urban Policy, Planning and Development there. He is now the Director of History-Theory at the USC School of Architecture. He has initiated and led two Foreign Programs at USC, in Malaysia and Brazil and has now written or edited more than 50 books on contemporary issues that affect the built environment. His writing and research have had a measurable and enduring impact on architectural education throughout the world.

Juror Comments: Professor Steele exhibits an outstanding tenure in academia. His submission presents strong letters, an impressive resume, extensive publications, and a convincing global impact. Steele is a widely published scholar. He has advised numerous thesis students whose design work is outstanding. 13



As the first female architecture instructor and faculty member at the University of Minnesota, Professor Julia Robinson, Ph.D., AIA “challenged the status quo in architectural curricula,… developing new innovative courses applying knowledge and methodologies from the …social sciences to the work of architects. A pioneer in evidence-based design…, she identified research agendas, [developed]… and shared knowledge that informs and enriches architectural design and practice.” (Bizios) Her leadership is exemplified by her service on the Board and as President of the Architectural Research Centers Consortium. “Successfully integrating her scholarly/research agenda with design, Robinson offers innovative architectural design studios as well as seminar courses dealing with architectural programming, urban design and housing.”(Bizios) For example, the trips she organized to the Netherlands, and the studios she developed subsequently that studied innovative housing and urbanism have substantively affected the design of dense housing in metropolitan MinneapolisSt Paul. These trips led to her current research on Dutch Complex Housing. Professor Robinson’s three architectural texts and many papers on topics from architectural pedagogy to contemporary Dutch housing are “accessible, useful and insightful” (Rockcastle). The monograph Programming as Design, written with J. Stephen Weeks “inspired other educators to teach similar courses in their institutions and contributed to the incorporation of architectural programming as an integral part of the design process.”(Bizios) The book she coedited with Andrzej Piotrowski, The Discipline of Architecture, “remains a landmark in the field, having spawned increased attention to …disciplinary knowledge” (Fisher). Institution and Home: Architecture as a Cultural Medium is “a culmination of her 30+ years of diverse and important research and thought “ (Rockcastle).

JULIA WILLIAMS ROBINSON University of Minnesota

ACSA Distinguished Professor

“She is a deeply dedicated teacher, a respected, accomplished researcher, and a consummately generous colleague…She is passionate about … program, housing and community and imbues that passion in her students” (Swackhamer).”

Juror Comments: Professor Robinson is an empowering leader and role model for her students. She encourages them to share in accessing and building new knowledge in this area of the discipline. Robinson totes an impressive resume and portfolio, and her work has made significant contributions to the field, particular in housing research and social concerns. It is great to see her research and teaching so well connected. 15



The foundation of my teaching is the understanding that architecture is never singular. Rather, it is a web of potential and possibilities. I call on students to solve problems that combine the theoretical and conceptual with the world of reality and production. Both enterprises engage and stimulate creativity and require self-reflection, continual refinement, and the nurturing of a passion. As students learn to balance their unconscious with conscious problem-solving, they come to understand that good design requires the merging of intuitive and rational responses. I hope to expand the influence of architecture across disciplines by examining the convergence of sociology and psychology with the tangibles of space, construction, materials, and details. My advanced design studios have dealt with issues of psychology and architectural design by directly engaging members of the professional psychoanalytic community as co-teachers and as guest reviewers. Issues of perception and psychology are woven into many course materials and assignments for other design studios and lecture courses.

ELIZABETH DANZE

University of Texas at Austin

ACSA Distinguished Professor

With my colleagues, I developed trans-disciplinary courses on homelessness and the psychological effects of wartime experiences on veterans. We are also researching the impact of design studio experiences on the psychological development of students. Our research has been presented in publications, symposia and seminars, both at the University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture and at meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association. The very inclusive nature of architectural discourse allows me to connect and explore these diverse realms through my scholarship, practice, and teaching.

Juror Comments: Professor Danze is an inspirational teacher and faculty member. She influences students and faculty alike with her incorporation of professional research into studio pedagogy. She displays an unwavering commitment to education and true talent for teaching. As a supporting letter says, “She is a master at conceiving design problems that will create fundamental learning opportunities.� 17


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The foundation of my teaching is the understanding that architecture is never singular. Rather, it is a web of potential and possibilities. I call on students to solve problems that combine the theoretical and conceptual with the world of reality and production. Both enterprises engage and stimulate creativity and require self-reflection, continual refinement, and the nurturing of a passion. As students learn to balance their unconscious with conscious problem-solving, they come to understand that good design requires the merging of intuitive and rational responses. I hope to expand the influence of architecture across disciplines by examining the convergence of sociology and psychology with the tangibles of space, construction, materials, and details. My advanced design studios have dealt with issues of psychology and architectural design by directly engaging members of the professional psychoanalytic community as co-teachers and as guest reviewers. Issues of perception and psychology are woven into many course materials and assignments for other design studios and lecture courses.

MICHAEL FIFIELD

University of Oregon

ACSA Distinguished Professor

With my colleagues, I developed trans-disciplinary courses on homelessness and the psychological effects of wartime experiences on veterans. We are also researching the impact of design studio experiences on the psychological development of students. Our research has been presented in publications, symposia and seminars, both at the University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture and at meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association. The very inclusive nature of architectural discourse allows me to connect and explore these diverse realms through my scholarship, practice, and teaching.

Juror Comments: Professor Fifield is devoted to nurturing leaders by creating opportunities for students to take on leadership roles. In addition to an impressive list of publications and presentations, his submission is strongly student oriented. Fifield is well connected to the profession though his involvement with AIA, and it is evident that his students will go on to advance the profession. 19



Teaching still feels new to me. I reported this sense of ‘newness’ at the beginning of my career. It came from the uncertainty and doubt I felt in the role of a design teacher. I suspect some saw this as a disqualifying characteristic; for me, it became important evidence that the question of how to teach design was not going to be quietly settled. The openness of the question has led to continuing experiments with the content and the process of the studios and courses I have taught. At the time, I stated the hope that I would feel the same way in twenty years. I am now almost exactly at that point and, remarkably, I can report that my hopes in this regard have largely been met. Much has changed in the interim but my sense of uncertainty surrounding teaching design has remained intact. Now past my novitiate, I have earned a more useful understanding of the source and value of the uncertainties that still occupy me as a design teacher. I understand that the inability to reduce this experience to a stable and reproducible model of how to teach architecture is precisely what keeps me actively interested in the effort. I work to protect the uncertainty of this process against assumption and habit. While questions about the specifics of how I teach design are difficult for me to answer concisely or consistently, questions about why uncertainty and doubt are important topics to bring into a design studio are clearer to me.

GREG WATSON

Louisiana State University

ACSA Distinguished Professor

“Here is what we have to offer you in its most elaborate form — confusion guided by a clear sense of purpose.” Gordon Matta-Clark Before becoming an architect, I studied to be a behavioral scientist, an experimentalist. After architectural practice, and before teaching, I studied studio art focused on painting and drawing. These interests are all design practices: the design of inquiry; the design of buildings; and the design of visual language and communication. In these contexts, if approached in a curious and exploratory way, design is always a slippery, risky task. The borders around ideas of content, quality, meaning, intent, relevance, and judgment are ambiguous and porous. Questions provoked by the affinities and tensions between these ideas grow larger before they get smaller. Success emerges slowly from a field of failure. Given this as a frame for design education, my responsibility is to help students develop independent, critical voices as designers through full immersion in this process. They must earn confidence in the skills necessary to deal with the inherent complexities of design. Instruction that suppresses this complexity by over-valuing predictability, control, and conformity delays this by falsifying the nature of creative work. Diligent curiosity, disciplined practice and persistence in the face of uncertainty are the habits necessary to do this work well. Patience is an essential first lesson.

Juror Comments: Professor Watson’s teaching philosophy is terrific; in his own words, “education as a thought provoking experience,” is the core of his methods and impact on students. His submission and resume are exceedingly well organized and highlight his impressive service, great student work, several teaching awards, and advising activities. 21


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NF T

ACSA/AIAS New Faculty Teaching Awards Granted jointly by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) and the American Institute of Architecture Students (AIAS) for demonstrated excellence in teaching performance during the formative years of an architectural teaching career.

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Preparing architects, critical thinkers, collaborators for careers with impact demands integration of multiple disciplinary perspectives, performance sophistication developed out of simple design logic, and public impact as both a goal and a metric by which we measure design solutions. For four of the past eight years, I have had the privilege to teach at the University of Virginia School of Architecture. I bring a multidisciplinary background to my teaching as an engineer/architect. I have sustained external funding and partnerships to offer my students collaboration with scientific, economic, community development, and fabrication experts during the development of their design research. The use of advanced technology is critical to my teaching, enabling students to find elegant, simple solutions for design and performance criteria—aiming to reduce rather than create complexity. Finally, I see the intersection of local design decisions and large-scale systems as a place of public action. As an integral component of the design process, my students develop clear research agendas and position their work according to its ecological, social, and economic impact.

JEANA RIPPLE

University of Virginia

ACSA/AIAS New Faculty Teaching

Through studios, research seminars, required lecture courses, and thesis advising, I have found ways to foreground these priorities—of integrated collaboration, performance sophistication, and public impact—paramount in my own research. My students and I challenge each other to engage relevant social, ecological, and economic issues at every scale of design research.

Juror Comments: Jeana Ripple’s teaching expresses a rigorous approach to diverse courses. Her digital design approach is calculated, measured, and intentional. Her material studies consistently build upon one another. And her research shows a clear commitment to public interest. Ripple’s submission represents the student well and reveals meaningful relationships with students on a range of levels. 25


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KYLE KONIS

University of Southern California

ACSA/AIAS New Faculty Teaching

I am an assistant professor at the University of Southern California School of Architecture, hired in Fall 2012 to teach courses on high performance building technology and sustainable design and to advise students in USC’s Master of Building Science (MBS) program. I bring a unique background in architectural design and high performance building technology research to USC. I have worked for firms in the US and the UK leading the profession in the integration of sustainable design principles into practice. I have also worked at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) on high performance facade research aimed at achieving zero-net-energy performance. Through both my professional and research experience, I know that there is often a chasm between design intent and how buildings actually perform, particularly from the perspective of their end users. While working at LBNL, I developed a critical awareness of the need for performance-based feedback in early-stage design to effectively achieve performance objectives, as well as the need for feedback from real buildings to validate and refine promising design strategies. However, I also developed an awareness of the limitations of current engineering methods to account for the importance and complexity of building end-users in the behavior and performance of real buildings. My approach to teaching has evolved as a hybrid of my two experiences. I work to adapt and apply scientific and engineering-based methods to integrate diverse sustainability objectives and end-user feedback within a design context evolving rapidly towards performance-based outcomes as the new normal.

Juror Comments: Kyle Konis brings a fresh approach to performance and design at various scales, from made to digital form making. He is highly knowledgeable in sustainable and environmental design, and his work is innovative yet pragmatic and practice oriented. Konis brings an enthusiasm and high level of engagement to studio. He is committed to his students, demonstrating the qualities of a true mentor. Konis is prime for making an impact throughout his career. 27


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JESSE LECAVALIER

New Jersey Institute of Technology

ACSA/AIAS New Faculty Teaching

I am an assistant professor at the University of Southern California School of Architecture, hired in Fall 2012 to teach courses on high performance building technology and sustainable design and to advise students in USC’s Master of Building Science (MBS) program. I bring a unique background in architectural design and high performance building technology research to USC. I have worked for firms in the US and the UK leading the profession in the integration of sustainable design principles into practice. I have also worked at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) on high performance facade research aimed at achieving zero-net-energy performance. Through both my professional and research experience, I know that there is often a chasm between design intent and how buildings actually perform, particularity from the perspective of their end users. While working at LBNL, I developed a critical awareness of the need for performance-based feedback in early-stage design to effectively achieve performance objectives, as well as the need for feedback from real buildings to validate and refine promising design strategies. However, I also developed an awareness of the limitations of current engineering methods to account for the importance and complexity of building end-users in the behavior and performance of real buildings. My approach to teaching has evolved a hybrid of my two experiences. I work to adapt and apply scientific and engineering-based methods to integrate diverse sustainability objectives and end-user feedback within a design context evolving rapidly towards performance-based outcomes as the new normal.

Juror Comments: Jesse LeCavalier is devoted to improving beginning design. His focused submission displays a unique pedagogical approach. His students’ work shows an impressive breadth of perspectives and methods of inquiry at various scales for his level of design student. LeCavalier notably redesigned NJIT’s first year program, combining history and engineering into the studio curriculum. 29


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CA

ACSA Creative Achievement Awards

In recognition of a specific achievement or series of achievements in teaching, design, scholarship, research, or service that advances architectural education.

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THE CAL POLY LOS ANGELES METROPOLITAN PROGRAM IN ARCHITECTURE AND URBAN DESIGN (CPLA_METRO) CPLA_Metro immerses aspiring architects in a multicultural urban setting – rich with learning, practicing, and networking opportunities. The program began as a two-quarter (20 week) course module set-up annually for 20+ off-campus Cal Poly San Luis Obispo architecture students alongside one faculty member to engage architects, alumni, and the many institutions in Los Angeles. In addition to our unique curriculum that focuses on Los Angeles – its architecture, history, urbanity, and culture – we reach out to the local L.A. community to enhance our program’s learning structure through visiting lecturers; digital design workshops; structural, acoustical, and ECS consulting; and a wide-range of public events. The program was founded and is administered, taught, and directed by Cal Poly Associate Professor Stephen Phillips, AIA, Ph.D. The CPLA_Metro curriculum consists of a design studio, history/theory and professional practice seminar sequence, and a professional internship all within one highly integrated off-campus research laboratory. Additionally, a public events series with lectures, panel discussions, symposia, guest seminars, digital workshops, and design charrettes assimilates the students within the local community and discourse. The students alongside their faculty member coordinate, design, and produce the lecture series posters; design and manage the website; photograph all events; produce publicity materials and Eblasts; host all events; and produce substantive research on architecture and design including our first book in collaboration with the Getty Research Institute – L.A. [Ten]: Interviews on Los Angeles Architecture 1970s-1990s published by Lars Müller and available in book stores and museums internationally. The program is sponsored by HMC Architects Designing Futures Foundations, Thom and Blythe Mayne of Morphosis Architects, and MAD Architects, alongside collaborative support from the A+D Architecture and Design Museum; CALA (the Center for Architecture and Urban Design Los Angeles); Hennessy + Ingalls, Hollywood; Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York; The Cuningham Group; ZGF (Zimmer Gunsul Frasca); Gensler; the Getty Research Institute; and LACMA.

STEPHEN JOHN PHILLIPS

California Polytechnic State University

ACSA Creative Achievement

Students: 2011-2014 California Polytechnic State University, LA Studio students, total of 68 students participated.

Juror Comments: This submission chronicles a small architecture program boldly stepping into the LA scene amongst bigger fish and performing amazingly. The Cal Poly program is truly original; it brings multiple external voices into the institution and then midwifes internships between these figures and students. Students and faculty do not just quietly observe LA, rather they actively participate in LA. The resultant LA Ten book exemplifies Cal Poly’s position as creator of new knowledge for the discipline of architecture. 33


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POSSIBLE MEDIUMS PROJECT

ADAM FURE University of Michigan

KELLY BAIR University of Illinois at Chicago

KRISTY BALLIET The Ohio State University

KYLE JAMES MILLER Syracuse University

ACSA Creative Achievement

The Possible Mediums project is a series of events showcasing design investigations based in speculative architectural mediums. It began two years ago when the four of us, all teaching and working in the American Midwest, came together to promote novel design trends emerging at our schools and across the country. In our view, the conventional mediums of architectural production are rapidly changing. Comics and toys are showing up alongside perspectives and models. Orthographic drawings are crafting optical tricks while digital drawings are exploding into vibrant vector fields. Machines are not only being used but built from scratch. From plaster casts of fat characters to geodesic kites, designers are actively expanding architecture’s mediums in order to captivate new audiences. To mobilize this exciting wave of speculative architecture, we created the Possible Mediums project as a diverse set of academic and social events that support, extend, and celebrate the diversity of contemporary design.

Juror Comments: What a fantastic submission that lays a framework to unite diverse, emerging voices at multiple schools. Possible Mediums broadly disseminates novel modes and methods of design. The innovative framework relies on student experimentation with actual making that, in turn, informs the discussion. Breaking out of the ivory tower, this format overcomes boundaries between institutions, as well as the acts of speculative thinking and making. 35


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CP

ACSA Collaborative Practice Awards To recognize programs that demonstrate how faculty, students, and community/civic clients work to realize common objectives.

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GREEN BUILDING DEMONSTRATION PAVILION Oktibbeha County Heritage Museum “Wreckage to Amenity” characterizes the design and construction process of the Oktibbeha County Heritage Museum, Green Building Demonstration Pavilion. Understanding both the positive and negative aspects of the endeavor as opportunities for skillful design the project team, including students from five disciplines, undertook the task of developing a pavilion that could rejuvenate the site, program, and local appreciation of the understated museum. Over four years, the Landscape Architecture program, and College of Architecture, Art & Design, at Mississippi State University has engaged in the redevelopment of the museum’s grounds to showcase sustainable stormwater management technologies and green building methodologies. Upon completion, the project became the only location in the region to offer public access to working examples of pervious pavement, green roof technology, an infiltration basin, a flow-through planter and a rainwater-harvesting cistern as a unified design ensemble.

HANS HERRMANN

Mississippi State University

CORY GALLO

Mississippi State University

BRIAN TEMPLETON

Mississippi State University

SUZANNE POWNEY Mississippi State University

JUSTIN TAYLOR Mississippi State University

WAYNE WILKERSON

Mississippi State University

ACSA Collaborative Practice Awards

Reflecting the museum’s motto of “celebrating the past and embracing the future” the pavilion is a re-purposed/imagined gas station canopy that was restructured and adapted to become a cutting-edge architectural element with a lush vegetated carpet now on its roof. The reuse of this former fueling station canopy not only demonstrates green building but also begins to work at the urban scale, as the canopy removal from a prominent, yet derelict, site within the city helped to clean up the formerly blighted streetscape. Architectural elements were also repurposed from a church and former school building, further illustrating the many low-tech and affordable methods of building in an environmentally accountable way. Students: Architecture, Making Elective: Jared Barnett, Amy Bragg, Reed Bradford, Katherine Ernst, Jonathon Greer, Scott Polley, Nick Purvis, Salena Tew, John Thomas – Building Construction Science, Undergraduate: Lake Jackson – Art, Undergraduate: Johnathan Nowell – Graduate Landscape Architecture: Robert Jackson, Sara Lamb, Austin Moore, Emily Overbey – Undergraduate Landscape Architecture: Lee Conner, Cameron Cooper, Lauren Doherty, Neal Downey, Kevin Gehrke, Brian Gracey, Andrew Gray, Owen Harris, Samuel Hawkins, Will Hearn, Jerry Hill, Jordan Lohman, Casey Mayne, Paxton Rooks, Justin Spratlin, William Stockton, Jason Treloar, Devlon Ward, Clint Wycoff, Michael Vampran, Beck Scholtes, Mclean Smith

Juror Comments: This project successfully integrates a breadth of curricular content: landscape, existing structures, projection, community involvement, and an understanding of a locally constructed sense of place. 39


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DESIGNBUILDBLUFF AT THE UOFU + COLORADO BUILDING WORKSHOP AT CU DENVER Since 2010 Colorado Building Workshop at the University of Colorado Denver has partnered with DesignBuildBLUFF at the University of Utah to design and build sustainable and affordable homes for families living on Navajo Nation. Since 2012 the partnership has included engineering students from Southern Utah University. Coupled with structural and lighting engineers from the local Denver community this unique interdisciplinary environment exposes students to the emerging field of integrated project delivery, IPD, the collaborative practice of solving problems as a team of designers. On Navajo Nation the programs partner with the Navajo Trust Fund to select a client. Prior to meeting the client, students work with Navajo educators to learn about Indian culture. After an intense study of the landscape, often with the client, students look at the material culture of the region and work with the Navajo families regarding their programmatic needs. Throughout the design process, and they build, the families are involved in design input, often helping during construction. The goal is to design an energy efficient home that uses local materials to capture and reuse passive energy in a program-specific design. Students rely on the Navajo family’s knowledge of the landscape to help inform their design decisions. Since most of the homes are built for $25,000, material reuse and labor-intensive building techniques are often used. With the help of the National Renewable Energy Lab, students use the latest energy modeling software to reimagine traditional building techniques. The results are site-specific, energy efficient homes for Navajo families.

RICK SOMMERFELD

University of Colorado, Denver

ACSA Collaborative Practice Awards

Students: 2010 Amber Danzl Amy Beresford Cayla McConnell Dominic Herrera Emily Martin Eric

Sechrist George Kincaid Jessica Garfin Jocelyn Turkowski Jonah Rogin Joshua Paulsen Katie Carleo Lisa Robins Matthew Joiner Matthew Rennert Mike Sullivan Mark Olsen Nik Rael Nina Afshar Peter Lutz Tina Pruett Wren Hoffmann 2011 Ellen Adams Brett Blackmon Lura Blumfield Jay Burkhalter Glen Camuso Jacob Ebling William Koning William Murray Rebecca Sockwell JD Signom James Anderson David Hevesi Zia Hooker Courtney Hughes Cameron Minor Milen Milev Michelle Pollock Josh Young 2012 Lindsay Moore Halle Hagenau Matt Brown Tor Jorfald Elise Mascitelli Laura Mears Maggie Hattman Megan Brankamp Sarah Boman Sara Zezulka Kimberlee Derhammer Brian Majerus Lauren Watkins Laurie Hollm Lauren Peterson Treonna Villasenor Craig Cherry Jason Astorino MC Burns 2013 Shawn Adams Erica Alfaro Patrick Beseda Gregory Behlen Anastasia Chmel Megan Garrett Lacy Graham Patricia Gut Amy Keil Anna Huey Catalina Pedraza Henry Rahn Foster Ramsey Scott Rank Joe Stevenson Dana Trill Iassen Vladimirov Megan Voiles Ronald Willison Kristin Zuro

Juror Comments: This submission presents a wonderful series of projects, each exposing students to integrated project delivery while providing shelters for the Navajo community. The collaborations span across academic and professional networks of architecture, structural engineering, and lighting design. 41


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DESIGN DULUTH Design Duluth is an interdisciplinary multi-year initiative organized loosely around Duluth (Minnesota) Mayor Don Ness’ “90,000 x 2020” initiative, which calls for establishing economic and cultural conditions to attract 4,000 new residents to Duluth by 2020. Motivated in part by catastrophic flooding in June 2012, the project began in September 2012 as a 3rd year interdisciplinary graduate design studio in order to help the city of Duluth envision and plan for a sustainable and resilient future. The studio works with the city of Duluth and various stakeholders (including the Port of Duluth, University of Minnesota– Duluth, the EPA, Minnesota and Wisconsin DNRs and over 25 other community partners) to propose resilient, multi-scalar solutions to long-term problems (climate change, economic instability, social paradigm shifts, and massive infrastructural reconstruction). It links students in Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Urban and Regional Planning with surrogate clients, local experts, and stakeholders throughout the design process. In a departure from typical service learning model, the students — while intensely engaged with community and stakeholders— generate forward-looking and grounded designs that address complex issues from a deep base of analysis and community engagement. Coming into its 4th year (2015-2016), Design Duluth has grown to include design teaching, community outreach and engagement, and civic activism. Design Duluth has been awarded a Bush Foundation Innovative Communities grant and will be working with grant partners, the Saint Louis River Alliance and Duluth -LISC to design a resilient future for the underserved communities in western Duluth.

OZAYR SALOOJEE

University of Minnesota

VINCE DEBRITTO

University of Minnesota

JAMUNA GOLDEN

University of Minnesota

JAMES WHEELER

University of Minnesota

ACSA Collaborative Practice Awards

Students: 2012-2013 Academic Year Students: Bill Brohman, Ally Czechowicz, Coal Dorius, Elizabeth Hixson, Kammeron Hughes, Jessica Lannoye, Eric Maass, Andrew Montgomery, Jessica Paine, Bianca Paz, Nicole Peterson, Michael Schumann, Anna Springer, Matthew Traucht, Tianfang Wang, Zhang Han, Jessica Andrejasich, Angela Bateson, Marcus Hulmer, Danica Kane, Katie Kangas, Julian Lemon, Ken Mata, Martin Meyer, Kai Salmela, Alec Sands, Peter Stauduhar, Michael Stephens, Kyle Tornow, Christ Wingate; 2013-2014 Academic Year Students: Yong Sam Kim, Stephen Foss, Elizabeth Shevi, Stuart Shrimpton, Mike Silvestrini, Ryan Ruttger, Stephanie Wagner, Kevin Belair, Emily Osthus, Madel Duenas, Solange Guillaume, Derek Gallagher, Namdi Alexander, Stefano Ascari, Michael Healy, Xinai Liang, Montana Harinsuit, Matt Kessler, Mitch Hein, Dantes Ha, Elissa Brown, Briana Schramm, Patrick Triggs, Michael Schiebe, Jordan Barlow, Kaylyn Kirby, Stephanie Erwin, Claire Lonsbury, Nicholas Hoffman, Amber HIll, Vanessa Abin Fuentes, Jennifer McGinnity, Stephen Himmerich; 2014-2015 students: Not Listed (course in progress) 2014-2015 Full Time Faculty: Vince Debritto (Senior Lecturer, Dept. of Landscape Architecture; Ozayr Saloojee (Associate Professor, School of Architecture) 2014-2015 Part Time Faculty: Jamuna Golden (Adjunct Assistant Professor, Dept. of Landscape Architecture; James Wheeler (Adjunct Assistant Professor, School of Architecture)

Juror Comments: This program should be lauded; it is clear that a great amount of work poured into the project. It presents terrific links between the academy, practice, and industry through continued collaborations over a number of years. In addition, this well-funded project garnered a lot support from the community. 43


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SHOBAK PROTECTED AREA: Developing a New Model of Ecotourism and Nature Reserve for Jordan This project is the result of a year and a half of collaborative research and design between a graduate school of architecture and a Jordanian NGO, the Royal Society of Conservation of Nature (RSCN). Through the case of the Shobak Protected Area in Jordan, the project tests a multi-scalar approach for protected area planning, design, and ecological management. This approach proposes that the protected area’s ecological integrity is insured not by an outside institution, but rather, by measures that empower local citizens to protect their natural heritage. In this non-deterministic approach, protected areas are conceived as evolving, resilient entities, whose spatial and temporal sustainability is the result of key, acupunctural planning strategies, which spur both civil stewardship towards the environment and local soco-economic improvements.

AZIZA CHAOUNI

University of Toronto

ACSA Collaborative Practice Awards

The social ecologist Helen Ingram stresses the efficiency of people’s networks versus formal institutions for effective enforcement and compliance with environmental regulations. Unlike institutions, these networks have the possibility to be more flexible, to respond faster to threats, and be resilient to change in the face of sudden political and environmental developments. Positive narratives that celebrate the contributions of people, which envision an improved future, help sustain these networks and propel them into action, subsequently resulting in positive, ecologically sustainable outcomes. Hence, the masterplan for the Shobak Special Protection Area promulgates a participative approach, based on an in-depth site analysis and collaboration between experts and local stakeholders. The masterplan’s strategies not only directly benefit the local population, especially the primary target group (nomads), but also foster the emergence of “network weavers”. It is this process, from the regional to the building scale, that this project brings forward. Students: Keren Golan, Mani Tabrizi, Nicolas Roland, Avis Yau, Gladys Cheung, Lisa Sato, Crystal Waddell-Gardiner

Juror Comments: This project stands out for its realism. The forms were more than just applied; they were culturally driven. The collaborations were exceedingly well organized, which translates to desirable outcomes. 45


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FD

ACSA Faculty Design Awards

To represent theoretical investigations advancing the general understanding of the discipline of architecture. The awards recognize exemplary built and unbuilt work that reflect upon practice and research.

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EMPTY PAVILION Empty Pavilion aspires to a method of architectural legibility that is appropriate for Detroit’s evacuated urban context. Breaking with the dominant narrative of Detroit’s deterioration, the pavilion is conceived under the willfully naive suspicion that a latent and viable urbanism exists within the city’s now diffuse urban context. The pavilion is designed as a collection of architectural figures drawn-in-space. Each figure is derived as a single line tracery of an underlying lattice of closely-packed platonic solids. These lines are then “relaxed” to loosely approximate the rigorous geometry underlying their inception – thus yielding a fleeting legibility of geometric intricacy, as well as a mood or affect of entropy that resonates with the surrounding city. From certain vantage points, and only momentarily, the project recalls familiar architectural elements that may entice memory – like the roof-line of house, a chimney, or a staircase. From other vantages, the project presents clear and yet unfamiliar architectural figures, soliciting projective association. Up-close, the pavilion is meant to encourage physical interaction. Elements within the design suggest differing occupations, such as seating, lounging and climbing. Constructed of bent steel tubing, foam and rubber, the pavilion is counter-intuitively soft to the touch, begging tactile engagement. The relationship between the pavilion and its site is meant to lend definition to the otherwise un-variegated surrounding emptiness, vaguely recalling the site’s history. Located in an empty field that was once divided into a series of residential lots, the project loosely describes the volume of the house that once sat in its place.

MCLAIN CLUTTER

University of Michigan

KYLE REYNOLDS

University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee

ACSA Faculty Design Awards

Students: Ariel Poliner, Nathan Van Wylen, Michael Sanderson

Juror Comments: This project possesses a strong conceptual premise, material sophistication, and figural depth. The potential appropriations of use give the piece a deep yet shrewd open-ended quality. The study of the line into a three-dimensional form is both rigorous and playful; variations of the line and technical/material facility to achieve this are also innovative. 49


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JUJUY REDUX Jujuy Redux is a mid-rise apartment building located in Rosario, Argentina, in a formerly industrial district adjacent to the historic downtown and the Paraná Riverfront. Occupying a corner lot, the building consists of thirteen small, shared-floor apartments; a Duplex; parking on ground level; and a collective terrace on the rooftop. Jujuy Redux participates in the transformation of contemporary urban housing by proposing a subtle delineated mass, allowing the social space par excellence of each apartment to visually connect with the street below. Diagonally oriented towards the corner, Jujuy Redux’s hyperbolic balconies are the most innovative feature of the project. Sheltering a geometrically inflected outdoor space that changes from intimate to exposed, the balconies distort the horizontal stability of the built mass both physically and visually. Utilizing local craftsmanship and steel-reinforced, cast-in-place concrete, the building’s pliant shell encompasses diagonal brise-soleils and triangular cutouts, which control sunlight and reduce heat gain. Concrete cross braces continue the balconies’ diagonal deviations to the lower-most floors, creating a double-height, cantilevered urban corner. Those deviations intensify at the Roof level, where the building tapers to accommodate mechanical spaces; a corner duplex; a rooftop sundeck; and other semi-sheltered areas. This attention to environmental, structural, and social aspects of the envelope underwrites the spatio-formal coding of the building’s shell. Straddling the scales of the individual and the collective, the project probes the possibilities of the balcony -and other repetitive architectural elements- as integral parts, rather than mere appendages, of the outermost interface of this domestic architectural typology.

MAXIMILIANO SPINA Woodbury University

MARCELO SPINA

Southern California Institute of Architecture

GEORGINA HULJICH

University of California, Los Angeles

ACSA Faculty Design Awards

Students: Rick Michod, Nathaniel Moore and Daniele Profeta

Juror Comments: The material, spatial, and visual qualities of this project are outstanding. The formal innovation of the balconies is both ambitious and intelligent within a market driven typology. The texture of urban and interior spaces is both dense and varied. The rigor of the research, exploring indooroutdoor spatial inversions, is supported by the technical merits of the project. The project pushes into experimental territory, transforming the unit and sense of inhabitation. It forms a new type of space that is neither courtyard nor balcony, nor core-based interior, but something oblique generating a torqued relationship to the site vertically and horizontally. 51


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UNDERLYING STRUCTURES This single-family house is comparatively large at a little over 5,380 square feet; the site is narrow, long, and sloped towards the south. Two different schemes are superimposed on top of one another: a longitudinal one, based on spatial forking, and the one underneath, based on a finger-like configuration. As a result, the structure is a fractured mass, ruled by the rhythm of the roof outline. Some other important aspects to the design are the growth against the slope, and the entrance through the umbilicus and permeable skins that thicken space boundaries. On the upper level, there is a daytime pavilion with a metal roof structure that persists all the way through in visual continuity, with long views through a sequence of spaces. Concrete supporting walls and glass enclosures are the other two vertical elements, blurring the idea of interior and exterior. Rooms below are burrowlike, with nested openings in between them. As for the floor plan scheme, the structure above combs space in a single direction — transversal to movement — while penetrations below fragment the volume, bringing light deep inside the built mass. It is a formless project in the sense that it is impossible to obtain any volumetric understanding as a spectator. This effect is due to the camouflage of the permeable skin with the concrete, and the perceptual dynamic of the light.

MARIA HURTADO DE MENDOZA

New Jersey Institute of Technology estudio.entresitio

JOSE MARIA HURTADO DE MENDOZA estudio.entresitio

CESAR JIMENEZ DE TEJADA estudio.entresitio

ALVAR RUIZ

estudio. entresitio

ACSA Faculty Design Awards

The permeable skin follows the same rhythm in the pattern of vertical lines as the concrete surfaces. It is not only about the absence of frames — supporting elements are secondary, intentionally hidden, and as thin as possible. The house is an inhabitable porous enclosure made by the superimposition of multiple layers with different density and permeability; and therefore, different degrees of interiority. For this project estudio entresitio were the architects as well as the general contractor; therefore, not only the art or process of building was in our hands, but also the act of physical construction.1 Architects: estudio.entresitio. madrid-ny Location: Madrid, Spain Photographs: Roland Halbe, estudio.entresitio 1

Text from Architizer: http://architizer.com/projects/house1130/

Juror Comments: The testing of how two-dimensional graphical patterns can emerge as a spatial device is conceptually rich and very clear. The volumes and apertures set up a vivid sequence of spaces across both plan and section. It was a smart decision to focus and limit the palette to white; it adds to the project’s exploration of light-play and the parallactic potentials of the screens. For a residential project, the spatial, formal, and tectonic resolution is laudable and imaginative. 53


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DOMESTIC HATS By looking at an age-old, impossible problem—a building’s top—the following investigation explores ordinary roof typologies and reconsiders the role of the massing model in architectural representation. A drive through neighborhoods across Americana demonstrate stylistic differences in the domestic architecture, but arguably the single most common element of the single family home is the roof. Whether located in Albuquerque, Aspen, or Atlanta, shared rooflines crisscross national geographies and neighborhood boundaries. Ordinary and simplistic, yet highly repetitive, gable and hip roofs dominate the scene while butterfly and mansard roofs represent a rarer species. Dormers, A-frame, and shed roofs are combined to make a complex system of functional rooftops with countless variations. These copypaste forms not only populate the country’s housing stock, but represent house figures and house shapes widely accepted by the public. But what happens if the conventions of roof typologies become distorted? What if the overly complex roofs seen in McMansions are celebrated and further exaggerated? By focusing on the intersection of non-similar roofs—rooflines that just don’t belong—foreign types are discovered. Originals are copied and hybrid forms are manipulated to create sixteen unique massing models. Domestic Hats consider misbehavior in the architecture, particularly at the roofline.

JENNIFER BONNER

Georgia Institute of Technology

ACSA Faculty Design Awards

Students: Ainsley McMaster Son Vu Israt Lopa Jessica Greenstein

Juror Comments: This project experiments with American vernacular typology and new, innovative forms of massing. The landscape of roofs in aggregate is very compelling and opens up new ideas of a second suburban ground plane. The objects at this scale intentionally disassociate the project from existing as a model or a building. The masses feel domestic, yet uninhabitable. Overall, the body of work is engaged, smart, campy, and offers great potential for further development. 55


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MARTIN DESPANG

University of Hawaii at Manoa

ACSA Faculty Design Awards Honorable Mention

ACADEMIC KINDERGARTEN This ACSA recognition further completes the acknowledgment of Professor Martin Despang´s critical practice methodology of the “synergy of typological diversity,” which has previously ACSA awarded buildings dedicated to the human events and activities of serving (military cafeteria) , socialization (coffee shop), public transport (tram stations), work (office building),food supply (grocery store), which all together form a comprehensive system of people and planet friendly ,happy and healthy well-being. This system integral typological case study is investigating in the human event of learning through playing and is the first postfossil (Passive Haus) kindergarten for a University, which is one of Germany´s oldest institutions committed to education and according to Wikipedia, “is like Cambridge in England or Yale in America: very provincial, not on the way to anywhere - no one comes to these backwaters except for the company of professors. And the professors are sure that this is the center of the world.” The building is strategically placed in the landscape-rich campus site showcasing flora and fauna as a “green lung” in the midst of an institutional 1970´s concrete brut built environment. As a hybrid of landscape and building, the kindergarten attributes to the multiplicity and complexity of requirements/ influences of the project: excellence in urban-landscape integration, phenomenological pedagogical architecture, and exemplary environmental / post-fossil performance. These premises shape the building’s architectural gesture, being a solid mass prefabricated concrete building, which is softened through the use of wood and light perforations and has demonstrated success through user satisfaction: YouTube.com/watch?v=HjmPGtI44_4

Juror Comments: This project notably integrates landscape and architecture; its strength comes from a clear and simple site strategy coupled with a precast structural system that creates a surprise in scale at the elevation. The spatial sequences, both indoor and outdoor circuits, are rich with depth and texture produced by the concrete and wood mixture throughout. 57


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HEAT BI-METAL BOW @ 250 AND INSERT ONTO ALUMINUM JOINTS.

LAY SECONDARY ALUMINUM SYSTEM INTO PLACE.

HEAT BI-METAL BOW @ 250 AND INSERT ONTO SECONDARY ALUMINUM JOINT SYSTEM.

ONCE INSERTED, ALIGN THE ALTERNATING BIMETAL NOTCHES. THIS RESULTS IN A 10 BEND AT THE INTERSECTION.

CONTINUE TO ALIGN THE ALTERNATING BIMETAL NOTCHES AS THE BOWS ARE INSERTED.

CURVED FIELD SYSTEM


EXO Thermobimetal is a lamination of two alloys of metals with different coefficients of expansion. When heated, the “smart” material curls. This natural behavior is beneficial during construction because it enables a person to assemble the project with minimal effort and danger. Requiring no mechanical force or tools besides gloves, a single person can assemble the surface with a single hand. Each individual piece is heated in a conventional oven to about 350˚ Fahrenheit. When it reaches the point of optimal geometric curl, the piece is held into position for a few seconds as it cools. When the piece returns to its flattened state, it locks into place, forming a pre-tensioned bow-beam (imagine an archer’s bow). When distributed in a field of bows on a cylindrical type of surface, the result is an extremely strong and lightweight shell, much like the exo-skeleton of a lobster or crustacean. The surface is held in tension with no fasteners or hardware. This proof-of-concept prototype is the bottom tier of a five-tiered tower. Testing and analyses of the surface are currently being performed. The four upper tiers are planned for completion in 2015.

DORIS KIM SUNG

University of Southern California

ACSA Faculty Design Awards Honorable Mention

Title: eXo: Using a “Smart” Material Smartly Designer: Doris Sung, DOSU Studio Architecture (Team: Dylan Wood, Hannah Woo, Evan Shieh, Jessica Chang, Dennis Chow, Carter Shaw) Engineers: ARUP Engineering (Team: Roel Schierbeek, Gregory Nielsen, Laura Mino) Fabricators: Neal Feay Company (Alex Rasmussen) Material Suppliers: Engineered Materials Solutions Completion date: January 4, 2014 Materials: Thermobimetal, aluminum, steel. Students: Dylan Wood, Hannah Woo, Evan Shieh, Jessica Chang, Dennis Chow, Carter Shaw

Juror Comments: eXo presents focused structural, material and visual research. The depth of analysis, models, renderings and prototyping demonstrate the rich potential of making and rethinking tectonics. 59


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ELIZABETH STREET HOUSE Designed to embrace a lifestyle that easily moves between inside and out and an aesthetic that values serendipity above composition, this highly efficient home takes maximum advantage of the pleasures of living in one’s own private enclave.

KEVIN ALTER

University of Texas at Austin

ACSA Faculty Design Awards Honorable Mention

A sculpted concrete wall highlights the sinuous lines of a Blue Atlas Cedar and lends a sense of mystery, while a generous front porch signals a gregarious presence to the neighborhood. Once inside, the courtyard expands the perceived size of its adjacent rooms and provides rich interior environments caught between a communal center and discrete external circumstances. The out-ofdoors is always present, but unlike classic courtyard houses that serve as a precedent (both modern and traditional), the Elizabeth Street House is anything but dogmatic; its rooms embrace both an idealized internal world and external conditions, balancing their views and light such that both conditions are omnipresent throughout the experience of the house. Moreover, the presence of a front porch and its associated operable shutters allow for a more nuanced relationship with the neighborhood than its modern predecessors (i.e. the Eichler Homes of northern California). Situated on an undersized lot in a dense context of modest homes, one-off stores and restaurants, this house is intended as an economical alternative to providing privacy while maintaining a direct connection to the out-of-doors. Constructed for $173/sf, it utilizes a slab-on-grade foundation and conventional framing, and emphasizes natural ventilation, light and privacy.

Juror Comments: This project has a clear concept; it experiments with capturing exterior spaces at a variety of scales. The variation of materials and how they are sequenced in each space allows for a project that is seemingly introverted, modest and straightforward, yet it is surprising in its spatial layered and tectonic resolution. 61


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VERMILION SANDS: Investigating the Performative Atmospheres of Artificial Nature Vermilion Sands is a living canopy structure that was installed on West Vancouver’s waterfront in 2014. The project investigates how novel material processes can productively exploit tensions between what is commonly perceived as the artificial and the natural. The investigation’s programmatic vehicle is a structure that provides cooling shade in a loggia-like social space for a summer arts festival. The canopy roof is comprised of 260 custom-fabricated modules, each hydro-seeded with either white clover or ryegrass, grown in a nursery, and then suspended from a grid of aircraft cable. Emerging from this unprecedented methodology is an axial structure that is abstract and geometric, yet heterogeneous and biotic.

MATTHEW SOULES

University of British Columbia

ACSA Faculty Design Awards Honorable Mention

The project synthesizes various domains of design inquiry into a unified, haptic space. Geometrically specific geotextile forms enable productive plant growth while achieving particular aesthetic, light and shadow, and solar protection qualities. At the same time, the project achieves a transcendent ambient atmosphere through the pragmatic necessity of artificial light and irrigation that is provided with an integrated misting nozzle system and LED uplighting. Vermilion Sands is the title of a collection of short stories by JG Ballard. In this sci-fi work, each story focuses on a particular design or artistic medium in which nature is hybridized with technology to produce surreal and baroque results – for example, singing plants and cloud sculptures. It is the designers’ fantasy that Vermilion Sands the canopy could be set within a long lost story from Vermilion Sands the book. Students: David Alba, Jordan Beggs, Rachael Chan, Ewing Choi, Nina Cicero, Cyrus Greenall, Annie Hony, Suzanne Kraus, Catherine Michelle, Zeinab Mobini, Nikki Ng, Luis Puente, Warren Scheske, Brandon Shaw, Daichi Yamachita, Sandy Wang, Vince Xi

Juror Comments: Vermilion Sands is both uncanny and straightforward. It is a conceptually rich project that overcomes the artificial versus natural conundrum. To this extent, the project produces its own nature. The inversion of grass as soffit is a brilliant upending of our established perception of the lawn, allowing for a heightened sense of awareness to permeate the space. The play of the hirsute against the modularity of the ceiling allows for both wild and elegant textures to emerge. In addition to its visual impact, the structural and technical merits of the project also stand out. 63


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HDE

ACSA/AIA Housing Design Education Award Granted jointly by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) and The American Institute of Architects, Housing & Custom Residential Knowledge Committee (AIA, HCR KC) to recognize the importance of good education in housing design in producing architects ready for practice in a wide range of areas and able to be capable leaders and contributors to their communities.

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FOUR URBAN HOUSING NARRATIVES: Getting the City to be a Master Developer

STEPHEN D. LUONI

University of Arkansas

JEFFREY ERWIN HUBER

Florida Atlantic University

ACSA/AIA Housing Design Education Award

Downtown Fayetteville has mostly seen suburban development solutions over the last 25 years since this is what the market rewards. Funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, the proposal establishes an urban vision and accompanying pro forma by which the city and its economic development partner—the chamber of commerce—can control development of its downtown holdings that are fragmented by surface parking lots and oversized streets. The goal is to transform a city-owned parking lot into a pedestrianoriented residential anchor for the city’s arts district which is centered around a 1200-seat regional performing arts center (PAC). The supply of urban housing affordable to middle-class constituents has not kept pace with the demand for downtown living. Four student teams worked within the school’s community design center to each prepare an urban revitalization approach—ranging from lean to ambitious—that features multi-family housing in tandem with a $32 million expansion to PAC facilities. Housing is conceived as a collective urban form in shaping the city’s image and regenerating the downtown context toward a complete neighborhood. Each approach addresses market challenges in financing, return on investment, vertical mixed-use configurations, elevator expenses, and incremental implementation. The study provides city officials with comparative options to elicit a more robust and informed public discussion on development futures— often elusive in the standard procurement process for professional design services. The four approaches in their aggregate have already reshaped public policy on downtown development regarding comprehensive parking solutions, shared street strategies, and inclusionary urban housing. Students: Abbas Esmaeel Ethan Fowler Joseph Hamm Shannon Hawkins Kristin Hughes John Noonan Jason Pieper Melissa Roberson Jared Skinner Caleb Tyson Tyler Jones

Juror Comments: More than just housing, this submission focuses on street life regeneration, an important and under-represented angle. This submission also addresses a number of larger issues facing urban housing, including vehicular circulation, parking, financial challenges, and contextualization within a greater urban environment. All of the schemes include dense urban housing, contemporary forms, and an activated streetscape. The inclusion of stakeholders in the public and private sector was critical in reshaping public policy. 67


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INCORPORATING WORKFORCE HOUSING IN THE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT PLANNING AND DESIGN OF URBAN LOS ANGELES

KYLE KONIS

University of Southern California

ACSA/AIA Housing Design Education Award

The City of Los Angeles has an urgent need to improve resource efficiency while simultaneously supporting equitable economic development and a growing population. While sustainable design strategies are becoming standard practice for developer-driven projects, Los Angeles faces a critical shortage of housing units, particularly housing affordable to the majority of the LA workforce. These are typically middle-income earners, who fall into a housing ‘donut hole’ by earning too much to qualify for subsidized affordable housing, but too little to afford the high-end market-rate housing preferred by developers. The objective of this project is to address the need for workforce housing linked with transit and jobs as a basis for developing a comprehensive sustainable development proposal. In one course, a project is executed at the building scale, where students develop a mixed-use multi-family project that respondes to the current housing and resource efficiency needs of LA. In another course, architecture students work collaboratively with planning, landscape design, engineering, public policy, and historic conservation students to coordinate a district-scale development plan incorporating workforce housing with a multitude of additional citywide objectives (e.g. climate adaptation, carbon reduction, bicycle and pedestrian networks, public transit links, ecological revitalization, historic conservation, water efficiency). Work involves assessment of current housing and transit needs, energy and mass flows, assessment of future demand, establishment of performance targets, case study evaluation, application of environmentally responsive technologies, and identification of potential barriers and leverage points for effective action.

Juror Comments: This two semester course addresses the critical needs of workforce housing linked with transit and jobs in the City of Los Angeles. The work deals with big issues, such as climate change, housing shortages, jobs, and affordability. The schemes are well supported by research, including exhaustive sheets depicting history, large scale planning and connectivity. Students participated in public outreach, with multiple stakeholders and a final public presentation. This level of involvement begins to get at some sort of communitybased dialogue, which should be applauded. 69


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DA

ACSA Diversity Achievement Award

To recognize the work of faculty, administrators, or students in creating effective methods and models to achieve greater diversity in curricula, school personnel, and student bodies, specifically to incorporate the participation and contributions of historically under-represented groups or contexts.

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ARCHITECTURE Q-ARC INITIATIVE The Architecture Q-Arc Initiative at CCA is part of a broader effort to expand diversity college-wide through the discussion of LGBTQ issues. The multipronged effort expanded on an ongoing collaboration between San Francisco’s Queer Cultural Center (QCC) and CCA to foster a series of Queer Conversations on Culture and the Arts (QCCA) in the Bay Area. I initiated and led the architecture specific efforts including the development of a Masters level housing studio curriculum focusing on the needs of LGBTQ seniors, a public exhibition of the student work at the San Francisco LGBT Community Center entitled Alternative Futures, a lecture by Aaron Betsky revisiting his seminal book Queer Space after 20 years, and a screening and forum with the director of the documentary film The Grove, which dealt with the establishment and challenges for the future of the National AIDS Memorial in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. At times in San Francisco LGBTQ issues can seem so ingrained in the fabric of the city that the need to call them out specifically can be questioned. Yet, taken together over the course of the school year, this multi-pronged initiative helped to change the culture of the institution by creating forums in which the issues of diversity for these historically under-represented groups could find voice. By addressing the issue through a variety of formats and activities, I attempted to provide multiple venues for engagement while being sensitive to the broad range of interests and comfort levels within our student audience. I was extremely cognizant that attempts to address issues of diversity within an architectural education can at times backfire with our students if the discussions seem forced, top-down, or perfunctory.

NEAL J.Z. SCHWARTZ

California College of the Arts

ACSA Diversity Achievement Award

The following is a list of students whose studio work was included in the Alternative Futures Exhibition, one component of the multi-pronged Q-Arc (Queer Architecture) Initiative: Christopher Baile Alan Cation Jill Chao Harrison Chou Tyler Jones-Powell Enrique Justicia Dmitrii Kanivetc Sanna Lee Mikaela Leo Jeffrey Long Clayton Muhleman Maryam Nassajian Yasmine Orozco Melissa Perkinson Jude Simon Dustin Tisdale Mallory Van Ness

Juror Comments: Neal Schwartz is a steadfast agent working to create the necessary conditions to encourage and promote diversity. His work skillfully leverages academic institutional support and student talent to provide a forum to discuss and engage challenging issues confronting the LGBTQ community. The graduate design studio explored LGBT sociality and developed critical proposals for LGBT senior housing, leading to healthy public conversation on LGBT issues between the community, students, and faculty. The studio also created a nurturing and safe day-to-day environment for students to express who they are to the world. 73


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DB

ACSA Design-Build Award To honor the best practices in school-based design-build projects.

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RIVERLANDS AVIAN OBSERVATORY Perched alongside a constructed wetland, the observatory was designed for the Audubon Society and marks an important site of habitat restoration while keeping visitors from disrupting a sensitive ecosystem. The project includes a 300sqft building on 240 tons of fill, relocated parking and an accessible pathway within a redesigned landscape. Students designed, prototyped, fabricated and constructed the observatory while exploring issues of aesthetic identity, constructed ecologies, and material techniques for digital fabrication. Today, visitors can now come into close proximity with the 300 migratory avian species that call the site home. The design process began by reimagining the surrounding landscape, trail networks, vehicular access and vegetation to minimize the disturbance to sensitive species. The grade was raised to mitigate flooding and improve visual access while providing an accessible path within the visual shadow of the observatory that choreographs a sequence of views, educating visitors while crafting a memorable experience. The exterior is uniquely camouflaged; as birds are bothered by people, not the building, the patterning helps the observatory stand out to attract visitors while incorporating apertures that help to hide them within. The diagonal openings make bird watching easy for kids and adults alike, while inside, black perforated aluminum muffles sound and keeps the space dim and hidden from view. A polycarbonate roof, cedar frame and concrete foundation are of simple construction, while the cnc-milled exterior cladding is more intricate. In a major flood, these exterior panels are demountable and can be taken to higher ground for safety. Students: Nike Cao, Emily Chen, Wassef Dabboussi, Duan Duan, Can Fu, Jina Kim, Masha Konopleva,

ANDREW COLOPY

Washington University in St. Louis

KENNETH JOSEPH TRACY

American University of Sharjah

ACSA Design-Build Award

Chun Liu, Joe Lomas, Yiyang Min, David Orndorff, Yiming Pan, Glenn Park, Chris Quinlin, Yu Rong, James Struthers, Yilong Wang, Nash Waters, Hao Wu, Yao Xia, Yu Xin, Shuojin Yang, Haosheng Zhang, Han Zhu

Juror Comments: Riverlands Avian Observatory should be seen as a benchmark in design/build education. It is a thoughtfully conceived and skillfully executed project that results from a carefully considered pedagogical approach. The project balances technical research with poetic expression, form with function, and conception with craft. The teaching balances academic schedule with project schedule, student leadership with faculty guidance, technical competence with theoretical underpinning, and individual excellence with collaboration. 77


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HOMO LUDENS | HOMO FABER The Homo Ludens | Homo Faber project is a 4500sf privately owned custom playground that is open to the public. The design aspires to employ architectural space, form and material to render a stimulating play environment specific to the ergonomics and imaginations of the 2-5 year old user group. The project is conceived as a dialectic conversation between two social forces, the cultures of risk and security. They both facilitate freedom, exploration and growth but only in concert, a balance that is delicate and controversial. Security provides the necessary degree of safety and comfort to encourage children to thrive and is rendered through compliance with the safety standards established by the US Consumer Product Safety Commission. Risk is the exposure to uncertainty and is rendered through the creative negotiation of those standards to provide children the opportunity to challenge their physical and psychological comfort zones. Pedagogically, the project provided students an educational experience that is analogous to professional practice. Students learned to listen to stakeholders, earn their trust and thereby authority over the design; once empowered they also learned to be responsible and accountable for the stakeholders’ interests. Students engaged in pre-design research; expeditiously drawing upon the knowledge and experience of relevant experts. The act of making was considered a kinesthetic exploration of the aesthetic/technical dimensions of architecture but most importantly it facilitated a negotiation with reality, resulting in an architectural product subject to use and evaluation by the user group, early childhood educators and the general public. Students: Mohammad Alawadhi, Drew Allen, Dana Decuzzi, Paul De La Torre, Jesus Alan Figueroa,

CHRISTOPHER D. TRUMBLE University of Arizona

ACSA Design-Build Award

Estephanie Graham, Karl Hansen, Laura Huylebroeck, Tyler Jorgenson, David Koenst, Dan Kozak, Ashley Loberg, Kevin Moore, Lidia Orda Diaz, Sam Paz, Andre Rodrigue, Jim Sauer, Jeremy Shough, Brandon Swigart

Juror Comments: Practical experience has often remained the domain of the internship, however opportunities for students to “practice” within the framework of the academy allow for much greater control of curricular content and an environment where mistakes and teachable moments are embraced. Homo Ludens | Homo Faber rises as an example of a student-led collaborative environment that simultaneously holds the student architects accountable to standards of safety and professionalism and allows for the risks and rewards of exploration. This beautifully conceived and realized project is as much a testament to talent and commitment of the student team as it is to the strength and confidence of the faculty who guided and trusted them. 79


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AUDI-FAB DESIGN BUILD RESEARCH STUDIO Acoustics and fabrication processes were the dual-focus of this undergraduate architecture studio sequence that utilized full-scale prototyping as a means to develop innovative material systems for interior applications. Students conceived and prototyped alternatives in the fall semester and developed a site-specific intervention during the spring semester. The sequence started with modules that taught fabrication skills, introduced various processes employed by local building industry, and supported selfdirected research in architectural acoustics through interaction with acoustic engineers as consultants. Students developed architectural responses to the problem of noisy reverberant space, developing systems that maintain visual openness. Gaining intuition from direct experience with materials was a major goal of the course, so students began to prototype their design ideas early in the process. Iteration was key to the development of sophisticated fabrication systems. The “failure” of any prototype was at least as useful as a success because it exposed usable limits and pointed to possible transformations. It was transformative for students to understand and address construction tolerance within their designs. This had ramifications down to the fraction of millimeter when producing files to be cut on the laser. The design solutions from both semesters evidence a grasp of not only the need to deal with construction tolerance, but also the possibility to use such constraints as design catalysts.

Image Credits: 01, 03, 05, 06 – Juan Roldan. All others courtesy of the designers.

Because the prototyping semester foregrounded the students’ exposure to materials and fabrication, they were able to delve into the design build work with deeper understanding of possibilities as well as constraints, and the construction process was greatly streamlined. The experience of this and other architectural interventions in the school creates a discourse around fabrication, material choice, and spatial order. It allows for a didactic catalog of fabrication principles and processes that students can draw from, critique, and work to advance in future projects.

EMILY BAKER

American University of Sharjah

ACSA Design-Build Award

Students: Dareen Abdallah, Mariam Osama AbuEbeid, Saly Rakeen, Mays Albaik, Shadi El Ghoul, Ibtisam Talal Fawzi, Maria Kalaiji, Noshin Khan, Merehan Kika, Amel Al Aboodi, Fatima Alawadhi, Sultan AlQasimi, Maryam Hosny, Noor Jarrah, Fatma Abdulla Mhmood, Azin Paryabzadegan, Basel Birkdar, Ban M. Ameen, Vahid Farbod, Haia Mazin Machfij, Dana Sawalha, Varsha Vineeth

Juror Comments: A fundamental question in design/build pedagogy is the appropriate allowance of unrestrained exploration and its often-messy results, within a full-scale built work and its imperative for success. The Audi-Fab Design Build Research Studio stands out because of its clearly articulated strategy. The first semester focuses on small-group research and prototyping. The second semester focuses on developing an entirely new, studio-wide collaborative work, built on the foundation of successes and failures from the first semester. Both the built work and the pedagogical approach are elegant and well crafted. 81


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STOP TRAFFIC! MBCI PUBLIC TRANSIT SHELTERS Two bus stop shelters for the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians are the recent result of Collaborative Studio. The shelters were designed and built by 35 architecture students, 14 BCS students and 5 faculty members in 4 months. Participating in design activities and the preparation of schedules and estimates with equal interest, both student groups were asked to broaden their concept of a studio project and the typical roles of their respective disciplines. Complete in one semester, on time, and on budget, the bus shelters are a success by typical design-build standards.

HANS HERRMANN

Mississippi State University

EMILY M. MCGLOHN

Mississippi State University

TOM LEATHEM

Mississippi State University

ALEXIS GREGORY

Mississippi State University

LEE CARSON

Mississippi State University

ACSA Design-Build Award Honorable Mention

The Pearl River Stop was built in the most populous of the eight Choctaw communities connecting patrons to regional medical, educational and cultural amenities. The second shelter was built in Tucker, MS. It stands at the threshold of the Tucker Community Center and serves as a major transit node to the grade schools and local community college. Collaborative Studio is an interdisciplinary, design-build studio between all of the second year students and faculty in the School of Architecture and the Building Construction Science Program (BCS). Its goal is to create awareness of the relationships between architecture and construction professionals through knowledge development of materials, methods, and processes associated with the built environment and how they impact design and construction outcomes. Through a design-build project, students develop a working knowledge of the principle construction material families and their related construction methodologies while learning fundamental concepts of professional communication and collaboration. Students: Aaron Ellzey Anna Barr Ashton Aime Audrey Duchemin Blake Jierski (BCS) Bradford Trevino

Brandon Fairbanks Brent Gaude (BCS) C.J. Grish (BCS) Caleb Fearing Cecilia Lemus Celia Garcia Chad Chordray Conner Ansley Connor Goodson (BCS) Edward Holmes Evan Fuller (BCS) Garrett Yelverton Jackson Parker (BCS) Jared Robinson John Ford (BCS) John Mark Stumpe Josh Johnson Kapish Cheema Kirby Lockard Ky Reynolds (BCS) Kyle Alford (BCS) Lucas Posey Luke Marshall Michael Carraway (BCS) Nathan Thomas Rachel Griffin Rachel Patronas Rashidat Momoh Ria Bennett Robby Keifer (BCS) Ryan Fierro Sam Vick Samantha Goodwin Spencer Powell Thomas Hampton Tim Sullivan (BCS) Walt Carter Webb Emerson (BCS) Whitney White Will Sparks (BCS) Yerix Morel Zac Busman Zak White

Juror Comments: It is clear that the learning environment for this project was carefully crafted with acutely established positions about education and strategies to achieve the expected outcomes. The course has many of the makings of a mature design/build program: social and environmental consciousness, collaboration, student leadership, and technical competence. The potential of this program with two modestly scaled projects is that a relatively large group of students can touch every aspect of conception and realization. However, the challenge of the parallel project approach is to equally develop and focus each project and set of experiences. 83


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JAE

Journal of Architectural Education Best Design as Scholarship Article This award is selected as the JAE Best Scholarly Article from the all those submitted to the journal in the award year. The JAE has for more than 58 years represented the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture as the flagship publication of this important architectural organization.

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SUPER DÉCOR Much like the design of the environment itself, the design of interiors is a charge now assumed by many caretakers, an activity indifferent to fields or levels of professional expertise, providing an opportunity, if not free-for-all, for disciplinary commentary, prescribed inhabitation, and self-expression. Paradoxically, the increasing proximities between parallel and discrete design disciplines, professions, and hobbies has not weakened the architect’s position regarding the design of interiors but has rather raised the stakes. The interior still offers an immediacy and expediency often missing in architecture—interiors are faster, cheaper, and less subject to the legal constraints of building. More ambitiously, interiors have historically offered extraordinary opportunities for architects to undertake new kinds of disciplinary work, often with notable wit, glamor, and imagination. As the professional landscape of interior design changes around architecture, architects are liberated to re-imagine their interior approaches.

PENELOPE DEAN

University of Illinois at Chicago

JAE Best Design as Scholarship Article

This essay presents the results of a pedagogical experiment in a year-long graduate “research studio” at the School of Architecture, University of Illinois (UIC) in response to this untapped opportunity. The studio speculates that the design of the interior should not be understood as a late development of a design project, but rather a precondition co-opted for architectural ends. Surveying the last century of published interiors, the studio reverses the typical pedagogical arc of design education: students design from the inside out, rather than the outside in. This paper presents six exuberant proposals in abbreviated graphic form—continuous detail, habitable ceiling, modeled floor, high contrast, and soft code—that re-imagine the possibilities of an interior architecture, or what we enthusiastically, if provisionally, call Super Décor.

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JAE

Journal of Architectural Education Best Scholarship of Design Article

This award is selected as the JAE Design Best Article from the all those submitted to the journal in the award year. The JAE has for more than 58 years represented the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture as the flagship publication of this important architectural organization.

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RETHINKING THE LEGACY OF THE SIXTIES: Pliny Fisk’s Political Ecology

SARAH DEYONG

Texas A&M University

JAE Best Scholarship of Design Article

In 1998, alumni of Yale University organized the symposium, “Rethinking Designs of the 60s,” to discuss the legacy of architecture’s engagement with social issues. My essay reopens the question of this legacy, by focusing on the work of activist and eco-pioneer, Pliny Fisk. Fisk graduated from the GSFA at the University of Pennsylvania in 1971, and his early projects combined emerging theories from its diverse curriculum – advocacy planning, appropriate technologies and systems thinking – in ways that were not pragmatic only. His projects from the 1970s and 1980s were also strategies for leveraging social and environmental change that foregrounded the politically radical stakes of this endeavor.

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ACSA/AIA Topaz Medallion Chair: Wendy Ornelas, Kansas State; Michael Hoffman, Norwich University; Charlie Klecha, AIAS President; Sylvia Lavin, University of California, Los Angeles; Michael Speaks, Syracuse University

ACSA Distinguished Professor Chair: Mo Zell, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee; Ikhlas Sabouni, Prarie View A&M/DPACSA; Juan Miro, University of Texas at Austin/DPACSA

ACSA/AIAS New Faculty Teaching Chair: Obiekwe Okolo, AIAS Vice-President; Ryan Smith, University of Utah; Shannon Criss, University of Kansas; Danielle Mitchell, Pennsylvania State University

ACSA Collaborative Practice Chair: Ryan Smith, University of Utah; Gregory Luhan, University of Kentucky; Jennifer Siegal, University of Southern California

ACSA Creative Achievement Chair: Mo Zell, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee; Mark Gage, Yale University; Peter MacKeith, University of Arkansas

ACSA/AIA Housing Design Education Chair: Ryan Smith, University of Utah; Carlos Reimers, Catholic University of America; Carey Clouse, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Victor Mirontschuk, EDI International

ACSA Faculty Design Chair: Meejin Yoon, MIT; Mo Zell, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee; David Erdman, University of Hong Kong

Diversity Achievement Chair: Ryan Smith, University of Utah; John Cays, NJIT; Norman Millar, Woodbury University

Design-Build Chair: David Hinson, Auburn University; Mo Zell, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee; Keith Brian Zawistowski, Virginia Tech

Journal of Architectural Education 92

JAE Editorial Board & ACSA Board of Directors


JURY 93


2014-2015

ACSA PRESS WA S H I N G T O N , D C


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