110th Annual Meeting

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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’.

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.

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
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 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.

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.

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.

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 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.