111th Annual Meeting

This research looks into Michael Sorkin’s urban images not only as vehicles of his universal guidelines for urban designs, but more critically as localized and situated instruments for social and environmental justice that manifest a coincidental parallel between China’s indigenous cultural psyche and Sorkin’s urban ideals. Since 2010, more than half of the Michael Sorkin Studio’s projects are based in China, including new city planning, river basin planning, infrastructure management, and massive residential complex designs. Although most of them remain on paper, these urban images function as intermediaries between theory and reality in their capability of visually incorporating unique local conditions with broad social arguments. This research frames foreign urban design projects as a virtual contact zone,[1] where designers/theorists’ own background and ideals engage with the local socio-cultural context through hypothetical images that envision ideal conditions, and thus catalyze new urban solutions with both universality and situatedness. This study sees unbuilt proposal images beyond “failed” projects, and argues for the significance of these images as intermediaries between theory and reality in Sorkin’s genre for their capability of visually incorporating site-specific specificities. I first introduce Sorkin’s radically socialist, left-winged urban theories which claimed “the end(s) of urban design” and critiqued the existing urban spaces dominated by global capital and consumerism. I then discuss the “transitional” Chinese cities, both driven by global capital and indigenous socio-cultural forces, as a test field for Sorkin to experiment his urban ideals. Tracing clues of indigenous spatial forms that are adopted, transformed, and re-applied in Sorkin’s urban designs for China, I particularly investigate how traditional ways of life and self-emergent urban forms in China, including danwei (work-unit), hutong, and lilong, coincidentally run parallel to Sorkin’s urban ideals for locality, diversity, sustainability, and spatial justice. Investigating how Sorkin’s localized urban solutions virtually intervene with the ruthless, speedy urbanization process valorized by the party-state, this research uncovers and explicates the potential of coincidental affinities between foreign urban ideals and local cultural conventions, with Sorkin’s work in China as an inspirational case that achieves both local and universal applicability in global urban studies.  [1] Mary Louise Pratt used the term “contact zones” to describe those spaces where “cultures, meet, clash and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power. The term, however, has been used outside of its original spatial concept to describe connections between identity groups that are interacting outside a specific space. The term is used here to describe the virtual space of cultural exchange that manifests through urban image. See: Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Profession (1991): 33-40; Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (Routledge, 2007); Joseph Harris, “Negotiating the Contact Zone”, Journal of Basic Writing (1995): 27-42; Martin Radermacher, Devotional Fitness: An Analysis of Contemporary Christian Dieting and Fitness Programs. Vol. 2. (Springer, 2017), 207.

The most accepted narrative about modern architecture’s dreams of social transformation imagines them born out of the ideals of 19th-century social experiments and the boldness of early twentieth-century avant-garde. It then sees them propelled into global significance during the postwar to slowly fall into decadence until its collapse in the late 1970s with the emergence of postmodernism. The discipline that emerged from these ruins was forced into two distinct positions that denied architecture’s ability to be a transformative force in society. It could either detach itself from reality in search of “the inherent nature of the architectural object” (Peter Eisenman), giving up, as Tafuri put it, “every dream of social function, every utopian residue”. Or if it chose to engage with the real world—as suggested by figures like Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, or Rem Koolhaas—, it had to remain uncritically submissive, seizing the opportunities that opened within capitalist societies, but “deferring the judgment” over their social dysfunction.  These two opposed narratives share their skepticism against the transformative possibilities of architecture in its engagement with both the discursive and the physical space of the contemporary commons. In contrast, this paper proposes a more constructive framework. Instead of the linear histories of modernity defined, as Marshall Berman denounced, by “rigid polarities and flat totalizations”, it will argue that the social changes initiated with architecture have often materialized through discrete and ambiguous moments of disruption. Moments in which reality upsets architecture’s prevailing values by introducing new characters, images and languages. Subject groups that already exist in society but are deemed unworthy of attention within architecture’s mainstream, emerge into visibility turning esthetic practices into political ones, in what Jacques Rancière calls the re-distribution of the sensible. The main effect of such disruptions is the expansion of who is accepted as architecture’s subject, and what is sayable as architectural discourse. Or, in other words, the alteration of the commons as a space of shared knowledge and experience.  To showcase this dynamic, I will compare three Twentieth-century European social housing projects, in which sociopolitical disruption fueled the revelation of new subjects and themes for architecture. First, the 1920s Red Vienna residential experiments, in which socialism dislocated the meaning of classicism. The monuments of the ruling powers became the everyday environments for the working classes who emerged as a new subject for architecture. Second is Rome’s 1950s Quartiere Tiburtino, built in response to the massive postwar rural migration in Italy. The cultural identity of migrants, as new subjects for modern architecture, prompted a furiously antimodern neo-vernacular, reaching far beyond regular notions of class. And, finally, Ralph Erskine’s Byker Wall in Newcastle, built during the 1970s and 80s, whose convoluted participatory processes witnessed the UK’s deindustrialization and Margaret Thatcher’s erosion of working-class culture. In Byker, the existing community and its delicate network of friendships and family ties emerged as architecture’s main subject, expanding and complicating the esthetic and political possibilities of the modern commons.

The lack of affordable housing in the US has reach a tipping point, contributing to homelessness (currently approximated at 580,000), cost-burdened renters (spending more than 30% of income on rent), and the impossibility to buy a home for nearly 2/3 of the population. At the mercy of neoliberal market values, escaping the basic premise of profit-based home ownership seems increasingly impossible. This essay, therefore, investigates two projects that in very different contexts rethought housing as a common good by allying with unions to question the dominant narratives around heteronormative family structure, domestic work, financial models, and involved shareholders. Ludwig Hilberseimer’s 1923 project of the Wohnstadt (residential city), conceived of an architecture that encompassed entire urban blocks and imagined a greater role for the collective as he called on labor unions to invest in housing with the aim to overcome the individualization of parcels. Almost forty years later, Bertrand Goldberg’s Marina City in Chicago is another instance where a union was instrumental for the project as their liaison with the architect made the project possible. What followed was a partnership between architecture and labor organization that goes far beyond spatial and programmatic ambitions. Both projects point at a model in which a union’s knowledge in collective bargaining became instrumental in the creation of housing through an alliance with architecture. Here, the joint efforts and shared responsibilities by architecture and labor unions offer an instructive model for new types of organized, collective involvements in the architecture of housing during a time of ballooning housing costs, stagnant wages, and shortages in affordable housing.

Architecture has made the socially normative body the primary audience for cities with a growingly diverse population. With this population evolving into one with an expansive idea of gender, the needs of our cities are beginning to challenge the historically rigid functions of space and spatial performance. Entering Through the Closet is a design manifesto exploring the future of trans-embodiment that extends beyond the body of the trans-gendered or the discourse of gender and gender non-conformists, and into that of architecture. Due to the constraints of economics and accessibility, the affordability of space becomes like that of the body given to one at birth, an assignment. Both the form of the domestic home and the form of the body hold identities that apply various restrictions and privileges to the self, occupying. The trans approach to the body is one challenging these restrictions through a deconstruction of the physical self. Entering Through the Closet identifies an architectural potential, methodology, and way of thought that requires one to deconstruct the historic identity of the old to provide habitability for the new, reconstructing architecture and architectural thought as we do ourselves.  Theorists and architects from Vitruvius to Le Corbusier have utilized the body and gender expression as a methodology to inspire “progressive” architectural designs. Joel Sanders, an architectural theorist, notes this integration of identity into work as a “recruit of masculinity to justify practice.” This attempt to coalesce qualities of building aesthetic and purpose to gender aesthetic and purpose has woven the discourse of gender, race, class, and architecture together from the Enlightenment to the present with little to no excavation or analysis. Irene Cheng, Charles L. David II, and Mabel O. Wilson note the effects of historic narrativization of human difference in their book Race and Modern Architecture and how these concepts establish hierarchies of power and dominations within cultures. “European colonial expansion and the subsequent development of racial slavery, mercantilism, and industrial capitalism depended indispensably on the creation of ideologies of human difference and inequalities.” The classification of human subjects into modern/non-modern, civilized/primitive, white/non-white, queer/straight and cis/nonbinary/trans shape the very definitions of what it means to be modern in today’s society. With architecture being the constructed reflection of this means each of these categories are a necessary part of its assemblage.  Architecture does not exist without these backgrounds just as the human body cannot be stripped of its race, background, or gender. Much like art itself, our buildings are a mirror of ourselves; a reflection of our collective community and values.   Trans-embodiment is not a one-size-fits-all, it cannot be mass-produced, nor can it be maintained over time. There is no one way to inhabit a body, there is no one way to perform gender, and there is no one way to occupy space. We are creatures of change and it is within our nature to adapt the forms that exist around us to fit our evolving, cultural needs whether that be skin or built construction.

If we construct a material circle, measure its radius and circumference, and see if the ratio of these two lengths is equal to π , what shall we have done? We shall have made an experiment on the properties of the matter with which we constructed this round thing, and of that which the measure used was made. (Henri Poincaré, Science and Hypothesis, 1902) The circle is perhaps one of the most iconic geometric figures in the history of drawing. Its prominent position in Euclid’s Elements ensured its appearance in key treatise on drawing and geometry (Euclid 2010) And yet the circle, like all geometry, cannot be realized in material form.  We can describe it as, Poincaré points out, by the ratio of its radius and its circumference. We can also make a rough material approximation, a “round thing”, with a compass, a string, a computer or a numerically controlled cutting device. Regardless of the relative precision or sophistication of a particular device of fabrication, a true circle cannot be fabricated. Instead, we are left with “round things” that have the appearance of circles but are in fact not (Poincaré 1913). The work contained in this submission is produced with a custom  program written in Python for the software environment of Processing.py.  The program produces two-dimensional animations of a set of approximate spheres, round things, rotating around each other.  Each hatched object in the animation is a view of a round thing generated by the motion of approximate spheres.  There are two kinds of views within the animations. The first is an orthographic view, in which the round thing is described perpendicular to the reference plane (the screen) and is represented as a continuous polyline. The second set of views are oblique. They are constructed by displacing the two-dimensional points of the round things along an axis. The oblique views are composed of polygons filled with hatches ranging between black and blue. Additional drawings rotate out of the oblique views.  These drawings unroll each layer of the round things along the circumference of the largest of the rotating spheres. They do not describe the round thing through a view and provide no measurable information. Every round thing within the animation is constantly approximating another more precise geometry that can never described in material form. The animations and images are precise miscalculations of ideal geometries. There are no spheres or circles, only round things rendered in the material of which “the measure was made”—pixels.

Sidney K. Robinson’s 1988 essay, The Picturesque: Sinister Dishevelment, critically reframes the English Picturesque through the social and political implications of compositional strategies and mechanisms used for landscape design. Most critically, Robinson identifies sinister qualities of the Picturesque in the hidden power, or power in reserve, that gentlemanly landscape designers used to create scenes in the landscape that only they could discern as having been either labored upon or the result of natural decay. Today some post-digital practices have continued the digital project in a picturesque mode similar to these historic landscape designers. These designers and practices obscure authorial labor in the works they produce with simulations of disorder or material decay. Labor that was evident and abundant in designs of earlier digital work is rendered ambiguous. Viewers are left unsure if the computer simulated these scenes using computational physics or if a person has directly authored the digital model or image. Computational power is intentionally rendered ambiguous. For these practices, digital expertise and labor have continued, but it is not clear where the computer’s agency stops and starts in the design process. The labor required to produce this sort of work appears indiscernible to all but the expert viewer when, in fact, the practices spared no effort in creating the appearance of a casual lack of labor. Only those knowledgeable of the post-digital techniques used to generate this work can discern where labor has been applied, creating a novel form of sinister dishevelment. Today’s post-digital picturesque does not protect an aristocratic elite as those of the 18th century did with parlor talk but continues the digital project with intentionally limited discourse while sidestepping its excess. The reuse of Sidney Robinson’s essay and a comparison to alternative types of post-digital practices provides a lens to understand these post-digital picturesque practices and the implications of concealing the indexes of labor.

Proyecto Volcadero is a participatory design-build binational collaboration that aimed to develop agency in an underserved community in Venezuela through EDIT methodology (Zingoni, 2019), a process that proposes four stages to develop agency through design: the first stage proposes to involve the local community (engage), to then design from the voices of the first phase (design), generating the possibility of change (ignite), to transform the community involved (transform). This process aimed to amplify the voices of the Volcadero community, and learn by building together. The town of Volcadero is a fishing community located 334.2km west of Caracas with a deep historical heritage and tradition, but anyone who would visit the place would not be aware that such identity exists. Despite its strategic location and tourist port, Volcadero is perceived by its surrounding communities as unsafe, dirty and disconnected. The spike in gasoil prices has left the fishermen community unemployed and unable to cover the costs to sail at sea, a problem that extends throughout Venezuela’s population, where more than 75% of its residents live under poverty levels, and as a result, the sense of belonging, hope, and agency to improve ones’ lives is non-existent. Inspired by the data collected over five months, the architectural proposal responds to the cultural values of the intertwining form of the indigenous community -the Kariñas, the identity of the fisherman community, and the movement of women’s skirts during the traditional dances that fill their streets. These metaphors take shape through a system of three pavilions located on a plot of 1900 sq. ft. These pavilions are based on the movement of each individual porticoes which together compose a rhythm that is reflected in the shadow generated by the pavilions. Proyecto Volcadero resulted in an urban intervention and social transformation.

As we emerge from what we hope to be the worst of COVID-19, several “College Towns” are opening a larger conversation about what a “Just” or “Anti-Racist City” might look like and how we might get there. How do we intervene in the work of a renowned architect culpable in the erasure of a socially and economically integrated Black neighborhood? How do we help mend the marginalized and debilitated community that became their home? These were just some of the questions that were wrestled with in this cap-stone undergraduate architecture studio. Reparations are one crucial means of acknowledging the irreparable harm done to BIPOC populations since the colonization of this country, but are they enough? By focusing on the Urban Renewal programs of the 50’s and 60’s, these programs offer an opportunity to examine our role in blindly perpetuating the racist policies and discriminatory real estate and lending practices responsible for our current landscape of inequity. Without a clearer accounting for the lasting impacts of this difficult history, stark disparities in outcomes will persist. This legacy prompted Providence Mayor Jorge Elorza to commit to a Truth Telling and Reconciliation process in July of 2020 that recently led to the establishment of a Reparations Commission[1]. This studio examined two sites of past trauma and used design as a tool to both reveal and heal these physical and social scars. Students were able to engage with a wide range of historical and video narratives from the truth telling and reconciliation process and had regular engagement with leaders of this process and members of the affordable housing community with deep knowledge of the impacted communities[2]. Our two sites represent related but starkly different conditions. Lippitt Hill was an early Renewal project that led to the complete erasure of a vibrant and integrated Black (African American and Cape Verdean) community; and its replacement with University Heights, an insular middle-class housing complex and shopping mall designed by Victor Gruen. This project alone displaced 499 Black families and 42 Black owned businesses[3]. Some were displaced into crowded quarters bordering this verdant super-block. Most moved, with refugees from other Urban Renewal projects, to our second site in South Providence. This site was then subject to a series of equally violent intrusions that further marginalized and eroded the fabric of this community of last resort. This embattled community required buttressing from the ongoing encroachments from the Rhode Island Hospital and the environmental impacts from I-95 that cuts the community off from the waterfront. By examining this wide array of social and spatial injustices, we were able to expose students to the various ways that BIPOC communities continue to be prevented from participating in the wealth and community building opportunities that are available to white families and explore various urban strategies of repair and community centered renewal. This allowed us to use design to build empathy and empower both the students and community members to envision a more just, equitable and anti-racist Providence.

Until the lion tells his story, the tale of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. African proverb I am beneficiary of both educational privilege and diversity. This sometimes allows me to recognize inequity and injustice, sometimes becoming victim, but emerging stronger. My lifework often addresses this paradox. Recent iterations (2021-2022) include: 1. a studio for a mosque design in the center of Firenze, accommodating a multi-ethnic/multinational community currently housed in a garage; 2. the ‘critical renovation’ of an Advanced Urban Issues course. I also present foundation work which support these. I believe that a multiplicity of stories promotes responsible/inventive placemaking and expands understanding. When we fail to engender a variety of perspectives in architectural education and design practices, we operate with voices muted. Voices for justice, equity and diversity resound in my teaching and scholarship, articulating my pedagogical stance and methodology. In class I use Socratic method, asking questions to ‘draw out’ perspectives. In research, I often silently observe. Altering an angle of vision slightly can add depth and dimension to our understanding. I often compare my ‘Canadian mosaic’ birthright with the ‘American melting pot’. My viewpoint is also affected by the closure of our ‘beloved’ School of Architecture at an HBCU where I taught for many years. This was tragic for faculty, students, families and communities. Yet, questions which drove my PhD research were initiated there; my dissertation illustrates the potential for architecture to empower people in places which have been marginalized and disenfranchised. Through drawing out stories, whether in rural Louisiana or urban Firenze we can trace threads of injustice but also celebrate the self-empowerment of communities thriving through invention and perseverance. My work is incomplete. However, as students and world citizens exercise the currency of storytelling and its potential for empowerment, we continue to build diversity.

Problems have always existed in our educational system, but many issues have intensified due to the pandemic. One of the most substantial changes we have seen is the mental impact on the children, particularly those in high school. Mental Health cases, including depression and anxiety, have tripled in numbers due to the pandemic. The spaces these students spend their time has a great impact on their mental well-being. Our schools need to be designed to create places for the students to create communities, similar to marching bands or sports groups. Giving students a sense of belonging and making them feel proud of their work helps build their self-esteem, relieving some of these mental health issues. The pedagogies taught in the school system also have a great impact on a students’ learning. It is known that every child learns a different way, yet most systems continue to teach by the 3 R’s, reading, writing, and arithmetic, having students memorize facts and take tests to prove they’ve understood the lessons. As our culture changes, these systems are not meeting the needs of the students. Most job skills they need to know are not learned in a classroom. Tony Wagner, in The Global Achievement Gap, lists 7 skills students need to survive in today’s work world. The National Education Association for the partnership of 21st century skills is pushing a new movement, the 4 C’s, envisioning that students understand the content, but also master critical thinking, collaboration, communication and express their creativity to respond better to our changing world. My thesis is redesigning these environments to create classrooms, schools and a campus that focuses on the complete well-being of the student. I’m designing spaces that promote mental health, provide safety, inclusivity and give them a community space to feel a sense of belonging which allows them to learn in ways they may learn best and prepare them to become creative critical thinkers that we need in society today. The three initial focus areas I am striving to create include homeroom pods, or academic areas that unite several different departments into a single area, to utilize their skills and collaborate to create a common project or goal. These areas include hang out spaces that allow students to feel a better sense of belonging, giving them places to relax or work with a group. The third area includes outdoor spaces. We discovered one of the most utilized spaces this last year was outdoors. Biophilic Design and nature have been proven to increase one’s mental health, so creating more ways for students to do their learning outdoors does more than just enhance their learning experience.By creating new school architecture that focuses on the students mental health, and gives them more opportunities to learn tasks needed in today’s workforce, we can create schools that will provide for the student’s needs both now and in the future.

This paper examines how the intersection of real-time data and material assemblies provides novel opportunities to understand our built environment as a socially and ecologically constructed milieu. By integrating the Internet of Things (IoT) with brick-and-mortar buildings, we can create dynamic interfaces that leverage our material surroundings to contextualize a range of unseen information, such as where scholarship is being conducted, from which direction the wind blows, and what community members are posting. In framing buildings as not separate entities from growing online networks but inextricably connected to them, this investigation proposes a design methodology that blends computational design with construction methods to create interfaces that recursively integrate real-time information with the built environment, adding digital information as another material alongside concrete and wood in an expanding architectural palette. By analyzing three design projects, this paper documents design methods that synthesize real-time data with material assemblies to provide an expanded reading of our built environment. The first is a gallery installation that locates live Wikipedia updates through an arrangement of fabric, light, and sound. The second is a digitally fabricated tea house that integrates temperature, humidity, and airflow data in the design of an interactive facade. The third is a public art project that connects one local ethnic enclave with others across the globe through the display of social media imagery in real-time. Through their interactivity and materiality, these projects seek to connect users more deeply with their surroundings, and in doing so, encourage an attitude of action, engagement, and empathy within our built environment.

Increasingly, artificial intelligence surrounds us and mediates our experiences. Machine learning, a subset of AI, relies on complex sets of algorithms to manage vast amounts of data often oriented toward optimization and efficiency: superimposing new systems onto our digital and built environments that affect our patterns of life. Often unseen and blackboxed, the processes of machine learning when applied to image-making frequently produce uncanny visuals that are familiar but are rendered with distorted effects. These disruptions offer a glimpse into the patterns of machine learning and an opportunity for intervention. In one sense the errors that occur are merely awkward and seemingly harmless–classifying and producing images in ways that are simultaneously precise and wrong. Yet, these errors bear relationships with malignant realities of the world. Because machines learn from the world around it, it is not surprising that these systems are drawn into AI’s machinations and outputs that are inherently biased, sometimes in nefarious ways. When AI behaves badly, it both reveals existing systems of bias while also disclosing the pre-existing and very real protocols. As opposed to focusing on the potential of machine learning as a tool for optimization, this paper argues for slowing down our attention; instead focusing on the seeming errors of machine-generated “fakes” as sites of investigation. These moments of slippage reveal the means by which machine learning algorithms operate while simultaneously causing us to look at routine objects in a new light (for example, machine-generated images of faces, cats, shoes, etc.), thereby revealing a substrate of codes that define our cultural practices and built environment. By drawing these traces into the foreground we might understand better both the systems we take for granted and the behaviors of the machine.  As opposed to a lingering techno-positivist position on the digital, the paper will critically approach computation as a medium with the capacity to affect, manage, and disrupt. Here examples of architectural applications of machine learning will be used to agitate and apply pressure to reflect upon the stability of our defined disciplinary conventions. This paper will describe moments of friction where our disciplinary conventions come into contact with external systems of AI technology: how they share similarities in how information is generated and where they fundamentally differ. This paper proposes to fold these tendencies back into the way we think about making architecture; back into our processes and pedagogies to develop a reciprocal and discursive relationship with technology. By leaving space to foster attention, the paper’s larger mission is to develop skills that allow us to see the world anew and to become aware of the coded ways in which both technologies and the physical stuff of the world are implicated and to open up new frames for rebuilding our existing systems, practices, and conventions. The paper will feature an analysis of the similarities and differences of architectural design methods and AI protocols drawn out through a series of projects by the author and will include work from studios the author has led.

HoloWall is a wall assembly that integrates mixed reality (MR) protocols with nonuniformly sized lumber to develop a customized hollow-core cross-laminated timber (HCCLT). Referencing traditional windbreak shelters in agricultural landscapes, the HoloWall is a repository of cultural traces for the emblematic and utilitarian windbreak walls that protect livestock and buildings. Constructed from locally sourced salvaged wood, the prototype sat loosely between trees in the Arts Quad at Cornell University to provide shelter from the prevailing wind across the valley. This project presents the development of an augmented reality (AR) and mixed reality(MR) workflow to guide the material processing and the fabrication using irregularly sized lumber to construct HCCLT wall assembly. The prototype develops a material language of lamination that peels away in calibrated gradients to generate structural and visual porosity. The 1:1 scale prototype is intended to provide outdoor seating space where users can be sheltered from the wind and interact with surrounding context through visual openings. The custom MR framework entails the following process: 1) MR tool was utilized to process nonuniform wood boards with specific holographic guidance; 2) design parameters were used to customize the structural and visual porosity of hollow-core cross-laminated timber (HCCLT) panels; 3) MR- and augmented reality (AR)–aided fabrication and installation process. This MR-informed process facilitates the reuse of discarded wood wastes for the customized HCCLT assembly and provides an intuitive workflow for expert and nonexpert users. In conjunction to MR tools, computational processes such as structural and CFD analysis are introduced to reduce the material usage and generate a series of customized hollow voids. These tools optimize the organization of member placement within the wall assembly, resulting in the use of 50% non-uniform recycled wood members. Each element can be measured, cut to scale, and assembled with holographic guides within a MR environment. The significance of the project lies in its resourceful development of material experimentations with mixed reality technology to make mass customization an accessible goal with local skilled and unskilled labor in a rural-urban context.

As the landscapes of domestic life, remote work, healthcare, and other social norms shift, how does architecture respond? Through architectural ethnography and augmented reality, a group of 13 thesis students at Virginia Tech uncovered opportunities for reenvisioning everyday architecture from the perspective of the inhabitants. As an alternative to the tradition of independently advised thesis year, our B.Arch program in 2021/22 introduced Thesis Concentration Areas, a cohort of students who broadly shared interest in a faculty’s research, in which each student would identify and develop their own thesis. Our group began with a focus on relations between the built environment and human health, and applied design research methods I had used in transdisciplinary healthcare design projects, including ethnography, full-scale mockups, and augmented reality. During the fall semester, the students focused on representation and mapping of spatial conditions through observation of everyday spaces. We expanded on the traditions of ethnographic drawings by architects such as Kon Wajiro and Atelier Bow Wow and incorporated new methodologies and began to interrogate the colonial entanglement in anthropological ethnography. The students made drawings to visualize a complex array of interactions between people, technology, built environment, and information by augmenting orthographic drawings with 3D scans and animations as means to capture actions and spatial relations that our eyes might miss, and to challenge the observer’s biases. In late Fall, each student identified their own site and program, which included housing, schools, clinics, and infrastructures, to further investigate the thesis that emerged from their studies. In early Spring, the group held an exhibit in Virginia Tech’s Cube, Blackbox theater designed for augmented environment experimentations, to experiment with projection mapping on physical models and video projection on cyclorama These immersive environments, combined with ethnography, facilitated imagination of what is possible;or new realities; in everyday architecture.

Recent advances in Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) hold considerable promise in architecture, especially in the early, creative stages of design. However, while GANs are capable of producing infinite numbers of new designs based on a given dataset, the architectural relevance and meaningfulness of the results have been questionable. This paper presents an experimental research method to examine how human and artificial intelligences can inform each other to generate new designs that are culturally and architecturally meaningful. The paper contributes to our understanding of GANs in architecture by describing the nuances of different GAN models (SAGAN vs DCGAN) for the generation of new designs, and the use of Natural Language Processing (NLP) for the conceptual analysis of results.

As designers and educators, we work in a space of profound tension: between the world that “is” and the world we want. This panel bridges the work of three educator-practitioners who grapple with this tension through their research and teaching. Cleckley will present his work at University of Virginia, which centers empathy and layered site histories. Roberts brings experience from Rhode Island School of Design, where he works through interdisciplinary approaches across key sites of memory: museums, maps, monuments, and archives. Diamond will share her work around racial capitalist frame in urban history/theory and field-based historical methods.

Concrete has long been the material of choice for energy efficiency and disaster resilience. Concrete is the most used human-made material on the planet with 14 billion cubic meters produced each year for use in everything from roads to bridges, tunnels to homes, and hydropower installations to flood defenses. Concrete is an essential element of construction; with no other material equaling its resilience, strength and wide availability, yet it is responsible for 8% of global carbon dioxide emissions. Communities are beginning to collectively commit toward achieving a decarbonization of the infrastructure in the their communities. The session will discuss and analyze some the strategies/tactics and best practices successfully used to help communities decarbonize their infrastructure.

Would you like to see behind the scenes of structural steel fabrication? Ben Hur Construction and Steel Worx, LLC, now merged with Stupp Bros, Inc., is offering a tour of their facility where they fabricate steel framing for large building and bridge projects, including the new Pedestrian Link Bridge at Washington University. The company dates from 1909 and is one of the original steel producers in the US. At the 350,000 SF facility, you will see how structural steel is cut to length, welded, and prepared for connections and finishing before it is shipped to the construction site. There is equipment that descales steel for use as architecturally exposed structural steel in buildings, as well as state-of-the-art CNC equipment, including robotic plasma cutting technology that fabricates a wide variety of structural sections. You will see how Ben Hur barcodes and tracks each steel piece as it moves through the shop to provide seamless tracking of all material. Sponsored by the American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC).

The implementation of complex perspective systems in the room decorations of the Ancient Roman villas, located in Naples around 80 B.C. – A.D. 200, illustrates how art historiography can inform a fundamental framework in new media. 360-degree stereovision-friendly application of spatial perspectives in the ancient rooms mediates a relationship between physical and virtual by appealing to the notion of sensorimotor contingency. The law-like relationship between actions that are in adaption with ever-changing sensory inputs lands into realization by utilizing suspension of disbelief. This biological phenomenon has been at the locus of interdisciplinary inquiry, encompassing both archaeological findings in Italy and the immersive technologies of virtual reality (VR). Media theorist Oliver Grau showcases a famous example of illusionary spaces in classical antiquity. He examines the triclinium of the Villa of the Mysteries, Pompeii where the viewer is immersed in realistic figures in narration. This paper aims to shift the attention from figuration to pure illusionistic representations of cityscapes in atrium 5, cubiculum 11, triclinium 14, and oecus 23 of the Villa A at Oplontis. Coined by the German archeologist, August Mau, the Second Style wall paintings mark an application of the trompe-l’oeil effect, which introduces the suspension of disbelief into the physical environment. Convergent and divergent grid systems with various points of recession in the rooms of Villa A, Oplontis approximate a level of immersion; head-mounted display (HMD) or CAVE system can now afford in the 21st century.

On May 12, 2022, in Turin, Italy, the Serbian architect and vocalist Konstrakta (Ana Djuric) performed her song “In Corpore Sano” (A Healthy Body) at the second semifinal of the Eurovision Song contest. The performance, hailed by some as “too clever” for Eurovision”, questioned the relation of mental to physical health of “the artist”, and showed Konstrakta obsessively washing her hands while rifling through names of organs and ailments which affect physical beauty. “A sick mind in a healthy body/A sad soul in a healthy body/A desperate mind in a healthy body/A frightened mind in a healthy body/So what do we do now?” ‘In Corpore Sano’ has drawn comparison to the works of fellow Serbian performance artist Marina Abramovic’s 1975 performance piece ‘Art Must Be Beautiful, Artist Must Be Beautiful’. In this work, Abramovic brushes her hair with increasing aggression while repeating the phrase “Art must be beautiful, artist must be beautiful”, wincing in pain as she does so, rendering a banal act at the intersection of beauty and health – exceedingly difficult to watch. Although there are overt similarities between Djuric and Abramovic, this paper posits that deeper influences on Konstrakta’s practice come from the female architectural avant-garde of the post-war Yugoslav period. More to the point, the female architects of the period, almost all with families and children at the time, would commonly, professionally co-opt an image of the avant-garde artist, for their practice (similarly Konstrakta is the superintendent of her building and engages in a small architectural practice with her husband). The explicit domesticity of their private lives was publicly suppressed in favor of a black-clad persona whose work and communication veered away from the everyday and relatable, choosing to focusing on the conceptual. Examples of these post-war Yugoslav female architects who code-switched throughout their careers are: Olga Milićević Nikolić, the inexhaustible architectural critic, urbanist, landscape architect and designer of much of the landscape of New Belgrade; Atelier Lik, the rockstar supergirl architectural practice made up of  four female architects (Sofija Nenadović, Vesna Matičević, Nadežda Filipon Trbojević and Dušanka Menegelo Aćimović) who in their time designed 11 airports including that of the capital, Belgrade; and Svetlana Kana Radević, whose life spanned three continents, but whose prolific oeuvre was unapologetically Montenegrin. Her 1980 movie “Life Unites Man” attempts to critically position her practice and explain the importance, influence and meaning of architecture to the general public. It is important to note the lack of a shared practice with men or husbands, as was (and still is) often the case. Likewise, many of these architects’ archives are lost to history and can only be reconstructed through narrative, on-the -ground research and analysis of Serbo-Croatian sources written at the time. This paper will contrast their work and public nature of their practice to that of how they lived their lives privately Lastly, the concept “In the Commons” for these women is their avant-garde image set as a veneer over their complex domestic life. This practice continues for female architects today.

This paper traces a lineage of device-as-architecture through the mediatization of Julia Child’s kitchens. A historical survey of the changes to her kitchen and its relationship to interior design during the latter half of the 20th century suggest a reading of interior architecture not as a means to house new technology but rather as composed by technology and devices. Counter to Ryener Banham’s projection of a future where interior technologies give shape to an architectural exterior, Child’s kitchen reflects a growing trend in the second half of the 20th century in which tool-based clutter and the interior’s autonomy from the exterior, best characterized by the storage-accumulation aesthetics of lofts and garages, dominated. Rather than necessarily limiting the role of the architect to exterior form, the elevation of gadgets, gizmos, and devices to the status of architecture opened up the possibility for a functional user-driven design agency.  Analysis of the kitchen backdrops that served as sets for her various cooking shows as well as the cataloging and installation of her kitchen in the Smithsonian Museum of American History reveal an evolution of architectural interiors that shifted with her own identity and paralleled shifting domestic aesthetics away from minimalism, modernism, and post-World War II home automation. This examination of Julia Child’s kitchens frame a narrative of domestic design beginning in the 1960s when tools and technology were increasingly seen as the backbone of a new ecological or environmental society. Julia Child’s display of functional clutter took part in popularizing a new craft aesthetic where tools were prominently displayed and often collectively used. The images of her kitchen, spanning four decades, provide a context for changing cultural and architectural discourse in relation to the aesthetics of function, devices, media, and attitudes toward preservation.

My paper provides a theoretically situated framing of the global deployment of digital design tools vis-à-vis globalization of architectural productions in the context of rapidly transforming urban India in the 21st century. Following the economic liberalization of 1991, globalized architectural typologies such as shopping malls, residential enclaves, luxury hotels, and Information Technology (IT) hubs mushroomed throughout India’s urban spaces, changing its material and visual fabric. The digital revolution played a crucial role in this transformation, both through the systemic processes of global informatization and through the relatively less interrogated paradigmatic shift within architectural production techniques from analog to digital modalities. In the last two decades, emerging scholarship on Global South’s particular urbanities focused on the symptoms of these co-proliferating socio-spatial transformations, one emerging from the studies on the effects of neoliberalism and the second on informatization. Reacting to the shifting terrains of the  architectural industry, design scholarship focused on the exigencies of architects acquiring advanced digital skill sets to meet market demands of efficiency, aptly captured as “innovate or perish.” Historians and urban scholars have extensively deliberated on the chronologies of India’s evolving IT landscape from the 1950s to the turn of the millennium and the digitization of urban governance and citizenship in the last decade. However, little theoretical deliberation exists to date on what software does to design in a postcolonial setting. Addressing this gap, I problematize the supposedly neutral front of digital design packages and argue that they reproduce the geo-architectural surroundings of their origins and aid in advancing globalized norms and techniques that homogenize architectural modus operandi. In lieu of focussing on the substantive dimensionalities of urban India’s architectural transformations with its specificities, I refer to ‘urban India’ as a site of a critical inquiry. To this end, I weave together theoretical concepts of global mnemotechnical systems and mimicry from the works of Bernard Stiegler and Homi Bhabha that can help explicate the encounter of the global deployment of architectural software as the industry standard in the arena of Global South’s architectural productions.

If architecture is a way of knowing the world—not just a profession or a discipline—then how do we know what we know of the world of architecture? Answering “through experience” is trivial, getting us no closer to architecture specifically. This essay will propose that it is neither experience, tectonics nor even form that grants access to architectural knowledge, but instead control. Ever since Deleuze christened our current condition a society of control, ominous inklings of cybernetics, feedback loops and the biopolitical have arisen like so many ghost sightings within architectural history and theory. By describing the implications of our present-day, Deleuzian logic as an architecture of the control room, new folds in architecture theory are discernible. Yet control rooms need neither be rooms (enclosed), nor be dominated by dials, screens or surveillance. They are not so much a space, or a place, but instead the potential of both—in all their metaphoric complexity and dialogical potentials—to be networked, and for that network to be displayed, through architecture. Dispensing with formal prototypes (Laugier’s primitive hut or de Quincy’s tent and cave) and functional ones (the dwelling, the temple or, to be Kantian, the folly), the control room instead trumps them all, by encompassing them all together. For what a control room actually controls is precisely the means by which architecture displays—and architecture displays culture, while all the while displaying architecture displaying culture. Historically, the word display has had three meanings: to arrange (organize, like an exhibition); to show or reveal (render no longer hidden, like a symptom); and to stage (simulate, like an enactment). The formal and functional prototypes just mentioned clearly do many of these things, yet they do not always do them all at once. The control room does, by making visible a tacit organization that simultaneously both is and isn’t just actual, and also is and isn’t just ideal. Just as Semper proposed that the essence of architecture was the knot (joint) yet textiles were architecture’s primordial material condition, because they encapsulated architecture as mask, the control room fuses formal and spatial qualities of architecture with socio-cultural values, within the realm of knowledge and how its reflections and shadows appear in the world around us, as the camera obscura once did. Deleuze’s theory of a control society points to the recent dematerialization and atomization of disciplinary institutions—the home, the school, the prison, the factory, etc. In a similar manner, the control room links its inside to a world beyond, a network of connections simultaneously social and virtual (both moral and digital). As both sacred and secular spaces originally had dual functions, providing both usable locales for rituals and giving their enactment a proper (meaningful) setting, they hence acted as control rooms. Nowadays, our culture of screens reinterprets lush interior spaces replete with multiple patterned textiles; yet unlike the NASA Mercury Control Room at Cape Canaveral, today’s everyday spaces, and places, containing multiple screens, at multiple sizes, displaying constantly changing images, control us.

Architecture’s most valuable representational tool, the orthographic projection, is one that is both extraordinarily simple and exceptionally complex. In the case of complex geometric designs, taking numerous sections through a formed object has proven to be a continually compelling design technique (Iwamoto, 10). This multidisciplinary project, completed by a team of architects and engineers was heavily dependent on using orthographic architectural projections in the process of analyzing and interpreting data from experiments done on a Fluid Dynamics phenomenon: Vortex-Induced Vibration (VIV). VIV is widely observed in the world that surrounds us and manifests itself in both extremely large (offshore structures) and infinitely small (laboratory size experiments) settings (Modarres-Sadeghi, 2022). In VIV, a cylinder placed in fluid flow oscillates due to the shedding vortices in its wake. Different patterns can be observed in the wake of a cylinder undergoing VIV. In the lab, these wakes are tracked using hydrogen bubble visualizations and are quantified using Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV). Our team studied this phenomenon by exploring notions of form, time, and space in our visualization and data analysis process. By employing orthographic projections and translating data (primarily in form of cartesian coordinates of the bubbles) into two-dimensional scapes, we were able to overlay, separate, and spatialize our interpretations of the data into different forms. Aware of our limitations for processing considerable number of data, we set forth to “extrapolate, generalize, infer or induct” the data sets to make sense of them (Carpo, 35).  The breadth of our design creations consisted of 2D and 3D drawing sets, 3D printed experimental models, a series of layered and superimposed illuminated models, and a large, human scale, installation.  The 3D models and 2D drawings were created from data extrapolated from the hydrogen bubble visualizations and PIV to produce layers of lines or closed curves, stacked at vertical intervals to introduce time, and connected to create solid, spatial artifacts of various opacities and transparencies. The layered illuminated models were created in an opposite manner, by distilling moments of the moving wakes, etching these planimetric forms in sheets of plexiglass, and lighted at measured intervals to again show the passage of time. Our study culminated in making a 3D installation; where the emphasis was  on interpreting the data. This construct, similarly,  attempted to transform 2-dimensional datasets into an  affective experience, a goal often used by architecture of larger scales (Picon, 201). We set forth to create a feeling of being surrounded within a large body of turbulent water, represented by transparent acrylic rods, presenting movement of the vortices over the duration of a VIV cycle. The rods, etched at a specific interval, track the movement of the vortices across time and space. As visitors walked through the structure, they experienced being in  a vortex, further emphasized by LED lights that illuminate the rods from a concealed base. The multi-sensory experience augments one’s understanding of the phenomenon and its process of unfolding, allowing visitors to engage with the phenomenon through their own individual experiences.

Due to its unique tectonic history and extreme biological diversity, East Tennessee is a place defined by the incredible abundance of natural resources and the inevitable environmental degradation in the exploitation thereof. What we share most truthfully and vividly in the commons of Appalachia are the myriad forms of catastrophe wrought by extraction economies. Representing a body of scholarship undertaken as the Tennessee Architecture Fellow in the University of Tennessee College of Architecture and Design, the work began by investigating the means of production within three dominant material regimes of East Tennessee – the lithic, metallic, and xylological – this project locates three sites as the theater of operations for the development of architectural ‘mock-ups’ which address the consequences of extraction by inducing circularity in flows of material and labor. Evoking histories of abundance, craft, and community of pre-modern and indigenous4 Appalachian cultures while working directly with material harvested on site, each mock-up seeks to conjure an immanent geopoetic agency, generating unique assemblages of meaning, feeling, and place in proto-architectural relationships between structure and surface. Speculative fabrication protocols introduced digital precision to traditional, high-participation means and methods of manual craft in order to manage the inherent complexity and eccentricity of non-standard parts in structural assemblies while foregrounding issues of automation which loom large in the region. The project culminated in a semi-permanent installation located in the courtyard of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville College of Architecture and Design that synthesized these material strategies into tangibly architectural elements, exhibiting the possibilities of re-commoning resources through circularity. As a performance component of the Tennessee Architecture Fellowship exhibition, ‘Leant-To’ was constructed over the course of two weeks in view of and collaboration with students of the College. The performance of a social act of construction served as the culmination of a body of scholarship and action-oriented pedagogy. By extending from the particular immanence of local material regimes into action-oriented protocols of scavenging, augmenting, and interpolating, an inextricably Appalachian craft emerges. The work attempts to define a future paradigm guided by a work ethic for living well on a damaged planet in Appalachia and beyond with hope for the possibility of an infinite number of insurgent and celebratory practices unique to the truths of every common struggle.

A decade-long design-build project necessitates an organizational strategy that allows design of an entire project while also creating subcomponents that facilitate new design opportunities and a sense of authorship by each generation of students involved. Context: a new Master Plan for the University in 2009 resulted in heated conflict between the University and an adjacent residential neighborhood over projects in the expansion zone. Besides the removal of existing housing stock, a new parking garage would be much larger in scale than the residences at the expansion boundary. Eventually, the University and neighborhood association reached an MOU that included a “visual buffer” between the parking structure and the neighborhood. Project Overview: in 2014, an Architecture professor proposed to the University and neighborhood association that students design and construct a row of small houses to mitigate views of the parking garage, transition the street edge back to a residential scale, and help stabilize the residential boundary. A 2015 studio produced and presented multiple masterplan proposals to joint meetings of the neighborhood association and the University’s planning committee. With unanimous support from the stakeholders, the South Stadium Rowhouses became an official University project. Project Components: masterplan proposals were handed off to new generations of students, who would design the individual housing units, produce construction drawings, and build the rowhouses. Depending upon their year level in the Architecture programs, students could be involved in one, two or three semesters of the sequence. They might, for example, design and draw construction documents, then build for one semester. Or, they might come in during building semesters and inherit many design decisions already in place. The accompanying presentation illustrates how deeper and more focused design projects each semester gave each generation of students the opportunity for full engagement and authorship of the projects as they were realized.

Omaha Mobile Stage is a creative placemaking project to design and make a portable stage as a cultural and economic catalyst in public spaces throughout Omaha. A converted box truck serves as a fully functional mobile venue bringing all forms of performing arts to communities and schools. Recently, cities have seen a collapse in the cultural and commercial activities that support urban life. The pandemic created a vacuum in cultural districts and severely impacted employment in the live entertainment industries, which retreated online. While physical distancing saved lives, social isolation and loneliness emerged as serious public health concerns. Now that vaccines circulate, the creative and public realms have an opportunity to work together to breathe life back into cities. In response, Omaha Mobile Stage is a new type of outdoor venue providing a fun and flexible, but safe and serene, place for people to re-engage with each other, reactivate public spaces, and reanimate social, creative, and economic life in the city. The design and construction of the Stage results from a collaborative designbuild studio comprising 4th-year Architecture and Interior Design students. The team worked exclusively in a university makerspace at the end of the pandemic (Fall 2021) and collaborated with a wide range of suppliers, fabricators, sound engineers, electricians, theater technicians, and performers from a wide range of disciplines. A pivotal part in the curricula of all undergraduate disciplines in the college, the studio emphasizes collaboration of all types – between students of different disciplines, between the studio and external partners, and with fabricators from diverse areas of expertise. Promoting a variation on typical designbuild pedagogy, the goal of the studio is not to train students as builders but as design professionals capable of managing non-traditional projects and working with fabricators and suppliers outside of the conventional building industry.

This dynamic interdisciplinary community-based design/build project began with exploring the potential for an outdoor classroom and learning garden at XXX Elementary School in Jackson, MS. As work commenced and the design took shape the scope evolved to become a prototype design focused on health, food, access, and nutrition education. Through research into learning gardens’ physical, pedagogical, and administrative needs, the design/build team determined that there was a major divide between the way gardens were used and how they were being built. Most applications envision a type of miniature farm, designed for production where kids are active “farmers” cultivating the garden throughout the year. While this model has been successfully executed it tends to be extremely resource intensive and therefor often financially beyond the reach of most schools. This team decided to design a learning garden which would focus on students being outdoors and on the science of cultivation and nutrition rather than large-scale production, thus minimizing the need for on-going garden maintenance, an often-exclusionary expense; Working to refine the details and acquire the skills needed to effectively engage rapidly prototyped furnishings/structures, the team set out to engage other schools interested in the system to further test their concept. As The LivingRoom v1 was being completed new clients approached the team with sponsorship from entities such as AIM for CHangE and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. With these funding partners and school clients including the XXX Partnership School in XXX, MS, two schools in the Mississippi delta, XXX County Elementary School and the head start program in XXX, MS the teams was able to test the concept at a variety of scales and price points. For all four projects, the team developed a game-board style model to facilitate workshops with stakeholders to explore potential spatial arrangements.

In 1969, several publications and international conferences put citizens at the center of architecture and urban design. Robert Sommer discusses the influence of space on human behavior in his seminal book Personal Space. Edward T. Hall wrote the Hidden Dimension about the relevance of cultural perspective in characterizing the space surrounding people. The Dalandhui University of Strathclyde held the First Conference on Architectural Psychology hosted by David Canter, pleading for an architecture interwoven with participatory design. Among these examples, perhaps the most influential is A Ladder of Citizen Participation by Sherry Arnstein, which combines academia and activism, asking for complete and progressive citizen empowerment in design decision-making. In 1969, architecture began to strongly demand the pluriversal expansion of the discipline to share the commoning from a people-centered perspective. However, fifty-three years later, the debate on orchestrating the integration of people’s needs persists. Architects design logic to shape the territory following technical needs that do not always find a foothold for including emergent social dynamics. The gap between technical needs and people’s everyday demands has contributed to consolidating inequalities that have already become structural. In the inquiry for transdisciplinary strategies to overlap these multiple needs in the field of design, this research proposes the framework of Restorative Community Design (RCD) which combines three theoretical bodies: Restorative Justice, the Right to the City, and Participatory Design. First of all, Restorative Justice is a branch of criminal righteousness that seeks to bring together different stakeholders affected by wrongdoing; this theoretical framework aims to address needs and responsibilities and heal damage through the close relationships between various community members to the extent possible. Second, RCD  is also hinged on the Right to the City discourse, which posits that cities are environments that either allow or limit the development of the capabilities of their citizens, in which the networked access to the opportunities offered by the city is a fundamental variable. Finally, Participatory Design merges the two previous approaches through a critical understanding of practices to promote community empowerment. This research proposes the working definition of Restorative Community Design by implementing a methodology called PATH (Participatory Architecture Towards Humanity). Specifically, the investigation systematizes the application of PATH in two specific case studies. The first one took place in  Petare (2015), the denser self-produced settlement -commonly called the informal city – in Latin America, located in Caracas. The second experience happened in Flushing (2018), the most racially diverse borough in New York City. Researchers found historically disenfranchised communities in both cases, and Restorative Community Design appears as a conceptual and practical framework for people’s voice integration into the design processes. These implementations of PATHs towards Restorative Community Design discuss the difference between different forms of community engagement, specifically multi and trans-engagement,- and the relevance of these strategies to perform the agreements proposed by the Restorative Justice that oblige tangible action for the improvement of access to the spatial opportunities offered by the urban built environment, as suggested within the logic of the Right to the City.

As post-WWII America grappled with the cultural revolution of the 1950s and 1960s and its evolving identity – as perceived domestically and abroad – a core tenet of American life bubbled to the surface of political, social, and aesthetic discourse: privacy. Once the revelry of the Allies’ win in the World War cooled into the precarity of the Cold War, American democracy and the culture it afforded its citizens was positioned, first and foremost, in opposition to that of a totalitarian government and culture like that of the Soviet Union. In her book Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America, American literature scholar Deborah Nelson attributes the eulogizing of privacy that emerged in Cold War America to heightened national security discourse and the accompanying fear of the Eastern Bloc. “The potency of American democracy in cold war rhetoric was not its cultivation of a vibrant and free public discourse but its vigilant protection of private autonomy. The stakes of this conviction were typically apocalyptic: either we preserved the integrity of private spaces and thus the free world, or we tolerated their penetration and took the first step toward totalitarian oppression. The very starkness of this choice manufactured the cold war’s governing paradox: in the interests of preserving the space of privacy, privacy would have to be penetrated.”1 The trajectory of American life would be forever shaped by this national discourse, and nowhere is its influence more evident than in two layers of American infrastructure: law and the built environment. Corpus Comunis tackles this interdisciplinary correlation between the legal and the architectural by excavating a series of seven Supreme Court cases concerning a constitutional right to privacy for the architectural environments where their events took place. Privacy, as a right bestowed in America’s founding documents, was first acknowledged during the Cold War era in the case of Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), which gave married couples the right to use contraception. Justice William Douglas wrote for the Court’s majority: “Specific guarantees in the Bill of Rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance. Various guarantees create zones of privacy.”2 Exceedingly spatial in this description, these shadowy zones of implied privacy can be located in the First, Third, Fourth, Ninth, or Fourteenth Amendments, or some combination therein, depending on one’s constitutional interpretation. In practice though, these zones of privacy are enacted in and through the unassuming architectural spaces that serve as the backdrops to Americans’ daily lives.  From the front steps of a wood-framed residence-turned-fertility clinic in New Haven where Estelle Griswold enacted her advocacy, to the nameless adoption office that Norma McCorvey (f.k.a. Jane Roe) visited three times, to the interior of the Learjet plane where John Arthur and Jim Obergefell were legally married on the tarmac of BWI airport, Corpus Comunis bores through seven spaces joined not by typological or aesthetic architectural qualities, but instead by the spatial privacy precedent they establish together.

REDEMPTION is a physical manifestation of a non-profit organization’s desire to represent the salvation of under-represented communities, residents of those communities, and a path to financial viability for those from the community returning to society post incarceration. The organization commissioned the design and construction of a feature wall that represent their core mission areas of focus: Community and Economic Development, Education, and Environment. The work was designed to be completed during a job skill training program that offers the opportunity for living wage employment upon graduation. Detailed fabrication and on-site installation provided apprentices with experience beyond basic welding certification; elevating the prospects of the recently incarcerated men, their families, and the communities where they reside. The project is the product of a collaboration between a public interest design entity and an apprentice training program that teaches construction skills to people from the Allegheny County/Pittsburgh, PA Municipal Region. An inclusive project implementation process aspired to educate individuals from different backgrounds about one another, while developing understanding, humility, and common pride. All material used in the construction is repurposed, recycled, or the waste byproduct of the training program; symbolically and literally representing salvation. The wall system employs over 400 scrap steel blanks utilized in welding apprentice training to create a surface of aggregated aesthetic value. The wall and sub-structure were delivered to site as complimentary, pre-fabricated components. The 3,800lb weight of the steel wall required a secondary structural system to reinforce the high-rise building’s primary steel frame and navigate the parameters of the site. The wall was designed as a series of pre-fabricated panels that are lapped and installed sequentially to ensure a seamless composition.

What happens when independent designers form a collective practice rooted in co-creation rather than singular authorship? How could feminist values inform and inspire a shared design approach? Which professional conventions should be unlearned in order to foster more mutually supportive spatial practices? The history of feminist practice in architecture offers more than a century of women-led collective initiatives. But their marginalization has prevented feminist values from being normalized in the profession and the built environment at large. Still today, women-led collaborative practices are considered novel.  WIP: Work In Progress | Women In Practice is feminist design collective composed of two entities: a supportive community of women designers and a smaller collaborative practice shared between individual members. WIP is a work in progress, subject to adaptation by and for its participants. Within the shared practice, team structure and methodology adjust to the needs of specific projects, including scope, community and stakeholders, and the interests of WIP members involved. To date WIP has completed a range of projects that aim to improve the public realm by foregrounding considerations of equity, access, and inclusivity, including public space installations, community focused design research, and collective happenings. Learning from other feminist practices and workers cooperatives past and present, WIP is democratically organized so that participants contribute to its trajectory and creative processes. WIP’s projects reimagine public environments by challenging, expanding, and transforming their norms. They explore issues of embodiment – physical, sensory, and emotional experiences of the body – and create environments of choice that support the spatial and experiential preferences of a diverse population. By embracing a plurality of human needs and co-creative design processes, WIP operates outside the norms of conventional design practice in pursuit of a more vibrant shared future.

This special focus session features presentations by four peer-review authors selected from recent issues of the TAD Journal. In addition to a brief introduction presenting a summary of the authors’ research, additional emphasis will be placed on the respective process behind manuscript preparation including its conception, submission, editorial development, and final publication. These author-panelists will share insights from their recent experience within the TAD double-blind peer-review and editing process. The objective of this session is to increase visibility and awareness of TAD Journal editorial operations.

Models of Collective/Common/Co-operative Ownership and Design Innovation
The session claims that adequate and affordable housing provision for all can only be achieved by decommodifying housing. Discussing domestic and international examples that operate beyond the traditional categories of state and market, the session will explore how practices of commoning such as cooperative organizations, community land trusts and other forms of collective ownership can extract housing from the speculative realm and set impulses for innovation in urban development and housing design. We will debate the possibilities of translating international models to the US context and under which circumstances they can scale up to have systemic effect.

Both the profession of architecture and architectural education are moving toward the measurement of the performance of buildings, whether it is to meet sustainability goals or requirements or to quantify a particular aspect of design that reveals a priority of an organization. In educational programs, this is an opportunity to establish the values of a school and assess how well students are able to reflect those values in their projects. What is measured can vary from how well users’ needs are addressed, to structural sizing, to construction scheduling. In the recently implemented 2020 Conditions for Accreditation, performance measurement in several of the student criteria is emphasized. In response, the AISC Steel Competition has an additional requirement of design performance in the Program Category I portion of the competition. This session will be a panel of faculty from programs that were either recently reviewed or are preparing for a review under the 2020 criteria and faculty whose students have already included performance assessment in various studio settings, including their Steel Competition entries. The panel will establish a dialogue about their experiences and different methods of performance measurement.

The session will discuss a few sample papers included in the last themed issue of The Plan Journal, vol. 7, no. 2, Fall 2022 on the issue’s theme “The Right to Housing.” The presentations, dealing with one of the most pressing challenges of our time, as discussed broadly and in-depth throughout the issue, will highlight research on some theoretical and historical perspectives on the theme, as well as social, typological and technological aspects of a few case-studies. Invited discussants will complete the panel.

This paper interrogates the origins and provenance of the term ‘Islamic Architecture,’ making the argument that it is misleading.  The term reflects nineteenth-century Orientalist discourse and diminishes the remarkable diversity of architectural traditions found in the predominantly Muslim countries of Asia and North Africa.  The paper will survey the early terminology used to discuss the architecture of European colonies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and then discuss the reasons for rejecting the term ‘Islamic architecture.’   A major point will be to note how local traditions of architecture tend to trump the importance of religious function, so that the continuities between the architecture before and after the introduction of Islam are stronger than the similarities that emerged subsequent to conversion to Islam.  The result has been that the academic study of the architecture of the Muslim world has produced a false impression of homogeneity about this architecture parallel in many respects to the false homogeneity Western discourse has often attributed to ‘Orientals’ themselves (cf. E. Said, Orientalism).  The lack of definable stylistic criteria among examples of so-called Islamic architecture forces its advocates to emphasize the spiritual qualities of these works of architecture.         In the field of architectural history, the outcome is a skewed picture that includes the following problems: an excessive focus on religious monumental architecture and the prominence of a narrow canon of Middle Eastern mosques; a tendency to foreground ornamental elements rather than structural ones; a simplification of the complex cultural traditions, Muslim and non-Muslim, which contributed to this architecture; and a misinterpretation of certain aspects of architecture as purely religious.     In his pivotal three-volume work, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization (1974), American historian Marshall Hodgson (1922-1968), coined the term ‘Islamicate’ aligned with the concept of ‘Italianate,’ and ‘Islamdom’ after ‘Christendom.’  Hodgson acknowledges ‘the Islamicate civilization’ ‘as the latest phase of the Irano-Semitic culture, which goes back, in the lands from Nile to Oxus, to Sumerian times.’ (Hodgson 1974: 43)  He suggests, ‘the distinctive civilization of Islamdom, … may be called “Islamicate.”’ (Hodgson 1974: 95)  While Hodgson’s definition alleviates the problem, it does not present a complete reconciliation.                 Although the terms Islamic architecture and Islamic art are widely used today, there is still debate as to what they really connote.  The strong association of particular works of architecture or art with a religion, its branding with the word ‘Islam’ results in othering of the Muslim peoples -all the while augmenting the Orientalist and colonialist narratives with powerful patriarchal undertones.  The terminology, which contains the name of a religion, denies the very nature of architecture and art as a complex product of fluid cultural relationships and appropriations.  Yet, the hybrid disposition of art and architectural works is ever so powerfully present, especially in the so-called specimens of Islamic art and architecture.  The use of the terms Islamic art and Islamic architecture results in decontextualization and cultural isolation.

Baghdad, the birthplace of ancient civilization, was a laboratory for the cadre of modern architects. Prominent architects like Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Alvar Aalto, Jose Luis Sert, Robert Venturi, and Gio Ponti infused modern architectural ideology into the city. In the 1950s, With the help of Iraq’s Development Board (IDB), Iraqi leadership engaged with western architects to restructure the master plan of Baghdad, Baghdad university campus, civil and governmental buildings, art and educational buildings, religious and cultural buildings, and residential complexes throughout the city.[i] As a result, eleven western architects were selected to be part of the re-construction process of Baghdad to reshape the vernacular style into modernity completely. Although there is an interplay of social-political relationships in the architectural sphere, this research focuses predominantly on the architectural aspect of the 1950s with the analysis of western architects’ vision for the cradle of civilization.[ii] The study uses only three leading architects’ designs in a comparative analysis of the city of Baghdad to the buildings of similar function by the same architect designed in the United States [i]    Kultermann, Udo (1999). . [ii]    Anderson, Scott (2014).

The 1932 International Exhibition of Modern Architecture at the Museum of Modern Art is perhaps the most discussed event for introducing modernism to America. However, in the mid-1920s, modernist designs already appeared in American galleries. In 1926, the Metropolitan Museum of Art displayed exhibits from the 1925 Paris International Exposition of Modern Industrial and Decorative Art, including the pavilions designed by Robert Mallet-Stevens, Konstantin Melnikov, and Le Corbusier. [Figure 1] Also in 1926, The Little Review, a liberal magazine operated by Jane Heap, organized The International Theatre Exposition, displaying De Stijl and constructivist works. [Figure 2] In 1927, The Little Review organized the Machine-Age Exposition. Its organizing team included art critic Richard Bach, veteran architect Harvey Wiley Corbett, and modernist artists Marcel Duchamp, Louis Lozowick, and Fernand Léger. Among the accompanying essays published in The Little Review that celebrated the spirit of the machine were Jane Heap’s article declaring “There is a great new race of men in America: the Engineer,” and Italian Futurist artist Enrico Prampolini’s article, “The Aesthetic of the Machine and Mechanical Introspection in Art.” Exhibits were organized into three categories. The first was machine objects: radio, valve, gear, electric generator, and so on. [Figure 3] The second was machine-themed art works by Naum Gabo, Louis Lozowick, and other modernist artists. The third, which was the largest, was architecture. The spirit of machine was realized in building engineering, such as a factory complex in the USSR, a power plant in Germany, a grain elevator at Buffalo, and other utilitarian constructions. [Figure 4] The spirit was also realized through inspiring the new aesthetic, represented by the exhibits of skyscrapers, Walter Gropius’ Bauhaus School, William Lescaze’ Soldiers and Sailors Memorial project, Raymond Hood’s American Radiator Building, and Lili Engel’s Bath house. [Figure 5] Placing the Machine-Age Exposition in the context of American exploration of modernizing the design, this study traces the origin of the event, examines the modernist exhibits and their authors’ own writings, and reviews the contemporary comments of the show. The study further elaborates on the constituents that established the Machine-Age Exposition as the most important event in disseminating modernism in the 1920s. Although the show was criticized for loose curatorship and for not including works by important architects such as Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright, the Machine-Age Exposition, along with the discussions generated by its theme, nevertheless prepared an important step in the path to the rising of modern architecture in America. The Exposition left deep impression on the visitors, among them the future director of the Museum of Modern Art, Alfred Barr, who played a leading role of promoting the International Style at the 1932 International Exhibition of Modern Architecture.

The Bosnian War started in April 1992 following the proclamation of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s independence from the Yugoslavian Federation. After the recognition, Bosnian Serb forces besieged Sarajevo and for four years the city was subjected to bombings and gunfire. This became the longest city siege in modern warfare at the time. In his 1994 drawings titled “Destructive Metamorphosis,” architect Zoran Doršner documented how the population were forced to rebuild their main dwellings and way of life to prioritize all aspects of survival. The citizens of Sarajevo were in a constant state of reuse, adaptation, and reinvention – debris from destroyed buildings, infrastructure and vehicles were used as daily life resources and produced new transitional spaces. Sandbags were collected for window protection, destroyed vehicles became barricades, fabric was used as sniper view obstruction, and families began to reform destroyed and non-essential household items into innovative survival tools.  To this day, the urban landscape reflects the horrors that fell upon Sarajevo, and survivors avoid several urban spaces due to their associations with the war. As we study Sarajevo and the transformative power of war, this project recognizes the generative potential of its wartime spatial and physical transformations to activate the city during times of peace and prosperity. Inspired by the people’s adaptability and tenacity to survive during the siege, the project repurposes materials from the city’s waste into a multi-functional kit of parts. The transformed materials are united to create varying spatial conditions, bringing these neglected spaces back into the urban fabric and culture of Sarajevo.

The Side-Yard House, created through recent design/research into energy-efficient mass detached housing, is a proposed passive, solar-oriented house model whose key concept, at both urban and suburban site conditions, involves re-proportioning the lot from a backyard model to a side-yard model home while maintaining lot density.  This arrangement, similar to the Charleston House typology with its long gallery, provides a large side yard off the substantially glazed south facade that is focus of all occupied rooms. The design creates several sustainable functions such as passive solar heating, daylighting, natural shading, and PV electricity production, as well as a private, healthy outdoor space. Having previously tested the model at the urban planning and design scale, current research has focused in on the construction details to investigate how this house model could be built affordably and sustainably. This design follows Passive Haus principles, so construction typically costs more than standard because of the additional insulating materials required.  At the same time, rising construction costs are making new construction unaffordable to all except the wealthy.  To keep this house type affordable to missing-middle housing buyers1, who have a substantial income yet cannot afford new housing, methods of prefabrication and modular construction are employed to keep labor costs down.  The long, narrow massing and proportions of the Side-Yard House that work well with passive energy strategies also work well with modular construction dimensions, so the house models were designed with this technique in mind from the beginning stages.  This current phase further studies this idea by developing detailed construction drawings to obtain initial construction cost estimates and test energy efficiency. A sustainable, energy-efficient home should also employ low-carbon methods of construction, so the chosen building system is mass timber CLT (Cross Laminated Timber) construction rather than standard light wood framing typically used for prefabrication.  This system has been used extensively in Europe, especially for multi-unit housing, but has limited exposure in the US.  Dimensions of the Side-Yard House work well with CLT spanning capacity and transportation requirements of the modular orthogonal boxes. The bulk of the house consists of 4 modules sized to fit a standard flat-bed truck without being so large as to require special permission to transport. The 2 larger south modules contain the living spaces while the 2 smaller technical “wet” pods contain the mechanical equipment/chases and act as a north buffer.  The roof and long balcony are flatpack CLT slabs to be erected on site meaning the entire house could be shipped on a total of 5 trucks.  The construction details were created following manufacturers CLT construction details2 and the proposed methods were reviewed by modular construction consultants to verify feasibility.  The house’s energy efficiency will be tested using more detailed energy modeling software to check if initial estimates through Sefaira were on track. More accurate construction cost estimates will be generated to assess if this house model could be built affordably enough for missing-middle home buyers.

“Drawdown: Play to Enter” is a collaborative game designed to simulate the joys of negotiation and collective action required to work through climate strategy and resource management in the built environment. Disciplinary approaches to representing climate activism often focus on a fixed condition of intervention (before vs. after), whereas game design embodies the active qualities of negotiation, compromise, balance, and incremental progress that occurs in the in-between. By introducing the concept of interplay1 to architectural frameworks on the climate, game design expands the territory of architectural agency to model complex mechanisms of environmental stewardship that engage in scientific processes and stakeholder ecologies. The project leverages the fundamental principles of games as a medium of agency. 2 Using a large table game board as a representational tool for our shared domain, players in DRAWDOWN are tasked with the shared responsibility of mitigating carbon outputs through the introduction of drawdown technologies while maintaining critical public programs. The game revolves around specific agents and affordances: Operations, Programs, Emission Rate, Decarbonization Rate, and Resources. Operations decrease GHG emissions based on a set decarbonization rate while Programs release CO2 at a set emissions rate. Players are tasked to collaboratively build decarbonization solutions (Operations) on the board to mitigate the carbon emissions of critical public infrastructure (Programs). This orchestration and management of decelerating greenhouse gases is mediated through essential resources: CO2, H2O, food, and energy. Research for the Operations database comes from Paul Hawken and Project Drawdown3 who have compiled the top 200 solutions to lowering GHG emissions, the majority of which are rooted outside of architecture. These processes encourage architects to look beyond the discipline to unlock the design potentials of industrial, agricultural, energy, and carbon capture operations. The game design further asserts architectural agency in analyzing and representing these technical solutions based on their inputs and outputs while celebrating the formal and aesthetic eccentricities of each proposed solution as components of a near-future drawn-down city. The DRAWDOWN game is an active form 4 that represents the constant flux and continual work involved in moving towards decarbonization in our building stock. It addresses the equation that solutions require resources, and that environmental stewardship relies on considering solutions at multiple scales, even when they come into direct conflict with one another. The game also acknowledges that climate activism from an architectural perspective requires deep engagement with science, technology, and extra-disciplinary research. Modeling the entanglement between public stewardship and infrastructural strategy, the game prioritizes banal and non-canonical architectural typologies as complicated pieces to solving the climate puzzle. Nonetheless, envisioning a sustainable world requires bold, joyful imagination that exceeds the pragmatism of science and policy. By working through games, architects can explore both the object and process aesthetics 5 of designing for climate change. Players are encouraged to embrace a simultaneous sense of urgency and euphoria as they play together to cool the planet.

Affordable Housing is an expansive, multifaceted, and interdisciplinary problem that is currently considered a national crisis. The term affordable housing, however, is often conflated with subsidized housing – government support for the very needy – but the housing crisis not only impacts those at an extremely low-income levels but those at low to middle-income levels too. In the absence of direct public investment solutions, author/presenter, Quinlan McFadden explores attainable, urban infill prototypes that work towards providing diverse housing solutions for neighborhoods. Together, these prototypes propose design and public policy changes, challenging the reader to consider the spectrum of pathways to attainable housing, such as neighborhood characteristics

Studies have shown that low-wealth communities and communities of color are more likely to live in neighborhoods experiencing multiple environmental burdens and disproportionate vulnerability to the impacts of climate change in American cities. The practice of redlining in Philadelphia, PA has had caused environmental injustice in ways that might not have been obvious when it was happening. The practice began in the 1930’s and continued into the 1940’s to tell banks where it would be “best” to loan money to. This practice quickly became racist when the “best neighborhoods” were the areas that were in-demand, up-and-coming, and where white “professional men” lived. On the other hand, the “hazardous neighborhoods” were places where “infiltration” had already occurred. They were areas where the majority of Black people lived, who at the time were considered “undesirable people.” In Philadelphia, there are neighborhoods that are still affected by this practice. These neighborhoods have some of the lowest median household incomes, lowest life expectancies and, highest levels of Black or African American people compared to the rest of the city. Although redlining was found to have impacted the current Philadelphia’s racial segregation in terms of economic and social equity, very few studies have looked into the environmental inequity that has occurred. This research focuses on urban heat island, which is the phenomenon that the outdoor temperatures with a city are about 1–7°F higher than temperatures in outlying areas of cities. The main objective for this research is to map the heat vulnerable neighborhoods in the City of Philadelphia, and also suggest how to mitigate the urban heat island effect. The research began with mapping the heat exposure throughout the City of Philadelphia. Then some other factors that go into heat vulnerability that were mapped are access to green space/tree coverage, household income, life expectancy, access to healthcare facilities, and race. Mapping these indicators in ArcGIS Pro allowed the neighborhoods that are the most vulnerable to be pinpointed. Further, overlaying the Homeowners Loan Corporation (HOLC) redlining map and finding where the “hazardous” neighborhoods overlap the most vulnerable neighborhoods (found through mapping the indicators). Finding the most vulnerable neighborhoods allows the ability to conduct further analysis: using Rhino and Grasshopper (Ladybug Tools) to quantify the urban heat island indicators such as Direct Sun Hours, Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI) and Heat Stress Hours on the selected heat vulnerable neighborhoods. Specifically, both public spaces and streets were examined. Finally, the research proposed several design interventions, including a series of strategies in adding more greenery, to mitigate the urban heat island effect.

Giving voice to young students proceeded through collaborative engagement with a group which worked with an elementary school in the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood. This studio listened and collaborated with these 5th graders to amplify their ideas through architectural renderings and drawings. The area is a former military, industrial, and isolated area of San Francisco, with a long history of being a food desert with lack of access to grocery stores and fresh produce. Programmatically, the studio relied on input from these students in a series of visits to the schools. The process initially leveraged these college students design skills to evaluate and visualize improvements to the hillside and courtyard of the school. Through this close collaboration at a localized site, the studio gained an understanding of the aspirations of the children and found alignments with the overall resilience of the neighborhood and drew satisfaction in the implementation of small-scale built projects for the school. Moving to the larger scale of the neighborhood, on the southwest bank of Islais Creek, the studio worked on the speculative rehabilitation and adaptation of an industrial low-lying area identified in a city report on the area as the most susceptible to flooding and sea-level rise. Given this inevitability, the studio looked to develop architectural typologies which adapted to flood risks while promoting the health of the community. Based on the desire of the students, ecological remediation and inclusive urban farming were drivers of the projects. The economy of modular construction was informed by a local factory and an urban farmer who manages a large roof farm helped to solidify the aspirations of the 5th graders into comprehensive speculations about a resilient future

To gain a better understating of the roles that both architects and landscape architects play in creating an equitable resilient future, we have to rethink the foundation of ecological education and learn to design critically in the way that the original care-takers of our land, the indigenous tribes, have done by invoking and designing consciously for the next seven generations[1]. In theory, architecture should be designing, building and developing through landscape urbanism and developing the urban environment by shrinking city sprawls and suburbanization and cultivating stewardship through social-ecological transformations that reestablish human-ecosystem relationships. The case study presented here is a 5-year research project that investigates the Jack and Laura Dangermond Preserve, 24,000 acres with 8.5 miles of coastland at the confluence of fresh and sea water, as the last largely undeveloped, yet damaged by the foundational infrastructure of developers, in the state of California. The goal of the investigation has been to create a place at the preserve that would actively restore and remediate the land, returning it back to its original condition by implementing Chumash knowledge practices in ecological architecture, landscapes, craftsmanship through plants and properties, preservation of biodiversity, enhancement of migration patterns of fauna, and mitigation of climate changes etc.[2] which were in practice before the unpermitted occupation of the developers and investors, to ensure a resilient future for the state.

Architecture and human-built structures are embedded with speciesist practices of domination over the environment that are rooted in dualistic conceptions of the world, where humans are considered to be special and superior to other species. This (hu)man exceptionalism has driven architecture and the built environment to be conceived in opposition to ‘nature’, dominating natural terrains and consequently displacing or instrumentalizing the many other species who are given little to no ethical consideration. This way of intervening in the world is leading to the existential questions that must be posed given our global climate crisis. A reframing of human intervention as ‘built environment’ placed in opposition to the ‘natural environment’ of supposedly passive nature, is urgently needed.  The motivation for this paper is rooted in a deep concern for the role of humans in the climate crisis and a realization that architecture as a discipline is complicit in elevating the human category above all other beings in nature. There are biases embedded in our practices and teaching of architecture that need to be interrogated and reflected upon, starting with our own education; the role models and ideals that we unwittingly operate within. As a material and aesthetic practice, architecture has always been tied to our conception of nature and our role as humans in it. However, in the West it is practiced as a human-centric endeavor that has been the domain of a small group of interlocutors; mostly Western men from the enlightenment to the modern movement. With a broadening of perspectives, which includes the voices that have been silenced, new aesthetic paradigms become possible- those enmeshed with a different human-nature relationship.

Our exploitative models of building and design arise from misconceptions about the relationship between energy and objects. The current emphasis on efficiency, performance, and life cycle assessment are not adequate remedies for the problem. Through an analysis of Anishinaabe material harvesting techniques and building technologies, this paper contends that the lighter methods of low-carbon construction practiced in the Great Lakes region for millennia are ideal alternatives for development in the area, because they are clear and direct in their embodiment of energy and material. It includes careful study of material life cycles of traditional birchbark precedents designed to be light and portable, to be assembled quickly, and to decompose gracefully, like wiigwaasi-jiimaanan (canoes), waaginogaan (domed lodges), and makakoon (bark vessels). These models for making hold the potential to redirect prevailing conversations about sustainability, transition, resilience, and design in ways that are more ecologically responsible and better recognize and value indigenous cultures and material practices.

Rainfall, temperature alterations, and being located in an arid/semi-arid climate zone[i] have limited Iran’s renewable water supply which led to the water stress and droughts that would continue in the future[ii]. However, paradoxically some regions like Ahvaz City, suffer from floods. Additionally, anthropogenic impacts of development like continuous short-sighted unsustainable solutions depleted the reserve and created food and social insecurity. The flood-drought paradox in this province seems unorthodox considering its rich water management history where residents protected their urban ecosystem[iii] by utilizing ancient preservation schemes that stemmed from Persian beliefs. However outside forces and governmental decisions made people socially passive toward the depletion of their water resources. The study applies the theory of norm shift[iv] and employs the local ancestral expertise in water management and preservation. Such a paradigm shift has two aspects: efficient use of water resources, or “Natural Capital”, and increasing villagers’ awareness, or “Social Capital”, of effective ancient or modern water management techniques. The new norm mobilizes citizens to develop a bottom-up and self-reliant approach to the socio-cultural and environmental issue through active participation. They will be able to create a sustainable living system[v] using local materials and vernacular architecture. Based on a careful study of the site’s micro-topography, a drainage network is designed to control the detention and retention of floodwater in agricultural lands by employing the ancient water collection method (Gourab) and the preservation method of Ab-Anbar/Badgir[vi].  The considered subterranean water reservoirs (Ab-Anbars) in the designed cistern complex provide year-round potable water and a community oasis where a comfortable microclimate is produced. The outcome heals human-induced environmental damage by promoting local expertise and enabling natural capital. The proposed solution encompasses ancient collaborative communal construction methods that people are familiar with and would be an applicable approach for the residents. The construction and usage of the cistern complex both are in line with the traditional rituals of the local people acting as a purpose to alleviate their flood-drought problem as well as creating an active, participating, and caring community toward their limited environmental resources by a gradual shift in the social interactions of the people. A universally applicable practice can be extrapolated from this study to alleviate the water shortage problem in flood-prone arid regions. It diverges from the conventional 20th-century engineering approach where flood control is considered independently from drought resistance[vii]. The limits are now obvious on the water cycle. In contrast, the project proposes to “tame” the behavior of water by letting it follow its natural course. Instead of eliminating flood, the region will embrace it for a positive impact on agriculture, accumulating fertile soil and collecting floodwater to alleviate water shortage[viii]. Such a scheme speculates an alternative low-tech, hi-impact strategy toward a sustainable built environment. Gourab /go:rɅb/ is an ancient crescent-shaped Persian surface water collection barrier that holds rain or flood water.  Ab-Anbar /Ʌb ænbɅr/ (cistern) is an ancient water storage system to keep the drinking water. Badgir /bɅdgır/ (wind catcher) is a traditional structure used to provide passive air conditioning for buildings.

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

As climate change, sustainability, and shifting priorities in ecology come to the forefront, this panel brings together the heads of programs from across the Midwest to discuss the importance of strong institutions in landscape architecture. The Midwest hosts specific flora and fauna that deserve consideration from regional experts who have opportunities for local education. We will discuss how our unique waterways, plains, mountains, and ecologies are ripe for study, engagement, and education rooted in the Midwest.

The Urban Design Academic Council (UDAC) is an emerging forum for educators and practitioners advocating for the urban design field and towards more sustainable and just cities. Join this informal gathering to meet fellow urban design faculty and researchers, share experiences, and learn more about the UDAC.

Friday March 31, 5:30-7:00pm
Trust Coffee-house and Bar (one block from the Hyatt St. Louis)
401 Pine St, St. Louis, MO 63102