Assistant Professor David Gerber has been invited to return to give a keynote lecture to Brazil’s SindusCON an event that combines the leading Architecture, Engineering, and Construction communities on the Future of BIM and Design Technology. He has also been invited to co-organize a special session at the upcoming ACSA conference in Seattle on Data and Architecture. Dr. Gerber has been re-appointed to the Board of Directors for the Association of Computer Aided Design in Architecture. 

Gail Peter Borden was elevated to the AIA College of Fellows. He was also recognized with the USC Associates Award for Artistic expression (the highest honor the University bestows for creative achievement) as well as being awarded the USC Mellon Mentoring Award. 

Dr. Joon-Ho Choi organized and ran a seminar, entitled “Human-Building Integration: Thermal Comfort Control for an Individual Setting”, during the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating, and Air-conditioning Engineers (ASHRAE) Summer Conference held in Atlanta, GA. He also presented one of his research themes, “Human-Building Integration As a Proactive Environmental Control Strategy “. In July he was a speaker at the Healthy Building 2015 Conference, “Development of an Automatic Thermal Control System Using Human Facial Skin Temperature.”  Dr. Choi has been recently invited as a scientific committee to the 2016 PLEA Conference the 2016 International Conference on Indoor Air Quality Ventilation & Energy Conservation In Building.

Alexander Robinson was selected to present a paper at the UNESCO Conference: Water, Megacities, and Global Change in Paris this December, alongside the international UN Climate Conference. He is also presenting this work in the University of Leuven Landscape Architecture Lecture Series in Belgium. 

Prof. G. Goetz Schierle updated his computer program SDG: Structure Design Graph to design diverse structures for gravity and lateral wind and seismic loads

http://uscarch.com/structures/SDG/SDG%20tutorial-p.pdf

http://uscarch.com/structures/Arch499/index.html

Dr. Travis Longcore (Landscape Architecture Program) was an invited instructor for the National Park Service at their Sustainable Outdoor Lighting Training Workshop in Fort Collins, Colorado in August.  He published a book chapter on lessons learned from 20 years of butterfly conservation work in California, titled “Butterflies are not grizzly bears: Lepidoptera conservation in practice” (in Butterfly conservation in North America: Efforts to help save our charismatic microfauna, Springer).  Dr. Longcore has also recently been certified as a licensed Geographic Information Science Professional (GISP) by the GIS Certification Institute.   

Victor Regnier has a book contract with Wiley to look at housing design and service solutions for the oldest-old–that is–people in the 85+ and 100+ age cohorts.  These age groups are the faster growing ones in the US population.  Regnier will also keynote the Canadian Seniors Housing Summit in Toronto on November 4th.

Geoffrey von Oeyen was recently featured in the August 2015 issue of Architect Magazine. In “Next Progressives: Geoffrey von Oeyen Design,” Architect published a firm profile and images of von Oeyen’s current professional work, as well as a photograph of his Sailing Architecture exhibition at the USC School of Architecture. The piece concluded that by “looking at the way naval design leverages environmental forces like wind and water to deal with external forces– human occupation, space, and mechanical systems– while also creating elegant structures that are smarter, lighter, and stronger, von Oeyen is able to create innovative designs that have the potential to steer architecture through uncharted waters.”

USC will co-host the Passive and Low Energy Architecture conference in Los Angeles from July 11-13.  Professor Marc Schiler is the Scientific (Review) Committee Chair.  PLEA2015 was held in Bologna, Italy, with representation from 42 countries.  This will be the first time that PLEA has been held in the USA, since its founding in 1981.  It has been hosted in 30 cities across the globe.  The conference will deal wit Regenerative Environments at the scale of Cities, Buildings, People.  See PLEA2016.org.

Alice Kimm presented a TEDx talk entitled “What Architecture Can Do For You (if you take the time to ask),” at The Broad stage in Santa Monica, CA. Alice is also Chair of the upcoming 2015 Monterey Design Conference, to take place in Monterey, CA over the weekend of October 16-18. Her firm, John Friedman Alice Kimm Architects, was awarded a 2015 AIACC Residential Design Honor Award for its Field House, as well as an AIACC Design Merit Award for its Resnick Sustainability Institute / Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis at Caltech.

Vinayak Bharne was appointed as the urban design and planning adviser to the Government of Karnataka Directorate of Urban Land Transport, India, to help craft strategic mobility plans for four cities in the state. He was nominated to the Editorial Board of the Journal of Architecture and Urbanism in London. He was invited as one of seven international architects and planners to the “Chandigarh Rethink” symposium in India, to opine on planning directions for the future of the city of Chandigarh, originally designed by Le Corbusier in the 1950s. He was recently interviewed by Monocle 24 Radio, UK, in the program, The Globalist. The interview focused on the City of Los Angeles’ Mobility Plan 2035, that lays the policy foundations for making Los Angeles a multi-modal, bicycle-friendly city. 

The LA River Public Art Project, co-founded by Esther Margulies ASLA, will hold the inaugural 10 FEET event in Frogtown on the LA River on October 10th.  The event is a temporary installation of site specific pieces calling attention to the value of curated arts and culture along the river, and the newly created 10 foot wide river friendly zone along the 32 miles in the City of LA.  

Assistant Professor Alvin Huang has been selected as one of four “Emerging Voices” to speak at the upcoming 2015 Monterey Design Conference hosted by the AIA California Council in Asilomar, California. Additionally, he recently lectured on his design research as part of the Forum Lecture Series for Ottawa Architecture Week in Ottawa, Canada hosted by the Azrieli School of Architecture at Carleton University. 

Michael Ellars was an exhibitor for DLR Group at the TASA/TASB Conference in Austin, Texas, on October 2nd and 3rd. DLR Group’s K-12 Sector sponsored the “Student Innovation Challenge” at the conference, which brought teams from three high schools and two middle schools across the state to Austin for the weekend with the challenge to develop solutions to significant problems, including how to eliminate the national debt. Ellars crewed the exhibit hall booth to demonstrate the use of Virtual Reality technology for architectural visualization of projects at various stages of design, which is an on-going result of my DLR Group “Personal Development Grant” that he was awarded in January.