Associate Dean Mary Hardin received two awards from AIA Southern Arizona in a December, 2013 awards ceremony. She received an Honor Award for the “Split House”, a low-cost residence designed and constructed in Tucson with her design-build studio in 2011-12. The residence is a hybrid of rammed earth and frame construction, designed to conserve energy by the strategic placement of thermal mass walls, framed walls with apertures, and roof overhangs. The residence also employs a roof water collection system to reduce water use for the landscaping around it. It was purchased by a low-income family in June, 2012. She also received a Merit Award for the “Barrio Rowhouse”, her own courtyard residence built on an infill lot near downtown Tucson. For both projects, Hardin served as architect and contractor.

Lecturer Luis Ibarra and Adjunct Lecturer Teresa Rosano, AIA LEED AP, of Ibarra Rosano Design Architects have won Best of Houzz 2014 for design. They designed three of the “12 Desert Buildings Raising Arizona’s Architectural Profile” on Architizer’s blog: http://architizer.com/blog/desert-homes/  The Levin Residence, one of the three projects, was featured on ArchDaily and HGTV’s Extreme Homes.

Design Intelligence has named Lecturer Michael Kothke one of 30 most admired educators for 2014. 

Adjunct Lecturer Teresa Rosano was a speaker at the AIA Women’s Leadership Summit in October 2013.

Sustainable City Project director and Architecture department faculty member Dr. Linda C. Samuels has been awarded a $60,000 grant from the University of Arizona’s Renewable Energy Network. These funds support her interdisciplinary urban design studio and ongoing research focused on the I-11 SuperCorridor connecting Las Vegas to Nogales. This studio is working collaboratively with studios on the same topic at UNLV (under Ken Mccown, Director of UNLV’s downtown design center) and ASU (under Jason Boyer of Gensler Architects, Phoenix). An additional $70,000 has been awarded to the i11 SuperCorridor studio and research work by the Walton Sustainable Solutions initiative at the Global Institute of Sustainability at ASU. 

Assistant professor Chris Trumble’s paper, titled “An Introductory Pedagogy of Sustainable Structures for Architecture Students” has been accepted for publication and presentation at the 2014 Sustainable Structures Symposium at Portland State University, April 17-18. His paper titled “Bus Shelter Prototypes in the Sonoran Desert” has been accepted for publication in the July 2014 Special Issue of the Journal of Architecture and Planning (JAP) of King Saud University on “Sustainability in Hot Arid Regions”. 

Chris Trumble has been awarded a $24,000 public art commission for the City of Tempe, Arizona. He was initially selected as the Public Artist for the University Drive Streetscape Project. The commission has since been transferred to the El Paso Gas Line Multi-use Path Project. 

Four of Chris Trumble’s projects have been accepted for presentation and exhibition at the 2014 ACSA Annual Meeting in Miami Beach, April 10-12: “Research + Application | Bus Shelter Prototypes for the Sonoran Desert” (Design Research in the Studio Context),  “What’s in a Bus Shelter?” (Urbanism), “Interstitial Installation | Site Specific Furniture as an Architectural Microcosm”  (Architecture in an Expanded Field), and “Wood Cantilevers” (Materials). 

Chris Trumble has been named an executive board member on the “Thinking While Doing” grant, a $2.48m endeavor led by Ted Cavanagh of Dalhousie University, sponsored by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; other board members include Ted Cavanagh and Arlene Oak (University of Alberta). The grant is dedicated to studying best practices in educational design build. Chris has also been named director of the design build Exchange (dbX), an initiative to facilitate the exchange of information, knowledge, and practices critical to educational design build endeavors in North America.  Members of dbX include Ted Cavanagh, Geoff Gjertson (University of Louisiana Lafayette), Patrick Harrop (University of Manitoba), Greg Snyder (University of North Carolina Charlotte), and Stephen Verderber (University of Toronto).  The dbX will be holding a working session at the ACSA Annual Meeting.

In collaboration with Coastal Studio led by Ted Cavanagh of Dalhousie University, Chris Trumble is directing a design build studio delivering a 4000sf gridshell dining hall for the Ross Creek Centre for the Arts, near Canning, Nova Scotia.

Beth Weinstein, Associate Professor, has been appointed the new Master of Architecture Program Chair.  In relation to her research on Theater and Performance Design, Prof. Weinstein will participate in the July 2014 Performance Studies International Conference, at the Shanghai Theater Academy. With Dr Dorita Hannah (Aalto University, Finland) she will be spearheading PSi’s new Performance+Design working group and holding that group’s first panel session and workshop. In addition she will present a paper, “UN|DISCIPLINED,” on her research into interdisciplinary collaborations that push the boundaries of and critique disciplinary border, and in late July she will participate in the 2014 World Congress of the International Federation for Theater Research (IFTR-FIRT), held at the University of Warwick (July 28-August 1). Her presentation will address “Bringing Performativity into Architectural Pedagogy.”