The Department of Architecture celebrates its centennial with a reunion that will take place in Lawrence April 26-27, 2013. The centennial was launched last spring with the publication of Vitruvius on the Plains: Architectural thought at Kansas, 1912-2012 (The Lowell Press, 2012). Edited by Professor Stephen Grabow, the book offers a brief history of the school and its faculty. It contains a collection of thirty-seven essays written over the last century. The collection illustrates the way various schools of thought have converged at KU during the past 100 years.

Associate Professor Shannon Criss was recently elected to serve as the ACSA West Central Regional Director. She has also been selected to serve a two-year appointment as a University of Kansas Service Learning Faculty Fellow. She will work with faculty and staff to program new initiatives that broaden the understanding of engaged-community learning pedagogy within the university. She also recently presented a paper at the Biannual National Conference of the Design Communication Association at Oklahoma State University in October 2012 entitled  “Drawn Through: The Sectional Perspective as a Tool of Engagement.”

Students in Professor Kent Spreckelmeyer’s Health & Wellness capstone studio won a number of honors for their spring 2012 semester work. Sara Mae Martens, Maia Hoelzinger, Stephen Mayer, and Lindsay Slavin won an honorable mention for their submission to the AIAS/SAGE “Renewing Home” Competition.  Rana Elmghirbi won a third-place award in the Open Political Response category of the [Un]Restricted Access Competition, hosted by Architecture for Humanity. Dan DeWeese won first prize in the open-submission category of the ACSA Steel Competition.  Sara Mae Martens had her thesis project published in the November 2012 issue of the AIA/AAH Academy Journal, and Graham Sinclair had his thesis published in the October 2012 issue of Healthcare Design.

Four graduate students won an honorable mention in the ACSA’s Sustainable Lab Competition. The students, Ike Chinton, Joel Herman, Sara Lichti, and Taylor Maine were in a design studio taught by Associate Professor Paola Sanguinetti.  

The University of Kansas awarded Keith Diaz Moore, Associate Dean of Graduate Studies, one of five Strategic Initiative grants. This grant will support an interdisciplinary examination of the role architecture plays in resilient lifestyles for older adults.  This research involves colleagues in environmental studies, gerontology, nursing, occupational therapy, psychology, political science and urban planning. It is notable for placing architecture and design at the forefront of KU’s efforts to enhance its impact upon the world. 

Assistant Professor Chad Kraus and the students of the design-build Dirt Works Studio completed the Roth Trailhead, a 122-foot-long rammed earth wall and sun-shading canopy. The Roth Trailhead received an Honor Award from AIA Kansas and the Monsters of Design Best-in-Show award from the AIA Kansas City Young Architects Forum. In addition, during the summer of 2012, Professor Kraus presented and published two essays on rammed earth architecture as part of RESTAPIA 2012, the First International Conference on Rammed Earth Conservation in Valencia, Spain.

In June, Architecture Lecturer Bob Coffeen, received a Bose Educational Excellence Award. He also served as chair for the national meeting of the Acoustical Society of America held in Kansas City in October. 

NIls Gore, Associate Professor and Interim Chair, presented a paper at the ACSA Offsite conference entitled “Designing Better Portable Classrooms.” The paper described a design studio process that started with the observation that virtually every school district in the U.S. utilizes portable classroom units as a way of relieving overcrowding and as “short-term” solutions to changing enrollments, shifting demographics, and uncertain funding for capital improvement projects. 

Assistant professors Genevieve Baudoin and Bruce A. Johnson presented a paper entitled, “Off-Site / Off-World: Prefabrication for Extreme Conditions and Unpredictability,” at the ACSA Off-Site Conference in Philadelphia, PA. Their paper is a product of their overlapping research in the integration of systems, structure and site. It explores the techniques employed in parallel industries at the limits of prefabrication as a means of generating site-specific relationships in normative prefabrication.

Chester Dean Lecturer Frank Zilm along with Professors Kent Spreckelmeyer and Keith Diaz Moore, received an honorable mention for their 2012 NCARB Awards proposal. It was titled, “Integrating Specialized Knowledge in Architectural Curricula”. The awards are intended “to challenge conventional teaching pedagogy and create new curricular models for design studios. ”

In August, Studio 804 – led by Dan Rockhill, the Department of Architecture’s J.L. Constant Professor of Architecture – completed Galileo’s Pavilion, a highly sustainable classroom building, for Johnson County Community College, in Overland Park, Kansas. This fall, Studio 804 received two AIA Kansas Honor Awards for Galileo’s Pavilion and another project, the Center for Design Research, completed in 2011.

In early November, the American Institute of Architecture Students sponsored the Midwest Quad Conference. The event, themed “Building Communities” was held in Kansas City, Mo., and drew over 300 students from 13 states. Professor Dan Rockhill gave the keynote, address. The SADP’s Dean, John Gaunt, held a drawing workshop. Faculty members Genevieve Baudoin, Bruce Johnson, Chad Kraus, and Anne Patterson also gave presentations. Assistant Professor Kapila Silva is the KU AIAS faculty advisor.