The City College of New York was awarded entry into the prestigious international student 2011 Solar Decathlon competition sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy. As Team New York, the school is among 19 student teams that designed, built, and operated an aesthetic, cost-effective solar-powered houses that were open to the public on the National Mall during the fall of 2011. The CCNY Team New York entry, named the Solar Roof Pod, was an urban focused design meant for mounting on available rooftops in urban settings.  Professor Christian Volkman and Professor Hillary Brown were the faculty Project Advisors.

The Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture was visited by the NAAB accreditation team in October 2011 and had a very positive exit report.

Brian Healy was appointed Distinguished Visiting Professor for fall 2011.  

Joseph Tanne of Resolution: 4 Architecture was appointed Distinguished Visiting Professor for fall 2011 and is teaching the inaugural March II studio.

Three illustrious professors have joined the Spitzer School of Architexture faculty full time: Associate Professor Edward Eigen, Professor Toni Griffin and Associate Professor Catherine Seavitt Nordenson. Eigen is an architectural historian focussing on the intersections of the human and natural sciences with architecture in the 19th century. Griffin was appointed to direct the J. Max Bond Architectural Center. Seavitt Nordenson, principal of Catherine Seavitt Studio, is coordinating the first year studio in the MLA Program.

Associate Professor Jacob Alspector was a guest speaker at the annual meeting of the city’s oldest neighborhood civic organization, the Washington Square Association. His lecture, “Grace Church School’s High School Division: Continuing Cooper Square’s Legacy,” addressed the architectural/historical/cultural context of his firm’s design, opening next fall.

 Professor Hillary Brown, FAIA, joined the Washington-based National Academies’ Board of Infrastructure & the Constructed Environment for a three-year term. In June, Brown organized a discussion/ presentation at the Museum of the City of New York of Team New York’s Solar Roofpod, with Associate Professor Christian Volkmann and PlaNYC officials.

 ACSA Distinguished Professor Lance Jay Brown, FAIA, was elected inaugural Chancellor of the ACSA College of Distinguished Professors. Brown also initiated and co-chairs the AIA NY Design for Risk and Reconstruction Committee and moderated its inaugural event “VisioNYC 2080: Towards a Risk-Resilient City.” He helped organize and spoke at the 2011 UN World Habitat Day event, “Cities and Climate Change,” held at the United Nations. Prof. Brown was appointed to the newly established Roger Williams University Community Partnerships Center Board of Advisors.

 Adjunct Assistant Professor Antonio Di Oronzo was a featured speaker at the Enadii Mexico 2011 conference in Mexico City. His work has been recently published in FRAME magazine (Netherlands), Beaux Arts magazine (Paris), in the books Contemporary Architects, edited by Frank Leung, and Teoria + Praxis, edited by Benjamin Molina.

 Adjunct Professor Alberto Foyo was awarded an honorary degree by the National University of Architecture and Civil Engineering in Ukraine. With Juhani Pallasmaa, he taught in the international summer program of the Compostela Institute in Spain. His students’ urban proposal, exploring ways of linking the medieval city of Santiago de Compostela with Peter Eisenman’s adjacent new City of Culture, was chosen by the mayor of the city for further development.

 Associate Professor Marta Gutman published “Construire la ville: la dimension mondiale dans l’urbanisation moderne,” in Perspective 3 (2010-11), journal of the French Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art. She spoke at the 75th anniversary celebration of the WPA pools, organized by the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation at Red Hook Pool in Brooklyn. She continues to edit Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum.

 Adjunct Lecturer Daniel Hauben is currently engaged in a two-year major commission to paint twenty-two paintings for a new Robert AM Stern library and instructional building at Bronx Community College.

 Adjunct Lecturer Adam Hayes’s firm Openshop has been retained to develop an architectural, graphic and digital framework for a new brand in China that will be an Authorized Premium Apple Retailer. Fifty stores are anticipated in the next two years.

 Adjunct Associate Professor Ali C. Hocek’s firm Think OffSite LLC is featured in “Thinking Outside of the Box,” in Architecture Leaders Today magazine (Sept/Oct 2011). 

 MLA Program Director Denise Hoffman Brandt coedited the Fall 2011 issue of SLUM Lab magazine, themed “Last Round Ecologies,” with Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner. The issue’s content covers an array of projects from around the world that reveal facets of the destructive capacity of contemporary city-making and ideas for alternative futures. SSA faculty contributors include Catherine Seavitt Nordenson, Elisabetta Terragni, and Michael Sorkin.

 Adjunct Assistant Professor David Judelson‘s architectural scale sculpture Shelter X-Posed received the curator’s award for best piece in an exhibition of outdoor contemporary sculpture at Chesterwood, a sculpture park in western Massachusetts.

 Adjunct Assistant Professor Vanessa Keith edited the book Kingston Harbour: Development Transects, published by the Urban Design Program of Columbia University. The book charts possible directions for development in downtown Kingston, Jamaica.

 Adjunct Assistant Professor Kenneth Petrocca obtained the Certificates of Occupancy for the James Weldon Johnson Children’s Center and Community Center and the Polo Grounds Community Center. These 20,000 sq. ft. facilities will serve residents by providing child care, senior services, after school programs, basketball tournaments and educational programs.

 Associate Professor Dominick R. Pilla published the article “An Affordable and Sustainable Building Design in New York City” in STRUCTURE Magazine (Sept. 2011), featuring his firm’s structural design of the Fox Point Residence in the Bronx and highlighting the benefits of using precast concrete planks and steel in the building design.

 Dean George Ranalli’s Saratoga Community Center was featured in the article “Oasis in Limestone and Brick” in Harvard Magazine (Sept./Oct. 2011). The project received a Design Award from the Pennsylvania Council Society of American Registered Architects. The Valentine #2 Chair, designed by Dean Ranalli, is currently on view in the exhibit “Highlights of Modern Design from 1900 to the Present, Part II” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The show features work from the Museum’s permanent collection of 20th Century Architecture and Design.

 Associate Professor Catherine Seavitt Nordenson received the President’s Citation for Outstanding Alumni Achievement in Architecture at The Cooper Union’s 152nd Commencement in May 2011.

Her essay “High Stakes: Soft Infrastructure for the Rising Seas” appears in the Museum of Modern Art’s catalog Rising Currents, for the 2010 show of the same name.

 Adjunct Professor Markus Schulte is a structural engineer and principal with Arup. His work for the Hypar Pavilion at Lincoln Center received a 2011 National Award for structural engineering excellence from the American Institute of Steel Construction (AISC).

 Distinguished Professor Michael Sorkin recently published All Over the Map (Verso, 2012), his 16th book on architecture and urbanism, and it is getting excellent reviews. The Michael Sorkin Studio won first place in a competition to design the renewal of a thirty-mile stretch of the Weihe River and a major urban expansion in Xi’an, China. The Studio’s project for 3,900 units of housing in the Xiging District of Tianjin, China, was featured in Architectural Review. Terreform, the non-profit Sorkin directs, has just published By The City/For The City, a project of the Institute for Urban Design, of which Sorkin is President, under its new imprint, Multi-Story Books.

 Professor Achva Benzinberg Stein, FASLA, received the City College of New York Outstanding Teaching Award for 2011, an award honoring her commitment to her students and to her field, based on nomination statements submitted by students and colleagues in the School. A plaque bearing her name will be hung in the NAC Rotunda. She becomes a member of the Outstanding Teaching and Mentoring Award Selection Committee for three years. Prof. Stein is currently working on a Master Plan for the Green Belt of the city of Auroville in South India, founded in 1968 as a World City, and recognized as such by both the Government of India and UNESCO. Her design for the Moroccan Court at the Metropolitan Museum opened in November as part of the New Galleries for the Art of the Arab Lands, Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and Later South Asia.

 Associate Professor Elisabetta Terragni’s Trento Tunnel project was selected for the Smart Future Minds Exhibition/Competition. Along with civil and military authorities in Albania, she is working on a large scale project to transform a former military base in Porto Palermo into a Cold War Museum. She presented the project at Festarch 2011: “Città e Anticittà / City and Anti-city” in Perugia, Italy, organized by Abitare magazine.

 Adjunct Professor Barbara Wilks, FASLA, published the article “Marine Streets” in Ecological Restoration magazine (Sept. 2011). She spoke at the Pecha Kucha New York #12 event “Dimensions of Urban Design,” as part of Urban Design Week. Her firm W Architecture and Landscape Architecture completed phase one of “The Edge” waterfront park in Williamsburg.

 Associate Professor June Williamson organized an interactive workshop on retrofitting suburbia and the panel “Sprawl: Past, Present, Future” for the BMW Guggenheim Lab, a temporary space on East Houston Street, designed by Atelier Bow-Wow. She delivered public lectures on her research at Cornell and the University of Michigan.