Sara Caples of Caples Jefferson Architects has returned as Distinguished Visiting Professor this semester. Her firm just received a 2011 MASterworks Award for Best Restoration for the Queens Theater in the Park. Also joining us for the first time as Distinguished Visiting Professor is Ann Beha, whose eponymous firm, based in Boston, has built an impressive, highly awarded body of work of additions to historic buildings and settings.

Associate Professor Jacob Alspector’s most recent appearance on the internet radio program “Burning Down the House” covered the topics of the education of architects and their path toward licensure.

 Professor Hillary Brown, FAIA, has been named an executive committee member of the Education for Sustainability (EfS) Working Group. EfS is being convened for New York State institutions of higher education, in alignment with the goals set by the national Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE).

 ACSA Distinguished Professor Lance Jay Brown has been busy, serving as: a juror for the AIA NYS Honor Awards; advisor to the ENYA 2012 Competition “The Harlem Edge”; organizer of an AIANY panel discussion on “Freedom of Assembly: Public Space Today, reviewed in Curbed; and a panel for the NYC Department of Design and Construction on climate change and sea level rise. He will deliver the 2012 Charles H. Atherton Memorial Lecture at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC, in May.

 A drawing by Adjunct Professor Caleb Crawford was included in the exhibition “C I T Y” at the Bridge Gallery on Orchard Street.

 Adjunct Associate Professor Antonio Di Oronzo was awarded his first project in China, a 120,000 sq. ft., 5-star hotel in Shenzhen. His firm bluarch was also just awarded the design of a rehabilitation complex on a 40-acre site in Cleveland County, North Carolina. 

 Associate Professor Jeremy Edmiston lectured at Sydney University School of Architecture, Design and Planning as part of their 2011 speaker series. His project Urban Space Station was included in the show “A Civic Action: A Vision for Long Island City” at the Noguchi Museum. 

Associate Professor Edward Eigen participated in a panel discussion on the “Formless” hosted by The Storefront for Architecture. His presentation examined Louis Braille’s “relief writing” and the medico-religious history of spit (saliva). His biblio-geographical study “Where Time Never Stands Still: On the Losses of Mont-Saint-Michel,” appears in the most recent issue of Thresholds, the journal of the MIT School of Architecture. Interviewed by the architect Iñaki Ábalos, his views on “Ideal Beauty” can be found in the volume Jardin y Paisaje. At a Yale conference he presented the challengingly titled paper “Some Preliminary Notes on Historical Seismicity and Cognate Developments in Time Series Analysis with Specific, though Intermittent, Reference to the Antillean Island of La Española (Ayiti) and Cities and Towns of the Former Saint-Domingue: April 20, 1564–January 12, 2010 ( 21:53 GMT).” 

Professor Peter Gisolfi, Department Chair, has published a series of recent articles: “Collaboration and Compromise, A Misunderstood Aspect of the Design Process” and “Small-Scale Solution to Alternative Energy Resistance” in ArchNewsNow.com; “Sites Unseen” in American School & University (August 2011); “Effective Additions” in American School Board Journal (Sept 2011); and “The Architectural Jumble” in American School Board Journal (Oct 2011). His firm, Peter Gisolfi Associates, received two 2011 design awards from the AIA Westchester/Hudson Valley: a Citation for the Peekskill Middle School, and an Honor Award for Goodhue Memorial Hall at the Hackley School in Tarrytown. Goodhue Memorial Hall also received a 2011 Citation of Excellence from Learning by Design. 

Adjunct Lecturer Domingo Gonzalez delivered the keynote presentation “Historic Lighting: An Evolutionary Overview” at the 2012 annual meeting and symposium of the Association of Preservation Technology Northeast Chapter (APTNE). His firm’s award-winning Old DC City Hall / Courthouse restoration project was profiled in International New Landscape (Sept 2011).

Professor Toni Griffin delivered the lecture “Design and the Just City” at the University of Notre Dame. She contributed the opinion “Seizing an Opportunity” to a discussion on the New York Times Room for Debate blog, and participated in the Zoning the City conference sponsored by the New York City Department of City Planning, Harvard’s GSD and Baruch College. 

An article about the ambitious painted artwork project at Bronx Community College Library by Adjunct Lecturer Daniel Hauben was published in the Bronx Times (Febrary 3, 2012).

MArch Program Director and Assistant Professor Brad Horn authored a chapter in The Story of Design Education (Peking University Press, 2011). Berman Horn Studio’s Wooster Street Social Club project was published in New York Magazine.

A proposal for the Busan Opera House in South Korea by Adjunct Assistant Professor Vanessa Keith’s firm Studioteka was published in Mark magazine (Dec 2011/Jan 2012). Her firm’s project Nurse Bettie Bar is featured, with an interview, in Design Bureau (Mar/Apr 2012).

Assistant Professor Fran Leadon was profiled in CityLand, the monthly journal of the Center for New York City Law.

Model Shop Director Jorge Plazas and his firm MRK Lab, working with Illi.SITE.Studio, completed construction on the Franklyn Avenue Bar in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

Dean George Ranalli’s Saratoga Community Center is featured in John Hill’s Guide To Contemporary New York City Architecture (W. W. Norton Publishers, 2011). Dean Ranalli is also profiled in two online video segments: “Pratt Eye on Alumni: George Ranalli” features an interview about the Valentine Chair #2 and “Building Cities, Revisited,” by CUNY Media. Dean Ranalli’s fourth monograph In Situ is scheduled for release this summer. 

Recess, a restaurant project by Associate Professor Julio Salcedo-Fernandez’s firm scalar Architecture, appeared in the book Gusto: a Journey Through Culinary Design by Bridget Vranckx. Salcedo and scalar Architecture’s inflatable proposal for the Farnsworth Residence is included in the invited group exhibition “The Homestead Project” at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine, running through Sept 2012.

Associate Professor Catherine Seavitt Nordenson presented the paper “De-domestication and the Wild: The Carnivorous Wolf and the Feral Herbivore,” at the March 2012 Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture (CELA) Annual Meeting and spoke on “Soft Infrastructure for Climate Change Mitigation” in the City College Interdisciplinary Climate Change Seminar, organized by Prof. Marco Tedesco of the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences. She presented her work at the conference RISK at the University of Michigan and served as a juror for the 2012 AIA Honor Awards for Regional and Urban Design.

The design by Professor Achva Benzinberg Stein, FASLA, for the Moroccan courtyard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was prominently featured in an article in Landscape Architecture Magazine (Feb 2012). 

Associate Professor Elisabetta Terragni was invited to enter the competition “Minna-no-Ié / Home-for-All,” to design concepts for communal gathering places to benefit and encourage those affected by the Japan earthquake. The project was included in the exhibition “A see-worthy vessel” at the Toyo Ito Museum of Architecture in Imabari, Japan. Her Trento Tunnel Project is included in the “Re-Cycle” exhibit at the new MAXXI museum in Rome, where she also participated in the “Re-cycling Italy” design workshop and served as advisor to the 2012 Young Architects Program at MAXXI, in collaboration with MoMA PS1. Her collaborative project for a Panorama of the Cold War was published in Abitare (Nov 2011).

As an architectural photographer at Esto, Adjunct Associate Professor Albert Vecerka worked on two note-worthy projects at Lincoln Center: making still and time-lapse images of the IBM Centennial Exhibition designed by Ralph Appelbaum, and photographing the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center for the Rockwell Group. Also, he documented a house upstate for Weiss/Manfredi and is currently photographing their new Visitors Center at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden. A highlight of his recent work, however, was documentation of CCNY’s own Solar Roofpod.

Associate Professor Christian Volkmann, in collaboration with faculty from the engineering and economics departments, was awarded a $50,000 City SEED grant award from the Provost’s Office in conjunction with the Office of Research Administration for the interdisciplinary proposal “Daylight Reuse for Improving Energy Efficiency in Existing Buildings.”

Adjunct Associate Professor Barbara Wilks, FASLA, and her firm W Architecture and Landscape Architecture, in conjunction with Civitas, won a competition to design a new 21st century park for Calgary on an island in the Bow River which balances the river ecology with recreational needs. 

Associate Professor June Williamson received a $10,000 Independent Award from the New York State Council on the Arts to support publication of her manuscript Designing Suburban Futures. Travelling to the Pikes Peak region of Colorado, she participated pro-bono in a Sustainable Design Assessment Team (SDAT) for the AIA’s Community by Design program. As 2012 George Pearl Fellows at the University of New Mexico, she and Ellen Dunham-Jones delivered a public lecture and day-long “master class.” Her guest post “Retrofitting for Fecundity” was published on the BMW Guggenheim LAB|log. 

An apartment renovation, constructed in primary colored Lego, by Adjunct Associate Professor Suzan Wines’ firm I-Beam Design, was recently featured in New York Magazine (Feb 5, 2012) in the article “The 20-000 Brick Apartment.”

Adjunct Professor Bill Young has been appointed Wetland Scientist for Yellow Bar Island in Jamaica Bay. The project, designed and managed by the US Army Corps of Engineers, will take ten months to rebuild the island back to its historic dimensions. Sea level rise, pollution, and other phenomena have reduced this fifty acre island to almost half its size of one hundred years ago.