2016 ACSA Representatives on NAAB Visiting Team Roster Deadline: February 25, 2015
The ACSA Board of Directors seeks nominees for 2016 ACSA representatives on the National Architectural Accrediting Board (NAAB) school visitation team roster member for a term of four years. The final selection of faculty members participating in the accrediting process will be made by NAAB.
Nominating Procedure
Members of ACSA schools shall be nominated annually by the ACSA Board of Directors for inclusion on a roster of members available to serve on visiting teams for a term of four years.
Proposals for nomination shall be solicited from the membership via ACSA News. Proposals must include a 2-page curriculum vitae (please include any accreditation experience).
The ACSA Nominations Committee shall examine dossiers submitted and recommend to the board candidates for inclusion on visitation team rosters.
Nominee Qualifications
The candidate should demonstrate:
Reasonable length and breadth of full-time teaching experience;
A record of acknowledged scholarship or professional work;
Administrative experience; and
An association with several different schools.
Each candidate will be assessed on personal merit, and may not answer completely to all these criteria; however, a nominee must be a full-time faculty member in an accredited architectural program (including faculty on sabbatical or on temporary leave of absence.)
ACSA Nominee Selection Candidates for NAAB team members shall be selected to represent geographic distribution of ACSA regional groupings. The number of candidates submitted to NAAB will be limited in order to increase the likelihood of their timely selection by NAAB for service.
Description of Team and Visit Pending acceptance of the Architectural Program Report (APR), a team is selected to visit the school. The site visit is intended to validate and supplement the school’s APR through direct observation. During the visit, the team evaluates the school and its architecture programs through a process of both structured and unstructured interactions. The visit is intended to allow NAAB to develop an in-depth assessment of the school and its programs, and to consider the tangible aspects of the school’s nature. It also identifies concerns that were not effectively communicated in the APR.
The visit is not independent of the other parts of the accreditation process. The visiting team submits a report to NAAB; NAAB then makes a decision regarding accreditation based on the school’s documentation, the team report, and other communications.
Team Selection The visiting team consists of a chairperson and members selected from a roster of candidates submitted to NAAB by NCARB, ACSA, the AIA, and AIAS. Each of these organizations is invited to update its roster annually by providing resumes of prospective team members.
A team generally consists of four members, one each from ACSA, NCARB, AIA, and AIAS. NAAB selects the team and submits the list to the school to be visited. The school may question the appointment of members where a conflict of interest arises. The selection of the chairperson is at the discretion of NAAB. The board will consider all challenges. For the purposes of a challenge, conflict of interest may be cited if:
The nominee comes from the same geographic area and is affiliated with a rival institution;
The nominee has had a previous affiliation with the institution;
The school can demonstrate that the nominee is not competent to evaluate the program.
NAAB tends to rely on experienced team members in order to maintain the quality level of its visits and reports, and to comply with COPA and U.S. Department of Education guidelines. Each team member shall have had previous visit experience, either as a team member or observer, or shall be required to attend a training/briefing session at the ACSA Administrators Conference or ACSA Annual Meeting.
Nominations Deadline and Calendar The deadline for receipt of letters of nomination, including a 2-page curriculum vitae (please include any accreditation experience), is February 25, 2015. E-mail nomination preferred; please send all nomination information to eellis@acsa-arch.org. ACSA will notify those nominees whose names will be forwarded to NAAB by May 2015. ACSA nominees selected to participate on a visiting team will be required to complete and submit a standard NAAB Visiting Team Nomination form. NAAB will issue the roster of faculty members selected for 2015-2016 team visits in November 2015.
Nominations should be sent to: ACSA, Board Nominations 1735 New York Avenue, NW Washington, DC 20006 Email: eellis@acsa-arch.org
The Department of Architecture welcomes Robert Alexander to join the faculty as an Assistant Professor Design and Digital Instruction. Robert Alexander, principal of BobCat Studio received his bachelor’s degree in Architecture from Cal Poly Pomona in 2001. In 2005 he received his Masters in Architecture from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. In addition to his professional experience on a wide variety of projects with the architecture firms Rafael Vinoly Architects, Behnisch Architekten, and Daly Genik. In 2008, Mr. Alexander won the Cavin Fellowship and received the Boston Society of Architect’s Rotch Scholarship in 2013, which started his current research on the urban effects of large-scale incomplete building projects in Europe.
Associate Professor and Chair, Sarah Lorenzen recently co-curated the widely acclaimed Competing Utopias exhibit at the Neutra VDL House
Professors Lauren Weiss Bricker and Luis Hoyos have contributed articles to the forthcoming catalog Barton Myers: Works of Architecture and Urbanism, which accompanies an exhibition of the same name on view at the Art, Architecture & Design Museum, UCSB from September 12-December 12, 2014. Professor Bricker has also written “Civic and Educational ‘Architecture As Environmental Expression,’” which will be included in the catalog accompanying the exhibition An Eloquent Modernist: E. Stewart Williams, Architect, the inaugural exhibition of the Palm Springs Art Museum Architecture and Design Center, Edwards Harris Pavilion; the exhibition November 9, 2014-February 22, 2015.
Professor Hofu Wu, recently presented “Outside Forces – Academic Perspective” to showcase the status of the Cal Poly Pomona Healthcare Initiative from the students innovative researches and designs at the American College of Healthcare Architects (ACHA) California Health facility Forum in Oakland, CA.
Associate Professor Pablo La Roche recently published an article in the journal Energy and Buildings entitled Comfort and Energy in Smart Green Roofs. He also presented papers at three recent conferences including the California Higher Education Sustainability Conference, and two papers the World Sustainable Building Conference SB14. He has presented eight recent lectures including, the American Solar Energy Society National Conference ASES 2014, the Society of Building Science Educators Annual Retreat, the Instituto de Ciencias de la Construcción Eduardo Torroja, Madrid, the Practica y Enseñanza de la Arquitectura en California International Workshop Sustainability in the Built Environment, Seville, Spain, and the Façade Tectonics Conference at the University of Southern California. He is the current President of SBSE, the Society of Building Science Educators.
Associate Professor Michael Fox recently presented a paper at the 2014 ACADIA, (Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture) conference on the Eco-29 project which is a fully interactive kinetic event Hall in Israel. He also wrote the preface to the conference proceedings and is the current president of the Organization. He recently authored a chapter in the book “Building Dynamics”, by Routledge Press, edited by Branko Kolarevic and Vera Parlac. He also contributed to the book, “Space Architecture: The New Frontier for Design Research” edited by Neil Leach,by AD. He authored a chapter in the journal PAJ 109 on Performance and Architecture, edited by Chris Perry and Catheryn Dwyre.
Associate Professor Juintow Lin recently led an attempt to revitalize the California State Parks system, where 12 Cal Poly Pomona graduate architecture students took on the challenge of redesigning a modern cabin and succeeded. The California Parks Forward Commission is making an effort to reach out to students for creative and innovative ideas, as younger generations are not visiting state parks. The students began their project in spring 2014. The timing was just right for the project because of available funding. The Resources Legacy Fund, a consortium of major foundations in California, funded the project. The 150-square-foot cabin is made from recycled and prefabricated elements. It includes a full-sized bed, a bunk bed, and a bench that can accommodate four people. High triangular windows, French doors, and a sloped roof allows for maximum light to enter the cabin. The first prototype was constructed in 4 days in a factory in Phoenix AZ, by CAVCO.
Lecturer Barry Milofsky was appointed by Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti to the Cultural Heritage Commission of the City of Los Angeles, the five-member commission that considers nominations of sites as City Historic-Cultural Monuments (designated City landmarks) and reviews proposed project work affecting more than 1000 existing Historic-Cultural Monuments. The Commission also serves as the city’s primary forum for the discussion of historic preservation policy. Recommendations of the Cultural Heritage Commission are forwarded to the City Council for their final action. The Cultural Heritage Ordinance also gives the Commission the authority to temporarily delay alteration or demolition of historically significant structures until a proper review can be completed.
Lecturer Katrin Terstegen is a Designer and Project Manager with Johnston Marklee & Associates in Los Angeles, where she recently completed “Various Small Fires”, an art gallery in Hollywood, as well as the “Vault House” in Oxnard.
Lecturer Jose Herrasti’s firm MUTUO is currently working on a 5 acre park in the Coachella Valley in collaboration with KDI, a nonprofit dedicated to the creation of low cost, high impact environments that improve the physical, economic, and social quality of life of under-served communities. MUTUO has also been working with a developer in El Paso, TX to transform an area of dilapidated buildings into a thriving community. They are also beginning construction of a three single family development in the Hollywood Hills and a residence in Cordoba, Mexico.
Architecture/Machine. Programs, processes, and performances
Conference 30/31 January 2015 ETH Zurich
From the mid-eighteenth century through to the present day, architecture has been repeatedly imagined, defined or designed as a machine. While a strongly deterministic reading – as in “machine for living”– has held sway ever since the term was coined in the 1920s, usage of the machine concept actually needs to be understood in a much broader sense. Describing architecture as a machine has in various epochs and in the light of changing technologies always also implied paying attention to its performative properties in the context of certain processes and procedures, ranging from design to construction and use. Such performative properties may manifest themselves in spatial dimensions or contexts, in technical apparatus, or in other physical conditions. What distinguishes the concept of architecture-as-machine – considered from a genealogical perspective and independently of its various semantic nuances – is that the respective requirements of any architectural program can be individually thematized and hence also individually planned. The ‘machinic’ of the architecture/machine accordingly implies not merely a context of production or a normative mechanism but, primarily and fundamentally, a relationship between the architectural object and the processes it involves.
The conference examines the history of the architecture/machine from the mid-eighteenth century to the present day in the light of the above. It focuses not necessarily on literal machine metaphors but generally on historical instances of discursive or material articulation that formulate a relationship between architecture and machines. The conference contributions will be pursuing this theme through analyses of concrete buildings, spaces, devices, or apparatus, respectively the ways in which these are represented or described.
PROGRAM
FRIDAY, 30 JANUARY 2015
09:00 Welcome & Coffee
09:30-10:00 Laurent Stalder: Introduction
Panel 1: Flow Chair: Martino Stierli
10:00-10:30 Moritz Gleich: Équipements 10:30-11:00 Julian Jachmann: Water/Space 11:00-11:30 Dustin R. Valen: Indoor Environments 11:30-12:00 Discussion
12.00-14:00 Lunch Break
Panel 2: (Dis-)Connection Chair: Martino Stierli
14:00-14:30 Daniel Gethmann: Walls 14:30-15:00 John Harwood: Wires 15:00-15:30 Michael Osman: Steel 15:30-16:00 Discussion
16:00-16:30 Coffee Break
Panel 3: Delegation Chair: Ita Heinze-Greenberg
16:30-17:00 Reinhold Martin: Personhood 17:00-17:30 Martin Bressani: Prothèse 17:30-18:00 Monika Dommann: Trading Pit 18:00-18:30 Discussion
Organisation: Department of Architecture Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture Chair for the Theory of Architecture Dr. Laurent Stalder, Moritz Gleich
Alpha Rho Chi (APX) is a national co-ed fraternity for architecture and allied arts. The Andronicus Chapter of Alpha Rho at the University of Southern California has been a fixture of the school from the earliest days of the founding of the School of Architecture. The USC Chapter of Alpha Rho Chi has won many national awards, and the membership represents some of the best students at USC. Each year, the fraternity welcomes new incoming students and hosts educational sessions to help them navigate the program. The Alpha Rho Chi chapter house is a registered landmark in Los Angeles (see photo).
In December 2014, Professor Diane Ghirardo’s edited volume on Aldo Rossi’s Town Hall at Borgoricco was published and launched in the Council Room of the Town Hall. The book is published in both English and Italian, with the title “Aldo Rossi. Il Municipio e Centro Civico a Borgoricco.” Professor Ghirardo was also interviewed by the Italian State Television network, RAI, for a documentary on Lucrezia Borgia, her letters and land reclamation activities.
Prof. Kyle Konis, Ph.D, AIA was recently awarded a $150,000 Energy Efficiency Small Grant (EISG) from the California Energy Commission for an 18-month research and development project entitled: “The Occupant Mobile Gateway.” The California Energy Commission supports academic and industry research that serves the public interest for energy efficiency and environmental quality. The O.M.G. project received the highest-ranking in technical review among all proposals. More details will be posted on the CEC website and here: http://arch.usc.edu/faculty/kkonis
Amy Murphy, Associate Professor, presented her current research on the relationship between contemporary post-apocalytpic cinematic narratives and future urban life at the “New Visions. Cinema and Cinematic Practices in Times of Radical Urban Transformation“ workshop held at the Center for Metropolitan Studies in Berlin Germany, December 2014.
In October and November USC School of Architecture faculty Victor Regnier and Charles Lagreco visited sites in Portugal and Spain to study urban development and housing in the region as part of Professor Regniers year-long Fulbright leave in Portugal.
Hraztan Zeitlian, AIA, LEED BD+C, NCARB, received the Presidential Citation Award from the American Institute of Architects California Council in October 2014. “You have helped confirm the Architect’s Role and responsibility to society on a larger scale”, the Citation read in part. Hraztan Zeitlian directed the design of the Hacienda Heights Community Center at DLR. The Center had a very successful opening in November 2014 and was praised in the San Gabriel Valley Tribune.
Aroussiak Gabrielian was an invited participant in a cinematic world-building workshop to envision the Downtown Los Angeles Innovation Corridor organized by the USC Annenberg Innovation Lab.
Prof. G. Goetz Schierle is collecting data for his joint venture book: Tensile Structures
Graeme M. Morland, Assoc Professor, is currently preparing a major 50 year retrospective of Architectural drawings and sketches, undertaken from 1965, at the Glasgow School of art, until 2015 BC, (before computer). This exhibit will be at the USC school of Architecture Gallery, Feb 1-15.
Geoffrey von Oeyen’s gallery interview and slide lecture from the 2014 Architectural League Prize has been published on the League website: http://archleague.org/2014/10/geoffrey-von-oeyen-design/. During a residency fellowship to The MacDowell Colony in December 2014 and January 2015, von Oeyen will pursue writings and drawings following his USC School of Architecture event Performative Composites: Sailing Architecture.
Dr. Joon-Ho Choi, Assistant Professor of Building Science in Architecture attended the Defense Energy Summit, held in Austin, TX, and presented one of his research projects, entitled “Bio-Sensing Adaptive Thermal & Lighting System Controls in the Built Environment.” In addition, a research paper, as a
part of the research, titled “Investigation of the Potential Use of Human Eye Pupil Sizes to Estimate Visual Sensations in the Workplace Environment,” has been accepted and will be officially published in December 2014. Another research, “Climate-Responsive Evidence-Based Green Roof Design Decision Support for the U.S. Climate” has been selected to receive a research grant from the Roof Construction Institute Foundation, and the proposed research will be conducted with a financial support for one year in 2015.
The Board of Directors of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) voted today for Ehrlich Architects to receive the 2015 AIA Architecture Firm Award. The firm will be honored at the 2015 AIA National Convention in Atlanta. Ehrlich Architects is renowned for fluidly melding classic California Modernist style with multicultural and vernacular design elements by including marginalized design languages and traditions. The AIA Architecture Firm Award, given annually, is the highest honor the AIA bestows on an architecture firm and recognizes a practice that consistently has produced distinguished architecture for at least 10 years. The work of Ehrlich Architects covers a wide variety of program types (residential, commercial, institutional, educational) and uses a much richer palette of materials and textures than the typical California Modernist-influenced firm. However, they are most distinguished by the subtle and complex way they blend Modernist and multicultural design elements. Before founding his Los Angeles-based firm in 1979, visiting professor Steven Ehrlich, FAIA, spent time working with the Peace Corps in Africa. There Ehrlich gained an appreciation for simple, natural materials and vernacular solutions to energy, sustainability, and building performance challenges. Back in Southern California, Ehrlich found opportunities to renovate properties designed by architects high up in the California Modernist canon (like Richard Neutra, FAIA), which helped him to develop a confident, loose-limbed, but still traditional Modernist aesthetic. But his experiences in Africa, with building traditions created years before Modernism demanded a total rupture with the past, pushed him to develop an architecture that was more inclusive, responsible, and responsive than pure Modernism.
The City of Los Angeles and the USGS have published a report, “Resilience by Design,” this week describing a broad range of actions the city should take to improve its seismic resilience. Assistant Professor Anders Carlson was on the Technical Task Force working directly with Dr. Lucy Jones on the year-long study.
Lorcan O’Herlihy, FAIA, will be a featured participant in an exhibition opening January 31st at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, PA, titled “Sketch to Structure.” The museum has acquired a selection of O’Herlihy’s sketches and models and, in conjunction with the show, Lorcan will be lecturing and hosting an event at Carnegie Mellon University in March 2015.
Nefeli Chatzimina will be organizing and teaching the international X|A Advanced Architectural Design Workshop, ‘X|Pixelism’ , from 15th – 23rd of December 2014 at the Benaki Museum in Athens, Greece.
Adjunct Associate Professor Eric Haas presented DSH // architecture’s rehabilitation of R.M. Schindler’s Bubeshko Apartments at the Getty Center in December, as part of the Getty Conservation Institute’s Conserving Modern Architecture Initiative.
Olivier Touraine reports that the USC school of Architecture Spring program in Italy is invited by the prestigious MaXXi museum to pair with Roma 3 school of architecture in a research project “Roma 20-25”. 20 teams from the worlds’ most prestigious schools of architecture will be pairing with 20 Italian teams. The city of Rome will supervise the projects addressing urban redevelopments in the extended suburbs of the capital city. The 20 projects, each addressing a specific grid area, will be exhibited at the MaXXi museum in Fall 2015.
Sofia Borges, lecturer, published the article “Stromae Navigates the Unnavigable” in the latest issue of Mark Magazine and “Designing Desire” in Amarello Magazine. She released two new books in August. Hide and Seek:The Architecture of Cabins and Hide-Outs and Building Better: Sustainable Architecture for Family Homes are now available on Amazon and bookstores worldwide. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/09/25/hidden-homes-gestalten-book_n_5846062.html?1411664026
Ted Bosley reports that the School of Architecture has received a $100,000 grant from the Ralph M. Parsons Foundation to create a new “contemplative” garden at the Gamble House. Isabelle Greene, FASLA, granddaughter of architect Henry Mather Greene, has designed the proposed garden to resonate with the Gambles’ original cutting garden in the same area, and to give today’s visitors a place to rest and appreciate views of the house. Installation is expected to begin in early 2015.
James Steele was a presenter at the 4 th Annual Cultural Heritage Forum in Abha, Saudi Arabia, from Dec. 8th through 12, as well as presenting and acting as a Session Chair at the IASTE Conference ” Whose Tradition” in Kuala Lumpur Malaysia from Dec.14- 17, 2014. Steele has also been invited to present a paper at The Architectural Forum of Southwest China in Chengdu, January 8-12 2015.
In October Ken Breisch was a speaker at the symposium, “Bakersfield Built: 1930s Architecture,” which was sponsored by the School of Arts and Humanities, California State University, Bakersfield, as part of their celebration of the 75th anniversary of the publication of John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath.
Assistant Professor Alvin Huang’s Pure Tension Pavilion, a portable solar-powered pavilion for the Volvo V60 electric car made it’s Chinese debut at the Guangzhou Auto Show in November. Huang also gave a lecture on his recent work at the South China University of Technology in Guanzhou. Huang has also recently been announced as a juror for two international awards – the 2014 World Architecture News Colour in Architecture Award, and the ArchDaily + IIDEX Canada Virtual Spaces Design Competition.
Esther Margulies, Lecturer in the Landscape Architecture program has launched a new firm known as The Office of the Designed Landscape. She was recently appointed to the West Los Angeles Area Planning Commission and collaborated on The River Art Project, an LA 2050 proposal.
Professor Victor Regnier has received a Fulbright Award to teach and conduct research in the architecture graduate program of the Catholic University in Portugal. He will be giving five topical lectures in the Fall and conducting a studio class in the Spring centered on purpose-built housing for older people. This summer he completed a 74-page monograph entitled “Motion Picture Television Fund Apartment for Life” that chronicles the work of his Spring 2014 402/605 studio in designing a mixed-use, 82-unit housing project for a 3.0 acre site on their Woodland Hills campus–a free pdf is available on request (regnier@usc.edu).
Scott Uriu along with his business partner Herwig Baumgartner have been chosen as one of the 2014-2015 COLA Master Artist Fellowship – Cultural Grant Artists for the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs. The prestigious City of Los Angeles (C.O.L.A.) Fellowships honor a selection of the best of Los Angeles contemporary arts. These awards allow very accomplished artists to focus on creating a new work to be exhibited at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery in May of 2015. Uriu and Baumgartner have been chosen as one of the 2014-2015 COLA Master Artist Fellowship – Cultural Grant Artists for the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs. The prestigious City of Los Angeles (C.O.L.A.) Fellowships honor a selection of the best of Los Angeles contemporary arts. These awards allow very accomplished artists to focus on creating a new work to be exhibited at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery in May of 2015. Uriu has been selected to be one of the speakers at the TxA Emerging Design + Technology Conference where Baumgartner+Uriu will make a presentation on Responsive Architectural Environments in Houston TEXAS. Baumgartner+Uriu’s installation Apertures uses sensors and sound feedback loops to immerse the visitor in his or her own biorhythms. The TxA Emerging Design + Technology conference Nov7th-8th brings experimental research and exploration among academics and practitioners to a broad audience of designers, practicing architects, construction industry executives, building products manufacturers, students, and other researchers.
USC faculty member Laurel Consuelo Broughton (WELCOMEPROJECTS) presented work and participated in a symposium at Princeton SOA on November 15, 2014, titled “F_i_r_m_n_e_s_s_,__C_o_m_m_o_d_i_t_y_,_ & Delight,” along with Mark Foster Gage (Mark Foster Gage + Associates), Andrew Kovacs (Archive of Affinities), Jimenez Lai (Bureau Spectacular), and Michael Loverich (Bittertang). On November 1st, 2014 Broughton’s project in collaboration with Andrew Kovacs, Gallery Attachment (www.galleryattachment.com) opened in Chinatown in Los Angeles with a corresponding show of drawings, As Builts at Jai and Jai Gallery. In October she released The Miranda, a collaboration with writer, director, and artist Miranda July with a short film that launched on Vogue.com. As well throughout the fall, Laurel was also featured in the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design’s Out There Doing It which invites young architects to present their work in a series of events and discussions.
The University of Southern California School of Architecture announces the appointment of Kelly Shannon as Director of the Master of Landscape Architecture Program and Landscape Architecture Discipline Head, effective January 1, 2015. She joins the USC faculty as Professor of Architecture. Dr. Shannon is currently Professor of Landscape Architecture in the Institute of Urbanism and Landscape of the Oslo School of Architecture. She also holds a part-time appointment as Professor of Urbanism, Faculty of Engineering, Department of Architecture at KU Leuven. “The landscape program at the USC School of Architecture has grown steadily, and with a new director as accomplished as Kelly Shannon, the program is poised for global impact in cross-disciplinary research and cross-territorial practice,” said Dean Qingyun Ma. The USC landscape architecture program has a longstanding commitment to urban and environmental discourse. Its impact has expanded with the leadership of retired director Robert Harris and through cross_-disciplinary connections with the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy and the Spatial Sciences Institute of the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. The Master of Landscape Architecture First Professional Curriculum and Advanced Standing Curriculum are accredited by the Landscape Architectural Accreditation Board.
USC Landscape Architecture student work proposing new uses for the Santa Monica Airport will be exhibited at the Writers Boot Camp Gallery, Bergamot Station, on Thursday, October 23, 6-9 pm. “Reimagining Santa Monica Airport – Part 1” features work from Christopher Sison, Chen Liu, Zeek Magallanes, and Yongdan Chunyu, all students from a USC graduate landscape architecture studio taught by Aroussiak Gabrielian. The exhibit is sponsored by Airport2Park, a coalition supporting the creation of a park on the land that is currently the Santa Monica Airport. First used informally as a landing strip by pilots flying WWI biplanes, the 227-acre site was the home of the Douglas Aircraft Company, and in the 1970s, it became a general aviation airport, currently serving about 300 people daily who fly privately. As the airport is surrounded on all sides by residential areas, noise and air pollution have long been local community issues. ‘’What is amazing about getting students involved in projects that address sites currently in transition, like the airport site, is the capacity of their visions to affect policy change, as well as provide advocacy of worthwhile community efforts through design speculation,” said Gabrielian.
Article submitted by Jesse Vestermark, Architecture and Environmental Design Librarian, California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo
Barbara Opar and Barret Havens, column editors
Editor’s note: The article which follows discusses a challenging situation for faculty in the design disciplines and librarians alike: how to gear students in large introductory classes up for doing college-level research during a brief, one-time library instruction session. Our colleague Jesse Vestermark shares some strategies for maximizing the impact of these “one-shot” scenarios.
Massive open online courses (MOOCs) have received a lot of attention in the last few years, but what about large, in-person “one-shot” sessions? These are instructional scenarios where a professional–in our case, librarian–is given the one-time opportunity to address a large introductory course. Obviously, the larger the course, the more students a librarian can reach in one fell swoop, so there is much to be gained by carefully planning for the greatest impact.
As the librarian for the College of Architecture and Environmental Design at California Polytechnic State University-San Luis Obispo, I have become something of a trial-by-fire veteran of this scenario, co-designing the course’s research assignments for our pass/fail Introduction to Environmental Design (EDES 101) course, which has ballooned from 300 students in 2011 to over 400 last fall. Each year a different professor has taught the course and driven the assignment’s primary content, while I steered it in a direction that would provide a foundation for research fundamentals.
The first year, we devised what was easily the most complicated assignment, yet ironically towards the simplest end: to find a single book in the library on the topic of their interest. However, for fear of bottlenecking on certain topics, authors, architects or books, the professor suggested a clever matrix puzzle for groups of 5 to solve by limiting their topic to a combination of discipline and first initial.
Example of a completed matrix puzzle using randomly chosen initials. Concept by Thomas Jones.
Once they identified a book on their topic, they weren’t required to check it out–simply photograph it sitting in the stacks. This made for an easy deliverable, but explaining the concept behind the matrix and shepherding 300 students into groups of five required a lot of work for the simple outcome of familiarizing them with the library’s organization.
In 2012, we went interactive, focused more on critical thinking, and expanded my participation to two class meetings, giving us the opportunity to expand in depth. The first time I addressed the students, we covered the nuts and bolts of our discovery system–the recent makeover of our catalog that allowed them to find books and articles. They were again allowed to pick their topic, but instead of a photo of a single book in the stacks, the professor had them find and cite nine sources: three books, three articles, and three websites.
The instructor had also required the students to purchase remote voting devices commonly called “clickers” to allow the students to weigh in, multiple-choice-style, on class topics. For the second session, students were asked use the clickers to rate various types of sources or source characteristics on a “spectrum of reliability” both in their own experience and along with a librarian/professor “live” discussion of academic resources such as trade articles, peer-reviewed articles and architecture firm websites. This was a crucial step towards imparting the lifelong skill of critically evaluating information sources.
Visual representation of the results of the “spectrum of reliability” interactive exercise.
Last year, with a third completely different assignment, we were able to ramp up the depth of real-world source evaluation even as I was again limited to one class visit. This time, students were asked to role-play and engage as a team in local mock-planning projects, representing either the city, the public, expert consultants or the design team. I took the opportunity to focus most of the hour on explaining the clues, characteristics of and differences between the range of reliable sources their role-playing might lead them to encounter, including academic, professional, government documents as well as free information found via search engines. For example, the city might look at the general plans of other, similar cities, consultants may study more of the peer-reviewed literature, the public might start with free, web-based information and the design team may look at a little of everything. I incorporated diagrams and images to illustrate universal concepts such as “stakes” and “biases” as they relate to the professions. To illustrate stakes, I compiled the images on an “information timeline” using photos to illustrate that immediate Google results are adequate for settling pop culture debates but as the responsibilities and consequences of one’s professional life increase, so should the quality of the resources one consults. For biases, I used the classic blind men and the elephant story.
Digitized version of original woodcut print “Blind Monks Examining an Elephant” by Hanabusa Itch_ available from the Library of Congress with “no known restrictions on publication in the U.S.”
Instead of having the students use clickers to vote on the relative reliability of potential sources, I used mobile polling software, PollEverywhere, for which our library subscribes to a single higher-ed account that allows up to 400 respondents and instructor moderation. Using PollEverywhere, I essentially gave them a three-question pretest and posttest assessment on appropriate source choices for different research scenarios. I gave the students one of ten source choices, and the scenarios varied from seeking an at-a-glance overview on a topic to needing information that had been reviewed by experts. The results suggest they listened and took my professional advice to heart. For example, when asked the “best place to get detailedinformation that has been subject to expert editorial review” and given ten options, only about 35% of the 243 respondents chose “peer-reviewed publications” the first time around. When asked the same question at the end of the class, exactly two-thirds of the 159 respondents chose “peer-reviewed publications.”
PRE-LECTURE:
POST-LECTURE:
Note from the reduced number of respondents that I found that when you request voluntary participation, their interest in voting wanes over the course of an early-morning hour.
Some of the keys to success in the evolution of these collaborative lessons were pretty straightforward, but not necessarily easy to execute with little face-to-face time and lots of students. My primary advice is to plan ahead, collaborate, simplify, be flexible, interact with the audience, visualize, and practicalize. I would also encourage a combination of humor, passion and variety while maintaining your professionality. We all have strengths and weaknesses on those fronts, but above all, I’ve found that if I treat the material with earnestness, the students respond in kind.
The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) is one of the organizations promoting Open Access Week, which takes place from October 20th through October 26th this year. They want us to be excited about having free and unfettered access to articles from thousands of scholarly periodicals. And I am! Who, among architecture librarians and architecture faculty wouldn’t be? But I’m also overwhelmed, because as librarians and faculty, it is our job to make sure that we’re guiding students to quality information (and using quality information ourselves!). And, though by most definitions, open access means online access to scholarly research, it isn’t always easy to determine whether a free online periodical is scholarly. This problem is compounded by the sheer volume of free periodicals out there, some of which would like to be perceived as scholarly, yet are not scholarly at all.
You may have encountered that sheer volume of periodicals, including some unfamiliar or questionable titles, as you have navigated the online resources of your academic library (or even mine). Even though we have the best of intentions, librarians are partly to blame for this. In order to provide access to as many periodicals as possible, some of us have added packages of hundreds or even thousands of freely accessible online journals to our holdings so that they will show up in our indexes, our library catalogs, and even our databases via a link resolver when full text articles aren’t available through the native interface of the database itself (the latter case includes The Avery Index to Architectural Periodicals, which doesn’t include full text–though, according to the Avery Library website, they are investigating the possibility of doing so in the future).
Among those massive packages of freely accessible journals that many academic libraries have incorporated into their holdings is the Directory of Open Access journals, which has its own criteria for vetting journals for reliability and making the somewhat subjective judgment of what is “scholarly.” However, some of the packages of journals that libraries have incorporated into their holdings aren’t associated with any organization that exercises strict oversight over quality control. They are simply packages that Serials Solutions or other companies that a library contracts with in order to manage access to online periodicals have made available.
Take, for instance, the package, Freely Accessible Arts & Humanities Journals, which is comprised of 1,262 periodicals currently. Included in that package are the titles Conservation Perspectives, which is published by The Getty, and Metropolis (which, though it is not a scholarly journal, is one that many of us would recommend for use by our students). But if a library adds the complete package Freely Accessible Arts & Humanities Journals to its holdings, along with quality publications like Conservation Perspectives and Metropolis, they will have added some publications that many of us might think twice about recommending to our students. For instance, Art Bin.
Unlike the websites of most scholarly publications, the Art Bin website offers no information assuring readers that it is affiliated with a university or a scholarly or professional organization. Nor is there any reference to a peer-review process or editorial criteria. Some articles in Art Bin do discuss art, but many cover random topics unrelated to fine arts such as the use of fluoride and mercury in dentistry or the history of distance learning (with no mention of its ramifications for the arts or architecture-related disciplines). Many librarians use Ulrich’s International Serials Directory to verify whether a publication is scholarly and/or peer-reviewed. However, Ulrich’s designates Art Bin as an “academic/scholarly” publication even though it seems to fall quite short of deserving that designation. Furthermore, Ulrich’s lists The Journal of Natural Pharmaceuticals as both “refereed” and “academic/scholarly.” Yet, that publication was one of many journals identified by a sting operation (“Who’s Afraid of Peer Review?”) for agreeing to publish the results of a bogus and quite far-fetched cancer study. So I have to take Ulrich’s recommendations with a grain of salt.
So, though all we intended to do is provide access to lots of high quality free and/or open access publications such as Metropolis and Conservation Perspectives, some libraries, mine included, have opened a Pandora’s box. In many fields, there are additional tools, beyond Ulrich’s, for judging the quality of publications. The Social Sciences Citation Index, for example, identifies high impact social science publications. There is no such resource in our subject discipline to help us to determine which among the hundreds of free online periodicals are scholarly and which are just free junk.
One solution to this problem would be simply to not enable access to these packages of journals. But since many of the journals in these packages are truly open access (scholarly and perpetually free), and even some of those that don’t qualify as open access are still high-quality, that would be like throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Another solution would be to enable access to only those individual titles that the architecture librarian has determined to be reliable (Serials Solutions provides the option to choose journals from these packages title-by-title). But given the sheer volume of periodicals to investigate, this would be a full time job and many of us are spread too thin to accomplish this. Furthermore, new titles are being added to packages like Freely Accessible Arts & Humanities Journals on a monthly basis so the process of vetting the titles included in these packages would be ongoing.
Yet, if we don’t do the work of hand selecting titles from these freely available packages, it seems like the responsible thing to do would be to give our own students a “buyer beware” warning about the periodicals that their academic libraries have made accessible. That just doesn’t seem right, does it? If we do decide to take on the task of vetting these titles, a lot of work must be done. This job is too big for a librarian. It is probably too big for any single group of librarians. It is likely to require collaboration between AASL and other relevant groups including the Art Libraries Society of North America (ARLIS). Are there other solutions I haven’t considered? Has your school developed a way to deal with this challenge? Please let us know.
Barret Havens, Outreach and architecture subject specialist librarian, Woodbury University
Banham Fellow Jordan Carver’s review of the September 11 museum, “Selfie of a Nation,” was published in the Avery Review: http://www.averyreview.com/issues/2/selfie-of-a-nation. He also had an exhibition opening at the Istanbul Design Biennial as part of Who Builds Your Architecture? The exhibit highlights migrant labor issues in the architecture profession by connecting architects and construction workers through the design process. http://2tb.iksv.org/proje.asp?id=51
In August, Associate Professor Despina Stratigakos presented a paper, “Architectural Propaganda and the Nazis as Colonial Builders in Norway” at the Art in Battle conference held at the KODE Art Museum in Bergen, Norway. She also participated in the Feminist Futures symposium organized by the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. In October, Stratigakos and Kelly Hayes McAlonie presented “Architect Barbie: The Debate and Discussion 3 Years Later” at the American Institute of Architects in Washington, D.C.
Jin Young Song in partnership with MINIMAX Architects, the partner firm in South Korea, has been awarded a research grant for the master plan/housing innovation research from the government of Yangpyeong, S. Korea. Prof. Song will conduct an intensive research/design studio in Spring 2015. This studio is funded by the city, including a 5 day studio research trip to Korea.
In October, Nicholas B. Rajkovich presented a paper entitled “A Bicycle-Based Field Measurement System for the Study of the Urban Canopy Layer in Cuyahoga County, Ohio” at the 20th International Congress of Biometeorology in Cleveland, Ohio. The conference was sponsored by the International Society of Biometeorology, a forum for interdisciplinary collaboration among meteorologists, health professionals, biologists, climatologists, ecologists, and other scientists.
Clinical Assistant Professor Dennis Maher was an invited speaker at the 2014 Preston Thomas Memorial Symposium at Cornell University. The symposium explored the ancient phenomenon of spolia and its relevance to our present need for more sustainable and resilient human patterns of habitation. http://aap.cornell.edu/news-events/spolia-histories-spaces-and-processes-adaptive-reuse
The Albright-Knox Art Gallery has also acquired the first edition of his “House Anamnesis,” a suite of seven graphic works on canvas. Works in the suite propose the walls, floors, and ceilings of Maher’s ever-evolving Fargo House as agents of hallucinatory self-reflection.
Paul Battaglia has been appointed to the Underwriters Laboratories Standards Technical Panel for review of UL 1479 “Fire Tests of Penetration Firestops.” He also presented a paper, “Achieving acoustical comfort in restaurants,” to the Acoustical Society of America at their fall conference in Indianapolis on October 29. The data for the study was derived from student projects in the Aural Architecture seminar from spring term 2014.
Stephanie Davidson co-wrote an article with her sister, Tonya Davidson, a sociology professor at Ryerson University, entitled “Building by Design: A Critique of DIY Architecture.” The article is published in the current issue (volume 5, issue 2) of curb magazine, published by the University of Alberta (http://crsc.ualberta.ca/CurbMagazine.aspx).
Dr. David Gerber, Alvin Huang and Jose Sanchez, all Assistant Professors of Architecture at the USC School of Architecture recently co-chaired ACADIA 2014 | Design Agency, ACADIA’s annual conference at USC.
Dr. Gerber published and co-edited a book Titled “Paradigms in Computing | Making Machines and Models for Design Agency in Architecture” with eVolo and ACTAR-D. He was also the first multiple recipient of Autodesk’s competitive IDEA studio research grant. Dr. Gerber is a current editor of two leading design and computing research journals Simulation and the International Journal of Architecture and Computing. Dr. Gerber was the chair of this years’ Simulation in Architecture and Urban design Symposium. Dr. Gerber has published his research this year in eCAADe, CAADRIA, ACADIA, SimAUD and numerous journals including Energy and Buildings, Automation and Construction, and Design Studies as well as been the editor of the proceedings for SimAUD and ACADIA. Dr. Gerber’s Parametric Design course at USC has won research and teaching support from Dassault Systems (3DS).
AIA Los Angeles (AIA|LA) announced the 2014 Design Awards winners on Wednesday evening, October 29, 2014. The annual AIA Los Angeles Design Awards honor excellence in work built by Los Angeles architects (Design Awards) as well as work by Los Angeles designers as yet unbuilt (Next LA Awards). In both the Design and Next LA categories. among the USC Architecture faculty winning awards for built work were Lawrence Scarpa, Lorcan O’Herlihy, Warren Techentin and Alvin Huang:
Lawrence Scarpa (Brooks+Scarpa) for PICO PLACE, a 36-unit affordable housing project in Santa Monica for very low income tenants. The jury appreciated the idea of a certain responsiveness of the overall mass. “The project is cohesive but it has a lot of complexity. There’s an impression of openness from the street-side. Trade of tightness to achieve spaciousness within the public was a challenge.”
Lorcan O’Herlihy for the Edison Language Academy. “The moves of this project are the right moves – said the jury. It’s a simple diagram, it could have been boring, but it adhered to its own principals and articulated in those pieces. It’s hard to do. The designers have created value within limited resources. Very clear ideas organize the whole and make it really easy to understand.”
Warren Techentin for his project “La Cage aux Folles.” Located in the Materials & Applications courtyard exhibition gallery La Cage aux Folles explored the craft of pipe bending and joined form, computational procedures, and fabrication processes in the making of a 17 foot high structure which encouraged informal use and programming throughout its exhibition. This project is in collaboration with USC professor and structural engineer, Anders Carlson. “It’s very original, sophisticated, and elegant project,” said the jury. “It’s very clever. It’s a wonderful folly. It’s magic.”
Alvin Huang of Synthesis Design+ Architecture won an award for unbuilt work for theDaegu Gosan Pulic Library. “The jury applauded this design for challenging the conventions of library typology. It is a very comprehensive and resolute idea, both formally and spatially. The plasticity of the project allows it to reconfigure itself into a terrain for books. The projects articulates a library in the 21st century to accommodate books, data and a variety of elements – and figures out a way to make it seamless and useful.”
In October, the Italian state television network RAI’s documentary on Lucrezia Borgia was televised, for which Prof. Diane Ghirardo was the historian of record. The documentary in part based upon Prof. Ghirardo’s research, addresses Borgia’s entrepreneurial and reclamation activities in 16th century Italy, among other topics. The Portuguese architectural publication, Arqa, published an article by Prof. Ghirardo on the restoration of Modern Movement architecture in the June 2014 issue, and also in 2014, the Polish architectural journal RecyklingIdee. Pismo spotecznie zaangazowane translated and published her essay on Manfredo Tafuri, which originally appeared in Perspecta in 2001. Her edited volume, Aldo Rossi’s Municipio a Borgoricco was published in November 2014 by the town of Borgoricco.
Professors Goetz Schierle, Karen Kensek and Douglas Noble are preparing a book on tensile fabric structures co-edited with other USC faculty.
Hraztan Zeitlian received the AIA California Council Presidential Citation Award on 10/23/2014, for having helped “ . . . confirm the architects’ role and responsibility to society on a larger scale. Your dedication on behalf of the architectural profession, and the future of design is deeply appreciated and recognized.”
Lecturer Andy Ku and his Los Angeles-based firm, OCDC have recently been commissioned to design a 3D printed housing prototype for a Hong Kong-based, consumer goods design and development company. In August, OCDC opened its first satellite office in Hong Kong.
Lecturer Geoffrey von Oeyen is organizing a major event titled “Performative Composites: Sailing Architecture” at the USC School of Architecture on November 3 + 4. Through workshops, panel discussions, and an exhibition that includes the design of Greg Lynn’s new trimaran and the hydrofoil from an America’s Cup catamaran, this event explores how new materials and techniques in sailing, particularly carbon fiber composites, allow for designers to reconsider the multiplicity of spatial, formal, and environmental forces in architecture in important new ways. Presenters and panelists include Greg Lynn, Bill Kreysler, Bill Pearson, Kurt Jordan, Fred Courouble, Lynn Bowser, Bruno Belmont, Neil Smith, and Rick Pauer.
Assistant Professor Alvin Huang and his firm Synthesis Design + Architecture were awarded an AIA|LA NextLA Design Award for their Daegu Public Library Proposal at the annual AIA Los Angles Design Awards on October 29, 2014. Additionally, a 1/2 scale prototype of their Durotaxis Chair, a multi-material 3D printed chair that gradiates from soft to rigid was exhibited at the recent ACADIA Design Agency Conference at USC and has been featured in numerous publications including Dezeen, 3D Printing Industry, Inside 3D Printing, TCT Magazine, and others. Three additional projects (Chelsea Workspace, Daegu Public Library, and Pure Tension Pavilion) were also included in the peer-reviewed ACADIA exhibition, as well as the publication and presentation of a peer-reviewed paper entitled “Nearly Minimal: Intuition, Analysis, and Information.”
Eric Haas, Adjunct Associate Professor, presented his paper “Do We Have to Stick to the Script? : Cities, Surveying and Descripting” at the Mediated City Conference held at Woodbury University in October. Haas’s firm DSH was recently named a finalist in the Spark > Spaces 2014 Design Awards for the Larchmont Charter Lafayette Park school. The firm is beginning work on renovating a 1953 Neutra & Alexander building for use as a preschool.
Jose Sanchez has recently co-chaired Acadia 2014 Conference ‘Design Agency’, with speakers including Zaha Hadid, Will Wright and Casey Reas. In the event, he exhibited ‘Polyomino’, a 3d printed piece sponsored by Stratasys as part of the ‘From gaming to making’ research, connecting gaming technology with the maker movement. Jose will be speaking in Autodesk University in Vegas in a panel dedicated to the future of technology and the integration of gaming in the world of design.
Christopher Warren, and his office, WORD, received an AIA|LA 2014 Design Merit Award for A.P.C. Melrose Place, an adaptive re-use project built for the French fashion label’s Los Angeles flagship store – in collaboration with A.P.C. New York and Laurent Deroo Architecte, Paris.
Douglas Noble and Karen Kensek received the AEP Educator Award from the California Council of the AIA.
Assistant Professor Alison Hirsch will be lecturing on her recent book, City Choreographer: Lawrence Halprin in Urban Renewal America (University of Minnesota, 2014), at the Graham Foundation in Chicago on December 4th (6pm). The event will also serve as a book launch and signing.
Ken Breisch has been named as Co-chair of a Task Force to Develop Guidelines for Evaluating Digital Art and Architectural History Scholarship for Promotion and Tenure. This study is co-sponsored by the Society of Architectural Historians and the College Art Association and has been funded with a grant from the Mellon Foundation.
The USC School of Architecture faculty Alvin Huang, Jose Sanchez, and David Gerber hosted and chaired this years’ ACADIA annual conference entitled Design Agency. The event was the most widely attended in history with 545 participants including, students, professionals, and academics from every continent. The conference peer review accepted 74 papers and 50 projects from a very competitive pool. The event had keynote and awardee lectures including Zaha Hadid, Casey Reas (UCLA), Will Wright (of SimCity fame), Neil Gershenfeld (MIT) Nancy Cheng (UofO), Jenny Sabin (Cornell), and Marc Fornes. During the week of events 10 workshops were supported by NBBJ, SOM, Zaha Hadid Architects, Woods Baggot, Autodesk, Formlabs, Marc Fornes, Roland Snooks,and Robots in Architecture. The conference included an exhibition in part sponsored by Stratasys with an amazing collection of 3D prints on display including works from Alvin Huang, Jose Sanchez, and David Gerber. The event culminated with a day long Hackathon lead by Jose Sanchez.
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