University of Waterloo


View of Arctic Adaptations exhibition, Arctic Adaptations, 2014.
Image courtesy of Latreille Delage Photography.

Canada at the 14th International Architecture Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia 

Arctic Adaptations: Nunavut at 15, Canada’s national exhibition at the 14th International Architecture Exhibition— la Biennale di Venezia, recently received a Special Mention Golden Lion Award for Canada and was ranked as one of the top 10 exhibitions by AZURE. The exhibition was organized and curated by Lateral Office, whose partners are Lola Sheppard, Associate Professor at the University of Waterloo and Mason White, Associate professor at the University of Toronto. Matthew Spremulli, adjunct professor the University of Waterloo, is a co-curator.

Arctic Adaptations: Nunavut at 15 surveys a recent architectural past, a current urbanizing present, and a projective near future of adaptive architecture in Nunavut, Canada’s newest, largest, and most northerly territory, which celebrates its 15th anniversary in 2014. Today, there are almost 33,000 people living in 25 communities across two million square kilometres, making Nunavut one of the least densely populated regions in the world. These communities, located above the tree line and with no roads connecting them, range in population from 120 in the smallest hamlet to 7,000 in Nunavut’s capital city of Iqaluit. The climate, geography, and people of Nunavut, as well as the wider Canadian Arctic, challenge the viability of a universalizing modernity.

Modern architecture and urbanism encroached on this remote and vast region of Canada in the name of sovereignty, aboriginal affairs management, or trade, among others. However, the indigenous Inuit people have inhabited the Canadian Arctic for millennia as a traditionally semi-nomadic people. Inuit relations with Canada have been fraught with acts of neglect, resistance, and negotiation. People have been re-located; trading posts, military infrastructure, and research stations have been built; and small settlements are now emerging as Arctic cities. Some have described this rapid confrontation with modernity as a transition “from igloos to internet” compressed into forty years. This abruptness has revealed powerful traits among its people—adaptation and resilience—qualities which modern architecture has often lacked.

Arctic Adaptations responds to the shared theme of the 14th International Architecture Exhibition: Absorbing Modernity: 1914-2014. The exhibition documents modernism’s legacy in this remarkable but relatively unknown region of Canada, describes the contemporary realities of life in its communities, and examines a projected role for architecture moving forward. It argues that modern Inuit cultures continue to evolve and merge the traditional and the contemporary in unique and innovative ways, and questions whether architecture, which has largely failed this region—both technically and socially—can be equally innovative and adaptive.

The exhibition looks at the past 100 years through a series of carvings by Inuit artists of important buildings. It presents its current context through a series of bas relief models describing every community in Nunavut, paired with photographs taken by residents within each community. It projects forward 15 years, through a series of speculative architecture projects

Developed by five design teams. Each team is made up of a Canadian school of architecture, a Canadian architecture office with extensive northern experience, and a Nunavut-based organization. Each team’s proposal examines one theme – housing, health, education, arts, or recreation – and is rooted in Nunavut’s distinct land, climate and culture. A series of 15 ‘living models’ brought to life by time-based animations, hover in the exhibition space, describing proposals at three scales: the territorial, the community and the architectural scale.

Arctic Adaptations: Nunavut at 15 will be at the Canada Pavilion at the 14th International Architecture Exhibition – la Biennale di Venezia from June 7 – November 23, 2014.

A catalogue, Arctic Adaptations: Nunavut at 15, as well as a broadly accessible publication, entitled Many Norths: Spatial Practices in a Shifting Territory, will accompany Arctic Adaptations. After the exhibition returns from Venice it will tour Canada in 2015-17.

Links to other media:

Azure Magazine:

http://www.azuremagazine.com/article/dispatch-venice-biennale/

 

Canadian Architect

http://www.canadianarchitect.com/news/canadas-arctic-adaptations-nunavut-at-15-honoured-by-a-special-mention-at-the-14th-international/1003111917/

http://www.canadianarchitect.com/news/arctic-adaptations-nunavut-at-15-to-represent-canada-at-the-14th-international-architecture/1003092884/

ACSA Update 6.13.14

 

June 13, 2014

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Connect to the ACSA/AIK International Conference

To help you plan your OPEN CITIES experience, check out the mobile app. Features include a detailed schedule, speaker bios, maps and a documents guide including paper abstracts. You will also be able to share your own pictures of Seoul in the Gallery, or by using #opencities14 on Twitter. Downloading the OPEN CITIES app is quick and easy. You can get it for your iPhone, iPad, Android, or web browser.

Download the App:
events.quickmobile.mobi
Event ID: opencities

Click here to learn more about the features of the app.

 

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Bring a Guest to Monday Evening’s Toyo Ito Lecture

Guests are welcome to come see Toyo Ito deliver the keynote lecture Monday, June 23, 2014, 5:00-6:30pm at the Ewha Womans University.

 

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Read the Paper Abstracts and View the Research + Design Project Winners

We offer full PDF downloads of the paper abstracts and a gallery of the Research + Design Projects. The projects will also be on display at the Ewha Womans University.

 

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Download an at-a-glance Schedule

In Seoul, we will hand out a shortened version of the schedule for attendees, but you can also download it in advance! Check out the app to select the sesions you want to attend and add them to “My Schedule.”

 

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Founded in 1912 to advance the quality of architectural education.

 

Architecture Students Travel to Haiti for Service Project

 

 

Washington, D.C., June 6, 2014 – The Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) is partnering with Howard University, School of Architecture and Design with the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, School of Architecture to lead a public-interest design education and service-learning project in Petite-Rivière-de-Nippes, Haiti. With support from the Fetzer Institute, the 2014 Haiti Summer Studio is the continuation of the “2011 Haiti Idea Challenge” where students were asked to design permanent solutions to rebuild the infrastructure, cities, and neighborhoods affected by the 2010 earthquake. The challenges include designing and building a media resource center in an area without running water or electricity and using designs that can be built by local residents themselves.

Ten students and six advisors from the U.S. will join Howard University’s partner, Mercy Outreach Ministry International, and Haiti’s University GOC on a design project that will help Petite-Rivière-de-Nippes residents develop the capacity to improve their daily lives through architectural design solutions. The group will spend two weeks in Haiti, where the students will practice the principles of compassionate and participatory design. The outcomes of the studio, including a documentary video chronicling the experience, will be published by the ACSA as a model for other schools to use service-learning to implement collaborative and participatory design processes that empower local citizens and foster community resilience.

The studio will be coordinated by Professor Lynne M. Dearborn of University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), School of Architecture and the project led by the partnership of Professors Edward Dunson, Victor Dzidzienyo and Bradford Grant of Howard University (HU) School of Architecture and Design along with Michael Monti and Eric Ellis of the ACSA.

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About ACSA
The Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, membership association founded in 1912 to advance the quality of architectural education. The school membership in ACSA has grown from 10 charter members to over 250 schools in several membership categories. These include full membership for all accredited programs in the United States and government-sanctioned schools in Canada, candidate membership for schools seeking accreditation, and affiliate membership for schools for two-year and international programs. Through these schools, over 5,000 architecture faculty are represented. In addition, over 500 supporting members composed of architecture firms, product associations and individuals add to the breadth of interest and support of ACSA goals. The association maintains a variety of activities that influence, communicate, and record important issues. Such endeavors include scholarly meetings, workshops, publications, awards and competition programs, support for architectural research, policy development, and liaison with allied organizations. www.acsa-arch.org

ABOUT HOWARD UNIVERSITY AND THE SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN
Founded in 1867, Howard University is a private, research university that is comprised of 13 schools and colleges. Students pursue studies in more than 120 areas leading to undergraduate, graduate and professional degrees. The School of Architecture and Design has a tradition of activist community service in design that advances collaborative scholarship, research, teaching and learning in the global context. Howard has produced more African American and Black architects than any other institution in the world. www.howard.edu

ABOUT THE ILLINOIS SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE
The Illinois School of Architecture is one of the oldest and largest schools of architecture in the country. Since the initiation of its architectural curriculum in 1867, the University of Illinois has consistently broken new ground in the education of architects in the United States. www.arch.uiuc.edu

ABOUT MERCY OUTREACH MINISTRY INTERNATIONAL, INC
MOM the international outreach mission of the Full Gospel Church of the Lord’s Missions International, Inc. It is a nonprofit, tax-exempt 501(c)3 organization dedicated to the transmission of appropriate technology for sustainable community and economic growth in developing countries. MOM has targeted the dispossessed and suffering in Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. It is listed among the poorest of all countries in the developing world. MOM is particularly dedicated to the rural communities that are isolated and without modern sanitation, food, water, and educational and medical facilities. www.mercyoutreachministry.org

ABOUT FETZER INSTITUTE
The Fetzer Institute is a nonprofit, private operating foundation based in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Established by broadcast pioneer John E. Fetzer (1901-1991), the Institute uses its philanthropic resources to create programs that foster awareness of the power that love, forgiveness, and compassion can have in our world. Visit Fetzer Institutes Website at www.fetzer.org

 

Washington University in St. Louis

On April 26, 2014, Dean and Professor Emeritus Constantine E. (Dinos) Michaelides participated as a keynote speaker in a seminar organized by the Hellenic Society for the Protection of Cultural Heritage and the Natural Environment (ELLET – NGO) and the School of Architecture at the National Technical University of Athens, Greece. The seminar took place on the island of Hydra. Titled “The Study of Hydra, Fifty Years Later” Michaelides’s presentation focused on both the Greek and US roots of the original study as well as subsequent publications on the development of the island town during recent decades.

AGENCY partners Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller have been selected to contribute to the United States Pavilion at the 2014 Venice Biennale as an OFFICE US Outpost Architect.  The mission of OFFICE US is to “critically reflect on the production of US architectural firms abroad, while simultaneously projecting a new model for global architectural practice open to all of us.”  Commissioned by Storefront for Art and Architecture and curated by Eva Franch i Gilabert, Anna Miljacki, and Ashley Schafer, the US contribution will collaboratively research, study, and remake projects from an onsite archive‘ of 1,000 buildings designed by US offices over the last 100 years.
AGENCY is one of 90 architects worldwide who will collaborate with the eight OFFICE US partners headquartered in the US Pavilion at the 2014 Venice Biennale to collectively redefine architectural production.

Washington University in St. Louis

Robert McCarter, Ruth and Norman Moore Professor of Architecture, had his monograph on Alvar Aalto published by Phaidon Press in June 2014. McCarter lectured on “The Architecture of Carlo Scarpa” at the University of Virginia (March 2014), Dalhousie University Halifax (April 2014), and the University of South Florida Tampa (May 2014). McCarter lectured on “The Houses of Frank Lloyd Wright” and “Wright at the Start: The Prairie Houses as Origin of Wright’s Ordering Principles” at Dalhousie University Halifax (April 2014), the University of Oregon (April 2014) and for the FLW Gordon House Conservancy in Portland, Oregon (April 2014). McCarter lectured on “Taking the Book to the Light: Louis Kahn’s Evolution of the Library in Three Designs” in the SOM New York Professional Development lecture series (February 2014). McCarter was appointed as a member of the Executive Committee of the Washington University interdisciplinary journal, The Common Reader, and as a Founding Member of the International Advisory Council for the Mies Crown Hall Americas Prize.

Using Neatline to bring research to life; a collaborative project at the University of Virginia

Barbara Opar and Barret Havens, column editors

June column written by Rebecca Cooper Coleman, Architecture and Instruction Librarian, Fiske Kimball Fine Arts library and Ronda Grizzle, Project Management & Training Specialist, Digital Research & Scholarship, University of Virginia

In the Fall semester of 2014, seventeen students enrolled in On Haj with Ibn Jubayr: Reconstructing the 12th Century Mediterranean.  The course, cross-listed as both an architectural history and art history seminar, focused on the writings of 12th century Muslim Ibn Jubayr as a starting point for broader exploration of the visual culture associated with pilgrimage and Mecca.  Final projects in the class consisted of online exhibits created using Neatline, which was developed in the University of Virginia Library Scholar’s Lab, and is described as “a geotemporal exhibit-builder that allows you to create beautiful, complex maps, image annotations, and narrative sequences from collections of archives and artifacts…”  Successful integration of Neatline into the course required collaboration between faculty member Lisa Reilly, course teaching assistant Elizabeth Mitchell, Scholar’s Lab technical trainer Ronda Grizzle and GIS specialist Kelly Johnston, and Architecture Librarian Rebecca Cooper Coleman.  Through their work with Neatline, students brought their research to life, using the tools and methodologies of the experimental humanities to create coherent narratives on their themes.  Students also learned to navigate primary sources and negotiate issues of intellectual property while curating their work for the web.  The collaboration between faculty and the Library in shaping and executing the assignment promoted numerous learning objectives that stretched far beyond the course title and allowed students to acquire skills that will continue to serve them as scholars.

The exhibits can be viewed here.

Your Jurisdiction and You

By Michael Monti, ACSA Executive Director

Expect cautious optimism over the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards (NCARB) endorsement of a path for students to earn an architectural license and a professional degree together. The decision last week sets in motion a process to get the first students underway. The idea is easy to get behind, but for these plans to succeed, schools and state licensing boards will need to collaborate. A change to a licensing regulation may be necessary, but alone it is not sufficient. Licensure upon graduation will instead require substantial commitments from schools and the profession.

From the schools it starts with a commitment to design a curriculum that adds professional competency—attested to by the license—as one of its outcomes. This drastic expansion in scope should not be underestimated. Schools and the profession will have to build and sustain a system to move students along a path that will take 10 years to bring to maturity.  

From the profession there must be a commitment to employ students regularly. This is not an infusion of free labor, it is more like a compact between firms and schools to have ongoing conversations about the experiences that students will get while working. 

The path to licensure is greatly streamlined when students satisfy educational and licensing requirements at the same time. Students seeking a license at graduation may need additional support.

Students must be confident that employment opportunities early in school will be in supply. During the contraction of the profession in 2008 and the years after, architecture programs faced real difficulties matching students and employers. Students looking for a job will have to be savvy about finding the right match. Firms taking students will have to adjust, as well. Interns need IDP experience across a number of work areas, and architecture schools typically define in advance the educational outcomes that work in a professional office will occasion. In other words, what happens in the office will have to be purposely educational.

A clear path to being an architect starting after high school is a potential game changer, but only with a lot of coordination, transparency, and frank assessments of the costs and benefits will it succeed. Start by looking where you live to see what the state requirements for registration are. What degree is required for registration? When can someone start taking the ARE? Are additional requirements in place?

If you’re lucky, you, too, could live in a state that wants your school to be responsible for both the education and the training of architects.

Washington University in St. Louis

 

Assistant professor Catalina Freixas will present “Eco-urbanism: Sustainable Strategies for Vacant Land in St. Louis” at 1p May 29 as part of EDRA45NewOrleans. Co-authored by senior lecturer Pablo Moyano, the paper introduces WUSTL’s Sustainable Land Lab initiative, which showcases strategies that can transform vacant land into assets that advance sustainability. Specifically, the paper looks at the five projects that have been implemented, as well as HUB: Hybrid Urban Bioscapes, a finalist proposal focused on a synergistic approach to eco-urbanism.

Assistant professor Chandler Ahrens (SlrSrf Residence) was featured in the 2014 AIA Center For Emerging Professionals Annual Exhibition, which promoted the compelling work of the rising generation of architects and designers.

Assistant professor Catalina Freixas was among the presenters at The Mediated City conference in London, which examined the city as a virtual, filmic, social, political, and physical construct. Freixas shared the paper “Shrinking Cities: A Sustainability Assessment of Eco-Urbanism Strategies,” which she authored with senior lecturer Pablo Moyano. 

The keynote speakers for this year’s St. Louis Earth Day Symposium included John Hoal, associate professor and chair of the Master of Urban Design program, and Derek Hoeferlin, assistant professor. In addition, as part of the Biodiversity session April 1, senior lecturer Pablo Moyano presented on Eco-Urbanism in a Shrinking City: A Quantitative Sustainability Assessment, a paper he co-authored with assistant professor Catalina Freixas, and adjunct lecturer Mikey Naucas, BS03, MArch/MLA12, co-presented on A Tree Master Plan for Washington University in St. Louis: Maintain, Enhance, Transform.

Professor Stephen Leet’s work was featured in an installation titled dec*o*ra*tive dip*tychs, trip*tychs, and an arm*co  : sophisticated wall art for the swank modern home at Centro Modern Furnishings in St. Louis. “Drawing on the artist’s experience as a former auto body painter and his contact with Arte Povera, conceptual, process and minimal art while at NSCAD in the 1970s, [professor Stephen] Leet’s most recent works are formally rigorous and knowing mash-ups of diverse influences from both high and low culture. Formats are drawn from diptych/triptych medieval altarpieces, renaissance proportion systems, Bach, 12 bar blues, and the repetitive patterns of window openings on walls. The various arrangements of alternating vertical color bars and intervals between panels recall post-war abstract parallel stripe painting, nautical signal flags, the universal barcode, gestalt figure/ground reversals, military campaign ribbons, and regiment neckties.” –Edoardo Persico, Avalanche.

Assistant professor Kees Lokman has been shortlisted for the 2014 Prix de Rome Architecture, the oldest and largest Dutch prize for architects and visual artists under the age of 40. In putting together this shortlist, the international jury considered the quality of the work and its potential to grow and make an important contribution to architecture in the Netherlands. Each of the nine nominees receives a budget and is given three months in which to devise and work out an assignment given by the jury. 

Eleven artists/artist groups–including assistant professor Chandler Ahrens and Aaron Sprecher–transformed Indianapolis Art Center’s ArtsPark into an outdoor gallery through the creation of temporary installation art for Installation Nation. Designed by Ahrens and Sprecher, “White out” explored the idea of difference and singularity through the process of embedding disparate geometries and objects under a homogenous white skin. The perception of difference is transformed when multiple unique geometries push and deform the surface while the white elastic skin attempts to pull the parts back into a cohesive singular object. The result starts to white out or reduce clarity of difference, similarly to overexposure in photography.

A commemorative piece by assistant professor Patty Heyda is included in a book that has been published on the life and work of her former mentor in the Czech Republic, architect Jiri Stritecky of Atelier 8000, who died in 2012. The book was launched together with a retrospective exhibition of his work that opened April 30 at Jaroslav Fragner Gallery in Prague.

Associate professor Zeuler R. Lima delivered a series of lectures about his book Lina Bo Bardi, the first comprehensive monograph about the work and life of the Italian-born Brazilian architect. Venues included Museo Marino Marini (Florence, Italy), Istituto Universitario di Venezia (Venice, Italy), Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna (Rome, Italy), and The Berlage Center for Advanced Studies in Architecture and Urban Design at Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands).

John Hoal, associate professor and chair of urban design, and Derek Hoeferlin, assistant professor, are co-principal investigators for “Climate Adaption Performance Model for Fluvial Zones along the Mississippi, Missouri and Illinois Rivers in the Midwest,” which has received $26,600 in funding from Washington University in St. Louis’ International Center for Advanced Renewable Energy and Sustainability (I-CARES). The research project is an extension of work they initiated for MISI-ZIIBI: Living with the Great Rivers. Hoal and Hoeferlin are looking to develop a Climate Adaptation Performance Model (CAPM) to be the framework for future multidisciplinaryMISI-ZIIBI workshops that will continue collaborations with numerous partners.

Rod Barnett has been appointed chair of landscape architecture in the Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design and Washington University in St. Louis, effective July 1, 2014. Barnett is a noted scholar, educator, researcher, and designer. He was recently chair of the graduate program in landscape architecture at Auburn University, and before that held similar positions at Unitec in Auckland, New Zealand. He teaches studio and courses in theory, history and drawing, and was selected as one of the top twenty design educators by DesignIntelligence in 2012. He received his PhD from the University of Auckland, where he researched the potential of nonlinear dynamical systems science to inform landscape architectural design and practice. As part of his studies he developed a self-organizing approach to urban development called Artweb, a multidisciplinary design and planning strategy that focuses on marginalized and underutilized urban terrains to create a network of arts and science projects throughout the city. Barnett has written extensively on themes developed from his work in nonlinear design, including re-examinations of historical landscapes such as the sacred groves of ancient Greece, and reinterpretations of art-historical tropes, such as the medieval garden of love. He also has studied landscape systems as emergent conditions in sites as far-flung as the coastlines of Fiji and Tonga, the Mississippi Delta, and the stone alignments of Carnac in Brittany, France. Although he has spent many years in practice, developing projects both large and small, public and private, he now maintains an experimental practice that culminates in competitions and exhibitions. Recently he published Emergence in Landscape Architecture (Routledge, 2013).

 

 

Licensed at Graduation: NCARB Endorses Plan for Architecture Students to Complete IDP, Examination While in School

On Friday, the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards (NCARB) announced their endorsement of a new path for architecture students —licensure upon graduation from an accredited program. Developed by the Licensure Task Force, a group comprised of leaders from NCARB, AIA, AIAS, NAAB and ACSA, this new track would integrate internship and examination requirements into the years spent completing a professional degree in architecture. 

This proposal would offer certain benefits, among them, shortening the timeline to licensure for students who know their career path in advance and adding more opportunities to bring people into the profession early in their educational careers. “While licensure upon graduation may not work for all schools or all jurisdictions,” said ACSA president Norman Millar, “we laud NCARB’s collaborative process with schools, students, and the profession to facilitate licensure.”

Millar, who represents ACSA on the Licensure Task Force, anticipates that this new opportunity will encourage collaboration between educators and members of licensing boards and the profession, allowing for more conversations about the goals and missions of architecture programs. 

Schools will have the chance to participate in the pilot program later this year through a Request for Information, followed by a Request for Proposals in 2015. “We look forward to an open process that allows architecture programs in any U.S. jurisdiction to work with their boards to see if their mutual interests can be advanced” says Millar.

Texas A&M University

Texas A&M environmental design students presented five design concepts for two state-of-the-art hospitals proposed as part of a giant medical complex to be located in an underserved region of Nigeria at an April 28 event attended by Nigerian investors and dignitaries at Legacy Hall in the Jon L. Hagler Center.

The architecture-for-health studio project, including designs for a an 800-bed adult specialty hospital and a 400-bed mother/child hospital, was undertaken during the spring 2014 semester in collaboration with HKS Inc., the Dallas-based international architecture firm that is working with Thompson & Grace Investments of Nigeria to develop a world-class 100-acre medical service and research complex to be known as the Thompson & Grace Medical City.

The five dual-hospital concepts unveiled at the April 28 gathering were designed by five, four-student teams in a studio directed by George J. Mann, the Ronald L. Skaggs, FAIA Endowed Professor of Health Facilities Design.

A master plan for the multi-use development, created in fall 2013 by three Texas A&M landscape architecture students directed by Chanam Lee, associate professor of landscape architecture and presented to investors last February, also includes a medical school and research institute, conference center, buildings for office and residential use, an elementary school and an artisan village.

In 2014,Texas A&M’s “The Big Event” went worldwide. Numerous public spaces in Europe received “facelifts” from College of Architecture students in three study abroad venues as a “thank you” to their host communities — mirroring the annual Big Event tradition in Bryan/College Station in which students perform volunteer community-beautifying tasks including cleaning, planting, painting and yardwork.

A total of 122 students in Barcelona, SpainBonn, Germany; and Castiglion Fiorentino, Italy muddied their boots, turned earth and wielded hammer, nails and other tools. “We are very proud of our College of Architecture students studying abroad this term who have transported the Aggie “Big Event” tradition around the world,” said Elton Abbott, assistant dean for international programs & initiatives. “It’s a great way to show the Aggie spirit to our global partners.”

Design for Pediatric and Neonatal Critical Care, a new book aiding clinicians tasked with planning new pediatric and neonatal intensive care environments, authored by Dr. Mardelle McCuskey Shepley, FAIA, director of Texas A&M’s Center for Health Systems and Design, is receiving favorable reviews.

“Planning for a new pediatric or neonatal ICU is daunting for most clinicians,” said Bob White, director of the Regional Newborn Program at Memorial Hospital in South Bend, Ind. “Few have prior experience, and the skills needed are far different from those they use on a regular basis,” Shepley’s book, he said, “fills this void in remarkable fashion.”

A professor of architecture who joined the Texas A&M faculty in 1993, Shepley is a member of the American College of Healthcare Architects’ Council of Fellows. She published influential books in the healthcare field, such as Health Facility Evaluation for Designing Practitioners (2010) and Design for Critical Care: An Evidence-Based Approach (2009, co-authored with Professor Kirk Hamilton).

The Department of Architecture at Texas A&M University held the 3rd annual Celebration of Excellence on May 9, 2014 at the College Station Hilton. This event, a sequence of presentations and selections from the completing Master’s thesis projects, culminated as a whole-day jury with five student finalists presenting their thesis projects to the entire school. Awards were presented to top students and faculty of the year during the event.

The jury of 2014 consisted of:

  • Velpeau Hawes, Jr. ‘58, head of Hawes Consulting, a member of the American Institute of Architects’ College of Fellows;
  • Smilja Milovanovic-Bertram, associate professor of architecture, University of Texas;
    • Jeff Potter ‘78, former president, American Institute of Architects, member of the American Institute of Architects’ College of Fellows, and
    • Bijan Youssefzadeh, director of the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Arlington.

“These awards recognize not only our most promising students and their individual accomplishments, but also represent the level of excellence of all our students,” said Ward Wells, head of the Department of Architecture. “The recognition of students and faculty is truly a cause for a celebration of excellence.”

The event is a project of the department’s Council of Excellence, an elite group of department friends and former students committed to supporting and enhancing architecture program excellence, building relationships with students and bridging gaps between the academic and professional worlds.