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NEW (2020) Conditions and Procedures for Accreditation

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The National Architectural Accreditation Board (NAAB) has issued “Draft 0” versions of the 2020 Conditions and Procedures for Accreditation, which are publicly accessible through the following links:

+ 2020 Conditions for Accreditation

+ 2020 Procedures for Accreditation

These two documents will be discussed at the 2019 Accreditation Review Forum (ARForum) that will take place on July 25 and 26 in Chicago. The boards of five U.S. collateral organizations (ACSA, AIA, AIAS, NAAB, NCARB) will meet then to also consider the future of architectural education, with guests and members of two NAAB-appointed groups that worked on drafting the two documents.

The “zero” drafts were prepared by the 2019 ARForum NAAB Steering Committee and the NAAB Task Force, respectively. ACSA was represented officially on the 15-member Steering Committee by Bruce Lindsey from Washington University in St. Louis, Rebecca O’Neal Dagg from Auburn University, and Michaele Pride from the University of New Mexico. Kate Schwennsen from Clemson was also a member of the group. John Cays from NJIT, Rocco Ceo from the University of Miami, and David Hinson from Auburn were on the NAAB Task Force (as NAAB board members), which was led by NAAB President-Elect Barbara Sestak from Portland State University. Tom Fisher from the University of Minnesota was an invited member of the Task Force.

In other words, a good number of members of these two groups were from our schools; our community did have a say in the preparation of the drafts and we were offered an opportunity to provide feedback about the proposed ideas during a NAAB workshop at the 2019 Annual Meeting in Pittsburgh.

Nevertheless, we encourage our members to carefully review the “Draft 0” of the Conditions and Procedures. The Conditions in particular contain significant changes. You will notice that SPCs are no longer there; in their place are Program Criteria and Student Learning Criteria. The draft document also describes the “Defining Values of the Profession” that programs must address as part of the accreditation process.

We welcome your feedback about the proposed changes before the ARForum takes place at the end of July. Please send your comments by July 1 to president@acsa-arch.org. Please note that we may share them with NAAB and let us know if you would like to remain anonymous.

Also, please note that NAAB will issue “Draft 1” of the Conditions and Procedures after the ARForum, which will be available for public comment until mid-November, i.e. we will get to discuss them at the 2019 Administrators Conference in New Orleans. “Draft 2” will be produced after the public comment period ends on November 22, 2019. The final version will be issued after the NAAB Board meets at the end of January.

As a final note, the programs going up for accreditation in 2021 will have a choice to use either 2014 Conditions and 2015 Procedures or the 2020 versions. All programs that will have accreditation visits in 2022 or later will have to use the new 2020 versions. So, please review the drafts as they contain some significant changes and let us know what you think. We look forward to hearing from you.

Branko Kolarevic
2018-2019 ACSA President

Tulane University

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Title: Architecture Graduate Student Presents Hybridized Infrastructure at National Symposium

May 29, 2019

Exploring how architecture can improve water management and engage communities in New Orleans, recent master’s architecture graduate Riley Lacalli developed a project that proposes a new infrastructure system and presented his work at a national conference this spring.

The CriticalMASS Graduate Research Symposium at the University of North Carolina Charlotte in April brought together 14 students for presentations to panels of experts from across the country. Lacalli, who graduated from the Tulane School of Architecture’s M.Arch I program in May, said the experience at CriticalMASS was both informative and inspiring with students’ topics ranging from virtual libraries to smog-diffusing glass, Lacalli said.

“The diverse representation of projects reinforced the idea that architecture can be used to positively influence a variety of problems,” he said.

Lacalli’s thesis project “Pumps Politikos” addresses urban infrastructural systems and the problems many cities, coastal cities in particular, are facing as the threat of climate change rises. Among his design solutions, he proposes a series of canopies, elevated above streets and around pumping stations, as green spaces for not only rainwater collection but also civic engagement. The goal is to create a better water management system that utilizes every drop of water as an asset and, by making these sites accessible, reconnect communities to infrastructure allowing them to play a role in the monitoring and management of the system.

“To combat issues such as rising sea levels, land loss, and an increased occurrence of natural disasters, urban environments and the machines that keep them afloat must be redesigned in a multi-scalar, multi-systemic manner,” said Lacalli. “My interest in architecture lies in its ability to contribute to many different disciplines and across many different scales. I would love to get involved with an architecture firm that is taking on projects at a larger city or neighborhood scale, specifically projects that work with the existing fabric and attempt to provide holistic and dynamic responses to potential problems.”

Tulane University

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Title: Norman Collaborates for Whitney Biennial 2019 Installation

May 28, 2019

Assistant Professor Carrie Norman has collaborated with Kenyan-born, Chicago-based artist Brendan Fernandes for the sculptural installation “The Master and Form,” currently on display through Sept. 22 at the Whitney Museum of American Art for the Whitney Bienniel 2019.

This installation, created through Norman’s practice Norman Kelly, explores the intersections of dance + sculpture + performance through devices that put dancers into specific positions and forms indicative of the technique of ballet.

“As a former dancer training in the ballet world, I’ve always been questioning my body, my sense of who I was in that world. Ballet is a very specific type of dance form and specific types of bodies are required to perform the gestures or to be ‘technically successful’ in that space. I think about race, class, gender through ballet, those things are very much set through Western hegemony narratives. Part of what I’m doing in this work is to be critical and to break down those binaries because we are in a space that we need to change that and dance needs that so much in its narrative, to think about things differently.” – artist Brendan Fernandes

Architecture Networks: Building Connections between Collections

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AASL column, May 2019
Lucy Campbell and Barbara Opar, column editors

Architecture Networks: Building Connections between Collections
Column by Aimee Lind, Reference Librarian, Getty Research Library (alind@getty.edu)

Much of the contact faculty and students have with architecture librarians takes the form of reference or collection development requests. Yet, as professionals, architecture librarians are also actively engaged in seeking ways of increasing access to resources. Open discussions on such issues are more than professional development. They serve to help us look for means and opportunities to improve the user experience. Initiatives like the one I describe below are aimed at taking on these challenges and developing new tools for our constituents.

This column originally appeared on ARCHSEC: the official website of the Art Libraries Society of North America Architecture Section.

For those of you who weren’t able to attend the ARLIS conference in Salt Lake City at all or were simply unable to attend the Architecture Networks panel, I wanted to share a summary of the content of the session and provide a place for feedback on the potential future form(s) a project like this might take.

The idea for the panel was sparked by conversations with colleagues over the past few years regarding ways we could increase discovery of our own architecture resources, highlight links to complementary collections, identify connections between collaborators, and facilitate creation of and access to metadata at a deeper level in order to bring to light the important contributions of historically marginalized groups within architecture and its affiliated professions. As we pondered how something like this might work, we began to focus on the component parts necessary to construct these architecture networks virtually:

  • rich, authoritative data on the people, places, and events critical to the study of the built environment
  • standardized, controlled vocabularies that can help link this data effectively
  • a flexible underlying system for data management
  • a user-friendly interface for discovery, and, most importantly…
  • individuals willing to put in the work to make it all happen.

I invited a group of esteemed panelists to speak to these essential elements in order to explore the feasibility of developing a freely available, comprehensive, authoritative scholarly resource devoted to the study of the built environment.

Alan Michelson, Head of the Built Environments Library at the University of Washington, discussed the past development and potential future directions of the Pacific Coast Architecture Database.

Margaret Smithglass, Registrar and Digital Content Librarian at Columbia University’s Avery Library, spoke about the challenges encountered while developing the Built Works Registry, as well as considerations for the future of the project.

Robin Johnson, Vocabularies Editor at the Getty Research Institute, detailed relevant authority work done within the Getty Vocabularies (ULAN and CONA, in particular).

and

Annabel Lee Enriquez, Associate Project Manager at the Getty Conservation Institute, provided an overview of Arches, an open source heritage inventory and management platform, and consider how it might be used for a collaborative project of this type.

Our goals were threefold:

  • to learn about projects, tools, systems, and standards relevant to the study of the built environment
  • to establish what a comprehensive, collaborative resource might look like and whom it might serve and
  • to gauge interest in participation at any level, from individuals contributing data to institutions facilitating larger initiatives

We’d allocated ample time for the engaging discussion that followed the presentation. Happily, many members of the audience indicated that they thought this was a project worth pursuing and several signed up to be part of working group(s) going forward. We hope some of you might like to do the same! Please have a look at the PowerPoint slides. Our goal in the coming months is to identify a preliminary dataset that could serve as a proof of concept for a collaborative grant. Interested? Questions? Please be in touch!  You can reach me at alind@getty.edu.

University at Buffalo, SUNY

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An article published in the May 9, 2019 edition of the New York Times by Eve Kahn featured the research project ‘Growing up Modern’ by Assistant Professor Julia Jamrozik and Coryn Dempster (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/06/style/modern-experimental-housing.html)

Assistant Professor Erkin Ozay served as a panelist on ‘Avenues of Exchange: Professionals, Researchers, and Communities building the Equitable City’ which was organized by ACSA and the AIA Housing and Community Development Knowledge Community hewld in Pittsburgh, on March 28,2019. Ozay presented his teaching and research related tto resttlemenmt urbanism in Buffalo. An article on the event and workshop was featured in Metropolis (https://www.metrpolismag.com/architecture/acse-annual-meeting-pittsburgh-architecture-school-comuunity-engagement/)

Assistant Professor Erkin Ozay served as a panelist on the Annual Western New York Refugee Health Summit held at UB on April 13, 2019. His presentation, titled ‘Construycting Landscapes f Arrival’ called for resettlement institutions to become active participants in housing and neighborhood development.

Professor Brian Carter was editor of the recently published book ‘Boundary Sequence Illusion – Ian MacDonald Architect’.  Dalhousie Architectural Press launched the book at Massey College in Toronto in May, 2019.

Assistant Professor Martha Bohm and Stephanie Cramer, together with UB alum Alyssa Catlin, will direct a design/build studio for students from UB and the University of Maryland in Costa Rica in May and June 2019.

Tulane University

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Title: Cameron Ringness (M.arch ’12) Designs New Statue of Liberty Museum

May 17, 2019

Tulane School of Architecture alumna Cameron Ringness (M.Arch ’12), of New York City-based FXCollaborative, was Project Designer for the new Statue of Liberty Museum, which officially opened on May 16, 2019.

The entire structure is meant to connect to Lady Liberty, using the same granite that’s part of the statue pedestal and including copper as a nod to the material the statue is made of, said Cameron Ringness, the project designer at FXCollaborative, which created the museum’s overall design. “It’s really trying to belong to the site and the landscape and not feel like this building that just got placed here out of nowhere. … We wanted to enhance the feeling that it’s really special to be in proximity to the statue,” said Cameron Ringness, quoted in the Associated Press. To read the full story, go to http://bit.ly/2Hv2e6e

See the site design, renderings, floor plans, and selected materials in the project booklet here.

ASINEA

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As President of ACSA, I was invited to attend a semi-annual meeting of our sibling organization in Mexico called ASINEA, which stands for Asociación de Instituciones de Enseñanza de la Arquitectura (asinea.org.mx). ASINEA brings together close to 100 accredited schools of architecture in Mexico, whose faculty and administrators meet twice a year in different places around the country. The student association, ENEA (Encuentro Nacional de Estudiantes de Arquitectura), meets at the same time and in the same locations.

León, a city of 1.5 million people in Guanajuato state, some 240 miles northwest from Mexico City, was the site of the 101st meeting of ASINEA. The meeting’s host school was one of our four Affiliate members in Mexico, Universidad de La Salle Bajio (http://bajio.delasalle.edu.mx).

The meeting was used to mark the 55th anniversary of ASINEA, including a large birthday cake (and the obligatory cake cutting ceremony). ASINEA was founded on April 30, 1964, in the picturesque old mining city of Guanajuato, 35 miles from León, so marking the birthday so close to the birthplace of the association seemed entirely appropriate. There were 12 schools at the founding of the association.

The ASINEA/ENEA gatherings are big: I was told that close to 1,000 people have converged on León from all over Mexico. There were actually three events running in parallel – think of our Annual Meeting being combined with the Administrators Conference and then add the AIAS Forum into the mix and you get the idea. Overall, it was a very well run event.

I was given a chance to address the meeting of some 60 administrators, deans and directors from the schools across Mexico. I started in Spanish, telling the group that I wasn’t a typical “gringo”, as they could tell from my name. I then spoke in English about ACSA and our conferences and publications, with most of the attention focused on the next year’s Annual Meeting in San Diego. At the end of the meeting, Marcos Mazari Hiriart, President of ASINEA and Dean of the Faculty of Architecture at UNAM in Mexico City, and I signed a Memorandum of Understanding, expressing our shared commitment to working together to facilitate contacts and cooperation between our member schools.

I used the meeting as an opportunity to invite our Mexican colleagues to join us in San Diego next year. We discussed the various ways in which they could do so that would make their participation meaningful. One of the ideas was to have the submission of abstracts and papers in Spanish. (We are implementing a multilingual interface to our submission system as part of our agreement to partner with UIA for the Congress in Rio de Janeiro next year.)

I also met Zurizaid Morales Padilla, director of the architecture program at Universidad Iberoamericana in Tijuana. That school is physically the closest in Mexico to the United States. It is located little over half a mile from the US border, in the Playa district, and a relatively short distance from the infamous section of the border wall that runs into the Pacific Ocean.

We plan to work with our colleagues in Mexico to explore the ways in which could begin to develop new and deepen existing connections between our schools across the border. The meeting in León was the first step in that direction.

Pennsylvania State University

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Architecture journal edited by Penn State professor gains international recognition

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – The inaugural issue of a new journal on research and architecture has resulted in a grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. FAKTUR: Documents and Architecture, which is edited by Pep Avilés, assistant professor of architecture at Penn State, and Matthew Kennedy, an American architect and writer based in Mexico City, is also among the seven finalists in the 2019 FAD Awards for publications in the field of architecture.

The Graham Foundation grant has been issued to Avilés and Kennedy to support the next two issues of FAKTUR which, according to its website, “…responds to the concerns of an emerging generation of architects and aims to bridge the distance between practice and academic scholarship.” The publication is the result of a collaborative effort between the Stuckeman School, the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University and the Centre for Documentary Architecture at Bauhaus-University, Weimar (Germany).

The journal has also been named a finalist in the Thought and Criticism category of the FAD Awards, Europe’s longest-running architecture and interior design awards. A record 616 works were submitted for the 2019 awards, which will be judged by a panel of critics, historians and writers to determine the winners.

Avilés is a well-respected instructor and researcher having taught at Columbia University, The Cooper Union, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya and the Barcelona Institute of Architecture before coming to Penn State. He is the editor of the 2015 Spanish edition of Siegfried Ebeling’s 1926 publication Der Raum als Membran. His writings have been published in magazines such as Footprint, San Rocco, Thresholds, Quaderns d’Architecture i Urbanisme, Clog and Project, and in books such as Climates: Architecture and the Planetary Imagery (Avery Review, 2016) and The Other Architect (Spector Books, 2016). He is also the founding principal of the experimental architectural platform The Fautory.

Pennsylvania State University

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Poerschke named Stuckeman Professor of Advanced Design Studies

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – Ute Poerschke, professor and interim head of the Department of Architecture, has been awarded the Stuckeman Endowed Professorship for Advanced Design Studies (ADS), which is a two-year appointment within the Stuckeman School. She will assume the new title of Stuckeman Professor of Advanced Design Studies in July.

The intent of the endowment is to enable a faculty member to embark on or complete a project that will benefit from having focused time.

Poerschke intends to spend the first year of her appointment researching the teachings and pedagogy of the Bauhaus, the famous German art school that combined elements of both the fine arts and design education. The school, which was in operation from 1919 to 1933, had one core objective, which was considered radical for its time: to reimagine the material world as a unity of the arts, crafts and industries. Poerschke has been involved in festivities surrounding the Bauhaus Centennial this year and will collaborate with Daniel Purdy, professor of German studies at Penn State, in co-editing a special journal issue and hosting a symposium that focuses on the relevance of Bauhaus ideas, theories, concepts, practices and techniques around the world from the second half of the 20th century through today. The journal issue will be published by the German-English online journal Wolkenkucksheim I Cloud-Cuckoo-Land in August, followed by the symposium at Penn State in September.

During the second year of the professorship, Poerschke plans to focus her efforts on studying solar orientation and daylighting in building designs of the 1920s and 1930s, which were then ubiquitously applied to mass housing by a number of architects and urban planners at the time. The topic ties Poerschke’s interest in history and theory to her expertise in technical systems integration, which is a field she teaches at both the undergraduate and graduate levels at Penn State. She also intends to spend time studying and documenting façade performance by visiting specific housing developments that were built in the 1920s and 1930s. Poerschke plans to publish her findings of the modernist solar orientation and daylight studies, as well as façade performance, in a future book.

A German native, Poerschke joined the Department of Architecture at Penn State in 2006 and has received considerable funding for her research projects. She is also a principal of the firm Friedrich-Poerschke-Zwink Architekten | Stadtplaner in Munich, Germany, where she is licensed architect and licensed urban planner. Poerschke is an associate member of the American Institute of Architects, and a LEED-accredited professional.

Tulane University

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Title: Professor Barron Publishes New Sketchbook on Tulane’s Iconic Architecture
May 14, 2019
Following the sketchbook model of his previous books, Tulane School of Architecture Professor Errol Barron recently published a reflection on the building styles, both historic and modern, throughout Tulane’s Uptown campus.Although the book took two years to create and publish, it is a culmination of Barron’s decades spent on and around the campus. In particular, Barron taught an architecture class that tasked students with observing and drawing Tulane’s buildings.“I used to walk students around and give them a sense that ideas don’t exist in isolation. We would connect buildings on campus with buildings that may have inspired them,” Barron said. “I would often draw with them.”

As noted in Barron’s foreword, the book is a personal, not comprehensive, reflection on the campus and its possible architectural inspirations. He used the 1984 book Tulane Places and interviews with former Tulane University Architect Collette Creppell to inform his notes and reflections on the architecture, but the vast majority of the book features Barron’s signature watercolor drawings. The size and layout of the book mimics the sketchbook style of his previous publications New Orleans Observed and Roma Osservata.

The Tulane book starts at the front of campus on St. Charles Avenue with its Romanesque Revival style, especially noticeable in Gibson Hall and Richardson Memorial Hall, and moves through four separate sections leading up to the edge of campus on Claiborne Avenue.

Additionally, the history of the Uptown campus prior to its function as a university is noted in the book’s preface, written by Richard Campanella, Associate Dean for Research at the Tulane School of Architecture and Senior Professor of Practice in Architecture and Geography.

The narrow, rectangular shape of the campus and its quads are a direct result of the land’s previous use as a plantation along the Mississippi River. French surveyors used the method of creating “long lots” to delineate land along the river, giving each plantation owner access to the river and its rich soil and elevated terrain. The administrators of Tulane acquired its sizeable section of from a large tract that once included what is now Audubon Park.

“Tulane students today live and learn within the walls of a wide variety of splendid structures built over the course of 125 years. They walk and bike within the geometry of a space directly traceable to the earliest yeas of New Orleans, 300 years ago,” Campanella writes. “The enriching experience created by this interplay of architecture and geography is beautifully captured in this volume by Errol Barron.”

Copies of the book are for sale at Octavia Books.

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