Study Architecture 
ProPEL ACSA Update 7.10.15
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| HEAD, DEPARTMENT OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE PROGRAMS MANAGER
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ACSA Update 5.29.15
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ACSA Update 5.15.15
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ACSA Update 5.8.15
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AASL Online Resource Review -- Tectonica-online
Written by Monica Kenzie, Architecture, Art & Design Library Specialist at the Littman Architecture & Design Library, New Jersey Institute of Technology
Barbara Opar and Barret Havens, Column Editors
Tectonica-online bills itself as “the first architectural website to associate construction details directly with products.” It is a Spanish subscription-based resource, with the majority of the content available in both English and Spanish. Subscription costs are very reasonable. As advertised on the site, an individual membership costs twelve euros ($13.22) for three months, or 32 euros ($35.25) for one year, with institutional memberships available as well. According to the “About Us” page of their site, the resource investigates “solutions for achieving the best quality construction possible” through access to articles, project analyses and a continually expanding database of information organized under three main categories: products and details, projects, and topics.
Begun in 1996 as a printed journal, Tectonica made the transition to the web in 2009. Archived versions of the older print journals are available on the site, but only in Spanish. The information contained in Tectonica lends itself well to the web format, and the visual presentation of the site is excellent, with a clean, well-organized layout making it easy to navigate between, and within, categories.
Tectonica-online home page. The disclaimer in the text box is the publisher’s (Tectonica-online), not the author’s addition.
A main focus of the content of Tectonica-online is on materials, products and construction systems. ‘Product’ entries provide information on material properties, application, and uses, as well as contact information for the manufacturer/supplier where applicable. Multiple high-quality, zoom-able images are included to show product details (some down to the microscopic level), the application process and the material in its environment, giving a full picture of how the material performs in all stages. ‘Detail’ entries show schemas of construction elements from real buildings, with links to full articles on the projects to add context. Browsing categories for both ‘products’ and ‘details’ include subjects like waterproofing, facades, solar protection and many others, and are structured in nested tables making for easy navigation and discovery, with a keyword search available as well.
Tectonica-online product profile
Given the emphasis on commercial products, it is somewhat reassuring that it is noted clearly on the homepage that, “the products that appear on the website have been selected for their interesting and innovative character, with no commercial interest.” However, more could be done to further explain the relationship between the site’s publishers and the companies whose products are represented. Advertisements can be purchased for the site and companies can sponsor new or old projects, or purchase the rights to add documentation to previously published projects. A more detailed disclaimer could help users better understand the criteria used in choosing products to represent on the site, and the role advertisers and companies play in the process.
Hierarchical organization of topics within the database
‘Projects’ features articles on architectural projects from around the world, providing a formal description and analysis of buildings with rationale on why certain materials were used. Large images of the sites along with plans and structural details accompany each article, making this a visual resource as much as an informational one. Projects can be browsed by geographic location or structural elements, among many other facets, making it easy to look through despite the lack of a keyword search function for this particular category. Articles are displayed as a series of images in a reading viewer which is intuitive and easy to use, but does not offer an option to download content.
‘Topics’ offers articles organized by general subjects like ‘interiors’ and ‘structure’, with broad coverage ranging from daylighting to fire safety. This section lacks a keyword search function as well, but as with ‘projects,’ browsing is easily facilitated by the well-ordered menus. The fully cited articles are written by practicing and teaching architects, offering insights from professionals on both practical and theoretical subjects.
Other noteworthy features on the site include the option to share a limited number of product and construction detail entries with others who don’t have a subscription, and, for individual users, the option to save content to a personal file. There is also a robust, regularly updated blog containing short articles along with high quality images and plans which can be accessed by anyone, though it is only available in Spanish.
The combination of practical, technical information and thoughtful, professionally written articles packaged in an easily navigable site gives Tectonica-online the unique quality of being ideal for both professionals and students. Here at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, faculty have implemented this resource in their courses with great success, and we have received positive feedback from students as well, who are always looking for good images of building details and plans. Despite the language barrier for accessing some of the content and the lack of a keyword search function in certain areas of the site, the real-world information on products, materials and construction, along with the wealth of images and plans, not to mention its affordability, makes Tectonica-online a worthwhile resource for any architectural program.
Author email: monica.kenzie@njit.edu
The Tools at Hand: Using Citation Metrics Databases for Assessing the Impact of Scholarship in Architecture and Design-related Disciplines
Barbara Opar and Barret Havens, column editors
Submitted by Rose Orcutt, Architecture and Planning Librarian, University at Buffalo Libraries
In Maya Gervits’s article “Citation Analysis and Tenure Metrics in Architecture and Design-Related Disciplines,” she articulately defines the issues surrounding the growing trends in citation metrics and analysis and how they apply to architecture faculty. Her article acknowledges that many existing systems of citation metrics do not provide as complete a view of the scholarly output of faculty in architecture and design-related disciplines as they do of the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) disciplines.
Though citation metrics tools each measure scholarly output in different ways, most tend to focus on the impact of publications in traditional formats. However, a new wave of “altmetrics” citation metrics tools, which include Plum Analytics and Scopus, go beyond traditional scholarly publications such as journal articles to track a wide variety of non-traditional works. The definition of altmetrics, according to altmetrics.org is “the creation and study of new metrics based on the social web for analyzing and informing scholarship.” Altmetrics bridges the gap in current citation analysis by capturing alternative publications and “real-time metrics of scholarly impact” (Sutton, 2014). This article will present several citation metrics tools widely used in academic settings today, including some of the more traditional variety along with a few that employ altmetrics.
In addition to assessing the impact of a single scholar’s publications and other works, a growing trend in higher education is the use of citation metrics systems by administrators to evaluate the impact of scholarly output at the institutional or departmental level (Hazelkorn). Two examples of subscription-based citation tools that provide measurable data for assessing institutional, departmental, and faculty performance are Academic Analytics and Plum Analytics. Both tools are prorated based on the institution’s full-time equivalent (FTE) but are expensive.
Academic Analytics is known as a “business intelligence” software tool or database that collects data on scholarly citations. It compares a university’s productivity discipline-by-discipline and tracks the institution’s overall performance. The database tallies faculty activities in these five areas of research: journal articles, citations, books, research grants, and awards. The citations are derived from Scopus. The database offers a number of different visualization tools to show data trends, patterns, and the strengths and weaknesses of the institution.
Plum Analytics (PlumX) is an EBSCO database and is similar to Academic Analytics as it also measures scholarly productivity discipline by discipline and the overall performance of the university by tracking traditional publications. However, it also tracks output using altmetrics, which take into account evidence of impact garnered from social media discussions, article views and downloads, news media mentions, conference proceedings, videos, blogs, tweets, grants, patents, presentations, clinical trials, book chapters, and more. The citations originate from PubMed Central, Scopus, and USPTO. Individual author records are used to populate the citation data. Graphs and comparison charts are easy to generate from the statistical output.
Scopus and Web of Science are both library subscription-based databases that analyze author output by tracking citations. As competing products, they cover all disciplines but have origins in the STEM disciplines. The cost of each is prorated based on the institution’s FTE.
Scopus is a relatively new database by Elsevier. It was introduced as a citation tool in 2004. The database tracks scholarly citations from peer-reviewed journals, books, patents, and conference proceedings from all disciplines and has a large international coverage. The metrics tracking covers author’s total citation and document counts, citations per year and h-index. Charts and tables can be manipulated easily. Altmetric, which will be discussed further along in this article, is a third party web application that has been integrated into Scopus. The application runs in a sidebar within the abstract page, providing additional altmetrics statistics. Scopus also announced the creation of their own Article Metrics app that will be made available at the end of this summer.
Web of Science (WOS) was created from the Science Citation Index which began in the 1960s by Eugene Garfield (Aghaei Chadegani et al., 2013). WOS includes the Arts & Humanities Citation Index, Science Citation Index, Science Citation Index Expanded, Social Science Index, Current Contents, conference proceedings, and two chemistry indexes. Citation reports are created on an author, displaying the number of times the author is cited, the average citations per item and the h-index in graph and chart form. The results of the reports are based on only those journals that are indexed in the Web of Science database collection. In March 2015, a press release on the WOS Thomson ISI website announced a collaboration with Google Scholar to enable citation count cross-checking.
Google Scholar generates statistics from the author’s own articles and then tracks their published work. The author creates and maintains his/her own profile which can be made public, graphs citations over time and generated reports on a publication’s h-index number. Google Scholar Metrics is free, and covers a large portion of scholarly articles published in the last five years but “only includes publications with at least a hundred articles” from that same time period.
Harzing Publish or Perish is a free, downloadable software program that retrieves raw academic citations from Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Search. In addition to capturing journal citations in English, Harzing also includes LOTE (Language Other Than English) citations and book chapters. The reports include the total number of citations, number of citations per year and the h-index. Along with the Author Impact Analysis, another feature is the Journal Impact Analysis.
Altmetric, a fee-based tool, was founded in 2011 and according to its website, its mission “is to track and analyze the online activity around scholarly literature.” Data is collected from newspapers, government policy documents, and mentions of scholarly publications in online conversations on social media sites and elsewhere. A score is given based on volume of mentions, number of sources, and how often that author is discussed unless the article was published before 2011 then the score may be inaccurate. An embedded API donut badge displays a color-coded visualization of each social media type represented in the score and the number is placed in the middle of the donut.
ORCID is an open, community-driven platform where a scholar can create their own research profile and add publications and other works including “research objects such as datasets, equipment, articles, media stories, citations, experiments, patents, and notebooks.” An author creates a record of their scholarly work which is tracked by an ORCID iD, a unique digital identifier assigned to each author. This digital identifier distinguishes one author from another and is used by other platforms such as PlumX, Academic Analytics, and Scopus to enable cross-platform sharing of metrics data. ORCID maintains a public registry of the all the ORCID iD profiles which is searchable in order to facilitate communication and collaboration among researchers
Used together, altmetrics and traditional citation metrics systems provide a holistic profile of an author’s body of work. The use of citation metrics is an established trend with a tangible impact within the academic community in some disciplines and an emerging methodology among others. Statistical analysis of faculty and departmental performance is critically important to higher education administrators as they seek to demonstrate productivity and compete for funding. Architecture and design subject librarians can play a vital role in faculty tenure and promotion by advocating for the adoption, support and use of altmetrics as a way to produce a more well-rounded profile of the scholarly output of architecture and design faculty.
References
Aghaei Chadegani, A., Salehi, H., Yunus, M. M., Farhadi, H., Fooladi, M., Farhadi, M., & Ale Ebrahim, N. (2013). A comparison between two main academic literature collections: Web of Science and Scopus databases. Asian Social Science, 9(5), 18-26.
Hazelkorn, E. Rankings and the reshaping of higher education : The battle for world-class excellence (2nd ed.). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Sutton, S. W. (2014). Altmetrics: What good are they to academic libraries? Kansas Library Association College and University Libraries Section Proceedings, 4(2), 1-7.
University of Southern California
Assistant Professor Alvin Huang was named to the Board of Directors for the Association of Computer Aided Design in Architecture. Additionally, his Pure Tension Pavilion received a 2015 R+D Award from Architect Magazine (featured in the July Issue) and was also named as a finalist for the SXSW Eco Place by Design Award. Alvin will be one of 5 finalists pitching their projects to the jury at the annual SXSW Festival in Austin, Texas in October.
Alexander Robinson is the 2015-2016 recipient of the Prince Charitable Trust Rome Prize for Landscape Architecture. He will be developing new tools to investigate the intersection of infrastructural design and picturesque theories.
The book Young Architects 16: Overlay, was published by Princeton Architectural Press in July 2015, featuring the work of Geoffrey von Oeyen from the 2014 Architectural League Prize. Also in July, Geoffrey von Oeyen participated in the symposium “Mapping the Middle Zone” in Shenzen, China, organized by fellow USC faculty member Gary Paige under the leadership of Dean Qingyun Ma.
Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects [LOHA] was recently shortlisted for a student accommodations project in Dublin. As a part of the Grangegorman Development Agency master plan, the student accommodations will help develop a new university quarter for the Dublin Institute of Technology and other institutions. LOHA is one of six firms participating in “Shelter: Rethinking How We Live in Los Angeles”, an upcoming exhibition at the A+D Architecture and Design Museum curated by Sam Lubell and Danielle Rago and opening on August 20th. LOHA’s proposal will examine the relationship between urbanization and water use to develop new modes of urban occupation along the Los Angeles River. LOHA’s UCLA Adjacent Student and Faculty Housing was recently awarded an AIA California Council Honor Award, and the Flynn Mews House was honored with a People’s Choice Award and an AZ Award of Merit from Azure Magazine.
Rick Gooding was recently one of the jurors for the North Carolina AIA Design Awards. Chu+Gooding Architects design for the Autry Resource Center in Burbank is currently under construction. This 102,000 Sq Ft Storage and Research Facility is a climate controlled, high-density Archive that will house the Autry National Center Collection of artworks and artifacts focusing on the American and Native American Southwest. As part of the primary design team including Populous, HMC Architects and OLIN, Chu+Gooding Architects is proud to announce that our collective has been awarded the $350 million Los Angeles Convention Center renovation project. The progressive design focuses on place-making, forward-thinking functionality and authenticity of experience.
Michael Hricak, FAIA, who served as the Editor-in-Chief of the 13th Edition of the Architecture Students Handbook of Professional Practice (AIA/Wiley 2008), is serving on the Advisory Committee for the upcoming 14th Edition of the ASHPP, reviewing articles and providing content.
Adjunct Assistant Professor, Mario Cipresso AIA, as Design Director with CO Architects is currently designing a new start-up medical school for the California University of Science and Medicine (CUSM) in Colton, CA. CUSM is only the 9th medical school to be established in Southern California and is scheduled to welcome it’s first class in 2017. As the first structure planned for the new campus, the 100,000 SF facility includes research laboratories, classrooms, various medical simulation and training spaces along with communal spaces for students and faculty.
Dr. Travis Longcore (Landscape Architecture Program) was an invited plenary speaker in May at the 3rd international Artificial Light at Night conference (ALAN 2015) in Sherbrooke, Quebec on the topic of light pollution as global change. In June, Longcore and an international group of co-authors published a paper in the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution presenting “A framework to assess evolutionary responses to anthropogenic light and sound.” Dr. Longcore was also a featured guest speaker discussing drought and the Los Angeles landscape at Los Angeles design firm Rios Clementi Hale.
Professor Marc Schiler presented a paper at the American Solar Energy Society’s conference, Solar 2015, on teaching environmentally responsive design in Architecture entitled “Sage on the Stage AND Guide at the Side: Teaching Strategies and Experiences in Preparing ZNE Capable Architecture Students” by Marc Schiler, Kyle Konis and Tim Kohut. Professor Schiler also gave an invited presentation titled Architecture and Environment: 40 years of climate responsive design, passive solar Architecture, and zero net energy. Professor Schiler was awarded the 2015 Passive Solar Pioneer Award at the Awards Banquet. “The American Solar Energy Society has established this award for passive solar pioneers. It honors those in the passive field whose pioneering work set the stage for others to follow. Honorees are men and women who developed the theories, early research efforts, new concepts, and opportunities for later researchers to develop. Their foresight, innovative thinking, and creativity opened the doors for others.”
The first full-length book on the Gamble House has just been published by CityFiles Press (Chicago) and the Gamble House/USC School of Architecture. “The Gamble House: Building Paradise in California” draws on recently discovered archival material to re-write the narrative of a house whose story had been assumed a settled matter for years. This publication, by Edward Bosley, Anne Mallek, Ann Scheid and Robert Winter, reveals new information about the Gamble family, their Pasadena winter home and the gardens designed for them, illustrated with stunning new photography by renowned architectural photographer Alexander Vertikoff. Available September 1 at the Gamble House Bookstore and other outlets specializing in architecture titles.
Auburn University
Auburn University’s School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture has released the most recent issue of its newsletter, StudioAPLA. The Summer Issue features events, student work, faculty and alumni news.
Sheri Schumacher, Interior Architecture Program Chair in the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture, was one of the twenty-three artists receiving awards at the 41st Montgomery Art Build Museum Exhibition on Friday, June 12. She was awarded the Foy Gilmore Goodwyn Memorial Fund Award for her mixed media textile, “Margins.” Ninety-seven artworks were selected for exhibition from 427 entered by 127 artists. All the winning pieces will be on display at the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts through August 9. The Montgomery Art Guild Museum Exhibition is a partnership between the museum and the Montgomery Art Guild. For more, go to this link.
Timothy Fuerst, a rising fifth-year architecture/interior architecture student in the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture, received First Prize in the Auburn University Outstanding ePortfolio competition at the second annual ePortfolio Award Luncheon in May. The exceptional work of thirteen finalists was honored, five from the College of Architecture, Design and Construction. The ePortfolios were judged on effective communication, critical thinking through reflection, technical competency, and visual literacy. Finalists were nominated by faculty or peers, and their ePortfolios were reviewed by a committee made of faculty and students. For more, read here
Samuel Thomas Hurst IV, Dean of the Auburn College of Architecture, Design and Construction from 1958-1961, died on April 10 in Montecito, California. A Georgia Tech graduate, Hurst served in the Navy during World War II. He studied with Walter Gropius at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, and Gropius remained a mentor and lifelong friend who influenced Hurst to devote himself to education with the spirit of the Bauhaus. For more, click here.
North Carolina State University
Now available — Public Interest Design Practice Guidebook
Public Interest Design Practice Guidebook: SEED Methodology, Case Studies, and Critical Issues introduces the standards and rigor that are needed to build public interest design into a practice that has a major global impact. Writings by Thomas Fisher, Heather Fleming, Michael Cohen, Michael P. Murphy Jr., Alan Ricks, and others cover topics such as professional business development, increasing positive impact, design evaluation, capacity building, and many more.
Themes, including public engagement and project assessment, are presented throughout the book and provide clear methods for an informed practice. Included are a step-by-step methodology and other tools for professionals to grow their public practices with new clients, new fee sources, and more meaningful design solutions. Groundbreaking is an Issues Index that categorizes 90 critical issues addressed by design which are clearly documented by an array of community projects focusing on global challenges.
This comprehensive manual also contains a glossary, a case study locator atlas, and a reading list, integrating research and techniques so that you can design community-centered environments, products, and systems. Whether you are working in the field of architecture, urban planning, industrial design, landscape architecture, or communication design,this book will inspire a public interest design practice that is informed and inclusive.
To order through Publisher, click here.
Marilys R. Nepomechie of Florida International University Starts Term as ACSA President and Bruce Lindsey of Washington University in St. Louis as President-Elect
Marilys R. Nepomechie of Florida International University Starts Term as ACSA President and Bruce Lindsey of Washington University in St. Louis as President-Elect
The Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) is pleased to announce that Marilys Nepomechie, Professor of Architecture in the College of Architecture + The Arts at Florida International University (FIU), has begun her term as ACSA President for 2015-2016 academic year. She assumes the role one year after her election to the board as Vice President/President-Elect.
Since 2003, Nepomechie has represented ACSA on National Architectural Accrediting Board (NAAB) visiting teams as both team member and chair, and authored white papers for the 2013 NAAB Accreditation Review Conference—on the role of social responsibility in architecture curricula, and on innovative models of education and accreditation. In 2004 Nepomechie co-chaired ACSA’s 92nd Annual Meeting, Archipelagos: Outposts of the Americas, in Miami, Florida.
As president of ACSA, Nepomechie has vowed to address the challenges facing ACSA schools, including diminishing institutional funding to support faculty and student work; a need to increase student and faculty diversity; the imperative to facilitate broad accessibility and affordability to our programs; the challenges of reframing the possibilities offered by online education; and in response to the breadth and rapid pace of change in the academy and the profession, the need to reassess, and perhaps recalibrate, our curricular structures.
Inaugural Director of the accredited professional program in Architecture at FIU, Nepomechie was lead faculty advisor for the award-winning FIU 2011 Solar Decathlon project and currently serves as the faculty advisor in architecture to the joint Tsinghua University (THU)-FIU Solar Decathlon China 2013 effort. She has served on the Editorial Review Board of Architectural Record and on the National Board of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) 2030 Commitment. Nepomechie is a registered architect and holds the Master of Architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has been inducted to the AIA College of Fellows.
Bruce Lindsey, teacher and administrator at Washington University in St. Louis, is also starting his term as Vice President this month. Lindsay has made significant contributions to beginning design education, sustainable design education, and community design education. He served as head of Auburn’s School of Architecture from 2001-06, and in 2005, he received the AIA’s National Teaching Honor Award for his work in beginning design at Auburn. Before that, he taught at Carnegie Mellon University, where he served as associate head of Carnegie Mellon’s School of Architecture and as associate professor of art and architecture from 1994-2001. In 1997, he co-chaired “Not Only But Also,” the 14th National Conference on the Beginning Design Student in Pittsburgh. Lindsey has been a visiting professor at Arizona State University and at Catholic University, and was the Pierce Visiting Critic at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He will begin his term as ACSA President in July 2016.
Founded in 1912 by 10 charter members, ACSA is an international association of architecture schools preparing future architects, designers, and change agents. Our membership includes all of the accredited professional degree programs in the United States and Canada, as well as international schools and 2- and 4-year programs. Together ACSA schools represent some 7,000 faculty educating more than 40,000 students.
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