ACSA108 Virtual Conference

Michael Eckhoff
Hoover Treated Wood Products, Inc.

The United States is undergoing a national wood revival. This wood revival’s nascent emergence suggests that architects are (again) becoming more familiar and comfortable with the advantages associated with wood-based construction, albeit slowly and in a piecemeal fashion. What appears to be missing from the wood revival, however, is not the sense of aesthetics or utility but rather the sense of urgency. After years spent teaching seminars to practicing architects, engineers, building/fire inspectors and officials (including in the wildland-urban interface or WUI) and teaching forest policy and wood products classes to university students, including about fire-retardant-treated wood (FRTW), class participants seemingly lack awareness of the connections between wood utilization and forest health based on questions they ask of the instructor during class.

This paper will strengthen the case for building (stronger) connections between architecture university programs and forestry/wood products academic programs in the United States. First, this paper will review recent data concerning both the current housing crisis as well as the current forest health/wildfire crisis in the United States, suggesting that addressing the forest health/wildfire crisis sustainably could help address the housing crisis simultaneously. Next, this paper will briefly qualitatively review professional architectural and forestry/wood product-focused organization accreditation schemes. Finally, the paper will suggest ways to adopt simple and inexpensive changes in pedagogy to help build those stronger connections in the absence of support from accreditation guidelines, with an emphasis on building with wood in the WUI.

Keith Peiffer
Oklahoma State University

Acoustical panel ceilings (APCs) are a mainstay in contemporary architecture. As a flexible, modular system of cross-T frames and solid panels suspended from the structure above, the APC provides the enclosure above many of the spaces we inhabit everyday: schools, offices, hospitals, and retail stores. It is a humble system, functional yet inexpensive, and it is everywhere. If “the secret ambition of design is to become invisible” as Bruce Mau asserts, then the APC has achieved this hallowed place within design as an assembly that performs effortlessly while often receding into the background, ubiquitous and taken for granted.

Its current status as a background material, however, belies its revolutionary beginnings. Although certainly not limited to this lineage, the contemporary APC was birthed as an innovative materialization of the aspirations, conflicts, and contradictions within Modernism, and is particularly indebted to the slab-style office buildings of the 1950s. To establish this context I will explore Modernism’s interests in standardization and industrialization of building components, clear-span universal space, and the integration of new technology through the following precedents: Mies van der Rohe’s clear-span pavilions, architectural magazines, product advertisements featuring renderings by Helmut Jacoby, and three 1950s high-rise office buildings. The confluence of these interests, explored in architectural practice, spurred more than a decade of focused development of the suspended ceiling in the 1950s, resulting in the Acoustical Fire Guard product that closely resembles the APC still installed broadly today.

Although architectural history and theory has not often mentioned the APC specifically, we can trace broader disciplinary influences to their manifestation in the APC. My interest is not in arguing for a newer or better alternative ceiling system, but in placing the APC at the center of the story, synthesizing various theoretical, historical, and technical developments to return to its beginnings with fresh eyes.

Gundula Proksch
University of Washington

Erin Horn
University of Washington

By 2050, two-thirds of the world’s population will live in cities and consume 80% of the global food supply. As the changing climate exacerbates pressure on all sectors of the economy, new frameworks for resource management in urban areas have been introduced. The food-water-energy nexus and the circular economy are two prominent examples; these conceptual frameworks recognize that resources consumed by cities are finite and intricately interdependent. In alignment with these ideas, professionals in the built environments shoulder a significant responsibility to design future buildings, neighborhoods, and cities that can sustain themselves while exerting minimal impact on the surrounding environment. The supply and consumption of food, water, and energy in future cities have, therefore become an architectural problem – and an opportunity for designers to contribute to a more significant societal shift.

In response to the strain that the current food system places on freshwater and fossil fuel supplies, urban agriculture projects that depend on technological innovation and an ecosystem approach are becoming more common. Aquaponics and other closed loop systems particularly aligned with the food-water-energy nexus and circular economy. To be implemented in cities, aquaponics must be examined from the built environment perspective – most commercial-scale aquaponic farms require climate control to produce food year-round. Additionally, aquaponic farms have the potential to interact with other urban programs, as illustrated by The Plant in Chicago, IL and the BIGH Ferme Abattoir which provide adjacent spaces for growing, processing, and selling food as well as hosting community and education events (see Figure 1 and Figure 2). In the interest of achieving a fully circular urban economy, aquaponic farms’ inputs and outputs can be integrated with inputs and outputs of other urban facilities.

This paper investigates the potential integration of aquaponic greenhouses with brewery spaces, to make use of the circular nature of this growing system. In the case of integrated greenhouses, careful design and a wide range of innovative technologies can be used to recycle growing and brewing process byproducts and reduce the overall energy and water demand while producing fish, crops, and beer. The key in this examination is to evaluate the potential of each process byproduct and describe how it can be captured and reused. (see Figure 3) Potential resources that can be linked between aquaponic growing and brewing by thoughtful architectural design include:

1. Water (rainwater collected on site and wastewater generated by each process)

2. Heat and energy (excess process heat and solar energy capture)

3. Organic matter (captured CO2, spent grain, yeast and hops and diatomaceous earth

The goal is to link as many resource inputs and outputs as possible to create a productive ecosystem for a circular economy. As cities transform to manage the food-water-energy nexus sustainably, architectural design that is intimately involved with the industrial processes that buildings host can play a crucial role in closing the urban resource loop.

Jian Zhu
Washington University in St. Louis

Heewoong Yang
Washington University in St. Louis

Hongxi Yin
Washington University in St. Louis

Ming Qu
Purdue University

Wenjun Ge
HIC Architects

By demonstrating an innovative, attractive and sustainable home, the Lotus House aims to explore the technological frontier of 3D printing in both architectural design and construction. Led by a transdisciplinary group of faculty in the departments of: Architecture, Construction Management, Computer Science and Engineering; the project was developed with oversight and partnership with companies leading the industries of construction and composite materials in both the US and China. The Lotus House is a 650 ft2, single-story home that competed in the Solar Decathlon Competition in 2018. The intention of the project is to demonstrate ability of 3D Printing technology to implement the mass customization of complicated organic structures into the housing typological market. The home is composed of 35 refabricated panels, each of which are entirely unique from one another. These panels are separated into twelve parabolic-shape panels for the exterior wall, eight double-curved panels for the pitched roof and fifteen irregular panels for entrance. Each panel consists of an outer shell of glass fiber reinforced concrete (GFRC) and an inner shell of glass fiber reinforced gypsum (GFRG). These shells are connected and supported by a fabricated steel skeleton, insulated with spray foam insulation. The component information for GFRC, GFRG and the steel skeleton were combined in a Revit Dynamo digital model environment and then sent to 3 different construction and composite material factories in China. This was done so that all components could be simultaneously produced. To reduce the deviation of each component before preassembling the GFRC, and steel skeleton together, each component was 3d laser scanned in the factory. This enables the digital comparison of the built components geometry and the true components geometry, which was designed and desired. Students used the high accuracy of prefabricated panels to ensure a compressed on-site construction schedule. The proof of this, is that project was finished on site within an impressive 20 day complete construction schedule with unskilled labor. To develop a quantitative comparative study of the effectiveness and economical differences of form making approaches, three GFRC prefabrication processes were utilized. Each being fully documented by using digital models and 3D laser scanning, these approaches were: traditional wood formworks, CNC foam formworks and 3D Printed formworks composed of 20% carbon fiber reinforced ABS thermal plastic polymer. This project demonstrates that the 3D Printing technology makes it possible to both improve productivity and decrease construction cost harmoniously in the most difficult construction type: the mass customized organic structure. In the future, this study will be the foundation for a cost analysis of 3D printing in other customized building types and situations.

Maryam Kouhirostami
University of Florida

Mahtab Kouhirostamkolaei
Noushirvani University

Mahya Sam
University of Florida

Ashish Asutosh
University of Florida

Charles Kibert
University of Florida

Designing an optimum natural ventilation system is not so simple, however, it has a long-lasting effect on human health and economic. There are many different items that have significant impacts on the air flow rate in a building such as windows design. For instance, the design of window louvers can have a considerable influence on the cross-ventilation flow. Many studies on natural ventilation have been released in the past; however, a review of the literature shows that most of them just considered the angle and direction of louvers. The purpose of this research is finding the optimum geometry for the design of a louvered window to improve the quality of natural ventilation in a classroom. This paper presents a Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) simulation in the classroom setting. The study analyses natural ventilation flow with five different geometry of louvers in the generic isolated classroom with the following dimensions: 21’*27’*12′. To make the study valid the geometry and dimension of the wind tunnel is the foundation for this simulation. Hence, dimensions of the domain are 70’*240’*12. The louvers operate in a circular motion about a central pivot and all louvers are at 30-degree. Wind direction is 15-degrees toward the north-west. The results show that aerodynamic geometry, which is a simple wing shape, has the best impact to improve air movement through the louvers. This design would increase the air velocity from 2.6 f/s to 3.9 f/s. Furthermore, it would conduct air to the upper side of the room. This result would be beneficial for designers and industry to design and produce high-performance façade in the future.

Elham Soltani Dehnavi
University of Washington

Christopher Meek
University of Washington

The indoor experience can be affected by several environmental conditions, including visual, thermal and acoustic comfort, Indoor air quality, layout, and location. There are physical metrics for each aspect that are calculating the occupant’s comfort by considering the acceptable ranges defined by widely recognized standards. There are also other factors such as occupant’s characteristics like metabolic rate and clothing insulation, building’s characteristics, and outdoor climate that influence the indoor conditions. Unfortunately, some of these aspects are conflicting with each other, and most of the studies have looked at the comfort metrics in isolation. Also, in most cases, putting the same weight to all factors can result in inappropriate conclusions. So, it is essential to consider all or at least a number of these comfort factors and rank them in order to have a better performance in office indoor environment. The physical factors related to comfort and productivity inside office buildings are location, metabolic rate, clothing level, window-to-wall ratio, glazing type, shading, natural ventilation, and heating and cooling set-points. These parameters can be used as simulation inputs to provide better space planning process. This study suggests two types of analytical prototypes that overlap different comfort factors in office buildings and can give designers an overall and broader perspective on space planning and comparing different zones inside the office from a comfort point of view. Computer simulation is used to provide the information needed. The simulation tools include the Grasshopper and plugins such as Ladybug, Honeybee, and EnergyPlus. In order to produce the X-Maps (experience maps), annualized climate-dependent percent of time-based metrics are selected for comfort evaluation and simulation. The first prototype is zone-based; its purpose is to identify the position relative to the window, and it goes through the Y-axis. For the zone-based simulation, the floor plan is divided into zones parallel with the window that the depth of each zone is 1.5 meter because most of the office workstations are 1.5m by 1.5m. The Thermal Comfort Percentage (TCP), Percentage of People Dissatisfied (PPD), spatial Daylight Autonomy (sDA), and Annual Sunlight Exposure (ASE) is calculated for each zone. The results are overlapped in the charts in order to choose the best zone. So, the effect of metabolic rate, clothing insulation, location, window-to-wall ratio, and improvements such as glazing type, shading, and heating and cooling set-points can be analyzed separately, and the best configuration could be selected. The second prototype is grid-based; its purpose is to find the spatial location in the XY axis and the optimum direction for the desk to be facing. For grid-based simulation, the floor plan is divided into 1.5m by 1.5m grids and the Occupied Thermal Comfort Percentage (OTCP), Daylight Autonomy (DA), and Annual Sunlight Exposure (ASE) is calculated for each grid. The results are overlapped on the graphs to select the best grids for locating the workstations. Also, the desk orientation is done based on the glare potential. These prototypes can be used in several design phases, including conceptual design, design development, post-occupancy, and renovations.

Gabriel Fries-Briggs
University of New Mexico

Technologies guiding building production introduce architectural techniques of vision. Beyond changes in the management of design and construction, BIM, integrated with new hardware such as augmented reality devices, produces new forms of perception and visualization. These shifts in the social-visual order of architectural production are abundant. They can be seen in promotional videos for augmented reality headsets as well as architectural schools and offices. An analysis of images and videos made with augmented reality hardware (integrated with BIM) suggests ways that architects can relate emerging construction technologies to aesthetic and disciplinary forms of knowledge, connecting historical conceptions of representation and abstraction to emerging modes of practice.

Rather than relegate technologies of modeling, managing, and visualizing to presentations and construction administration, this paper examines the way these technologies transform spatial perception, pedagogical methods, and ideologies of representation. With the ubiquitous use of computational imaging technologies and modeling software, the ‘drawing’ as the site of design has been dramatically altered. Section has been tethered to certain ways of working on, understanding, and abstracting architecture. The x-ray, panorama, and information rich environments suggested by recent visual hardware require an addendum to the section drawing as a medium tethered to the social and spatial characteristics of buildings.

These techniques of vision also find historical affinities with spatial vocabulary such as phenomenal transparency. The spatial superimposition, simultaneity, and ‘space-time’ established by Rowe and Slutzky in part presage the optical qualities of augmented construction sites. Computational image environments put forth a version of real-time transparency. Bringing new techniques of vision into the discourse around section is a means to build a foundation for examining their effects and impact. It suggests that these techniques both build on historical formats of representation and are fundamental to new modes of understanding architecture.

Alexandros Tsamis
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Ana Cecilia Toledano
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Mohammed Alnaggar
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

With anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions warming up the Earth’s atmosphere and triggering climatic changes around the world, the construction industry faces a challenge: providing a resilient built environment for an increasingly growing population while at the same time reducing the use of cement and the demand for energy use from heating and cooling in an increasingly urbanized world. Construction using Additive Manufacturing (AM) has gained traction in recent years, promising benefits such as: reduction in waste, building time, and need for formwork; customization and fabrication of complex geometries at no extra cost; and the reduction of human labor and on-site hazards. While implementations of AM in construction have mostly used cement[1] as a primary material, alternative technologies have been developed that use earth abundant, low carbon renewable materials, as can be seen in projects such as Gaia by WASP[2], as well as efforts from the Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC)[3]. This proposal extends the efforts of building with renewable materials by developing a Functionally Graded Materials (FGM)[4] 3d Printing technology to create a bio-ceramic composite wall using lime, clay and hemp bast fiber. Unlike traditional AM technologies that deploy a singular material, FGMs are a type of composite that use different materials according to where they are needed, with gradient transitioning between them to achieve non-linear interphases. We work under the hypothesis that with FGMs we can achieve better strength to weight ratio than regular ceramics and at the same time allow through the 3d printing process to express in form the functional requirements of material change. While used in fields other than architecture, FGM in AM has been proposed but not yet implemented in construction[5][6].        In this paper we will present advances in 3 areas of inquiry. 1. An envelope-to-structure example has been designed, in which a space-truss interior structure grades into an insulation material, and then grades back into the structural material as the surface. 2. A multi-material extruder for large scale 3d printing has been implemented. We will demonstrate a custom G-code format for design to construction using the designed structural envelope as an example. Unlike typical g-code, here we include the rate of change of material mix as part of the instructions for printing. We will showcase different tests of on-the-fly material mixing achieving gradient transitioning between materials and discuss affordances as well as limitations for the method. 3. We will show experimental results of characterizing different bio ceramic composites as candidate materials for construction. Hemp fibers and shells are chosen as natural reinforcement materials while clay and lime are chosen as matrix materials for their availability and benign carbon footprint. Different mixes are examined for their structural and thermal behavior in a structural envelope, their ecological footprint is analyzed in relation to current materials in AM and their ability to be used as candidate materials for AM is quantified. This type of construction and material logic allows for the use of locally available materials in ways that are customized for optimal material use and environmental performance. FGM for AM allows  better mechanical and thermal performance thus becoming a viable alternative to conventional, high embodied-energy materials currently in the main stream of research in AM.

[1] C. Gosselin, R. Duballet, Ph. Roux, N. Gaudillière, J. Dirrenberger, Ph. Morel, Large-scale 3D printing of ultra-high performance concrete – a new processing route for architects and builders, Materials & Design, Volume 100, 2016.

[2] The First 3D Printed House with Earth | Gaia | Stampanti 3D | WASP. https://www.3dwasp.com/en/3d-printed-house-gaia/. Accessed 28 Jan. 2019.

[3] “Pylos – Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia.” IAAC, https://iaac.net/project/pylos/. Accessed 10 June 2019.

[4] Mahamood, Rasheedat Modupe, and Esther Titilayo Akinlabi. Functionally Graded Materials. Springer, 2017

[5] Jorge Duro-Royo, Laia Mogas-Soldevila, Neri Oxman, Flow-based fabrication: An integrated computational workflow for design and digital additive manufacturing of multifunctional heterogeneously structured objects,Computer-Aided Design,Volume 69,2015 [6] Grigoriadis, Kostas. 2014. Mixed Matters: The Problems of Designing with Multi-materials.

Ihab Elzeyadi
University of Oregon

Belal Abboushi
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’

Building modelling and simulation approaches are increasingly being utilized in architectural design studios to guide and inform architectural students and professionals’ design process and offer them evidence-based feedback on their proposed building performance. The development of intuitive and simplified simulation interfaces has greatly contributed to achieving this integration. One aspect that is often overlooked is the workflow that governs and regulates integrated design, which can have significant impacts on final design outcomes. In this paper, we present a taxonomy of these workflows and review key factors that should be considered when selecting one based on an pedagogical experiment and a survey of AIA COTE top 10 architectural awards for the last five years. Currently there are numerous software packages available for environmental building simulations. This makes it challenging to select an appropriate tool that provides accurate results yet allow a designer to make architectural informed decisions with a designer-friendly interface. Further, the workflow utilized to incorporate simulations into the design process was proved to highly impact student’s success. Yet it is not clear what type of workflows are successful to provide an integrated design approach, under what conditions, and/or for which building and site typologies. This paper addresses these questions by first reviewing existing workflows of design-simulation integration processes and highlighting their strengths and weaknesses. Second, an experiment to test three of the most common workflows was conducted for three different integrated design architectural studios at the senior and vertical studios levels. The workflows, processes, and the resultant student projects were further analyzed based on criteria for better integrated design and architectural excellence. The analysis criteria was based on the COTE top 10 awards as well as architectural design quality based on an exit interview protocol. To situate the pedagogical experiment results within a larger context, a survey of the American Institute of Architects Committee on the Environment (AIA COTE) Top 10 student award recipients over the last five years was conducted. The results are categorized into a pedagogical framework that outlines best strategies of the type of workflows, software, design process to be used, methods to achieve desired interaction between design process and analytical feedback, and metrics for educators to evaluate the success of this integration and their learning outcomes in the design studio. The hope is bridge the gap between the building parametric design and simulation with the design studio creative process for a more integrated design outcomes.

Ming Hu
University of Maryland

The built environment assists societies in meeting basic needs for shelter and security. Throughout time, it has increasingly developed to provide greater scales of comfort and amenities, albeit with considerable environmental impacts. Life cycle assessment has been used as an analysis tool to help decision-makers plan for mass urbanization and building construction; however, the research to date focuses on either the individual building scale or overall urban scale. Although several methodologies have been applied to both scales, the results have not been reconciled or synchronized. In light of this, this paper first presents a systematic literature review using bibliometric network data to assess state-of-the-art knowledge of the use of LCA at different scales from 1990–2017. Second, the paper identifies the main research foci at the building and urban scales. At the building scale, three research focal points are identified: building materials and products, design solutions, and energy consumption/emissions reduction. At the urban scale, there are three research areas of focus as well: urbanization and infrastructure planning, urban metabolism (water/energy/waste synergy), and complexity of urban issues. Next, the most influential papers and journals are presented. Drawing upon the findings from the literature review, major gaps in current research activities are identified as the building-centric approach, energy performance–centric approach, and lack of consideration for uncertainties. These are critical areas requiring further study and research. Accordingly, a comprehensive LCA framework that integrates different scales of the built environment could play a major role in promoting the reduction of related ecological impacts. Most current LCA studies are confined to their own scale and scope while lacking consideration of other related factors, such as population density, urban density, transportation accessibility, open space, and public parks. It is imperative to synergize LCA at the building and urban scales together, using an integrated framework. The potential to use an integrated framework in both urban planning and a building design context is a relatively new development. At the building scale, early adoption of an integrated framework could help designers, architects, and engineers find optimized solutions through quantitative analyses and evidence. At the urban scale, the planning process is a matter of organizing land use and optimizing resources, materials, and the energy flow within city boundaries. Therefore, a future integrated framework could be used in two ways: either as an analysis tool to aid the decision-making of government officials or as a design tool for urban planners. There is also a need for the planning and design community—specifically, architects, engineers, and planners—to work together as a synchronized unit to set up work for a higher level of LCA integration in the built environment.

Niyati Naik
University of Oregon

Ihab Elzeyadi
University of Oregon

Architectural patterned screens–such as Jalis and Mashrabiyas–employed as a façade strategy in vernacular architecture on a global scale, are aesthetically and culturally significant. Several studies have proven their sustainability potential in managing heat gains, daylighting availability, and glare inside the perimeter spaces of building envelopes. These vernacular facade treatments are being used as design inspirations for dynamic and parametric-driven screens of contemporary building envelopes. In contrast to their vernacular counterparts, contemporary external dynamic screens (EDSc) are operable and account for temporal variability in the outdoor environmental factors as well as occupant’s control. The aesthetics of EDSc is found to be the main driver for rising interest in its applications (Attia, 2018). Dynamic shading façade typologies promise significant building energy savings (Elzeyadi, 2017). However, their impacts on indoor environment and occupant comfort is under-researched.   Recent studies in occupant thermal and visual comfort advocates design of non-uniform indoor environments for occupant well-being and productivity (Parkinson and de Dear, 2015; Reinhart, 2015). Non-uniform thermal environments are energizing for occupants and have the potential to generate hedonic thermal sensations; termed as “alliesthesia”. This study investigates the potential of EDSc in creating non-uniform thermal environment. Elzeyadi and his research team at University of Oregon found that building envelope shading has the potential to increase about 9 to 13% of occupant comfort hours during summer months in the US Pacific Northwest (Elzeyadi et.al, 2016). To better understand the applicability of EDSc, it is intended to test a full scale EDSc prototype in the US Pacific Northwest.  The prototype is conceptualized as operable sliding panels with geometric patterns whose perforation ratio (PR) and depth ratio (DR) can change with time. PR is the percentage of total void area and DR is the ratio of depth to width of a void. This study reports on how results from the computational analysis were used to inform the design of the full-scale prototype. Screens with different combinations of PR and DR were modelled on the east façade of a mid-sized office building. The simulations were conducted for design days of summer months from June to September in ASHRAE Climate Zone, CZ 4C which was represented by the moderate climate of Eugene, OR (44°03′07″N 123°05′12″W). The PR and the DR were assumed to vary within the range of 10% to 90% and 0.1 to 1, respectively. For different combinations of PR and DR, the predicted mean vote value (PMV-value) (ASHRAE-55, 2017) was computed as a measure of thermal comfort performance of the screen. The PMV-values using Fanger’s equation (1970) are obtained with-in the range of (-3) to (+3) indicate a person’s thermal sensation of (-3) as very cold to (+3) as very hot. PMV-value of (0) represents thermal neutrality. Transition of the indoor thermal environment from upper to lower fringes of the thermal comfort zone indicated by PMV values of (+0.5) and (-0.5) represents non-uniformity in the thermal conditions. The objective was to find out geometric parameters of the dynamic screen that could create non-uniform thermal environment within the limits of the thermal comfort zone. Results revealed that the variability in the PMV value due to change in the PR is highest for DR = 0.1. In other words, the sensitivity of thermal comfort to PR is higher for smaller value of DR. This suggests that one way to design dynamic screens to create non-uniform indoor thermal environment on the east facing perimeter space of a building in Eugene is by keeping the DR constant equals to 0.1 and varying the PR between 10 % and 90 %. This study was used as the basis to develop full-scale EDSc prototypes; the impact of which will be investigated on actual indoor environment and human subjects for future studies. This study adds to ways in which architecture is practiced and taught. It shows an approach where architectural design intentions target thermally delightful sensation for occupants in addition to façade aesthetics.

Helia Taheri
North Carolina State University

Kristen Ambrose
RATIO Architects

Sarah Wood
RATIO Architects

Traci Rider
North Carolina State University

Decision-making in architectural design is a complex process that includes various factors such as aesthetics, user needs, and environmental considerations etc. (Gercek and Arsan, 2019). Creating a visually comfortable space is one of the main goals for architects in the decision-making process (Konstantzos and Tzempelikos, 2017). ASHRAE Guideline 10P (2014) states four conditions which contribute to create a comfortable space for occupants: thermal, visual, indoor air quality and acoustics. Based on United Nations statistics (2017), the urban population is increasing and will become 60% of the total world population by 2030. The majority of employees will work in office environments (ASHRAE, 1993), and the time spent by employees in the workplace and related stress is increasing (Evans, G.W. and McCoy, J.M., 1998; Poursafar, et al., 2019). This elevates the importance of designing comfortable office space for employees. Since staff (labor) costs are one of the primary costs of an organization, improvements that affect overall comfort have the potential to improve productivity, retention and benefit employers. Studies show that visual comfort can improve productivity in space (Boyss et al. 2003; Heschong, 2003; Aries et al., 2015). The goals of the study are to explore the relationship between visual comfort and the employees perception of their own productivity. The methods used in this study include survey and environmental monitoring. The participants, designer/occupants in a design firm in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA, participated in an online subjective survey asking about their perceived productivity and visual comfort in the space from Aug 19 – Sept 6, 2019. The illuminance was measured by sensors and serve as empirical data for reference. A correlational analysis was conducted between the results of the survey questions (visual comfort and productivity). The results show that there is no statistically significant relationship between visual comfort and employees’ perception of their productivity for the study period. Furthermore, the data collected from sensors showed that the daylight distribution in the open office is unequal.

Kristen Ambrose
RATIO Architects

Helia Taheri
North Carolina State University

Sarah Wood
RATIO Architects

Decision-making in architectural design is a complex process that includes factors such as aesthetics, environmental, and user needs (Gercek and Arsan, 2019). Utilizing computational simulation tools is one way to gather quantitative data efficiently to help architects in this process (Reinhart and Fitz, 2006). Recent literature on decision-making in architectural design states that it is significant for architects to create a link between their professional experience gained from previous work and knowledge provided from simulation tools (Gercek and Arsan, 2019). Daylight simulation tools are regularly accepted in the market, since it is difficult to evaluate the quantity of daylight in a space through a simple equation
(Reinhart and Fitz, 2006). Whether the daylight simulation is done in-house or by a consultant, it is imperative for architects
to have empirical knowledge about how the numerical results relate to the user experience.

In this article, a set of methods is proposed to improve designers’ understanding of daylight simulation results. The study has been conducted in the summer of 2019. The methods used in this study are survey, daylight simulation, and daylight measurement. The participants who are designer/occupants in a design firm in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA, participate in an online survey asking about their productivity and visual comfort in the space. Daylight simulation analyzes the illuminance levels in the office space with Ladybug and Honeybee – plugins of Rhino Grasshopper. Furthermore, the actual illuminance in the space is measured by Omron sensors in certain locations for additional empirical evidence. A correlational analysis is conducted between the questions of the survey, its results shows that there is no statistically significant correlation between visual comfort and emloyees’ perception of productivity in the summer. Also, the data gained from the sensors and survey show that the daylight is not equally distributed across the office. Ultimately, by sharing the findings with the participants in the meeting, while conducting the realtime day-light simulation, they can relate results to their own experience in space. It helps them improving their design knowledge and process for meaningfully integrating daylight in their design.

Patricia Morgado
North Carolina State University

“[Luis Barragán’s gardens] are the best of the new landscape architecture that we have seen,” Josef Albers wrote to Jean Charlot on September 9, 1947 after visiting them during his six-month period in Mexico. He was most likely referring to the gardens of El Cabrío and Las Fuentes, both from 1943-44, where Barragán experimented new ideas prior to developing Jardines del Pedregal in 1945. At the time, the project was well under construction, as was Casa Prieto-López (1948-1950), where he introduced his signature use of color. For his part, Albers was beginning his first series exploring the interaction of color—Variants on a theme—that led to his renowned oeuvre, the series Homage to the Square.  The Alberses’s fourteen visits to Mexico (1936-1967) has led many scholars to believe that they probably met Barragán in the 1950’s and that the painter’s use of color was influential to the architect. This belief dismisses other possible influences, such as the muralist-painter JoséClemente Orozco, a close friend of Barragán since 1931, who inspired him to consider planes to represent the “flow of time and evoke a different reality,”[i]  rather than Mexican history like other compatriot muralists. Likewise, it disregards the influence that Mesoamerican aesthetics had on Albers’s work. Except for a photograph from 1967, and an exchange of letters between 1967 and 1968, there is no evidence that can help date when they met. However, they likely knew, and admired each other’s work from the late 1940s. This explains Anni Albers’s reference to Barragán as “a kind of Mexican Mies” when she brought forth the idea for an exhibition of his work to the director of the MoMA in 1967. Similarly, Barragán’s appreciation for Albers’s work is revealed in the letter he wrote to thank him for the copy of his book, Interaction of Color, in 1967 when he had already completed most of his projects. He wrote: “[I have profound] respect for your work, a lifelong process from which many people, now so bound to improvisation, would learn the steadiness of a profound insight.” Rather than Albers influencing Barragán, I propose that Barragán attempted to produce a new form of mural art that used colors and textures from vernacular architecture and folk art, two aspects of Mexican culture Albers admired. These facts set the premise for the semester long assignment for my seminar “Luis Barragán: Light, Color, and Water.” Since perception of color is central to understanding Barragán’s work, the seminar begins with a brief color course using Albers’s pedagogy as well as research on his work. In regards to Barragán, students analyze a project and the carefully composed—sometimes abstract—photographs that he commissioned for publications. Colors are identified from Albers’s Color Aid, to later calculate the percentages of color used versus those perceived.  This paper studies the relationships between the work of Albers and Barragán, the possible influences and inspirations, and Barragán’s contributions to understanding “interaction of color” in architecture, based on the work of my students.

[i]Antonio Riggen Martínez. Luis Barragán. Mexico’s Modern Master, 1902-1988. (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1996), 126.

Mara Helmuth, Aaron Tkac, Brendan Girten, Xinlei Liu, Christoph Klemmt, Carl Jacobson, Yunze Mu, Zhixin Xu, Joel Garza, Grace Choi, & Rugui Xie
University of Cincinnati

Although music and architecture utilize different mediums for their manifestation, various theorists and creatives have proposed close relationships between the two. Projects from one field have been used as inspiration for the other, or work in both disciplines has been developed in close relation [1, 2]. In their verbal descriptions the disciplines share a multitude of terms, and philosophers and theorists attempted to formulate their connections [3]. Various educators tried to connect music and architecture, and studios at different institutions have attempted an approach based on music or sound. The projects often use a single composition as the inspiration or data that define an architectural design [4, 5, 6]. Instead of this one-directional approach, we attempted an interdisciplinary collaborative studio of both architecture and composition students, working in groups of two architects and one composer. This exploration included the analysis of a composition, leading to a generative method for the creation of both architecture and music so that the design processes can influence each other. Rather than using one discipline as the inspiration for the other, the goal was the creation of a singular spatial and sonic experience unable to exist without the other. Evaluation Notable was the difference in working between the disciplines. Architectural questions of structural stability, sustainability or social relevance may not apply to composition so much. Where the architectural process sees a constant revision or complete withdrawal of existing material, the composition process on the contrary is often more aimed at generating new complementary material that extends the already existing. Group work, as usual, sometimes leads to great collaborations, but may suffer from interpersonal difficulties. We observed groups that interacted intensely, groups in which mostly one discipline attempted to take and learn from the other, as well as groups where the collaboration was limited to the joint presentation of the works. The unfamiliarity with the other’s subjects in some cases led to a questioning of working methods and even isolated disrespect, while also new friendships formed between students. Through the student’s projects we were able to identify, non-exhaustively, different categories of connections between the two disciplines: – An inspirational concept the work deals with that does not form a methodology (such as ‘traffic’ or ‘nature’). – As set out in the syllabus, the utilization of a common methodology for the generation of raw geometric and sonic material. – The arrangement of material on the local and global scale by borrowing proportions from the other discipline, a common theme observed in some of the other musical studios [4, 5, 6]. – The experiential emotional level of being in a space or listening to a piece. Interestingly, ‘style’ does not appear to be one of those categories. While bound by various constraints through the collaboration, these were not able to direct the students in terms of analogue vs. digital, straight vs. curvy, harmonic vs. dissonant, or even ornamental vs. minimal. The actual choice of style of each work therefore remained within the domain of each discipline.

Bibliography

[1] Kanach, S., 2008. Music and architecture by Iannis Xenakis. Nova Iorque: Pendragon Press.

[2] Holl, S., 2017. The Architectonics of Music. PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, 39(2), pp.49-64.

[3] Pascha, K. S. 2004. ‘Gefrorene Musik’ – Das Verhältnis von Architektur und Musik in der ästhetischen Theorie. Thesis. Berlin.

[4] Story, J.K. 2017. The Pedagogy of the Cigar Box. Texas Architect Magazine.

[5] Gur, M. and Sen, E., 2019. Visualizing Music as a Basic Design Assignment in Architectural Education. European Journal of Educational Research, 8(1), pp.123-139.

[6] Martin, E. ed., 1994. Pamphlet Architecture 16: Architecture as a translation of music (No. 16). Princeton Architectural Press.

Benjamin Smith
Tulane University

Carrie Elizabeth Norman
Tulane University

At one time, authorship was derivative. From Quatremere de Quincy’s theories on type, to Jean-Nicolas-Louis Durand’s study of morphology, some of the earliest theoretical texts on architecture propose imitation as the common starting point for any process of artistic production. The following paper elaborates on a course co-taught by an architect and an historian on design’s relationship to the aesthetics of architectural production. The motive of the course was twofold: introduce architecture students to digital media and address concepts that influence representation, including intellectual foundations and rules of drawing. Conceived of as a series of six drawing assignments, the course problematized fundamental elements of architecture—not doors, windows, walls, balconies, and toilets, but form, image, and representation became the lens for production. Through these lenses, students tackled the stakes of architectural image-making to imagine the craft of drawing through methods of visualization. Students reconstituted plans, sections, and renderings of given source materials that included fifteen precedents spanning 2000 years of architecture’s history. While the conventions specific to architectural graphic standards remained intact, assignment objectives aimed to leverage composition, configuration, and copy as sites of invention to transform source materials. Weekly lectures addressing the aesthetics of drawing, supplemented by texts by architects and theorists, including Massimo Scolari, Robin Evans, Sonit Bafna, Sam Jacob, and John May, among others, situated students’ efforts within a discursive context focused on mobilizing drawings as communicative artifacts that reveal qualities of architecture. One of the exercises asked students to create a “game plan” by proposing an architectural riddle as the generative tool for constructing a fictional plan that combined fragments from at least five precedents. Fusing a medley of recognizable and iconic fragments, results questioned parts and their respective wholes. The deliberate and disciplined act of the unfaithful copy presented opportunities to critique the inexact without losing precision. This strategy would play out five more times targeting inventive derivations through specified architectural projections. Viewing architectural history as an open-source canon, students proposed alternatives by confronting architecture’s past. Hovering between autographic and allographic subjects, architectural representation challenged the ethic of authorship as an artifact tethered, in equal parts, to repeatability and reproduction, as well as uniqueness and autonomy. Building off of discourse from aesthetic philosophy surrounding the copy and the fake, architectural drawings can be evaluated as devices to question intention and invention through pedagogy. The drawings from the class performed as both visioning and re-visioning tools, redrawing history, mobilizing referents, to make something new. Today, authorship is contingent.

Yael Erel
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

In order to create an atmosphere, architecture and light must interact; they are intimately linked. As architects we consider light as a mysterious substance, about which we are not necessarily experts.

This paper presents a pedagogy to teach the construction of such mystery, while understanding the physical and phenomenological mechanisms at play and the literary dimensions they hold. By constructing light installations students learn to design immersive environments that test various theses on projection.

Sofia Krimizi
Architectural Association

Kyriakos Kyriakou
University of Texas at Austin

Young, instant and radically small, the American town operates as an extreme condition of minimal complexity and minimum urbanity. If America is the original version of modernity, then the extremities of that vast internal territory- understood here as a sequence of Greysvilles, Crossvilles, Maryvilles but also Moscows, Paris, Florences spread out in Tennessee, Texas, Louisiana or Arizona- offer us an insight to an accelerated end state of that modernity. ‘-ville: not rural but micropolitan America’ produces an alternative understanding of urbanism that studies the American town as an instant and autonomous urban setup, one that is simple enough to be broken down in primary and identifiable elements, tools that enable urban function to operate at its very minimum. Such towns are seen through a lens of radical remoteness as sprawled, diluted and scattered nodes of a network that strives to both settle and conquer a vast territory. This project produces a contemporary reading of the internal fringes of the United States by carving a multi-scalar, cross country section through the not exactly rural,  but definitely micropolitan American, radically positioned on only one colour of the post election map.  The “-ville” project attempts an alternative history of the city, in medias res. These relatively young but still centennial aggregations are utilized to tell the story of the city from the middle going both forwards and backwards. The American “-ville” becomes the unit of urbanity that cannot be further subdivided, minimised or simplified. It is conceived as the absolute minimum to be potentially added upon, improved, extended, mored. In its radical smallness  the town presents a version of the city that has purged and/ or actually never acquired further complexities. By examining the -ville we examine the most basic manifestation of a contemporary urban settlement- this inherently American condition that is neither suburb  or countryside. Towns of such scale and type reflect the simplicity and straightforwardness that allows them to be interpreted, as the absolute minimum urban cell. A “-ville” has at least one church, one post office, a town hall, a bar. One building of each main public function.  The trip to the “-villes”, a scan- in other words- of a territory that is rendered continuous through the trajectory of the observer, is an ongoing research project but also pedagogical project that aspires to revisit the origins of the city as a recent archeology of the notion of the settlement through its youngest and less complex manifestation. The constellation of the towns becomes the territory that students are asked to survey, analyse and eventually intervene in through a localised design thesis.  We want to present the work of two advanced studios that took place in the past academic year that explore the latent potential of the Texan towns. Student projects put in question issues of power, production, and scale through design interventions in the texan towns and the territory that lies between them. Initially, each town is coined by the studio on a territorial scale- usually found on an intersection of the jeffersonian grid, wedged in a pinch of the landscape, placed unapologetically on the specific location by forces originating from the industry or as intermediate nodes on larger infrastructural networks: a company town, a water stop, an oil field guardian. Zooming in, the town reveals its own generic or idiosyncratic geometric structure- consistently appearing to be waiting to get filled, to be completed, empty more than emptied. The students travel to the towns, producing close ups of the courthouse, jail, church, corner store, gazebo, school, post office, water-tower and entry sign revealing anonymous yet radical acts of design. The research produced in all stages is considered an open resource within the studio. Students produce collectively a critical iconography of the American town, which is then re-inserted in the imagery of the land.

Madlen Simon
University of Maryland

Shaimaa Hameed Hussein
Al-Nahrain University

Gregory Weaver
University of Maryland

Bridging the Gap studio brings US graduate students together with Iraqi graduate students for a collaborative urban design studio focusing on urban redevelopment proposals for selected commercial districts in the two capital cities of Washington DC and Baghdad. Each group serves as information sources, eyes-on-the-ground, cultural informants, fact-checkers, and design critics for their overseas counterparts. We communicate through multiple digital means including WebEx video-conferences, Google Drive, and Facebook. (figures 1+2) The theoretical basis of the studio draws upon multiple disciplines. Initial motivation was citizen diplomacy, an international relations concept that engages private citizens in “individual endeavors that serve their own interests and diplomacy which includes a framework for cooperation between countries” (Bhandari and Belyavina 2011). The collaboration was built upon such frameworks, including a memorandum of understanding between universities and funding from IREX, an organization that “support(s) individuals and institutions to create change in their own communities – and to create person-to-person bridges between nations” (IREX) A key theoretical underpinning of the studio is globalization, cutting across multiple disciplines, spanning practice and academia (King 1990). Initial support came from a multi-national design firm that viewed the studio as a vehicle for inculcating competencies required for global practice. Interaction with the firm’s architects, including a studio design competition that brought US and Iraqi students to the Washington DC office for internships, shows the students how practitioners put those cultural understandings and skills into action. Globalization has also influenced the discipline of geography, leading to the innovations in the field of comparative urbanism (Robinson 2016, McFarlane and Robinson 2012) to work “across diverse human experiences.” Bridging the Gap Studio produces studies in comparative urbanism as the US and Iraqi students discover both similarity and difference in their focus districts. A particularly vivid graphic comparison of urban scales resulted from the juxtaposition of large-format prints of the commercial corridors under study, Washington DC’s K Street and Baghdad’s Karrada Dakhil (figures 3+4). The pedagogical method draws upon situated learning theory, positing that learning should take place in authentic practice settings and within social communities (Lave and Wenger 1991). While one could argue that every architectural design studio exemplifies situated learning, Bridging the Gap studio offers a particularly robust example, creating a setting that mimics global practice and a social community that includes inhabitants of the urban places under study. The social context of the studio education is particularly interesting, serving as content as well as context. One question on pre- and post-studio surveys of the US students asked, “How well do you know the beliefs, customs, norms, and values of your Iraqi counterparts?” Pre-studio survey results on a four-point scale showed all except one outlier evenly split between “not at all” and “barely.” Post-studio results showed all except one outlier had moved into the “fairly well” and “very well” categories. The greatest challenge for the studio moving forward is to surmount communication barriers – including a nine-hour time difference, drastically different university schedules, and unreliable web conferencing technology – to continue to strengthen the social community.

References:

Bhandari, Rajika and Belyavina, Raisa, Evaluating and Measuring the Impact of Citizen Diplomacy: Current Status and Future Directions, (Institute of International Education, 2011) p.3.

IREX website, www.irex.org/, accessed 6/19/19. King, Anthony. “Architecture, Capital and the Globalization of Culture.” Theory, Culture & Society 7, no. 2–3 (June 1990): 397–411. doi:10.1177/026327690007002023.

Robinson, Jennifer. “Thinking Cities through Elsewhere: Comparative Tactics for a More Global Urban Studies.” Progress in Human Geography 40, no. 1 (February 2016): 3–29. doi:10.1177/0309132515598025.

Colin McFarlane & Jennifer Robinson (2012) Introduction—Experiments in Comparative Urbanism, Urban Geography, 33:6, 765-773, DOI: 10.2747/0272-3638.33.6.765 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.2747/0272-3638.33.6.765.

Lave, Jean, and Etienne Wenger. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Learning in Doing: Social, Cognitive and Computational Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Doi:10.1017/CBO9780511815355.

Faysal Tabbarah
American University of Sharjah

The paper describes a teaching pedagogy deployed simultaneously in a seminar and design studio, titled Other Environmentalisms. The pedagogy critically examines and re-imagines the production of contemporary architecture in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) by interrogating the relationship between architecture, the environment, and colonial legacies. This has been developed within two ongoing challenges in the MENA: 1. The erasure of nuanced cultural specificities in the architectural imaginary; and 2. Climate crisis. Specifically, the paper problematizes how teaching about the environment in MENA’s architectural institutions, especially those driven by North American curriculum, reproduces a problematic form of Environmental Orientalism1. By Environmental Orientalism I mean the systemic weaponizing of narratives that conceal the heterogeneity of the biophysical environment of the MENA, amplifying narratives around the homogeneity of a hot desert barely able to support a struggling pastoralism. This also permeates contemporary architectural production in the MENA and is made doubly problematic when the majority of the student bodies originate from diverse ends of the MENA. The paper posits that environmental manipulation and protection by colonial is set the stage for an ongoing colonialism, under the guise of environmentalism, which works “to assimilate diverse cultures and spiritual traditions into a homogeneous code.”2 Therefore, resistance can be formed by integrating an environmental history methodology into architectural discourse and design. This enables students to rethinking of the relationship between historical environmental narratives, techno-scientific environmental solutions, as well as their post-colonial context in the Global South. This raises the following questions: What is the relationship between contemporary MENA architecture and colonial legacies vis-à-vis the environment? How do the ideologies and practices of Environmentalism impact MENA architectural practice? And finally, what are non-Western designers to do in the face of ongoing Orientalism and the growing threats of climate change? The paper is structured in three parts. First, I will unpack the theoretical framework and contextual background that enables the integration of orientalist critiques and environmental history methodologies. Second, I will outline the seminar course structure and the narrative logic constructed between the three main components of the course: 1. Orientalism and the wider MENA context; 2. Understanding environmental history within the lens of the built environment; 3. A case study approach (e.g. Algeria), that unpacks the relationship between colonial architectural practices, the construction of an environmental imaginary, and the case study’s actual environmental history. Finally, the paper describes the application of this framework into a design studio environment. This paper will focus on a single studio iteration that examines the architectural potential of the Plan Maroc Vert (Green Morocco Plan), an ambitious plan that aims to tackle current impacts of climate crisis on the Moroccan landscape and economy. Specifically, students responded to the questions raised within the agenda through developing an agri-tourism project that integrates economics, agriculture, infrastructure and architecture, situated in Marrakech, Morocco, on a site adjacent to a dry river. The studio output includes infographics, academic research, architectural drawings, and physical constructs.

Endnotes

1. Diana K. Davis points to the practices by imperial powers in MENA that aimed at othering the environment to facilitate and justify imperial goals. See Davis, Diana k. “Imperialism, Orientalism, and the Environment in the Middle East.” Environmental Imaginaries of the Middle East and North Africa, Ohio University Press, 2011, pp. 1–22. I take this thesis further to suggest that there is a discursive continuity between colonial environmental narratives and contemporary sustainability discourse about the region, overcoming seemingly neutral greening projects. This is irrespective of how supported this discourse might be by scientific knowledge, given the history of colonial actors manipulating scientific knowledge. I also posit is that the limited discourse around environmental orientalism is currently limited in scope to traditional historical narratives and has not yet been researched through the lens of its relationship to the built environment.

2. Huggan, Graham, and Helen Tiffin. “Green Postcolonialism.” Interventions 9, no. 1 (2007): 1-11.

Alice Read
Florida International University

“Quando dibujo, lo recuerdo todo“ (When I’m drawing, I remember everything).

Ana, a sixteen-year-old agricultural worker from Guatemala who had emigrated to South Florida, drew her neighborhood back home.  She showed a simple house with a loom in the back yard, a garden with corn and fruit trees, a school with kids playing soccer, a few streets, a market, and her grandmother’s house, all surrounded by mountains and forest.  As she drew and talked about her experience there and her more recent situation working in an orchid nursery, architecture students also made drawings to give visual form to her story. Our project was an interdisciplinary class with English literature majors, to tell local stories on the topic of immigration and climate justice.  This work contributed to a collaborative effort by faculty at 20 universities in the US and Latin America, under the auspices the Humanities Action Lab, an NEH-funded group based at Rutgers University.  We worked with a local non-profit organization, WeCount! in Homestead, Florida to focus on the experience of agricultural workers from Mexico and Central America, who often face unsafe working conditions such as exposure to pesticides and heat stress, both exacerbated by climate change. Through WeCount! we were able to interview six people who had left their countries, often in the aftermath of drought or other environmental disasters, to immigrate to South Florida for work in agriculture. As architects, we approached story-telling visually, and developed memory mapping as a specific technique.  During the interviews, students sketched both maps and images, adding and correcting as the conversation progressed – a valuable architectural skill.  The drawings describe the locus in quo, the place in memory where things happen.  As part of the oral history project, the images offered a counterpoint to the transcribed narratives by giving them a sense of place, which made the environmental reality more tangible.  Most people have vivid spatial memories of their childhood home and neighborhood that often define a sense of normalcy, a baseline against which all other places are measured.  As memory and as drawing, they do not succumb to accuracy.  The maps combine plan and view, and have no consistent scale, or shift scales as needed. They are necessarily sketchy and incomplete. The drawings that our students made reveal primarily their emotional connection with the stories being told – what they heard and envisioned, as perhaps distinct from what happened or what was said.  This they could share in conversation and set down in drawing.  The images, whether warm and wistful or harsh and horrifying, reveal a human connection in an imagined experience of place.

Katie MacDonald
University of Tennessee-Knoxville

Between Neighbors: Staging Domesticity in Multifamily Housing leveraged film as a vehicle for the study of multifamily housing design. The building program emphasized a study of part to whole relationships and the dynamics of communal life, bringing together private units and shared spaces. As urban populations grow, many cities are experiencing booms in multifamily housing, a phenomenon compounded by aging postwar housing stock and declining rates of home ownership. Developers have taken the reigns on housing design, privileging the unit over the whole. Furthermore, ubiquitous technology has resulted in the social isolation of residents and the decline of communal social structures. In response, students examined the relationship between neighbors and shared spaces, studying examples from film in which multifamily housing becomes a character within the drama. Building on the relationships revealed between human interaction and physical space, students created new models of residential living that preference the design of interstitial space in the vitality of the whole.

The project site was a generic corner lot within a low density urban fabric, and each student designed a nine unit complex. After drafting, modeling, and analyzing the shared spaces from his or her assigned film, each student designed a communal space as the seed of a larger building. These designs concentrated on mediating between unit entry and public space. Next, students scaled up to design the larger whole. During the final two weeks of the course, students made films that staged their designs, using both analog techniques and animation software. Building designs served as the setting, the protagonist, and the narrative. This one man show was not a trailer, but a full narrative, albeit short: one to three minutes in length. The resulting films convey both conceptual frameworks for living and the physical spaces that might house them.

Sarah Deyong
University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Craig Babe
University of Nebraska-Lincoln

Ever since the crisis of high modernism in the postwar era, the gap between academia and the profession has slowly but surely widened over the decades. More symptomatic in the United States than the Continent, the reasons for this gap are, of course, complex. One by-product has been the weakening of architecture’s disciplinary identity and an abdication of expertise to supporting fields in the domains of building technology and history & theory, for example. However, the recent publication of José Araguez’s anthology, The Building, is a clear sign that the tide has turned. Published in 2016, the anthology should be seen not as the dawn of a new direction, but as the culmination of collective voices, since the millennium, on topics like the projective (Sarah Whiting), operative history & theory (Sylvia Lavin, Robert Somol, Jeff Kipnis and Todd Gannon, among others), and the rise of experimental and collaborative practices, engaging political, social, and ecological concerns, in tandem with formal issues. With its collection of essays by architects onarchitects, Araguez’s timely book is an irrefutable sign of academia’s bid to reclaim the building as belonging to its own critical terrain. In this light, it is perhaps important, now more than ever, to reflect on the problem of the Comprehensive Studio, which often falls short of its potential to develop compelling projects and critical positions around the building.  In so doing, this paper does not so much present the agenda of a specific studio, as it reflects on teaching pedagogy in the face of challenges, such as addressing the baseline of NAAB criteria related to technical, programmatic, material and site concerns. Indeed, what is often at risk in the Comprehensive Studio is precisely the gap between academia and the profession, between critical thinking and the standardization of practice as it becomes corporatized. In the absence of any prescriptive method for teaching the design process, this paper reflects on strategies that might begin to counter this problem and potentially bridge the gap. Drawing a loose comparison with Gordon Harvey’s “Twelve Elements of an Academic Essay,” the authors assert the continued need for a lexicon pertaining to architectural composition. Just as the elements of an academic essay – thesis, motive, structure, style, etc. – are the components of all well-written arguments, the elements of an architectural composition – parti pris, poché, phenomenal transparency, character, dimension, hierarchy, scale, promenade, organizing grids,narrative, and so on – can be similarly construed as elements that enable the architect to eloquently organize the facts of a building’s program, context and structure while giving agency to architectural ideas that were once insulated within the walls of the academy, far away from the realities of practice. Parti pris, after all, means to take a position. To be clear, these terms are not so much the parts of a building (i.e., walls, ceilings, stairs, columns, doors, etc.) as the conceptual elements of a discursive architecture. While some of these terms have evolved over time, others remain more or less the same since the Beaux-Arts, and still others are emergent, such as those proposed by the Possible Mediums group. This paper discusses the deployment of the elements of an architectural composition in the context of making arguments and of taking a position with buildings, and finds evidence for this deployment in historical and contemporary precedents and within the larger scope of recent discourse that has reinvested itself in the problem and potential of the building.

Jennifer Shields
California Polytechnic State University

Ellen Burke
California Polytechnic State University

Jill Nelson
California Polytechnic State University

“Communicative learning involves at least two persons striving to reach an understanding of the meaning of an interpretation or the justification for a belief. Communicative learning involves understanding purposes,values, beliefs, and feelings… it becomes essential for learners to become critically reflective of [underlying] assumptions.” – Jack Mezirow

Complex design problems rely on communicative skills that build empathy through understanding, rather than reify disciplinary tensions. While these ‘soft skills’ are critical, they are not yet a fundamental part of design education. Design studio courses in undergraduate education tend to craft simplified simulations of professional practice experiences to explore formal, organizational, conceptual, and technical design approaches. One common simplification is for each discipline to learn independently in isolated courses, without being informed by the realities of multi-disciplinary practice. ‘Communication’ in these siloed studios refers to graphic and verbal presentations that convey student ideas to peers, faculty, and perhaps practitioners, with an emphasis on disciplinary conventions and graphic skills, and the use of discipline-specific language. Yet successful communication in practice requires complex and inclusive skills beyond the products of design, and leverages both interpersonal (between) and intrapersonal (within) communication skills in order to advocate for disciplinary values and needs during design negotiations. This paper describes the course format and outcomes for an interdisciplinary design studio consisting of students and faculty from architecture, landscape architecture, and structural engineering. The studio took a transformative (communicative) learning approach to the development of communication skills such as empathy, resilience, flexibility, and competence-based trust as integrated factors of design. Students were assigned to 7-person teams to design a campus media library and landscape. Lectures, activities, and readings scaffolded the learning of both ‘soft skills’ and technical design skills in the studio. In grading the student projects, equal weight was given to evidence of the development of communicative skills and to the attainment of design goals. Outcomes were measured using several instruments, including surveys, writing assignments, and presentation prompts that focused on describing interactions between the disciplines rather than solely on design product.  The submitted images illustrate the collaborative nature of both the design process and the design products for one of our interdisciplinary teams.

Angeliki Sioli
Delft University of Technology

Kristen Kelsch
Louisiana State University

Engaging a pedagogical methodology developed to interrupt the status-quo of the design studio, this paper discusses research on architectural pedagogy. Titled the “Strategic Disruptors,” this suggested methodology argues for the necessity of carefully orchestrated provocative and unexpected moments in the curriculum; moments that unsettle the students by connecting them with elements of the creative world outside architecture. By doing so the goal is two-fold: to expand their understanding of architecture’s definition and role in our contemporary society and to amplify the students’ willingness to engage with new challenges so that they may move from a feeling of anxiety to one of creative control. The discussion sets off with an overview of the approach’s philosophical and pedagogical underpinning, elaborating on the educational context in which it was employed and the motivations which lead to its conception.  It then zooms into a case of a recent first-year studio and three strategic disruptors designed specifically for the given context and year-level: “The Dinner Party,” “The Literary Imagination,” and “The Long View.” Examining the way each of the disruptors functions in the given architectural environment and the way it enhances the learning outcomes, the paper demonstrates how this methodology opens up possibilities to transform a student’s trajectory moving forward. Intentionally aligned with the very beginning, middle and end of the semester (although the students are not aware of this intention), all three disruptors are meant to appear random at the moment of their introduction, are quick-paced and short in duration, and conclude with a discussion on the interdisciplinary links between architecture and other creative fields. Presented as an opportunity to celebrate the beginning of a new semester, “The Dinner Party” is a playful and engaging way to bring forward architecture’s social capacity. It pulls from culinary culture to emphasize that architecture is often the design of an atmosphere, ritual or experience. Introduced as a deep breath during mid-term exams week and camouflaged as a typical reading assignment, “The Literary Imagination” pulls from works of fiction and poetry to introduce students to alternative approaches for understanding, studying and representing space through the arts. Although seen as an end of the semester convivial party, “The Long View” reinforces the first-years’ role and responsibility as part of a larger design community. It demonstrates the field’s collaborative nature and the importance of a deep understating of all the design disciplines related with architecture. Following a detailed presentation of the aforementioned examples, the paper concludes by exploring the relevant discourse related with similar pedagogical approaches as well as the possibility of the methodology to work in different contexts and with contents appropriate for these different contexts. It argues for the importance of an architectural education that surprises the students and consistently connects them with the richness of the life and the world outside the confines of the discipline; the world for which they will be called to design for in the future.

Claudia Bernasconi
University of Detroit Mercy

Education in the design field can be viewed as a path towards the development not merely of the ability to solve problems, but more importantly the capability to actively engage in the creative process of problem definition. Furthermore, the recognition of pressing complex societal, environmental and ethical issues calls for the creation of new types of knowledge that encompass the ability to involve people affected by design and planning decisions, to protect the built heritage and the environment, and to deal with problems associated with under-represented populations (Salama, 2005). Within this framework, what is the relevance of critical service-learning? A thorough analysis of overarching themes from current transformative pedagogical approaches, critical service-learning theories, and findings from a recurring service-learning project in Detroit will be presented to delineate outcomes of a pedagogical approach that centers on the intimate personal growth of students, and gradually enables them to see themselves as part of a larger context, in which critical issues become a personal call for action. Freely borrowing from the definition of “Architecture” as an articulation of the experience of “being in the world”, that directs “our consciousness back to the world and towards our own sense of self and being” (Pallasmaa, 2005, p.11), this paper argues that students involved in critical service-learning, not only gain a deeper sense of self and being, but become capable of expanded conceptualizations of interpersonal identities, such as self+other and self+society. Students reported that service-learning is “[…] reflective, and sets you up with an opportunity to intimately view yourself as part of a whole” , and that they saw themselves “[…] more clearly as a player in dialogue and not just the main character.” Through the project students overcame what could be defined as a figure-ground paradigm in education, a decontextualized self-centered learning model, and shifted towards a holistic “figure-in-ground” relationship, a self+XXX paradigm, in consistency with the philosophical foundations of service-learning1. The questioning of neutrality of the educational process, i.e the openness of such process to be used either as a tool for conformity to the established status quo or one for disruption and transformation put forth by Freire in the 1970s, highlights the inalienable social responsibility educators and administrators have while defining priorities for educational strategies and curricular content. Within the recognition of this illusionary neutrality of the process, service-learning can operate as a process that either “[…] reinforces or disrupts particular unarticulated norms of being and thinking” (Butin, 2003, p.1683). This paper will discuss traits of critical service-learning that ensure the promotion of core abilities, including the ability to understand social contexts and broad patterns, i.e. sociological imagination (Astin et al., 2000), to acknowledge the continuum in which one thinks and operates, to recognize needs as systemic versus individual, to question teaching and learning roles, and to overcome the framing of service-learning as a transaction between those serving and those being served (Mitchell & Humpries, 2007), towards an authentic embracement of social justice aims and a more accurate interpretation of learning outcomes. 1 This relative, versus absolute, paradigm is consistent with the philosophical foundations of service-learning, such the idea of learning as a by-product of social activities, the importance of experience in education and its connection with ideas of freedom and social norms, first explored by J. Dewey and P. Freire.

Astin, A. W., Vogelgesang, L. J., Ikeda, E., K., & Yee, J.A. (2000). How Service Learning Affects Students. Higher Education. 144.

Butin, D. W. (2003). Of What Use Is It? Multiple Conceptualizations of Service Learning Within Education. Teachers College Record, 105(9), 1674-1692.

Mitchell, C., & Humphries, H., (2007). From notions of charity to social justice in service-learning: The complex experience of communities. Journal of Education as Change, 11(3). 47-58.

Pallasma, J. (2005). The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the senses. Chichester: Wiley-Academy. Salama, A. (2005). Skill-Based/Knowledge-Based Architectural Pedagogies: An Argument for Creating Human Environments. Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Human Habitat, Mumbai, India

Yoonjee Koh
Boston Architectural College

A recent project has been initiated by faculty and students in the School of Architecture to create an open forum for in-depth discussion on topics encompassing our spheres of living. Each installment revolves around a changing topic with a guest moderator and an active participatory that collectively questions, examines, and imagines terrains of thought and thought-making. These conversation-based sessions rely on a series of shifting topics, which provide variegated indexes for learning. Topics range from issues of diversity and inclusion, social awareness, and matters of discipline, to more design-specific issues on the matter of critique, discipline, and the meaning of making. As each topic opens up a lieu of questions, the conversation is driven by a series of questions and provocations posed by the participants. There is no presenter and no audience. Instead, each person leads the conversation – students, faculty, alumni, staff, and any person interested in the topic in discussion is welcome steer the conversation. As there is little hierarchy amongst the crowd, a system of intelligence that builds upon the knowledge of the crowd manifests the conversation floor. This is a time to churn through what we know, what we think we know, and what is aspired to be known. One or a group of moderators, who raise the topic for discussion, lead the conversation, often guiding the crowd through heated debates and moments of thoughtful silence. These are often guest faculty, or a group of students who raise a pressing topic and hold a conversation session in contextually timely moments. These conversations are moments to learn how to explore, to question, and to think critically. Raising criticality, these conversations often reverberate in classes and hallways, germinating new ways of thinking. Students, in addition to faculty, weigh in constructive feedback in studio sessions, opening up questions for dialogue as they do in the Conversation sessions. Also, history and theory courses become opportunities to dig through deeper questions that stirred movements and schools of thought. Harvard GSD’s Talking Practice, Cornell’s The Living Room, MIT’s Dinner with the In-Laws, and an increasingly growing number of Architecture Schools have recently begun to employ these flexible, open platforms for learning. As these conversation sessions are extracurricular, students are free to join or leave amidst a conversation. This free-to-come, free-to-go format operates on the single strand of interest. As today’s consumer media culture expands beyond the hand-held device, the value of interest and ability to retain a stream of followers seem to permeate today’s classrooms. Schools have begun to radically shift methods to reach out to current and prospective students, to professionals, and to the public. Pioneering different approaches to not only instruction, but also ways of learning that may allow for more open and variegated approaches, the mode of learning through open, yet constructive conversation warrants a closer look in the study of Architecture.

Christopher Welty
Kennesaw State University

Arief B. Setiawan
Kennesaw State University

In The Craftsman, Sennett argued that engagement with things, tools, and procedures could facilitate leaps of imagination. 1 These engagements are a way to improve qualities of experiences, or the craft of experience, by understanding their forms and procedure, or techniques of experiences. In pedagogy, it is a form of learning-by-doing. Our awareness of the properties of materials, the ways tools perform, and the techniques we work with could help us explore possibilities in transforming a thing into another; in other words, design. Sennett mentioned the principle of joining at a right angle, of which our ancestors applied on joinery in shipbuilding, which in turn informed joinery of buildings, and eventually informed organizations of streets and blocks of a city. He termed this as a process of transposition. In this vein, we are interested in developing a design pedagogy that started from engagements with things, tools, and techniques. Thus, we set design problems that started from and problematized observations; procedures in drawing and modeling, both manual and digital; properties of materials; and artifacts. We applied this problem in studios in different years with increasing complexities, because we were interested in the development of students’ design thinking. Findings from these problems would serve as a starting point for design iterations of habitable space. In the first-year studio, we set design problems from observations of small, manmade artifacts. The findings would serve as a basis for the design of personal space. The next project started from explorations of woods and carving and joining techniques; which would inform design of a small structure with a simple program. We reiterate this strategy in the third-year studio. The design problem started by designing a small apparatus that would lead to the design of a wall system, which would evolve into a design of a medium-scale, mixed-use building.  Of interest here is the way students transpose engagements to an artifact, a type of material, or a production technique to generate a design process. In this line, we distinguished operative rules from generative rules. The former were rules and procedures to execute a task; while the latter were rules to organize design elements, including ordering systems. We also distinguished methodical and axiomatic thinking. Methodical thinking was a repetition of a set of formal procedures, while axiomatic thinking was critical of fundamentals in design. What would be teaching methodology to facilitate the growth from operative into generative rules and from methodical into axiomatic thinking? How did students go about finding solutions? This paper documentsour efforts to develop and refine this approach, as well as our observationsand experiences from both studios. It aims to discuss the learning process and the growth of design thinking abilities. It is also a reflection of our pedagogical approach of linking making and thinkingin design pedagogy.

1. Sennett, R. (2008) The Craftsman. New Haven, Yale University Press

Don Kunze
Pennsylvania State University

Medieval scholars and astrologers developed the Zairja (زايرجة) as a kind of “reverse computer.” Instead of compiling data and reducing it to more refined categories or determinative structures, the Zairja worked in reverse, using astronomical data and aleatory processes to extend potential and even fantastical relationships. Most historians presume that the Catalan mnemonicist/mystic Ramón Llull, whose methodology was taught at the University of Paris until the 1500s, based his Ars Magna (1305) on the Zairja and intended his various combinatorial diagrams to work in the same way, with the aim of spiritual perfection.  What does the Zairja offer to the modern thinker? Especially, what does it mean for the architecture student, teacher, or professional whose ambitions overrun the standard resources of history and critical theory? I propose that the Zairja idea may be extended to bridge between formless and form, indeterminate idea and sensible shape. The Zairja requires rigorous methodological exactitude while at the same time it resists limiting preconceptions. Zairjas are better made than found. The Zairja I propose begins with a process of note-taking derived from a more local source: the Irish author James Joyce’s detailed extraction of accidentally encountered conversations, taken out of context and reconfigured as “epiphanies.” The structure of the epiphany is that of the rebus, the form Sigmund Freud claimed that dreams assume to build conceptual bridges between interior details (latent content) and conscious dream-memories. The rebus belongs to both perspectival and a-perspectival orders. As Joyce demonstrated, the rebus “object” may be verbal or experiential. It makes connections without the prejudice of determinative interpretation and thus remains true to the logic of over-determination by which, in the dream, any single effect is the result of multiple causes.  My Zairja borrows graphical and narrative tools from Llull, the 16c. mnemonicist Giulio Camillo, the American poet Wallace Stevens,  and other sources. I employ stochastically paired topics to expand experimental data sets while simultaneously contracting structures to correspond to geometrical/diagrammatic/numerical conditions that may then relate to historical paradigms, such as the polyhedron used by Albrecht Dürer in his famous emblem-image, “Melencolia §1.” At this point physical/formal extension is required, and the thinker must become a teacher, and the teacher an architect. I will endeavor to explain the basics of the Zairja technique and demonstrate it with a design example. Furthermore, I argue that the Zairja promotes, more than other methods, the ideals of openness and innovation.

Ross Wienert
University of Houston

In his essay Architecture Enters the Age of Post-Digital Drawing, Sam Jacob writes: “Instead of striving for pseudo-photo-realism, this new cult of the drawing explores and exploits its artificiality, making us as viewers aware that we are looking at space as a fictional form of representation. This is in strict opposition to the digital rendering’s desire to make the fiction seem “real.” While one can argue that the merits of “pseudo-photo-realism” are dubious, the same argument could be made for methods of representation that carry architecture closer to the fictional and farther away from the experiential qualities of architecture. In an age saturated with digital images, where many value the instagram-ability of spaces over actually being there, perhaps it is time that architecture lent more credence to the reality of buildings and how they are experienced in the world. As an alternative to both striving to “make the fiction seem real” (virtual) and “exploring and exploiting artificiality” (post-digital), this paper focuses on an approach to architectural education that asks students to concentrate on the actual as it relates to architecture and human experience. These investigations utilize both physical models and digital technology in an effort to explore and document the physical reality of architecture. In these investigations, students build artifacts at a scale large enough to stick their head inside in order to engage their “peripheral vision, which enfolds the subject in space.” (Pallasmaa) This jump in scale allows students to peer inside and observe qualities of space, light and material, as well as how these qualities change over time. The studio utilizes this method both in the exploration of precedents as well as students’ own design projects. This change of perspective shifts the focus of their efforts away from the formal exploration of abstract objects toward the interior and the experiential. These artifacts are not approached as models, but as “concrete objects, three dimensional works on a specific scale” (Zumthor) in order to emphasize that they are a representation of reality.

Adam Marcus
California College of the Arts

Matt Hutchinson
California College of the Arts

This paper discusses a series of academic design studios that explore ways to imbue pedagogies of digital fabrication with a critical sensibility rooted in architectural precedent. The work does so by exploring the architectural detail as a locus for reconsidering contemporary domesticity in the context of new technologies of design, fabrication, and assembly. The research looks to the Case Study House Program spearheaded by John Entenza of Arts & Architecture magazine in Los Angeles (1945-1966) as a model for how architects can re-conceptualize and re-materialize domestic space through an understanding of digital and robotic fabrication processes. Just as the architects of the Case Study House Program crafted new prototypes for domestic living inspired by the postwar (modernist) logics of mass production, this work speculates how contemporary (postmodernist) logics of mass customization can inform new models of domestic space appropriate for today. Rather than accepting the architectural detail as a predetermined assemblage of standardized parts or products, this research speculates on the spatial, programmatic, and social possibilities of customizable, parametric, and bespoke details—and how such a paradigm can relate to emerging forms of domesticity. The work focuses on the domestic component: the guardrails, jambs, sills, stairs, moldings, doors, cabinets, coves, reveals, partitions, wall bases, and other parts that, when assembled together, constitute “architecture.” Each project employs technologies of mass-customized design and production to reconsider the component’s definition, its construction, and its assembly into larger configurations of structure and space. The ambition is to develop new understandings of part/whole relationships that reflect contemporary modes of living at all scales, from the component to the broader architectural organization. The pedagogical structure of the studio relies upon focused analysis of precedent as a way to drive both conceptual and material logics. Each project revisits a domestic component from a seminal architectural case study, typically a stair or other aspect of circulation. This component is then reverse engineered in light of contemporary manufacturing techniques that can process standardized, off-the-shelf material components in customized and bespoke ways. Students explore these processes through large-scale study models and physical prototypes that emphasize tectonic fidelity and the effects produced by customized components. Discoveries made at the scale of the joint and detail scale up to a spatial component, a proto-architectural interior condition not yet at the scale of a building, but large enough to understand ideas of public/private relationships within the space. It is only then—after thorough understanding of tectonic, space, and effect—that the ideas scale up to a sited architectural proposal. The research focuses specifically on readily available industrial manufacturing processes as a way to innovate within existing frameworks of architectural production. By melding computational workflows and advanced fabrication processes with the pragmatics of building and assembly, this work advocates a subtle but nonetheless radical shift in how we design and make architecture. And by grounding the work both conceptually and tectonically in precedent, the studio pedagogy fosters a critical, historically-sensitive ethos that sometimes is lacking in academic approaches to design computation and digital fabrication.

John Reynolds, Miami University

Friedrich Wilhelm August Froebel was a German educational theorist who laid the foundation for modern education based upon the unique attributes and capabilities of children. Since 2008, I have developed a design process using Froebel Gift Sets 3 through 6 that encourages students to discover and interpret the underlying patterns and structures that comprise their world as a preamble to design. Recalling the nature of DNA, the molecule that carries the genetic instructions used in the growth, development, functioning and reproduction of all known living organisms, the abstract compositional outcomes of the Froebel based exercises reveal aspects of the essential nature of things. I have used this process with student populations ranging from secondary STEM populations to architecture undergraduate and graduate students as seen in the Match Frame Creative film project link below.

The initial design process begins with the students building Froebel Gift Sets 3 through 6 in terms of their contents and container from a raw section of maple or other native species. The container construction explores box joinery and celebrates various movement and operational strategies for its opening and closure. The gift set contents are to fabricated to within one thousandth of one-inch degree of tolerance. The students then use the gift sets to explore systems of order, both emotive and analogic, as well as traditional architectural ordering systems through a series of timed exercises which are photographed and drawn to explore their experiential content. Additionally, students explore a tectonic theme discovered in nature which they capture in black and white photography and express as a Froebel composition and explored further through experiential drawing.

From this point in the process, the exercises branch out into related issued-based exercises related to the larger design problem. If it is a site design or master plan, the students may explore their Froebel compositions as a paper weaving to explore site part/whole affinity. If it is an architectural problem, I ask the students construct their own tools (Mallet, Hand plane) to construct a joint (Column/Beam + Column /Base) derived from their encounter with nature through their photography and Froebel exercises. Like DNA, the column-base condition acts as a kind of architectural Rosetta Stone, informing the architecture from tectonics to morphology. To date, I have explored this process in scales ranging from the site, the building, the room, the detail, and the object depending on the experience and year level of the student cohort. Currently, we are working on a Visitor Center at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Westcott House in collaboration with Peter Bohlin.

The Froebel-based design process envisaged here situates timeas a generative dimension of design inquiry. Through the exercises, student design narratives emerge out of the diversity of their past experiences and memories that are suspended and intertwined in a visceral and tactile present. Captivated in the simultaneity of their individual and collective responses to open nature of the design prompts, students discover the patterns or design DNA that will inform their future design speculation, decision making, and project outcomes.

Nora Wendl
University of New Mexico

Julian Maltby
University of New Mexico

Architectural educators are leading a drive to teach history and theory beyond the canon, as evidenced most recently by Theory’s Curriculum, a project by e-flux. It is well understood that the selection of texts for a theory course creates the infrastructure of learning theory. However, this paper extends that concern to the question of the theory assignment.             Architectural theory is imbibed textually—and yet, it is precisely our disciplinary emphasis on objects and images that allows the students who are ESL to excel despite language barriers. Architectural theory, even when focused on non-canonical examples, can still be isolating when it reaches students in a non-embodied form, giving an advantage to students for whom English is a first language. I argue that the projects we construct for these theory courses can begin to level the playing field without diluting the rigor of expectations. In a graduate architectural theory course that I teach at a Hispanic-serving institution, I ask each student to select an object (not a building) that brings together the environment and humans. First, they write observations of it—answering questions about its materiality, authorship, use, and lifespan, tracing its materiality back to its origins. This is a study of what Elaine Scarry refers to as the “interior structure” of objects: how objects “internalize within their design an active ‘awareness’ of human beings…that is not limited to their use.” Students then write a thesis statement connecting the interior structure of this object to a larger question within the theory of the built environment—examining architecture as related cultural object. The thesis statement is explored in a 4,000-word paper, and the paper is supplemented by a 3-minute film which seeks to reveal a tangible connection to the object and the theory underpinning it. For a student who chose to study an inherited metate, he observed the materiality of this tool for grinding corn—volcanic stone—proposing that “notions of time that are embedded in the cosmic scale of a metate can provide valuable insight into the way we design and construct buildings,” connecting the physicality of the metate to his own family’s origins, modernism’s avoidance of time, and the “dormant tectonics” of building with volcanic rock, which he’d learned during an internship in Mexico City. The companion film used footage of volcanic eruptions in Mexico, and the student using the metate, combining source and tool across time. This theory class was organized thematically around contemporary architectural topics that were presented in both canonical and non-canonical texts. However, arguably, it was this project that allowed students to locate their own culture within their questioning of an object, and then extend this study to questioning architecture—inevitably, a way around centuries of colonization that have informed our architectural sensibilities. For this session, I propose presenting the structure of this course, and three architectural theory papers it produced: papers whose origins were found in a metate, in the micaceous clay pottery of indigenous Taos Pueblo people, and in the ATLAS-1 Trestle at Kirtland Air Force Base, all objects specific to cultures within this region, and containing within their interior structures—as the students prove—theories applicable to the built environment.

Angeliki Sioli
Delft University of Technology

Engaging the example of the “Detective-Stories Design Studio,” a master-level course taught in 2018, this paper explores the role of literature and fiction in architectural design education. It sets off tracing the interdisciplinary history between space and literature from Romanticism onwards, and then focuses on the phenomenological work of Paul Ricoeur and Richard Kearney, whose work has paradigmatically drawn connections between fiction, architecture and space. Based on their theoretical positions, the studio argues for the importance of an architectural student’s “literary imagination”; an imaginative capacity which emerges from words and literary descriptions and uniquely leads to the creation of new and original spatial ideas and images. Following the philosophical underpinnings of this pedagogical approach, the paper presents the studio’s overarching structure; a structure based on three selected detective stories by Edgar Allan Poe. Poe’s work is not only the first of the specific literary genre but also a body of work that remains surprisingly relevant nowadays.  The conversation moves, through selected student examples, on the three distinct ways the studio employs literature to explore contemporary design issues. Touching on the ongoing conversation on atmosphere, space and emotional reconstruction (Zumthor, 2018) the first method introduces literature as an exploration of a place’s lived experience. It examines fiction’s potential to communication spatial qualities and moods, allowing us to understand how these intangible elements influence our perception and appropriation of a given environment. Based on these characteristics the design work focuses on the creation of a device that allows the students to attune with the specific atmosphere that Poe’s short story “The Masque of Red Death” uniquely captures. The second approach touches on literature’s imaginative power to suggest unexpected and many times overlooked uses of space. Based on “The Purloined Letter” the design-work heavily draws from the spatial investigative techniques analyzed in the short story to proceed with an unconventional site analysis, one that allows the students to find space where they think there is not. In todays overpopulated urban environments literature reminds us of our capacity to fabricate inventive and unexpected conditions of space. The third methodology emerges from literature’s capacity to point towards paramount sociological conditions of space, in a way that allows us to reconsider and reevaluate our own everyday reality. Poe’s “Black Cat” introduces tangibly the issue of domestic violence in the contemporary American­ society and the design assignment works towards a deep understanding of the conditions that we need to address as architects in related projects. The paper concludes with a contextualization of the suggested methodological approach in relation to the renewed architectural interest in literature, as manifested the last ten years through interdisciplinary conferences and publications both in North America and Europe. The paper places “The Detective-Stories Studio” in this contemporary context and evaluates its significance and uniqueness in the ongoing conversation.

Matthew Celmer
Syracuse University

Assembly & Sequence was an ARC 500 Selected Topics seminar created and taught during the Spring of 2019 at the Syracuse University School of Architecture. This course is a hybrid integrating architectural design, process, theory, and representation. Assembly & Sequence is about disparate, complex, episodic, non sequitur and sometimes confusing architecture. An architecture of multiple forms, ideas and accumulation. The formal investigations touched on heterogeneity, friction, overlap, adjacency, threshold, disintegration, collage, superimposition, juxtaposition, proximity, plurality, fragments, vectors, montage & composites. The course structure is influenced by and borrows strategies from the Exquisite Corpse a well-known surrealist parlor game. The game entails collectively assembling a series of drawings. Each collaborator adds to the composition in sequence and is allowed to see only the end of what the previous person contributed. The game results in distinctly different elements sharing the same space, creating startling associations and combinations. This simple game questions and blurs the idea of individual authorship by producing a collaborative collective artifact. The course was an experiment in the methodology of disintegrated design. We embraced the idea of a building as a collection of autonomous parts and examined their integration as a whole. The course was structured around a series of exercises progressing in scale. Each exercise is linked and are to be understood as a continuous project that was developed for the entire semester. For the initial exercise the students worked as individuals on the design of neatly compartmentalized spaces. Course Structure: The course consists of three primary design exercises, each building upon the last culminating in a team project. Each exercise entailed the production of drawings for review and discussion. After each exercise students were required to ‘pass’ there work on to other students and were not allowed to use what they produced from the previous exercise. Exercise 1: Students worked individually to sample, cut and reassemble architectural elements to create Spatial Primitives. Each student at the end of this exercise designed a small fragment of the final projects. Exercise 2: Students were assigned Spatial Primitives to accumulate, modify, mold, distort, collage and superimpose forming Accumulated Masses. Students were not allowed to use their own Spatial Primitives in this exercise. Exercise 3: Working in teams students assembled the Accumulated Masses into a final Collective Artifact. Each team created a system of constraints that guided the construction of their final artifact. Teams were not allowed to use Accumulated Masses they previously produced. Course Goals To develop an understanding of the term disintegrated design and its manifold applications in architectural design. To understand the history and development of design as assemblage in architecture and associated artistic fields. To become familiar with alternative modes of collaboration and authorship in the architectural design process.

Karla Sierralta
University of Hawaii at Manoa

Brian Strawn
University of Hawaii at Manoa

The state of Hawaii is facing a critical shortage of affordable housing. The Hawaii Public Housing Authority (HPHA) is in the unique position to contribute to solutions both through new mixed-use, economically-diverse, TOD-oriented projects, and through redevelopment projects. This paper presents the design of a community engagement process developed to involve future residents in the early phases of the design process of future housing.

In the spring of 2019, the University of Hawaii Community Design Center (UHCDC) was engaged to undertake an exploratory research project for the HPHA titled the “Future of Hawaii’s Housing.” The UHCDC is a teaching practice and outreach initiative led by the School of Architecture that provides a new platform for students, staff, faculty, and partnered professionals to collaborate on interdisciplinary applied research, planning, and design projects that serve the public interest. These projects offer service-learning opportunities for students through academic instruction, internship, and post-graduate employment.

The HPHA is the state’s primary housing agency managing 85 properties spread across five islands with a total of 6,270 housing units. With properties nearing the average age of 48 years old, the HPHA is need of renovating or replacing a large percentage of its portfolio. As the landholder with the largest contiguous sites near the new light rail stations, the HPHA is in the unique position to make a significant contribution towards helping solve Hawaii’s housing problem.

A series of questions activated this inquiry: How should we design housing for all in Hawaii? What attributes should be considered that are unique to our context? How do we provide more housing without compromising mountain vistas, parks, or farmlands? How do we provide density without locals feeling overcrowded? How can future residents become involved in the design process of their communities?

The process began by collecting qualitative data, through a series of in-home interviews, that would allow families to speak broadly and candidly about what home means to them. The findings that emerged from the analysis of these contextual interviews, together with secondary research, informed the development of a community engagement process, a design framework, three co-creation tools, and a mobile research lab.

The results of the first phase of this multi-year research project support the planning and design of future HPHA developments, aligning pre-planning, urban integration, conceptual design, and schematic design with co-creation activities facilitated with the three newly developed tools. This community engagement process supports the discrete steps that form the cognitive foundations of decision-making. User co-creation can take place across multiple community meetings or can be “stacked” into one event.

The Hawaii Housing Lab is scheduled to travel across Oahu, inviting a broader cross-section of citizens and community members to explore and share their preferences.

Jieqiong Wang
University of Michigan

Robert Adams
University of Michigan

Mary-Ann Ray
University of Michigan

From Europe to China, while biennial infrastructure allows global curators, architects, and urban designers to use exhibition tactics for disciplinary promotion, the quick in-and-out exhibition practices nevertheless risk overlooking local complexities and differences. How does expanding architectural collaboratives or activisms through international architecture biennales reclaim “the right to the city” and contribute to the multiplicity and heterogeneity in the city? This paper addresses this question in a Chinese context, by closely examining the 2017 Shenzhen/Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism (UABB) hosted in contested urban villages. In particular, this paper investigates an exhibition/renovation project House 17 within the main site -the Nantou Old Town. This study employs mixed research methods, including archival research, ethnographic research, and spatial analysis, to unravel the mechanisms in initiating, negotiating, and implementing of this international architectural collaborative project in the urban village. By situating the UABB and House 17 in the long history of the socio-spatial transformation of Shenzhen, this paper argues that the international UABB has expanded the capacities of the field of architecture and urban design to mobilize economic and social forces in making urban changes at a new scale. However, architect-curators’ partnership with the local government has put them in a new position that appears close to real estate developers in the process of urban renewal. The in-depth investigation into the exhibition project House 17 further reveals that local politics and complexities tend to be compromised in globalized architectural imagination and collaborative. Through the case study, this paper problematizes the globalization of architectural activism and calls for alternative design pedagogy.

Jason Carlow
American University of Sharjah

Affordable housing is a particularly sensitive issue in a country with a large expatriate, working-class population and a large income gap between groups of residents across the socio-economic spectrum. Although developable land is seemingly limitless in the United Arab Emirates, due to tight governmental control over land policies and a relatively high cost of living, the demand for comfortable, affordable housing for working-class expatriates is great. Many working class individuals are forced to live in cramped, corporately owned dormitories or within industrial areas of the city that offer few public amenities or open space. The research and design work presented here represents an effort to identify key issues in the development of affordable housing for the UAE and presents new housing solutions through design iterations. The title of the design studio, Over, Under, In-between, therefore not only refers to the activation and occupation of space for housing within the city, but how affordable housing must work above, below and in spite of obstacles within the global culture and local space of industrial production.

How can architecture move beyond the mere provision of shelter and allow residents opportunities to advance their livelihoods and improve the overall built environment? Design solutions seek opportunities to offer an open system of public amenities to the industrial zones and social and economic mobility to the residents. In a culture where issues of income gap and inequality are politically sensitive and rarely dealt with in an academic setting, this studio has positively impacted students as the future architects and developers of the region to tackle socio-economic issues head-on through design.  Discourse in and around the studio through research and reviews has had a lasting impression on the way that students in this course address societal problems in a rapidly developing region.

Jonathan Rule
University of Michigan

Kathy Velikov
University of Michigan

The New Domesticities New Collectivities studio was interested in exploring the development of alternative forms of housing for emergent forms of living and working in Detroit. Historically, the arrangement and configuration of plans within the context of domestic space, most often reveals tight allotments of square footage and compartmentalization of spaces with inherent naming conventions that imply single use, inflexible scenarios of inhabitation: Living Room, Kitchen, Bedroom, etc. But, how we live, work and play is continually changing. The nuclear family, which dominated housing design of the 20th century, is disappearing. It is being replaced by diverse typologies of post-familial living arrangements. These include various forms of collectives, cohabitation, and new ways of combining dwelling and working. These urban residents require a rethinking of what housing can be and what it can do.

This paradigmatic shift questions our assumptions for what constitutes a home, how the private and the shared are partitioned, and what new kinds of spatial uses are necessary. In response to these new domesticities, the studio focused on the development of alternative forms of housing for emergent forms of living and working in Detroit’s Eastern Market area. The studio was not interested in the standard kit of parts, but instead sought to explore how these traditional spatial labels can be reframed and recombined at both the unit and building scales to develop scenarios and spatial typologies that experiment with collective forms and combinatory strategies for both domestic arrangements and their architectures.  Collaboration, cooperation, and sharing were not only ideas that students tackled with their designs, but also defined how the work was undertaken in the studio, both through having students work in groups of three, and by collectively producing the overall site and massing plan for the sites. Three of the final projects that emerged from the studio are included in this package.

Team: Sarah Arthur, Brian Baksa, Hannah Cane, Teruaki Hara, Karina Hernandez, Jordan Laurita, Nour Mazjoub, Eric Minton, Samuel Scardefeld

Julia Jamrozik
University At Buffalo, SUNY

What was it like to grow up in an early Modernist villa or housing estate? How did this setting impact your attitudes growing up? Has it shaped the way you look at domestic spaces? Were you self-conscious of your avant-garde childhood home or proud of it? Since 2015 Coryn Kempster and I have undertaken a series of interviews with individuals who were, as children, the first inhabitants of radical buildings from the early twentieth century. We asked questions and recorded memories in an effort to understand the impact, or lack thereof, these buildings had on our interlocutors as children and the influence, if any, they continue to have on their adult selves. Called “Growing Up Modern,” this research and documentation project uses the methods of oral history and acknowledges the personal and subjective impact of the interaction between the interviewee and the interviewer in the close reading of the narratives and the material artifacts.

Jessica Garcia Fritz
South Dakota State University

Federico Garcia Lammers
South Dakota State University

Charles MacBride
University of Texas at Arlington

“Theory’s promise is to make up for what practice lacks: to confer unity on the disparate procedures of design and construction…It is of little use to see theory and practice as competing abstractions, and to argue for one over the other. Intelligent, creative practices – the writing of theory included – are always more than the habitual exercise of rules defined elsewhere.” [i]

This paper will describe the pedagogy, development, and delivery of an ongoing professional practice course sequence, as both a critique of traditional pro-practice coursework, and within the unique context of a recently formed architecture program in an underserved region. Among many of the challenges in starting a new degree program from scratch is the approach to pedagogy and curriculum. Student exposure to a range of voices and instructors is a significant challenge and one that has been addressed through a curriculum of interrelated course sequences, including studio, media, history, technology, and perhaps most successfully, professional practice.  Delivered across the final four semesters of the program, the professional practice sequence has been consciously developed to teach to an inseparable condition of practice and theory, avoiding the “fiction” and abstraction that Allen argues against. In addition, the courses have been conceived within the unique and place-specific lessons of a small program with little architectural tradition. Practice has its own narrowly defined lane in the region, and as such, any theory surrounding it has only now been proposed or verbalized by the emerging faculty. Though traditional professional-practice courses typically exist as a single-semester offering, spreading content across four courses has allowed the department to connect diverse theoretical and practical positions, while exceeding the narrow requirements for accreditation. Legal responsibilities in the profession, financial practices, environmental ethics, and the management of practice unfold respectively through Regulation, Economics, Stewardship, and Management courses. These themes are theoretically framed by rooting architectural practices through their historical emergence, intersection with small urban places, and as a critique of normative models. Simultaneously, they are framed as theoretical extensions of the studio and other curricular course sequences (figure attached). It has been found that this four-course sequence has established a popular and successful teaching methodology that both supports departmental pedagogy and has introduced a platform for wider investigation and dialogue in this professional context.  The challenge by Allen has been adopted with success. “There is no theory, there is no practice.There are only practices, which coexist in action and agency.” [ii]The diversity across four individual courses provides a plurality that reinforces the quality in teaching and content. Indeed, it has opened the formerly unquestioned and narrow condition of practice in the region, accurately described by Furjan in that “practice, as the format or terrain of architectural intervention and invention, is no longer singular but plural, no longer about propriety (the proper place of the architect or the proper rules of the game): practices are tactical operations, multiple, diverse, and competititve, operations that transform, deform, contest, and define the discipline and its spaces of effects.” [iii]

[i]Stan Allen, “Introduction: Practice vs. Project,” from Practice: Architecture, Technique + Representation, Second Edition (Routledge, 2009) pp. XII-XIII.

[ii]Ibid, p. XIII.

[iii]Helene Furjan, “Practice,” fromCrib Sheets: Notes on the Contemporary Architectural Conversation, ed. Sylvia Lavin, Helene Furjan, and Penelope Dean (Monacelli Press, 2005) p. 30.

Sandy Stannard
California Polytechnic State University

As an architect you are a builder. You are of course more than a builder……. you have to be a poet, you have to be a visionary, you have to be an artist. But certainly you have to be a builder. Everything starts from there.

Renzo Piano

While not a novel methodology, the teaching of architecture through full-scale, site based making continues to be an instrumental method for training future architects. From Booker T. Washington to Walter Gropius, from Steve Badanes to Sam Mockbee, from the Design Workshop to Studio 804, the inherent lessons that architecture students realize through full-scale physical design installations are clear and well documented. The particular focus of this paper is a selection of contemporary design/build projects sited in and around university campuses as the locus for these full-scale experiments (i.e., in the architectural education environment itself).

The siting of these examples is important, as architecture faculty and students are naturally and inherently connected to the places in which they teach and learn. Using the university setting as a laboratory for investigation, exploration and experimentation presents very particular opportunities as well as challenges. Being sited right at the epicenter of architectural education, it could be argued that there is no greater concentrated hotbed of critical thinking about architectural design than within an architecture school, in a milieu in which critical inquiry is central to architectural education. Additionally, such siting invites extended teaching and learning beyond the initial group of students and faculty engaged in theendeavor. While necessarily having to respond to site, context, client(s), materials, budget, code and other constraints, these substantive, creative and critical projects can act as a catalyst for continued discussion, criticism, investigation, and examination by the broader design education community, right at the moment when students are developing their design sensibilities. In this way, these interventions are “win-win” endeavors, as the educational dividends pay well beyond the initial experiments.

This paper will examine a sampling of university sited design/build interventions, to explore the embedded lessons inherent in these projects. While the design situations of these projects vary from the practical to the prosaic, all of the projects offer students the opportunity to explore design beyond the theoretical, offering a transformational educational experience. Embracing risk is involved as well, not simply the risk involved in construction but in the prolonged display of these works, which allows for extended and continual critical review and rumination. And ultimately, as durable artifacts, these design/build acts offer a manifestation of architectural ideals, open for all to reflect upon.

If architecture is going to nudge, cajole, and inspire a community to challenge the status quo into making responsible changes, it will take the subversive leadership of academics and practitioners who keep reminding students of the profession’s responsibilities.

Sam Mockbee

Elizabeth Grant
Virginia Tech

Peter Ozolins
Hughes Associates Architects & Engineers

Recent graduates of architecture schools who enter the workforce often report a mismatch between their experiences in academia and their experiences in the profession. This paper reports the findings of the first phase of a more extensive exploration that investigates these graduates’ experiences, discerns the nature of the relationship between education and practice, and develops suggestions for bringing the two worlds into closer alignment. The authors, during their time both as licensed architects and educators, have observed a disconnect between the academy and the office. For example, in the schools, they have seen priority given in lectures to so-called “design” architects working on prominent buildings, with less attention paid to “architects of record” who are often responsible for the long and messy process of bringing visions to reality. In practice, they have seen young interns who expected only to design high-profile projects become disillusioned when the reality of the fuller, more complex nature of architectural practice is revealed. Practitioners have expressed their own frustration with the unrealistic expectations and lack of appropriate preparation that they find in recent graduates. Such a disconnect compares unfavorably with the relation between the academy and practice of others in the licensed professions such as medicine, law and accounting. The paper begins with a brief literature review presenting the lines of past and current scholarship on the relationship of education to practice. The methodology of the first phase is then described: an anonymous, web-based, Institutional Review Board-approved survey containing both direct and open-ended questions, administered to alumni from three recent graduating classes with a Bachelor of Architecture degree from a highly ranked, accredited architecture school in the eastern United States. The questionnaire asks these alumni to describe their understanding of practice gained while in school, their sense of preparation when entering the profession, and their observations about the nature and degree of alignment between these two realms. The authors summarize responses from 53 of 224 alumni to whom the questionnaire was sent, and identify emergent themes to be used in the subsequent phase of the research. This next phase will involve a series of qualitative, in-depth interviews with students, educators, employers, and collaborators at accredited schools of architecture and architecture firms both in the United States and abroad. The conclusions drawn from the questionnaire describe the relationship between a theory-based and design-focused architectural education and the obligation of the architect to sustain a viable practice, respond effectively to project needs, and to ensure the health, safety and welfare of society. As these themes are investigated within a larger cohort, and in different populations within academia and the profession, the authors expect to unearth stories that expose to the discipline the nature of the relationship between training and practice, and how these trends impact students’ trajectories. The ultimate goal of the research is to provide students, faculty, and practitioners with a clearer picture of the expectations and obligations of the architectural profession and of those who prepare students to enter it.

Cathi Ho Schar
University of Hawaii at Manoa

In the past three years, UHCDC’s work has helped to advance numerous projects in my district. Their research and design work has facilitated deeper interagency collaboration, strengthened citizen engagement, and produced visions that explore the potential for projects that will revitalize my district’s rural community. However, UHCDC is doing more than just architecture and design. They are solving problems; they look at issues from different angles and provide options. Their participation offers a new context for conversation because students represent our future; they motivate everyone around them to consider what’s best for them.

Through UHCDC, students learn about the inner-workings of government-how projects are funded, how tax dollars are spent, how bills become laws. They have unique opportunities to engage agencies they might otherwise never encounter. I feel gratified knowing they will enter the workforce with a better understanding of their political world, because Hawai’i needs architects, engineers, and other professionals who are trained to work effectively with government to solve our region’s problems. I truly believe that we need UHCDC now more than ever. It is a promising resource for the state, combining higher education, internship, and employment in a hybrid university-based, government-serving, public­public partnership. 

-Senator Donovan Dela Cruz

Ryan Ludwig
University of Cincinnati

This paper considers architecture as the creator of interior atmospheres of “environmental potential” capable of cultivating spaces conducive to maintaining life through the mediation of variable external stimuli, but equally as possible is the articulation of this potential towards the construction of spaces intent on occasioning death.  Architecture conceived with this awareness requires a rethinking of parameters, moving beyond the visual modalities of geometry, composition, icon or style, to instead utilize various qualitative materials like temperature, light intensity, relative humidity, air composition, air pressure, auditory and olfactory stimuli.  This understanding is what Reyner Banham has called an “environmentalist” approach.[1] These two oppositional potentials of architecture’s capacity as a creator of “environmental potentials” are considered in this paper first through examining a brief history of the development and design of the greenhouse – beginning as temporary wood structures assembled around planted specimens, to the development of permanent structures incorporating heating and ventilating technologies, to the iconic 19th century greenhouses designed by Louden, Paxton, Turner and Balat with their greater use of glass and cast iron structure.  In juxtaposition to the greenhouse is an examination of the development and design of the gas chamber – first adopted in the U.S. by the state of Nevada in 1921 pursuant of a more humane method of execution, but later advanced by the Nazis during WWII for the mass execution of Jews, minority groups and political prisoners.  While providing opposing goals, both the greenhouse and the gas chamber were conceived as alternative “natures” of habitation through the construction of their respective interior atmosphere. Special attention in the paper is given to the ideas of contemporary German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk in his book In the World of Interior Capital (2013) pertaining to the social, ethical, economic and geopolitical aspects of Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace (an extreme manifestation of greenhouse design which Paxton had developed prior to the Palace at a smaller scale), as well as Sloterdijk’s understanding of the 20th century’s explication of the atmosphere-environment applied towards military warfare discussed in his book Terror From the Air (2009).  This paper concludes with a brief examination of the perverse agricultural development plan of rural Poland set forth by the Nazis whereby Auschwitz-Birkenau camp inmates were tasked to build several experimental greenhouse stations in the Village of Rajsko as part of Himmler’s planned agricultural estate of the German East.  As built these stations were used for cultivating flowers and vegetables to sustain the German military elite; today they stand in ruin as relics of the potential for cultivating life and death through an “environmentalist” architectural project. Aspects of this research were explored through an elective seminar course I taught in the Spring of 2017 titled “Climates of Resistance” which examined a variety of “environmentalist” case study projects intent on creating specific interior atmospheres.  Select work from this seminar research will be included throughout the paper.

[1] See Reyner Banham, “The Environmentalist” in Program 2 (Spring 1962) 57-64.

Whitney Moon
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

In 1970, Chrysalis—a Los Angeles-based architectural collective comprised of Mike Davies, Chris Dawson, Alan Stanton and Joseph Valerio—headed to the desert. Unlike their countercultural peers, who were fascinated by the barren landscape as an unchartered terrain for aesthetic and rhetorical exploration, Chrysalis initially employed the extreme environment as a method for advancing both the technical and social project of pneumatic structures. It was in Palm Desert, California that they tested the thermal performance of various materials and inflated assemblies, calling into question issues of durability and human comfort. In the course of just a few years, Chrysalis designed and executed dozens of innovative projects. Developed in collaboration with local aerospace, film, and media companies, their early works eclipsed the low-tech naiveté of pneumatics being generated by many of their contemporaries (e.g., Ant Farm, Archigram, Haus-Rucker Co., Coop Himmelb(l)au, etc.), and were guided instead by the refined structural and material experimentation of lightweight engineers like Frei Otto and R. Buckminster Fuller. Although little has been previously written about their practice, Chrysalis occupies a key position in the history of inflatable architecture. Their pioneering constructions index a few key ideas and phenomena: the rise of pneumatics as a radical project during the late 1960s and early 70s, the viability (and promise) of air structures as an alternative solution to conventional buildings, and the factors which likely led to the collapse of inflatables by the mid 1970s. By examining a selection of experimental structures generated by Chrysalis from 1970-1975—including those that prompted their initial formation—this essay maps their contributions to the development of pneumatic architecture as both a radical and pragmatic endeavor. Through their work with air, this collective of four young architects made visible the potential and pitfalls of an unorthodox construction type. Although inspired by the rhetoric and representational allure of countercultural architectural groups like Archigram, Chrysalis aspired to move pneumatics beyond an editorial project. According to Valerio, “What we did is we said: ‘We believe in all that stuff, but we also think that we need to raise the level of technology so that it’s not purely ephemeral.’”[1]Chrysalis viewed pneumatics as radical because they offered an alternative to the norms of professional practice and served as a vehicle to expand the boundaries of architecture without abandoning building altogether. Dedicated to the advancement of inflatables as a viable form of architectural production, Chrysalis asked what air structures can do, and how they could do it better.

[1]Joe Valerio, in conversation with the author, 06 October 2016.

Thiago Maso
Columbia University

Façade is the oldest, most ubiquitous architectural element in the history of architecture, and is constantly subjected to be the protagonist of its practice. At least since the orthogonal drawing in the renaissance, from compositional principles of the beaux-arts until its dissolution during the modern movement, the façade acquired the role of representing the ideals of its builders. Recently, the façade becomes void — a picture frame without a painting. Advocating the recovery of meaning, postmodern theorists proposed that the façade became the ultimate architecture — whatever the shed, its applied decoration absorbed the interest of the architect, and its consumers on it.  Historically, we can imply that the façade is an assemblage of symbols attached to the external face of a (generic) wall, and understand this lobotomy as a signifier to the city. But to reduce the definition to this superficial, linear comprehension of symbols and sheds is not so far from modernist thought — a proto-pop banality of this action was used, at least, in the height of the heroic modern period. Le Corbusier on his Nestle Pavilion in 1928 already applied a superficial treatment on the outside-skin as decoration to a shed to convey meaning. Thus we shall look deeper on the definition of the (contemporary) façade by researching not the decoration, but the relationship between the façade towards its thickness. Flat or folded, decorated or transparent, the façade always kept one fundamental principle as its definition: it had to be a surface. Even if the “invention” of the brise-soleil was a crucial points on the development of the thick façade, a device to control the environment that creates a new type of space, an in-between that belongs not to the inside nor to the outside that, although much studied from a technical point of view, as an architectural device it lacks a proper history. A new political, representational space was created, and the lack of its theoretical evaluation opens a new field of exploration with this research.  When Bernard Tschumi’s Lerner Hall creates a thick-envelope composed of ramps, the façade assumes a thickness that negotiates the inside-outside relationship, an in-betweeness that questions the position of the envelope as a threshold. A new condition appears, one that blurs the limits of the object and the city and assumes a new political role. WORKac’s Miami Garage expresses the magnitude of the concept: decorating the shed of the most generic building, the thickening of its envelope encloses spaces performing urban events. Not a functional snapshot of the building nor a representational portrait of symbolic meanings, the thick-envelope exhibits a renewed both-and attitude — function and meaning are flattened in a choreography displayed by the users. If the contemporary discussion focuses on the political and architectural production of spaces, relating to the question of interior urbanism becomes an active agenda to understand the construction of social spaces. Without a clear definition of spatial boundaries, the performative agency of its limits are questioned — the architect’s role is expanded to that of the urbanist — the subject of architecture becomes the city as much as the users of the building. With this research, I propose that contemporary architecture is the architecture of the thick-envelope, of the quasi-urban space where the definitions of inside and outside are mixed and its political boundaries collapse. In the inhabited space of the thick-wall the city and the building become one, and the question of whether to submit to public or private laws and behaviors are blurred: the new space invokes new performances. To understand the contemporary condition is to understand the thick-envelope as the mediator between object and city. The thick-envelope assumes the (last) role of political architecture, a space of architectural agency long ignored.

Alfredo Andia
Florida International University

Thomas Spiegelhalter
Florida International University

In the last two decades, large parts of the US economy have been radically transformed by digital and automation processes. However, the impacts of digitalization in the Design and Construction sector have been restricted to the use of software such as CAD, BIM or project management programs. These technological implementations have not radically changed the efficiency in which we build our environments. The lack of productivity in the construction industry has had many impacts in our cities. Today the lack of affordable housing, labor shortages in construction, and an inability to respond with significant innovation to our ecological condition are becoming national themes. In this article we argue that to truly transform the construction industry we need to rethink the whole processes of design and construction.    The Rise Of “Offsite:” Manufacturing Construction In Industrial Warehouses. In this paper, we argue that the “offsite manufacturing” of construction has been quickly gaining significant traction in the past 3 years and is bound to challenge traditional “on-site” construction. “Offsite” construction moves a significant part of the design and fabrication of buildings to a manufacturing plant away from the building site.  We present several cases of companies such as Katerra, Prescient, Broad Group, BLOX, Randek and Lindbäcks Bygg that are moving into prefabricating from flat elements to entire buildings in a manufacturing environment. We compare it to the developments of “car platforms” in the automobile industry and strategies such as “chunking” in the airplane industry to look at the future of design and construction. In this paper we analyze the forces that are guiding these changes, the aging construction labor, the consolidation of procurement, the rise of lean robotics, and the large venture capital that is coming to these enterprises. Architectural Thinking for Offsite Manufacturing. At the core of this paper we examine how “Offsite” construction will impact architectural thinking. We look at the work of two of these enterprises: Katerra and BLOX. Architects in Offsite manufacturing ventures are beginning to focus more on the variation of a particular program type and find opportunities to produce standards that could guide a more rational manufacturing process. But in standardization there must be variations because there are different sites, markets, clients and special conditions that make each design projects very unique. In the paper we show how Katerra and BLOX are working in developing design processes that develop processes similar to the ones one can find in the “car platforms” in the automobile industry and “chunking” in aerospace manufacturing. Conclusion. We predict that by 2035 close to 50% of all construction in the US will be “offsite” construction. We argue that although today’s “offsite” construction is highly manual, both in design and in the manufacturing plants, we see a clear trend in the development of semi-automated design processes based on manufacturing construction systems and the introduction of automated assembly lines (particularly in Sweden, Japan, and China) that are already prefabricating entire customized elements in warehouses and quickly assembled on site.

Yasaman Esmaili
University of Washington

Low-tech building methods have been gradually developed over thousands of years according to the actual needs of a community and the demands of location-specific requirements. High-tech digital design has advanced the level of precision and control over material applications and has increased the possibilities for studying design options. But where might the two meet? How can innovation in construction carry forward the lessons learned from vernacular and low-tech building solutions? How can contemporary technology be used to create new solutions that are as context-aware and affordable as low-tech solutions in places that low-tech solutions are still generally practiced? This paper explores the relationship between digital design and low-tech application by local labor looking for opportunities to advance the exchange between both the design process and the practice. The goal is to study and advance the linkage between the precision and design innovation of computational technology with traditional building systems in a context-aware manner. The study process starts by observations from designing and  building a screen brick wall in a school Project in Afghanistan which leads to developing an algorithmic digital 3d modeling tool that allows the users to design brick masonry wall systems in a digital world and to create construction guides for building the wall in the physical world, allowing for back and forth communication between the designer, the community and the mason during the design and construction process. This process lets the team simultaneously study different design factors including form, pattern, and solar exposure and allows the designer to communicate the result with the mason using simple paper guides called “DNA guide”. This approach advocates a collaborative process where the form-making, prototyping and building is a shared experience between the designer, the community and the layperson. Instead of presenting an image of a complex form and imposing a digitally fabricated foreign form in a traditional setting, the community are presented with a tool that allows them to engage with the designer and the mason to study the form, the texture and the materiality of a future design and advocate for their needs and desires.   Rather than solely relying on high-tech tools, this approach links digital design with traditional making techniques and builds upon existing low-tech methods for greater global implementation at smaller costs. The design tool connects high-tech digital methods with traditional brick masonry practices to create a “high-touch”, more responsive process. This paper explores an alternative approach to the practice of digitally designed artifacts by looking at brick screens as a manifestation for projects of bigger scale.  To develop the digital design algorithm and the practice toolkit a full-scale brick screen prototype was first designed and built, then the toolkit was applied in designing and building a Compressed Earth Block (CEB) screen wall, constructed in Western Africa by local labor as part the facade of a multi-family housing project. A third prototype is also designed to test the application of the toolkit at a larger scale.

Andrew Colopy
Rice University

David Costanza
Cornell University

VEER investigates an innovative new biocomposite material to create a chair design that is durable, comfortable and visually striking. The concept was developed for an outdoor school in Zambia where durability was the utmost important concern. In response, the examination looked to a biocomposite that incorporates a rapidly renewable agricultural byproduct, rice husks, used primarily as an exterior building cladding. The combination of materials provides the durability, formability, and strength of a composite with a surface quality more akin to wood. The material’s properties recall both the bent plywood and fiberglass chairs of mid-century, Panton meets Eames, and so the design takes a cue from both. The concept begins with a single, filleted profile along one edge but replaces a logic of surface fillets with conic sections. The result is added strength, an ability to nest for shipping, a space for storage in the leg, and a subtle, iconic asymmetry. More complex curvature, achievable given the material’s plasticity, is also introduced to provide both added strength and comfort at the feet and chair back. The design process utilized rapid prototyping of scaled models to test the basic performance and viability of different geometric variations. From these small heuristic models, general stability, ease of nesting and variation in deflection due to curvature were easily evaluated. In parallel, full-scale material tests were undertaken to examine the plastic thermoforming limits of the biocomposite, a proprietary material (Resysta®) comprised of approximately 60% agricultural waste and 40% PVC. A series of half-scaled prototypes were then undertaken to develop and evaluate the molding and thermoforming process, ultimately resulting in a five-part, double sided mold to accommodate the repeated inflection of the curved surface. The final mold was CNC milled from MDF and set within a plywood frame (to reduce weight). A series of five strategic clamping locations at either side provided the needed compression to form the material into the mold. Once cooled, the mold limits were traced upon the formed material which was then trimmed and sanded smooth. A second and final iteration of the chair doubled the layers of material—from 8mm to 16mm, chemically welded with PVC cement—for added strength and rigidity. Developed and tested using fused filament additive manufacturing methods, future investigation into the viability of 3D printing the biocomposite material are anticipated with the aim of reducing material waste and eliminating the high production cost of a more robust mold.

Leslie Lok
Cornell University

Sasa Zivkovic
Cornell University

Ashes & Ashes Cabin is a small building 3D-printed from concrete dust and clothed in a robotically fabricated envelope constructed from irregular ash logs. The cabin has a footprint of 3×3 meters and lifts off the ground on 3D printed legs which adjust to the sloped terrain. The concrete structure is characterized by three programmatic areas, a table, a storage seat element, and a 6.5m tall working fireplace. 3D printed from concrete and sliced from trees, the project aims to reveal the 3D printer’s idiosyncratic tectonic language while questioning preconceived notions about material standards in wood. The custom 3D printing process explores how the layering of concrete, the relentless three-dimensional deposition of extruded lines of material, and the act of corbelling can suggest new strategies for building. Built without formwork, concrete 3D printing eliminates substantial construction waste. For its envelope, the cabin utilizes wood which is widely considered as “waste”. The invasive Emerald Ash Borer threatens to eradicate nearly all of the 8.7 billion Ash trees in North America. Many of these trees cannot be processed by regular sawmills and are therefore regarded as unsuitable for construction.

Mature ash trees with irregular geometries present an enormous untapped material resource. Through high-precision 3D scanning and robotic fabrication on a custom platform, this project aims to demonstrate that dying ash trees constitute a valuable resource and present architectural opportunities. Utilizing a robotic arm with a custom band saw end effector, irregular tree logs can be sawn into naturally curved boards of various and varying thicknesses. The boards are arrayed into interlocking SIP façade panels, resulting in a minimum waste fabrication method. The curvature of the wood is strategically deployed to highlight moments of architectural importance such as windows, entrances, roofs, canopies, or provide additional programmatic opportunities such as integrated shelving, desk space, or storage.  From the ground up, digital design and fabrication technologies are intrinsic to the making of this architectural protoptype, facilitating fundamentally new material methods, tectonic articulations, and forms of construction. At various scales, the cabin’s performance, structure, and architectural expression are inherently derived from its digital construction protocols, design logics, and natural materiality.

Christopher Beorkrem
University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Alireza Karduni
University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Fernando Claudio Rodriguez
University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Ashkan Radnia
University of North Carolina at Charlotte

This paper will describe the creation of a series of prototypes which are intended to convert an archive of Building Information Models (BIM) from a large Architectural Design firm (Top 60 U.S.) into a database which can be analyzed using Big Data approaches to data analysis. Over the last 18 months we have worked with XXXXX Firm an early adopter of Autodesk Revit to develop an understanding of what information might be available within their archive of approximately 300 design models (an initial data set).  This archive (as those with most firms have) were modeled using an evolving subset of standards which have been loosely adhered to within the firm structure.  In addition to these models we have access to the personnel and financial data associated with the production of each respective model and of each respective building.  Each model also has a widely varying number of backups which were archived during the modeling process. This results in a large and rich set of unstructured data which doesn’t necessarily follow a consistent set of modeling standards or definitions.  We have been working to develop a process by which we can harvest particular data points within these models and add parameters to their definitions to be able to subsequently use them for creating benchmarking standards for internal office processes as well as programming and design of future projects.  These tools will allow for each model to be standardized and then easily mapped using typical database tools to better understand past programming standards for a program type (office, retail, etc.). Secondly, we have developed a tool which will strip each of these models of their unnecessary data and create data models which will have a uniformly searchable set of standards regardless of how, what version, or when they were modeled.  This tool can be used to create a uniform data set which can represent both past and future work of the firm. These uniform inter-project data sets can be used for analysis using simple data analysis and exploratory visualization tools. With more complex tasks and inquiries, these datasets can enable advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence algorithms. Each of these tools are based upon databases created using PyRevit and the Open Database Connectivity (ODBC) export, each of which creates a simple self-referenced database of all the elements in a given model.  At their core the databases allow for more typical approaches to data analytics, but they are quite large and have object IDs which are often duplicitous.  The default exports are then rendered more complex by the often-changing standards used to tag objects within the model by users.  Lastly, both user-defined and manufacturer-produced families have a wide range of parameters often with contradictory naming conventions.  With user input or with standard presets, our tool preemptively modifies these databases, creating a uniformly searchable and analyzable system. This approach will then allow for deeper inquiry using exploratory visual systems or with more advanced Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to conduct both supervised and unsupervised analysis of the data given various problems architectural firms might be facing. This approach will allow for us to better understand the implications of the processes we use to design and make buildings in the 21st century and allow us to see unobservable patterns in the way we design, work and build.  These patterns could prove to be immensely valuable in understanding the implications of BIM modeling on the built environment.

Joseph Bedford
Virginia Tech

This paper will address the transformations that took place in the field of architectural history and theory (especially in the United States) between the years of 1980 and 1990. It will do so by focusing on the development of a new generation of architectural history and theory professors that emerged around the journal Assemblage, exemplified by Michael Hays and Beatriz Colomina.

The paper will focus in particular upon the importance of scholarly debate over modernity and postmodernity; a debate which has since been forgotten by subsequent intellectual historians. Where intellectual historians of the field have focused primarily upon the rise of postmodernism during the early 1980s as a style associated with eclectic historicism, irony and pastiche (Otero-Pailos, 2010, Petit, 2013, Szacka, 2016), this paper will focus on the importance of the category historical, philosophical and societal category of postmodernity, as a historical epoch defined by new conditions of subjectivity, production, and communications. This new generation of theorists first positioned themselves in the academy and the field around these debates over postmodernity as a condition, engaging in their early seminars and writings with writings such as Frederic Jameson “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” (1982); Hal Foster’s The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture (1983); Andreas Huyssen’s “Mapping the Postmodern” in the New German Critique special issue “Modernity and Postmodernity” (1984); and Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (1984).

Through an analysis of the earlier teaching and writing (between 1980 and 1990) of these generational figures, the paper will show how modernity as a concept—and with it modern architecture—was recuperated through re-readings of these debates on postmodernity as a condition. It will show how as a result of this recuperation, the discipline was shifted away from the critique of the feared alienation of functionalist modern architecture that had defined the philosophical context behind postmodernism as a style, and towards a renewed embrace of modern architecture, now seen as an expression of the media conditions of the age; especially the emerging digital complexity, image saturation, and networks.

The paper will argue that this new generation of theory ultimately worked to render postmodernity and modernity as virtually synonymous, thus bringing modern architecture into play once again in the early 1990s, in the new contemporary horizon of digital networks, advertising culture, flows and connectivity that defined the early 1990s.

​

Nathan Howe
Kansas State University

The history of theorizing over typology in architecture is centuries old. Quartremere de Quincy begins to discuss the idea of typology in the 18th century by classification – tent, cave and hut de (Quincy 1803). Contemporary, Durand codifies architecture within type (Durand 1802). The modernists add with ‘functionalism,’ where form is derived as component and aesthetic efficiencies. The postmodernists weigh in with Adolf Rossi’s reclassification of typologies regarding geometric form and historical archetypes (Rossi 1966). These various theories put into context the contemporary design ideas of their day. However, there appears to be new versions of form currently infiltrating design that have not been classified. They also can not be reduced to codified parts.  There is now a plethora of starchitects that are creating formal edifices. These latest sculptural gestures are not steeped in efficiencies, precedent or classification of architype. What they truly are, are buildings whose singular idea of form making directs every decision. They are beholden to the purity of an original form thesis. There is a growing number of morphological formal types percolating in contemporary architectural practice. The author has dubbed these form types tubular, ribbon, peeling, shed and fractal. Each adhere to a geometric construct that is embedded in every major design decision. In the works from Zaha Hadid’s office, BIG, Sir Norma Foster’s office, Diller Scofidio + Renfro and less famous firms Shuhei Endo, Architrend Architecture and Ron Arad Architects, to name but a few, these geometric complexities have left an indelible mark on contemporary design. Within these designs the question is not whether the form fits the building type – a home, a church, a museum. The question is, does the building hold clearly and well to the formal strategy that drives the entire thesis? In Tubular Form Type | understanding design complexity the tubular form type was dissected. Building on this work, this paper will introduce the ribbon form type. The study will use the case studies of the following works: Vagelos Center, Springtecture B, Villa T and Holon Museum by noted architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Shuhei Endo, Architrend Architecture and Ron Arad Architects. These buildings expose new ideas of form making that is based on formal morphological constructs.  Within this form generator there is embedded an idea of how to still answer the pragmatic questions of opening/light, architectural program, touching the ground, and termination of form that architecture has always grappled. However, in this new form type the answer to these questions are built around the sculptural motivation of ribbon. Inspired by the work of Anthony di Mari, which uses simple diagrams to discuss complex ideas (di Mari 2014), this paper will also explain the ribbon through diagramming. The diagram will help to make the argument and communicate the principle issues and the opportunity of architectural celebration the ribbon offers. This work endeavors not to provide a stylistic formula for design but to reveal basic principles of contemporary form and develop a critical study to help the next generation of designers understand key design issues within geometric complexity. References Quatremère de Quincy. ( 1803). De l’architecture égyptienne: considérée dans son origine, ses principes et son goût, et comparée sous les mêmes rapports à l’architecture grecque, Paris, 239. JNL Durand. (1802). Précis des leçons d’architecture données à l’École polytechnique, Paris, 5. Rossi, Aldo. (1966) The Architecture of the City.  Typological Questions, 35-41 Moneo, Rafael (2014). Oppositions. On Typology, 22-44. Anthony di Mari. (2014) Conditional Design: An introduction to elemental architecture.

Manuel Shvartzberg Carrió
Cornell University

In 2013, the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, whose reservation lies across Palm Springs, California, sued for the rights to a large aquifer under the reservation. The Coachella Valley Groundwater Basin stretches from the north of the Valley to the Salton Sea, and supplies almost all the water which allowed the Valley to become one of the world’s largest golf resort areas—120 golf courses carpet the Colorado Desert, consuming 37 billions gallons of water annually—as well as a key site of midcentury modern architecture. The celebrated homes designed by architects like Albert Frey, William F. Cody, and Donald Wexler, with their legendary framings of the desert and golf landscapes, would have been impossible without a largely invisible infrastructure of water pump stations, storage reservoirs, and associated pipework for human consumption and irrigation. Many of the famed homes and estates, such as Sunnylands, designed by A. Quincy Jones & Frederick Emmons in the early 1960s for Walter and Eleanor Annenberg, were constructed with, and are still supplied by, privately-operated water wells. Since then, however, excessive water pumping and inadequate replenishment have severely depleted the aquifer and led to its progressive contamination—a key reason for the Tribe’s lawsuit. This paper explores the governance history of the Coachella aquifer—what UNESCO calls the necessary “Hydrodiplomacy” of “transborder aquifers”—through an exploration of the ways in which midcentury modern architecture made this resource fungible, for utilitarian and aesthetic uses, and thus also produced certain geopolitical relations between the Tribe and the State. Indeed, one of the first projects to explicitly address the aesthetic and economic potentials of the groundwater basin was the Agua Caliente’s Palm Springs Spa, designed by Cody in collaboration with Wexler and Harrison in the late 1950s. This project was the first in the nation to develop a long-term lease of Native American property, thus establishing a crucial precedent for transborder aquifers. Through the highly complex coordination of myriad technologies and local, state, and federal agencies—from the US Geographical Survey to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Department of the Interior, and the US Congress—Cody and his team effectively produced an allocation of water uses between different geopolitical entities, at an architectural scale. To this day, there exists only one recognized transborder aquifer agreement with allocated volumetric water rights, between France and Switzerland. As Hydrodiplomacy experts argue, the main impediment to developing these complex transborder agreements lies in the technical and political challenges of governing a subterranean resource across different jurisdictions. The history of midcentury modern architecture in relation to the Coachella Valley aquifer provides an early case study of how these geo-technical and geo-political relations are crafted—how territorial and architectural expertise determines the formation of rights to natural resources. As architects and designers ponder how to build more equitable infrastructures for addressing climate change—through initiatives like a “Green New Deal”—the historical perspectives of Native American and Indigenous peoples like the Agua Caliente, centering water use rather than speculation, is key.

Ian Erickson
University of California, Berkeley

Modernism lives on in Scandinavia. In most western countries, Modernism’s aesthetic project began to unravel in the 1970s-80s into a more diverse set of experiments that have been termed “Postmodern”, and the Modernist social project more or less died with the failure of Pruitt-Igoe. The Scandinavian countries, however, are typically understood as having a continuous legacy of Modernism that began with luminaries like Aalto and Utzon and was inherited by contemporary retailers like Ikea, whose modernist sensibilities are branded and commodified with terms like “Scandinavian simplicity”. Nonetheless, there was a dynamic Postmodern movement in Scandinavian architecture (1975-1990), with activity primarily concentrated in exhibitions like ARARAT at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet (1976) and journals like Arkitektur (1976-2008). The phenomenon of Scandinavian Postmodernism is obscured by academic historiography, as widely read surveys of both Scandinavian architecture and Postmodern architecture regularly fail to include Scandinavian Postmodernism.[i] Perhaps the only Scandinavian figure present in the canonical discourse of Postmodernism is the phenomenologist Christian Norberg-Schulz[ii], but the colorful and symbolically charged design work of his close friends (and fellow Norwegians) Jan Georg Digerud and Jon Lundberg remains obscured behind the white shroud of Scandavian modernism.[iii] Just as Scandinavian Postmodernism challenged Modernist aesthetic regimes, it also challenged the Modernist model of a functionalist welfare state for universal subjects. The movement of Scandinavian Postmodern architecture coincided with the political shifts such as the Swedish “Third Way Policy”, a government structure based on concepts like “personal freedom” supported by radicals on both the left and right of the political spectrum. In this way, the discourse around Postmodern architecture in Scandinavia became a site where “emancipatory movements like feminists, environmentalists and radical leftwing movements, overlapped (unintentionally) with conservative forces struggling towards a more liberal society.”[iv] Postmodernism’s symbolism and historical grounding captured the Scandinivian conservative imagination. The political contention and overlap in Scandinavian Postmodern discourse is best described through Danish Architect and writer Ernst Lohse’s article “Our Construction Should be Based in the Irrational” (1984; translated into English for the first time for this paper) where, despite Lohse’s own sympathy for the environmental movement, he adopts familiar conservative rhetoric, bemoaning the loss of Western culture and the limitations of the welfare state. Lohse and his contemporaries predicted that in the 1990s Scandinvian architecture would be characterized would by its integration of regional myths and powerful graphic symbolism. This proved only partially true, as the singular architectural image that characterized Scandinavia in the 1990s was historical churches set on fire as tensions between the left and right about architecture, history, symbolism, and politics literally ignited architecture itself.[v] This paper will reconstruct the obscured history of Scandinavian Postmodernism, locating discourse that reveals the movement as a site of contention and overlap between diverging political radicals and its appeal to the conservative imagination. The paper will do this through introducing the first English translations of key texts published in Arkitektur and Kristeligt Dagblad. [i] See: Miller, William Charles. Nordic Modernism: Scandinavian Architecture 1890-2015. Crowood Press, Limited, The, 2015. Farrell, Terry, and Adam Nathaniel. Furman. Revisiting Postmodernism. Newcastle upon Tyne: Royal Institute of British Architects, 2018. [ii] This due largely to the fact that he was a part of the American Academy through his position at Yale and as such wrote primarily in English. [iii] See: Thiis-Evensen, Thomas. The Postmodernists Jan & Jon. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1984. [iv] Mattsson, Helena. “Revisiting Swedish Postmodernism: Gendered Architecture and Other Stories.” Konsthistorisk Tidskrift/Journal of Art History 85, no. 1 (2016): 109-25. doi:10.1080/00233609.2015.1116605. [v] These church burnings were largely pinned on/attributed to youth in the Scandinavian Black Metal Scene, itself a community plagued by contentions between the right and the left

Richard Chenoweth
Mississippi State University

When the U. S. Capitol burned on 24 August 1814, its principal chambers were gutted and an early masterpiece of American Neoclassical sculpture, a colossal personification of Liberty in the style of the times, was completely destroyed.  The Liberty is not well known because in her brief lifetime, no artist stopped to record her – not even Latrobe himself, a prolific sketcher of his surroundings, investigations, and inspirations.  Liberty presided over Latrobe’s majestic Hall of Representatives, a chamber that was, itself, a difficult collaboration of conflicting ideas between its client Thomas Jefferson and the architect Latrobe.  Liberty was an integral part of the architecture and of the architectural sequence; upon entry into the chamber, the ten-foot tall sitting Liberty established the chamber’s cross axis within the streaming diffusion of one hundred skylights, proffered entrants a carved copy of the Constitution, cradled a cap of liberty, and was heralded by a bald eagle.   Two major sources of historical information lead to the Liberty’s story: (1) a trail of about a dozen letters by Latrobe in which he describes his thinking and his aesthetic concerns for the sculpture as well as details of size, positioning, arm placement, and accoutrements; and (2) a history of early American sculpture and painting (and the shifting of aesthetics from 1780-1800) which lead to several important changes, such as – the evolution of carved wood and marble portraiture, the introduction of Italian sculptors to America, efforts to monumentalize an allegorical Liberty sculpture on a public scale, and popular depictions of Liberty figures from political cartoons to coinage.   Latrobe’s drive to create the Liberty was essential to his concept for the famous Hall of Representatives.  His collaboration with the artist Franzoni also is essential as it demonstrates the delicate dialectic between architectural concept and executed form in a public project.   I will show for the first time a model of the colossal Liberty, carefully reconstructed based on known facts and the known proclivities of the principal designers.  I also have diligently reconstructed the entire Hall, with the Liberty, necessarily, being the most formidable aspect of the design of the nearly complete state of Latrobe’s First Campaign at the Capitol.  The making of the Liberty represents twenty years of effort by various architects and artists between about 1783 and 1807 to bring to fruition the confluence of a major public work of American architecture and an integral work of monumental American sculpture.

Jonathan Ochshorn
Cornell University

Architectural function in relation to architectural form is inherently ambiguous. Even the Vitruvian functional triad of firmitas, utilitas, and venustas (durability, convenience, and beauty) foreshadows the difficulty that theorists encounter when attempting to classify architecture on the basis of form vs. function. The nature of this relationship was most famously postulated by Louis Sullivan at the end of the nineteenth century, yet the ramifications of “architecture’s double code of beauty and utility”[i] continue to be debated. For while architecture can certainly be understood as having both utilitarian functions and non-utilitarian formal qualities (whether the latter are characterized as “expressive,” “symbolic,” “evocative,” “provocative,” or merely “beautiful”), it is equally true—as Vitruvius implicitly argued by including venustas in his famous list of architectural functions—that those formal qualities also constitute a function of architecture.

Many theories of architecture carry a not-so-hidden agenda: to explain (justify) a formal preference on the basis of an incomplete, selective, and often self-serving functional analysis. In such theories, utilitas/firmitas may well be cited as the source of, or inspiration for, a formal solution, but it is really the a priori pursuit of venustas that motivates the formal outcome: the simplistic distinction between form and function—or between venustas and utilitas/firmitas—becomes hopelessly inadequate when the goal of expressing, symbolizing, evoking, provoking, or creating something beautiful is, itself, the architectural function that, more than any utilitarian consideration, determines a building’s primary formal characteristics.

Sullivan’s specific arguments about function can therefore be profitably revisited, in part because his famous four-word proposition—that “form ever follows function”[ii]—has been too easily dismissed simply on the basis of its explicit claim. But the problem with Sullivan’s formulation is not that it isn’t true (it is, in fact, often true for building elements). Rather, as this paper argues, two related objections can be raised: first, that Sullivan’s defense of his proposition on the basis of biological and inorganic analogies is flawed (Figure 1); and, second, that his writings promote a formal agenda by invoking a few functional considerations while strategically ignoring many others (Figures 2 and 3). Sullivan’s true contribution to architectural theory has little to do with clarifying the relationship between form and function. Rather, his genius was to find a few superficial functional attributes that could be eloquently (and disingenuously) invoked in order to justify an expressive and self-serving formal agenda. That this template has been copied countless times, by architects and critics who feel compelled to provide a seemingly logical (functional) rationale for their formal intuitions or preferences, provides the impetus for this investigation.

[i] “Design decisions are regulated by architecture’s double code of beauty and utility: functional vs dysfunctional (code of beauty), and formally resolved vs formally unresolved (code of utility).” [This is, of course, a typo, since the two codes in parentheses need to be reversed.] Patrik Schumacher, Autopoiesis of Architecture, John Wiley & Sons (Chichester, UK: 2011), p.157

[ii] Louis Sullivan, “The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered,” Lippincott’s Magazine 57 (March 1896), pp.403–409 (emphasis added; subsequently reprinted in several other venues), p.408.

Heather Peterson
Woodbury University

On one of the longest days of 1401, the ambient temperature of the air over Florence may have been warm enough to soften wax. The hot air of the city-state, provided a befitting context for the announcement of a competition—sponsored by the guild of the Arte di Calimala—to design a set of bronze doors for the baptistry of San Giovanni; an event that is widely regarded as one of the establishing marks of the Renaissance. The sanctioned inventory of factors that pressed the aesthetic dimensions of the Quattrocento into service can be accounted for in four sheets of bronze, the demands of a quatrefoil frame measuring thirteen by seventeen inches, the old testament passage of Genesis 22:2-13, The Sacrifice of Isaac, and the constraint of one year.  This tabulation is a compressed and precise record of the baptistry doors as bounded elements, but it fails to capture the political economies and material ecologies, that locate the doors as an instance expressed by a broader set of processes. An expanded record of the doors might include the fibers of a sheep’s fleece, and the waxy ester of the honey bee; for it was these two substances on which the circumstances of the competition were staked.  A sheep is a division of offerings. The side of its skin facing the interior can be dried and stretched into vellum, or provide sustenance with its organs, muscles, and milk. Its fleece, which addresses the external world of commerce and governance, can clothe a populace and insulate us from the asperities of winter. At the time of the competition, Florentine commercial achievement, and the wealth and reach of the Calimala (wool merchant’s guild) were established by international trade in English wool; a political economy from which the Renaissance was largely written.  As was customary, the doors of baptistry were cast in bronze, and dressed in a thin veil of gold leaf, but the material from which the panels of the doors were shaped, the actual substance from which the competitors worked, was in the far humbler, and more fugitive medium of beeswax. The formal terms and subject matter of the competition required a single, agile material to render the various forms and textures of drapery, landform, vegetation, locks of human hair and facial expressions, a ram, a donkey, the feathers of angel wings, an altar, and the blade of Abraham’s knife, all in various degrees of relief. Wax, which is effectively the building material of bees, is uncommonly workable. It can be cast or carved. It is abundant, accessible, and amenable to iterative development. Notably, it is also substitutional, and in the case of this particular history, sacrificial, like its subject. The paper proposed here will use this instance of the baptistry doors to reconsider and expand its position to include material behaviors and histories, and their social and political economies.

Robert Flanagan
University of Colorado Denver

This research reports on a four-year project to restore a 1906 structure designed by architect William Ellsworth Fisher (1871–1937), one of Denver and Colorado’s most prominent architects and builders in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It evaluates three competing decision making process issues and the prioritization of each: restoration values (look and feel), integrated decision matrix (scope & process), and rules of thumb (architect’s methodology). It focuses on infrastructure to provide safety, historical authenticity, and maximum utility in preserving the look and feel of the original architectural design. This two-story masonry house was acquired in a bank foreclosure; it was in derelict condition, condemned by the health/building departments, requiring immediate remedial action to prevent catastrophic collapse. A 1959 renovation compromised the historic character of the interior when the single-family structure was converted into a rooming house. Substantial completion of the restoration was in the summer of 2019. Objective. In historic masonry structures with similar heating degree days and cooling degree days, a streamlined decision-making process can be developed to optimize the outcome. Personal safety is always integral to this process. Standards relating to the treatment of historic properties—preservation, rehabilitation, restoration, and reconstruction should be maintained1.  Existing architectural features should be recorded and preserved. False ceilings, chases, and the use of non-period materials and methods are avoided. An in-depth discussion of the systemic implementation of these factors follows. Safety.  There is a strong preference to remove and not encapsulate hazards: lead piping, lead-cadmium contaminated paint surfaces, asbestos, free silica (deteriorating plaster), and mold contaminated surfaces. Dangerous levels of radon (an unrecognized cancer agent in 1906) must be remediated. Structural integrity. Masonry structures of the era are most at risk from poorly maintained or implemented moisture control systems. Intact roofs, gutters, and foundation drainage are prioritized. Materials and processes. Using modified mortars or painting of exterior facing, interior plaster walls is not acceptable. Deteriorating plaster removed from the exterior walls should be replaced with the same since it is a sacrificial substrate protecting the masonry. Walls must breathe. Insulation. All floors (including basement slab) should be insulated with thermal/sound insulation. The attic should be insulated to recommended contemporary standards. Note that exterior insulation is aesthetically unacceptable and interior insulation alters the wall’s moisture freeze location, compromising masonry integrity. Heating and cooling. Sub-floor heating with a zoned, HE condensing boiler is the least disruptive process, maintaining the look and feel of the original structure. Ductless cooling is desirable.

Conclusions. The identification and development of means and methods, applicable historical resources, and safety considerations, organized in an integrated decision matrix, conclude this illustrated and documented process.

Mireille Roddier
University of Michigan

Whereas most categories of photography—be it portraiture, still life, experimental, or any of the genres traditionally represented in award categories—are close to having achieved gender parity, street photography still lags far behind. Why does the visualization of the streets still stand as a dominantly male activity? From “street-literature” (the literary genre that grew out of the modern city, influenced by its capture on film) to contemporary urban representations, this paper traces whose voice or gaze has had the authority to chronicle the public sphere, and how these narratives were constructed as dominant, or disseminated as alternative point-of-views. Divided between historical analysis and creative program, it engages the character of the flaneuse as writer, painter, photographer, cartographer, and the authority of her gaze as cultural apparatus, in order to uphold a contemporary mode of urban image production specific to, rather than concealing of, its subjects. The essay is structured according to a three-part progression that begins with the idea of “reading” both the book and city, followed by the notion of “copying,” and ends with the act of “writing” or “re-writing” the scripts that have been heavily rehearsed onto the scenes of the public sphere. Understanding the city as the locus of the theatrum mundi, the paper borrows from interdisciplinary theoretical fields including visual studies and film theory, feminist performance theory, and urban studies in order to demonstrate how the act of representation is one of appropriation, contending that those who immortalize the streets uphold their ownership of it. It also underscores its corollary: belonging is a product of narrative wars.

Phillip Mead
University of Idaho

Since 2006, four books claim architecture’s ability to increase our happiness or well-being: The Architecture of Happiness in 2006, Happy City in 2013, The Blue Zones of Happiness in 2017, and A Place to be Happy in 2018.  One is written by a philosopher and one by an architect practitioner, but none by academic architectural theorists or environmental psychologists.  None of these books meaningfully reference key concepts of happiness found in philosophy, or the recent academic movement of Positive Psychology.   What is missing from these books, and the architectural profession’s writings about well-being, is a more rigorous academic framework drawn from Positive Psychology’s findings on well-being/happiness.  In particular, the conditions laid out by the movement’s founder, Martin Seligman of Penn, who between 2002-2011 laid out five pillars of well-being and flourishing: Positive Emotions, Engagement/Flow, Relationships, Meaning/Purpose, and Achievement.  These conditions along with other psychological concepts such as Resilience and Strengths appear to resonate well with classic architectural texts.  This paper takes stock of architectural texts since the 1800’s that claim that architecture can deliver pleasure, happiness, meaning, etc.  The paper also takes stock of the limited evidence that supports their assertions.  Here the writings of Ruskin, Le Corbusier, Norberg Schultz, Alexander, and Pallasmaa among others are examined for how well they resonate with Positive Psychology’s findings and principles.

Ke Sun
University of Florida

The flâneurs of the twentieth-century Paris traversed the city subconsciously through spontaneous walks, who perceived urban space as a mnemonic mechanism that provoked sensational experiences charged with intimate imagination. Oppositely, the urbanites of the twenty-first century Shanghai navigate the city by rapid underground transportation with a sense of immediacy and intentionality that dissimulate subconscious urban experiences. To identify this contemporary counterpart to the flâneur, I have adapted the French word navette, which extrapolates the meaning “shuttle” to describe a transportation method between locations with singularity and rapidity. In contrast to the flâneur’s invocation of strolling, the word navetteur captures the eidetic experience of directionality and intentionality by commuting with underground metros. This paper investigates Parisian flâneurs and Shanghai’s navetteurs’ perceptions of urban space through a surrealist theoretical framework and finds that the Parisian flâneurs craft a surrealist phenomenon in urban space with the city opening up as a mnemonic mechanism that evokes dreams and imagination; whereas the navetteurs of Shanghai recollect the city with fragmented metro stations covered with signage and perceive the city with a sense of estranged exteriority that confines their urban perceptions with detached conformity. This paper further compares the changing and transformative urban perceptions between flâneurs and navetteurs and investigates the enigmatic relationship between navetteurs of Shanghai and
flâneurs of Paris, specifically with the cases of Tadao Ando’s Shanghai bookstore and Hector Guimard’s Paris Métro entrances, and generally with its implications to contemporary cities to understand urban space through human movements and imagination. Consequently, this paper argues for the return of the flâneur as a method of reminiscing perceptions of urban space in surrealist experiences through which we can revisit our intimate relationship with the twenty-first
century contemporary cities and ruminate on the predicament of the contemporary urban life.

Solmaz Kive
University of Oregon

James Fergusson created one of the earliest comprehensive narratives that systematically incorporated non-Western traditions within the history of European architecture. Although it was later overshadowed by Banister Fletcher’s A History of Architecture, Fergusson’s history played a significant role in establishing the common structure of the future global architecture survey books.  Fergusson’s was a working history. In 1849, when his An Historical Inquiry into the True Principles of Beauty was published, he was already an established scholar of Indian architecture and had written on other subjects such as the ancient Jerusalem. However, The Historical Inquiry was dismissed by architects and public readers alike. Six years later, in 1855, Fergusson rearranged the same material into a new structure to publish The Illustrated Handbook of Architecture. Unlike the former, Handbook of Architecture was immensely successful and run into a few editions. However, as his authority was established, Fergusson rejected the “much more popular manner” in which the Handbook was written and eventually rearranged the book in an allegedly more “scientific” manner. This third and best-known version first appeared in 1865 as A History of Architecture in All Countries from the Earliest Times to the Present Day. In fact, Ferguson’s three versions bear many similarities in their material and the underlying theories of race and ethnography. Nevertheless, as he emphasized, they follow different classificatory systems. This paper would discuss Ferguson’s three versions of global history to discuss some strategies that he employed in order to overcome the challenges of creating a comprehensive, yet cohesive narrative. Writing in the nineteenth century, Fergusson was fascinated with classification. Throughout these three versions, he explored different methods of groupings, exclusions, and distortions in order to create a coherent structure. From the first book’s chronological arrangement, he moved to a combination of geographical and religious classifications in the second and eventually established his narrative around a central, Eurocentric narrative in the third. Fergusson considered this arrangement his main contribution to architectural historiography. Nevertheless, this new structure was also supported by a methodological shift from formalism to ethnography. Despite many differences in methods and materials, Fergusson’s work bears many structural similarities to the mainstream approach to surveys of architecture in the twentieth century. Most significantly, the classificatory system that he gradually developed would eventually establish the binary division between Western and non-Western traditions. While the current desire to go beyond the Western canons in history courses and textbooks has faced many practical, pedagogical, and ideological challenges, this paper would discuss some of their roots in the early phases of the global history. In addition, it would review some alternatives that Fergusson had explored in his earlier versions but eventually dismissed in order to create a tidy, linear narrative.

Andrew Reed Tripp
Texas A&M University

There is much to indicate that ethics is an important field of inquiry for contemporary architects; and yet there is little evidence that this field has been defined in a way that will support ongoing academic and practical inquiry. One impediment to the formation of this field is the divergence between disciplinary and interdisciplinary understandings of ethics and architecture. Does the conversation on ethics and architecture reflect an interdisciplinary movement? Or is ethical theory already intrinsic to architectural theory? This paper takes up two antithetical positions in order to initiate a line of questioning critical of both. These positions include, on the one hand, the survival/revival of virtue ethics within the phenomenological school of architectural thinking, identified herein with the architectural theorists Joseph Rykwert and Dalibor Vesely, and on the other hand, the interdisciplinary arguments of architect William Taylor and moral philosopher Michael Levine.

Steven Lauritano
University of Michigan

Imagine an architectural history survey in which the diversity of interpretive approaches takes precedence over any attempted comprehensiveness of content.  This paper examines the merits, and possible pitfalls, of such a course based on the presenter’s own experience teaching a global survey of architecture at a large public university.  Instead of asking students to work through a single textbook, an “eclectic survey” presents a chapter from a different book every week, each one selected to highlight a distinctive interpretive tradition: Sigfried Giedion on Paleolithic Europe, Vibhuti Sachdev on Ancient Southeast Asia, George Kubler on Ancient America, etc.  Alongside relevant details of buildings and artifacts, the course lectures also unpack the contexts and strategies that shaped each author’s approach to history.  Working through such historiographical variety poses challenges for students and instructors alike, but we seem to have reached a moment in which survey eclecticism is not only plausible, it might also be essential.  Detailed information on previously overlooked buildings is more readily available than ever before.  Yet this positive development has exponentially exacerbated one of the inherit problems of the survey itself: the challenge of selecting single examples to bear the representational burden of entire oeuvres, regions, or epochs.  An “eclectic survey” does not skirt this issue, but attacks it from a new angle.  Making a single chapter representative of an author’s – or at most an intellectual school’s – method is still reductive, but less problematically so.  In effect, the “eclectic” approach charts a middle path between the thematic organization typically preferred in schools of architecture and the chronological presentation still taught in most art history departments.  Themes emerge organically as a consequence of the assigned authors’ methodological specificities.  Reading Spiro Kostof opens up a discussion of urbanism. Liang Sicheng raises questions of climate and morphology.  Isabelle Hyman’s work necessitates a conversation about Orientalism. The difficulties created by this “eclectic” approach are worth embracing – or so this paper argues – to the extent that they escape the expansionist mode of today’s global surveys, many of which are fueled by the misguided belief that an ever-more-granular expertise will one day deliver an all-encompassing picture of historical reality.  If history has taught us anything, it is that its own interpretation remains perpetually in flux.  Historians’ methodologies shift, often seismically, from one generation to the next.  Why not equip architectural students to understand such changes and their underlying motivations?  Ultimately, an architectural survey guided by an ethos of eclecticism creates a better framework to discuss the consequences of choices historians have made and are still making.

Sekou Cooke
Syracuse University

Hip-Hop, the dominant cultural movement of our time, was established by the Black and Latino youth of New York’s South Bronx neighborhood in the early 1970s. Over the last five decades, hip-hop’s primary means of expression—deejaying, emceeing, b-boying, and graffiti—have become globally recognized creative practices in their own right, and each has significantly impacted the urban built environment Hip-Hop Architecture is a design movement that embodies the collective creative energies native to young denizens of urban neighborhoods. Its designers produce spaces, buildings, and environments that translate hip-hop’s energy and spirit into built form. Some 25 years in the making, Hip-Hop Architecture is finally receiving widespread attention within the discipline of architecture thanks to a series of influential essays, lectures, and presentations.

During this period of emergence, the movement’s ideals have primarily been tested by a loosely organized group of pioneering individuals, each using hip-hop as a lens through which to provoke and evoke architectural form. Close to the Edge: The Birth of Hip-Hop Architecture exhibits the work of these pioneers—students, academics, and practitioners—at the center of this emerging architectural revolution.  The exhibition, on display at the AIANY Center for Architecture from October 1, 2018 to January 12, 2019, included work by 21 participants representing five countries, with projects ranging across a variety of media and forms of expression: from experimental visualization formats and installation strategies, to façade studies, building designs, and urban development proposals. In aggregate, these projects reveal a collective vision for alternative forms of expression and practice, and serve to formalize work created over the past 25 years into an emerging canon of Hip-Hop Architecture.

Kathryn Bedette
Kennesaw State University

This paper presents a historiographic sketch of the attribution of Eileen Gray’s architecture, demonstrating a turning point in how her work is credited and in the acknowledgement of its historical importance. Two types of texts form the basis of this sketch: architecture history and theory textbooks and monographs of Gray’s work. Discrepancies between the two sets are noted and both types are examined for word use, attribution, and the extent to which the work is discussed in terms of its design and the design’s relationship to larger discourse within the profession. The turning point in scholarship on Gray’s architecture is signaled by changes in attribution and in the critique of her work offering meaningful conclusions.  These shifts take place from one monograph to the next (1-4) and, tied to the ongoing renovation of E.1027, create new criteria in the assessment of texts used for teaching history of architecture and architecture theory courses that cover the development of modern architecture. From this review, what’s the singularly most important thing missing in how we teach Eileen Gray’s contributions to Modern Architecture?  Her work in textbooks. A full analysis of Eileen Gray’s approach to architecture—through examples of her built work and design positions taken—is now necessary for any thorough discussion of modern architecture, specifically in architecture history textbooks. This argument is based on three main points. One, Gray’s work was initially omitted from surveys and the modern “canon” because she was a woman. Two, scholarship has reached a turning point in both the attribution of her work and in the discussion of its historical importance. And three, her work provides case studies for student learning that expose key contributions to the discourse on modernity not offered by other architects at the time. While Joseph Rykwert (5) argued for the significance of Gray’s work in 1971, a review of twelve survey texts available thorough 2019 shows only five mentioning Eileen Gray or her work. (6) The number implies a largess that doesn’t actually exist. In one case only her last name is given in a footnote. (7) In another two, her name is only included within a list of other names. (8)(9) Eileen Gray’s projects exist where experience, time and space interact.  It’s time to make room for her architecture and design positions in how we talk about modern architecture in our histories, anthologies, surveys and sources: in our textbooks and course readers. What’s at stake is the canon.  And it’s time for Eileen Gray.

1.   Philippe Garner, Eileen Gray (Taschen, 1993)
2.   Peter Adam, Eileen Gray: Her Life and Her Work, 2014 ed. (Schirmer/Mosel, 2008)
3.   Caroline Constant, Eileen Gray (Phaidon, 2007)
4.   Jennifer Goff, Eileen Gray: Her Work and Her World (Irish Academic Press, 2015)
5. Joseph Rykwert, “Eileen Gray: Two Houses and an Interior, 1926-1933,” Perspecta 13/14 (1971): 66-73.
6.   This sample includes: Francis D. K. Ching, Mark Jarzombek, and Vikramaditya Prakash, A Global History of Architecture, 3rd ed.; William J. R. Curtis, Modern Architecture Since 1900, 3rd ed.; Michael Fazio, Marian Moffett, and Lawrence Wodehouse, Buildings Across Time: An Introduction to World Architecture, 5th ed.; Kenneth Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History, 3rd ed. World of Art.; Abigail Harrison-Moore and Dorothy Rowe, eds., Architecture and Design in Europe and America 1750-2000; Richard Ingersoll and Spiro Kostof, World Architecture: A Cross-cultural History; Hanno-Walter Kruft, A History of Architectural Theory: From Vitruvius to the Present; Harry Francis Mallgrave and Christina Contandriopoulos, eds., Architectural Theory: Volume II: An Anthology from 1871-2005; Marian Moffett, Michael Fazio, and Lawrence Wodehouse, A World History of Architecture; Christian Norberg-Schulz, Meaning in Western Architecture, 1980 ed.; Nikolas Pevsner, An Outline of European Architecture; Marvin Trachtenberg and Isabelle Hyman, Architecture, from Prehistory to Postmodernity, 2nd ed.
7. Harrison-Moore and Rowe, Architecture and Design in Europe and America 1750-2000, 340.
8. Frampton, Modern Architecture: A Critical History, 334. 9. Ching, Jarzombek, and Prakash, A Global History of Architecture, 794.

Liyang Ding
University of Pennsylvania

German architectural historian Julius Posener (1904-1996) maintained that Hugo Häring (1882-1958) was the only early modernist architect who had formulated an entire body of architectural theory of his time.[1] Häring’s thinking and its central argument, however, has received very little attention, especially in the English-speaking world.[2] The author substantially contributed to interpreting Häring’s original ideas and Hans Scharoun (1893-1972)’s later application was Peter Blundell Jones, who wrote the only monograph on Häring in English as well as a number of articles that aimed to promote the “organicist” architectural tradition. Nevertheless, Häring’s design theory still deserves further studies, as Blundell Jones failed to discuss Häring’s fragmented notes on the subject of the “philosophy of Gestalt,” a theme that had occupied his mind since the early 1900s. Thus, this paper will provide a long overdue discussion of Häring’s “philosophy of Gestalt” and its historical, theoretical, and methodological implications. I shall argue that his Gestalt theory—alongside the notion of the “New Building” (Neues Bauen)—can be understood as an “alternative” approach to architectural design for its underlying holistic way of perceiving (Vorstellungsarten) in contrast to the mechanical parallel. I shall also argue that Häring’s view towards building as “living organism” and his focus on the immediate experience of what is “happening” (geschehen) presented an adoption of German romanticist tradition and, more specifically, Goethe’s scientific methods and its reliance on “primal phenomenon” (Urphänomen). Furthermore, I will acknowledge Häring’s role as an “outlier” of the modern movement, while contending that it was the result of, rather than the “discursive limitations” of his theory,[3] the “authority-usurping” of the modern movement right at the moment of its emergence[4] and the dominance of the historiographic narratives that center on heroic figures such as Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, and Mies van der Rohe. Indeed, Häring stood in opposition to these influential architects. But this stance became one of the reasons for the current resurfacing of Häring’s theory as well as Scharoun’s development, which poses renewed issues for thinking through contemporary architectural pedagogy.

[1] Peter Blundell Jones, Hugo Häring: The Organic versus Geometric (Stuttgart: Ed. Axel Menges, 1999), 33. Julius Posener stated, “Häring was the one whose written oeuvre has been the most important by far. Not only had he written considerably more than any other leading architect of the time, his theory was more consistent than the occasional manifestoes or essays written by his contemporaries.” See Julius Posener, From Schinkel to the Bauhaus (London: Lund Humphries, 1972), 33.

[2] For books on Häring in languages other than English see Jürgen Joedicke and Heinrich Lauterbach‘s Hugo Häring: Schriften Entwürfe Bauten (1965) (German), Adrian V. Sudhalter’s Hugo Häring: Architect des Neuen Bauens, 1882-1958 (2001) (German), Das Andere Bauen: Gedanken und Zeichnungen(1982) (German), and Sergio Polano’s Hugo Härin, il segreto della forma (1983) (Italian).

[3] David J. Lewis, “Channeling Häring, Mediating Scharoun,” The Cornell Journal of Architecture, Vol. 6 (1999): 54-67.

[4] Colin St. John Wilson, The Other Tradition of Modern Architecture: The Uncompleted Project(London: Academy, 1995), 6.

Anne-Catrin Schultz
Wentworth Institute of Technology

Architecture has been used to demonstrate political change in many instances throughout history. This research paper explores tendencies in German architecture after West and East Germany unified in 1990 after more than 40 years of separate political systems, economic conditions and architectural development. The main narrative of the research traces the process of defining new identities after the collapse of a strong physical border and a shift in political and economic structure. Practically overnight an area of 1,800 square miles was added to its Western counterpart, joining a lifestyle that seemed to have been driven by consumption and opportunity. Over the next few decades, a building boom unfolded in the former area of Eastern Germany and in the city of Berlin, which had been the macrocosm of the cultural, social and urban consequences of the separation. German architecture had already gone through a re-definition after World War II, a phase of reconstruction and political articulation that in the West resulted in a strong push for transparent, modern and well-engineered buildings, demonstrating an open and ultimately good society. In the East, modernity was one vehicle to show progress and showcase the SED regime (1949-1990). Architecture after 1990, the year of the German re-unification also modeled a set of values aiming at progress, unity and technical ability. It retained a preference for glass curtain walls and stone veneers balancing optimism for a great future with nostalgia for the past. In the former West Germany, the architectural evolution was little impacted, the former East Germany underwent a comprehensive renewal, especially in the realm of infrastructure, civic, commercial and transportation buildings. This paper compares a series of urban interventions such as the Berlin Potsdamer Platz development, Leipzig Hauptbahnhof (Leipzig main train station) and Coutbus Technical University Library aiming at identifying and articulating shared formal principles that signify a united country. Many of the sites signal public places but are part of private (corporate) development; they expand on modernism but nod to the architecture of previous centuries; they communicate serving function but focus on the image. Especially new public and civic projects in former East Germany had to reconcile the duality of different political ideologies, neoliberal capitalism on the one hand and the former ideals of a socialist republic on the other hand. This examination represents an analysis of a series of completed sites and considers the intention formulated in the briefs that initiated them. The study reveals what Emily Pugh calls the process “colonialization of the Eastern part of Germany Western architects.”1After 1990, western architects seized the opportunity and secured numerous commissions along a type of new frontier. The urban and architectural interventions nevertheless carried the role of creating and supporting a new German identity. This paper documents the tendencies and narratives articulated between nostalgia and avantgarde that characterize German architecture of re-unification.

1 Pugh, Emily. Architecture, Politics, & Identity in Divided Berlin, 2014.

Wenbo Guo
Georgia Institute of Technology

George Johnston
Georgia Institute of Technology

The study of Chinese architectural history by Chinese scholars started quite late as compared to the study of Western architectural history by Western scholars. Influenced by the philosophy of Confucianism, which devalued material artifacts, architecture was not considered to be a scholarly field in pre-Modern China.¹  Chinese scholars treated architecture as a technique mastered by craftsmen and excluded it from the domain of fine arts such as painting, calligraphy, sculpture and inscription. The Western idea of architecture as a respected gentleman’s career was not introduced into China until the end of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) with the increasing presence of foreign populations. Once Chinese scholars accepted the idea that architecture was a scholarly discipline, they commenced the study of Chinese architecture through the application of historiographical approaches adapted from non-Chinese sources. Contemporary Chinese scholars are now pursuing revisionist approaches to Chinese architectural historiography that takes account of these complicated lines of influence. In light of these complex cultural genealogies, the objective of this paper is to chart some of the methodological questions to be considered in the development of a critical approach to the historiography of Chinese architecture. This paper is structured in three parts. The first part is an introduction to the writings of significant architectural historians in the period of the late-19th century to mid-20th century, in which the different approaches applied to research in Chinese architectural history are examined. These include writings by Western scholars; writings by traditional Chinese intellectuals; and the writings from the first scholarly organization devoted to researching Chinese architecture, the Society for Research in Chinese Architecture. The second part addresses contemporary scholars’ critical assessments of the different approaches to Chinese architectural history employed by their predecessors. Finally, the paper will outline some methodological questions to be addressed in the development of more critically conscious and culturally nuanced accounts of Chinese architectural history if such histories are to go beyond old preconceptions based in an east-west dialectic.

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1 It is commonly agreed that Modern China starts with the Opium War of 1840 and ends with the establishment of the People’s Republic of China of 1949. Therefore, following this convention, the pre-Modern period can be understood to be the time before 1840s.