UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — A new exhibition that highlights the multidisciplinary work researchers from the Stuckeman School and the College of Engineering at Penn State are doing to create sustainable housing solutions on Earth and beyond by using 3D printing processes will open at 6 p.m. on Nov. 3 in the Willard G. Rouse Gallery as part of the school’s Lecture and Exhibit Series.
Titled “From Earth to Mars and Back,” the exhibition builds on work the research team initiated for the 2019 NASA 3D Printed Mars Habitat Challenge, in which the team — dubbed Den@Mars — finished second. Featured in the show are a collection of images from teaching experiences at the undergraduate and graduate levels, research experiments from different parts of the design and 3D printing processes, and full-scale prototypes of practical applications of additive manufacturing technologies to build concrete structures on Earth and Mars.
Organized by José Pinto Duarte, Stuckeman Chair in Design Innovation and director of the Stuckeman Center for Design Computing, and Shadi Nazarian, associate professor of architecture, the exhibit was curated by Julio Diarte, adjunct lecturer of architecture and a 2020 alumnus of the architecture doctoral program.
“Interdisciplinary research is one of Penn State’s great strengths and this exhibition is an opportunity to take a look inside different aspects of the collaboration between architecture and engineering researchers in the development of technology to 3D print buildings,” said Duarte.
The work displayed in the exhibition showcases the results of research within the Additive Construction Lab, housed in the Civil Infrastructure Testing and Evaluation Laboratory, that focuses on using 3D printing at the construction scale to create sustainable housing options that could revolutionize the construction industry and address larger societal issues, such as homelessness.
From Earth to Mars and Back is free and open to the public and will run through Jan. 19.
UNIVERSTY PARK, Pa. — Penn State is hosting a virtual symposium Sept. 23-24 that will explore how architects and designers in related disciplines can gain a better understanding of the impact the built environment has on shaping society’s inequalities, how the decisions they make as design professionals have consequences, and how they can help bring about better social equity in an increasingly polarizing world.
With a theme of “Design Consequences: Taking responsibility for our ideas,” this Stuckeman Research Symposium is being organized by Alexandra Staub, professor of architecture and an affiliate member of the Rock Ethics Institute at Penn State.
Staub received a Racial Justice, Anti-Discrimination and Democratic Practices Grant from the College of Arts and Architecture for the event. Additional funding has been provided by the Harold K. Schilling Memorial Lecture on Science, Technology, and Society endowment of the Rock Ethics Institute; Stuckeman School; Department of Architecture; Stuckeman Center for Design Computing; and the Hamer Center for Community Design.
The symposium is being held in conjunction with the Stuckeman Research Open House, which will highlight the work that has been done within the school’s research centers and units over the past academic year.
“Starting with their formal education, architects and designers in related disciplines are trained to seek solutions to problems that are largely defined through the values and demands of their clients. The needs of additional stakeholders – especially members of marginalized communities – are typically not considered during the design process,” explains Staub. “Because our built environment is a powerful reflection of our culture while also shaping how we live, we need to address how we design and build if we wish to create environments that serve all members of a community, rather than simply those whose financial means put them at an advantage.”
Staub concluded by adding: “Designers are powerful thinkers. We need to tap into that potential to help promote social equity.”
The event, which is being produced and recorded by WPSU, will feature a series of lectures in which speakers will discuss their work and thinking on topics of social equity. This will be followed by roundtable discussions in which the speakers address methods that can bring social equity thinking into the classroom as well as professional practice of design.
Symposium speakers include:
Antwi Akom, professor and founding director of the Social Innovation and Urban Opportunity Lab — a joint research lab between the University of California, San Francisco and San Francisco State University that focuses on combining culturally- and community-responsive design with new digital technologies in order to increase racial and spatial justice and improve health equity.
Catherine D’Ignazio, assistant professor of urban science and planning in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT and Director of the Data + Feminism Lab.
Rayne Laborde, associate director of cityLAB UCLA, a design research center concentrated on urban spatial justice.
Andrea M. Matwyshyn, associate dean for innovation and technology, professor of law and engineering policy, and founding director of the PILOT Lab, a policy think-tank at Penn State.
Lily Song, assistant professor of race and social justice in the built environment at Northeastern University, whose work focuses on infrastructure-based mobilizations and experiments that center the experiences and insights of frontline communities.
Ife Salema Vanable, founder and leader of i/van/able, a Bronx-based architectural workshop and think tank, visiting professor at the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of the Cooper Union, visiting scholar at the Yale School of Architecture and doctoral candidate in architectural history and theory at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation.
Architecture graduate students earn Engineering for Change Research Fellowships
UNIVERSTY PARK, Pa. — Dima Abu-Aridah, Ali Ghazvinian and Tiffanie Leung, all graduate students in the Stuckeman School’s Department of Architecture, have been named 2021 Engineering for Change Research Fellows in the habitat sector.
Designed to prepare early career professionals to solve local as well as global challenges, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) E4C Fellowship program provides a platform for the next generation of technical professionals to “reach their fullest potential” and advance the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.
This year the Autodesk Foundation, which is the philanthropic arm of Autodesk, Inc., partnered with ASME to offer even more emerging professionals the opportunity to apply their technical research to solve some of the world’s most pressing social and environment issues. As such, nearly 650 applications from interested candidates in 80 countries were submitted for the program with 50 students and young professionals from 24 countries ultimately selected for the 2021 cohort.
An architect and urban planner from Jordan, Abu-Aridah is a doctoral student whose current research focuses on the planning and informal transformation of the built environment in refugee camps, with a focus on the context of her home country.
“My motivation to pursue [an E4C Fellowship] comes from studying and working in Jordan, a country that hosts a large number of refugees from the Middle East,” said Abu-Aridah. “In Jordan, there is a vital need to improve the development sectors, including the education, health care and housing sectors, so that those sectors can work to serve both the country’s citizens as well as the refugees.”
A native of Tehran, Iran, Ghazvinian is focusing his doctoral studies on computational design and is working on converting mycelium-based bio-composites to the architectural context in an interdisciplinary area. A researcher in the Form and Matter Lab (ForMatLab) within the Stuckeman Center for Design Computing, Ghazvinian is attempting to define a comprehensive framework for preparing nature-based materials to be used as an alternative for the traditional masonry materials in an affordable, repeatable and more sustainable way.
“I found the E4C Fellowship program as a fantastic opportunity to broaden and deepen my perspective for finding solutions to global programs,” he said. “Learning from other people and their experiments within similar scenarios will help me in my journey, both academically and professionally.”
Leung just completed her first year in the master of science in architecture graduate program and has centered her research around material improvements to earthbag construction systems and bag-making processes that can enhance builder empowerment.
“Motivated by the humanitarian application of earthbag construction in disaster recovery, I applied to E4C to gain some insight into the processes and strategies used in engineering for global development, which I want to apply to my own research,” said Leung. “This fellowship is also the perfect chance for me to connect with people outside of architecture and foster interdisciplinary relationships that could have an impact in my career in the future.”
Stuckeman School alumnus Julio Diarte, who graduated from Penn State earlier this month with his doctorate in architecture, was part of the E4C Fellowship cohort in 2020.
E4C is a nonprofit organization made up of engineers, technologists, designers, social entrepreneurs, nongovernmental organizations and community advocates who are committed to improving the quality of life in communities around the world by facilitating the development of affordable, local appropriate and sustainable solutions to the most pressing social challenges. More about the fellowship program can be found at https://www.engineeringforchange.org/e4c-fellowship/.
Penn State architecture students and faculty contribute to Pan-African exhibition in France
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Penn State faculty members DK Osseo-Asare, assistant professor of architecture and engineering design, and Yasmine Abbas, assistant teaching professor of architecture and engineering design, have designed an architectural space within the “UFA – Université des Futurs Africains [University of African Futures]” exhibition at the Le Lieu Unique, a national center for contemporary culture in Nantes, France.
The exhibition, which opened on April 9 and runs through Aug. 29, is part of a year-long “Africa 2020” event that was launched as a laboratory for production and the spread of knowledge and ideas generated out of African cultural heritage and knowledge systems. At the opening of the Africa 2020 season, which was delayed by a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, French President Emmanuel Macron noted that both its “multidisciplinary nature – visual arts, performing arts, cinema, literature, science, technology, entrepreneurship, gastronomy, fashion, design, architecture” and its inclusion of 54 African countries make the Africa 2020 event “unprecedented.”
Curated by Oulimata Gueye, the UFA exhibition explores 21st-century relationships between technology, science, ecology, care, and the emancipatory potential of pan-African paradigms of computational knowledge. The projects on display engage the continued relevance in art and design of the term “HistoFuturist,” which is defined by African American science-fiction writer Octavia E. Butler as “someone who looks forward without turning his or her back on the past, combining an interest in the human factor and in technology.” The work also reflects the concept of “active utopia,” a term advanced by Senegalese economist Felwine Sarr, whereby African actors create their “own metaphors of the future” based on indigenous models.
Osseo-Asare and Abbas’ featured work is the latest evolution of their open-source ”Fufuzela” design research, experimental adaptive bamboo structures engineered to function at the intersection of architecture and furniture while integrating biology with environmental design and engineering. These kit building systems leverage a novel, bamboo-composite, steel joint mechanism to enable low-cost construction of dynamic modular spaces that allow for a hybrid or “blended” experience of physical and digital realities. At Le Lieu Unique, the designed space is titled “Fufuzela – Lieu Utile,” which translates as “the useful space,” and serves as a central makerspace-type installation within the exhibition that can be used as a gathering place for research, meetings, collaborative work, and performances.
The research has been supported by the Museum of Modern Art, Penn State Materials Research Institute’s Covestro “Materials Matter at the Human Level” humanitarian materials initiative, and the Collaborative Design Research Center in the Stuckeman School. Central to the project is the approach of Osseo-Asare and Abbas to connect Penn State researchers in the Humanitarian Materials Lab (HuMatLab) and the Spatial Æffect Lab jointly with high-end fabricators in the United States and Europe, as well as grassroots artisanal makers and engineering technicians in Ghana and West Africa, to work on materials-driven, collaborative design research.
A dozen Penn State graduate and undergraduate students from both the Stuckeman School and the School of Engineering Design, Technology and Professional Programs (SEDTAPP), have participated in the Fufuzela collaborative design research project, including Lizz Andrzejewski, Paniz Farrokhsiar, Sam Rubenstein, Nicholas Fudali, Bryan Ray and Danielle Vickers. In addition, the work of current master of science in architecture students Tiffanie Leung and Mahan Motalebi in the past year garnered them credit in the UFA exhibition.
Leung, who worked with Osseo-Asare to study the “bone” morphology and joint mechanics and maintained the open-source repository throughout the co-creation process, reflects that “ … one can see how the Fufuzela can begin to emerge as an organism capable of development and revision beyond the lab.”
Motalebi, who assisted Abbas with computing the threaded “skin” of the structure, said, “One thing that I like about [the] Fufuzela is the way it gathers people from … different parts of the world with people working on it from different locations … I see [the] Fufuzela as an object and a structure that provides the space for more human entanglement, and I appreciate the opportunity to be a part of that.”
Since France was under lockdown due to a COVID-19 surge in early spring, Osseo-Asare and Abbas could not install the exhibit themselves; however, students from Ecole des Beaux-arts de Nantes St. Nazaire have worked with the pair remotely to make their design come to fruition.
According to Osseo-Asare, both the Stuckeman School Shop and the Digital Fabrication Lab were “invaluable resources to support building physical mockups and using computer-controlled rapid prototyping equipment to iteratively test design components.” The Fufuzela design research project is part of the Material Matters (MM) research cluster in the Department of Architecture.
In parallel to the exhibition in France, several additional modules of the Fufuzela have been constructed in Ghana by members of the Agbogbloshie Makerspace Platform (AMP) Makers Collective in collaboration with a local partner, the ANO Institute of Arts and Knowledge. The modules are slated to travel to eight regions in Ghana for codesign, knowledge exchange, and curation workshops conducted as the third cycle of ANO‘s Mobile Museum project that Osseo-Asare collaborated to pilot in 2015.
Founded by renowned writer, filmmaker, historian, and cultural theorist Nana Oforiatta Ayim, ANO is currently leading a complete re-establishment of Ghana’s museum sector on behalf of the Government of Ghana. In January 2021, Osseo-Asare authored a chapter titled “Architecture” for the Ghana Museums Report, as part of the President’s Committee on Museums and Monuments, titled “Fufuzela: Futuring the Pan-African Museum.”
The AMP, founded by Osseo-Asare and Abbas, is a transnational project that helps bolster maker ecosystems in Africa by encouraging grassroots makers, students, and young professionals to collaborate to reutilize recycled materials. The project has garnered numerous awards, most recently winning the Smart Cities Urban Innovation Award for Citizen Engagement in the Le Monde 2020 World Urban Innovation Challenge. The project won the Rockefeller Foundation Centennial Innovation Challenge 2013, a 2017 SEED Award for Public Interest Design from Design Corps, and a Design Award Commendation, Social Impact, from the American Institute of Architects-Austin 2020 Design Awards.
Osseo-Asare is a co-founding principal of Low Design Office, an architecture and integrative design studio based in Austin, Texas, and Tema, Ghana, that explores the links between sustainability, technology, and geopolitics. The firm was recently named a winner of the Architectural League of New York’s Emerging Voices 21 competition.
At Penn State, Osseo-Asare directs the HuMatLab, which triangulates the Stuckeman School, SEDTAPP in the College of Engineering and the Materials Research Institute. The lab serves as a key driver of the University’s Alliance for Education, Science, Engineering and Design with Africa (AESEDA), a cross-university initiative to leverage teaching, research, and service to better the lives of those living in Africa and the diaspora. Osseo-Asare’s research spans design innovation, open-source urbanism, digital fabrication, and architecture robots.
Abbas, who is also affiliated with the College of Arts and Architecture’s Center for Pedagogy in Art and Design (C-PAD), researches the computational design of ambiances and the making of environments for living across contemporary conditions of expanded physical, digital and mental mobilities. The Spatial Æffect Lab, which she founded, advances atmospheres design as a general approach to parametric placemaking. The two modules of Fufuzela on display as part of the UFA exhibition investigate the optical effects of structural color in threaded spatial envelopes.
Architecture professor’s firm named Emerging Voices competition winner
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Low Design Office (LOWDO), an architecture and integrated design firm co-founded by DK Osseo-Asare, assistant professor of architecture and engineering design at Penn State, has been named a winner of the Architectural League of New York’s Emerging Voices 21 competition.
Established in 1982, the Emerging Voices award spotlights individuals and firms based in the United States, Canada and Mexico with distinct design voices and the potential to influence the disciplines of architecture, landscape design and urbanism.
Based in Austin, Texas, and Tema, Ghana, LOWDO explores the links between sustainability, technology and geopolitics. The firm’s projects search to find optimal balance between design and resource consumption — to achieve the “most” with the “least.”
LOWDO has earned numerous international accolades in recent years and was named one of the 50 best emerging architecture practices in the world Domus magazine in 2020. The firm was featured in Architect magazine’s “Next Progressives” list in 2019, was a finalist for the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program that same year and was recognized as an emerging architecture firm in the December 2017/January 2018 issues of Architectural Review.
Osseo-Asare and Ryan Bollom, LOWDO co-founders and principals, started the practice in 2006 while they were students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. The firm was created around the idea that transformative innovation in creative fields “most often originates when the creator must overcome limited means and resources to provide meaning in their work.”
LOWDO will be featured in the Emerging Voices lecture series at 6 p.m. on March 18. More information about the event, which is free and open to the public but requires advanced registration, can be found on the Architecture League’s website.
UNIVERSTY PARK, Pa. — The work of the Department of Architecture’s Autonomous Builders Collective (ABC) in the Stuckeman School using waste cardboard to develop resilient, low-cost housing has been accepted into the Seoul Biennial of Architecture and Urbanism 2021. The show, which has a theme of “Crossroads, Building the Resilient City,” opens on Sept. 16 and runs through Oct. 30.
Marcus Shaffer, associate professor of architecture and the director of the ABC, along with lab members Elena Vazquez, an architecture doctoral candidate and Julio Diarte, a doctoral candidate in architecture who recently defended his thesis, have been invited for their entry titled, “Tapping into Urban Recycling for Low-cost/No-cost Housing Solutions: Using Waste Cardboard to Build and Sustain the Resilient City.” In their submission, the trio proposes a series of workshops in Seoul during which the lab members would work with informally employed waste collectors around the city to explore the potential of using post-consumer waste cardboard and common, discarded vinyl flooring to produce cast concrete building elements, such as screens, blocks, beams, floor slabs and window frames.
According to Shaffer, the ABC’s creative mission to “develop and/or revitalize building technologies and material strategies that empower people to create and realize architectures for themselves” neatly aligns with the focus of the 2021 biennial, which is “considering the city of tomorrow as a collective invention.”
The team’s work, which will be displayed in the Cities category of the biennial at Zaha Hadid’s Dongdaemun Design Plaza, will include cast artifacts, process videos and ‘how-to’ documentation produced in lab workshops, as well as cardboard-based building elements, tools and material studies. The project builds on the extensive doctoral work of Diarte on waste cardboard-based architecture and community workshops, and on Shaffer’s experiences with waste cardboard-based concrete formwork in the first-year architecture studios in the Stuckeman School
Some of the objects and tooling to be displayed by the team in Seoul were created by Diarte, Shaffer and Vazquez in the Stuckeman Building Yard, and they represent a range of architectural technologies, including hand-crafted objects and building components largely fabricated through digital workflows and tooling. Through their proposal, the group seeks to match recycling scenarios, housing needs and the building skills transmission tested by Diarte’s work in Asunción, Paraguay to similar conditions and needs in Seoul.
“Being accepted to exhibit our work on waste-cardboard reuse for architecture at the Seoul Biennial 2021 is a great honor,” said Diarte. “The Biennale motivates us to advance the project at a distinct level, exploring waste cardboard-based architecture at the scale of a city like Seoul, a city that has a strong cardboard recycling culture and paper use tradition in architecture.”
Shaffer is particularly happy to take Stuckeman School work to Seoul, where he spends his summers, often accompanied by students who participate in the Department of Architecture’s Korea/Japan Summer Study Abroad Program for design majors.
Held every two years, the Seoul Biennial was established in 2017 as an event that focuses on cities and gathers their representatives to discuss the challenges linked to the urban condition and share their potential solutions. With 10 million inhabitants, Seoul is one of the most representative examples of contemporary metropolises and, as such, a particularly relevant context to frame the event.
Sponsored and organized by the Seoul Metropolitan Government’s Urban Improvement Bureau, this year’s event is directed by French architect Dominique Perrault and is co-curated by architect Choon Woong Choi, University of Seoul Professor Marc Brossa, the Seoul-based design group FHHH Friends and the architectural studio BARE.
More information about the Seoul Biennial can be found here.
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — After nearly 18 months of planning, several production hurdles and a worldwide pandemic that shut down international travel, not to mention all of Italy, architect and 2007 Penn State alumna Gillean Denny and a group of students, faculty and research assistants in the Stuckeman School are celebrating the virtual unveiling of a “Living Chapel” they designed to promote environmental consciousness as part of Global Catholic Climate Movement (GCCM) activities in Rome from May 16-24, and the United Nations (U.N.) World Environment Day on June 5.
Musician Julian Revie, Denny’s longtime friend and the associate director of music at the Center for Music and Liturgy of Saint Thomas More Chapel at Yale University, was the catalyst for the project. Inspired by the U.N.’s 2030 sustainable development agenda and “Laudato Si” — the 2015 papal encyclical on climate change — Revie worked diligently with Vatican officials to get the plans for the chapel approved and the structure installed.
“The chapel is an instrument to inspire a sense of serenity and oneness with nature in those who pass through it,” explained Revie, who was the recipient of the Vatican’s 2016 Francesco Siciliani prize for a sacred music composition.
The purpose of the chapel is “to encourage worldwide acts of ecological restoration with an emphasis on tree planting in support of the U.N.’s Trillion Tree Campaign,” said Denny, who earned a bachelor of architecture from the Stuckeman School.
The structure, which features green walls that are adorned with living plants and an elaborate chime wall featuring metal embellishments, will officially be introduced via streaming video on June 5 in the Rome Botanical Garden as part of events organized by the Italian Alliance for Sustainable Development (ASviS) in celebration of the U.N.’s World Environment Day.
The chapel will eventually be on display at the Vatican, where it will become the second structure in Vatican City to be designed by an American architect. The first was the Chapel of the Holy Spirit by architect Louis Astorino, also a Penn State architecture alumnus.
From the Vatican, the Living Chapel will move to its permanent home in Assisi, Italy, as a feature point of a new Saint Francis pilgrimage trail that is being unveiled this spring by the GCCM.
The massive structure, which measures 45 feet long by 30 feet wide with walls that range from 10 to 15 feet high, was built out of aluminum and recycled and repurposed materials on the University Park campus during the latter part of the fall 2019 semester and the early weeks of the spring 2020 semester. It was then shipped to Rome, where it was put into storage while travel restrictions were enacted and the country went into lockdown. At that point, Revie and Denny reevaluated their plans from their respective homes in New Haven, Connecticut, and Toronto, Canada.
But how did such an elaborate project for the Vatican and the U.N. come about in the first place?
The friendship and the idea
Revie and Denny met while they were both attending graduate school at the University of Cambridge. The friends became housemates during their time in the U.K., with Revie introducing Denny to her now-husband, and they would often discuss the possibility of collaborating.
After graduating with a master of philosophy and doctorate from Cambridge, Denny became an educator and freelance designer for several years before reducing her professional commitments to start a family. Revie, meanwhile, composed two papal masses and served as a composer and professional organist in Los Angeles before moving on to Yale.
Revie had the initial idea of creating a chapel that could be designed to play a musical piece he would compose while furthering the conversation on climate change in time for the fifth anniversary of the pope’s Laudato Si. A member of the Catholic church, Revie also wanted to pay homage to St. Francis of Assisi, who is known in the faith for his love of nature.
After much discussion with members of the Vatican and theologians worldwide, Revie was frustrated by the lack of a single design vision for the chapel, which is when the idea of collaborating with Denny reemerged. As a fellow Catholic with a professional background in sustainable design, urban agriculture and theatre production, Denny seemed ideal to help solidify the chapel vision.
They decided to begin precisely as St. Francis did. “It is said that when Francis received a message from God to ‘go build a church,’ he took the directive literally and built a prayer chapel,” explained Revie. “We wanted to reimagine that structure.”
The church built by St. Francis — Porziuncola — still stands in Assisi and resides within the larger Basilica of Saint Mary of the Angels, which was built to accommodate the visitors that come to pay homage to the saint. The site has since been named a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The vision for the Living Chapel took on a life of its own, and the scope was immense. The pair knew they needed help to pull it off.
“I was really intrigued by the idea [of the chapel], but I thought Julian was completely insane for wanting to have something of this scale finished by early 2020,” said Denny. “Then as we discussed it more and started fleshing out ideas, the less crazy it seemed and the more excited I got. There was a moment that I knew I wanted to be a part of this project, but I also knew that I could not design and build what we had in mind by myself.”
By then it was the spring of 2019 and Denny decided to seek assistance from the place that fueled her passion for design-build projects and Italian architecture.
A tradition of design-build
The Department of Architecture in the Stuckeman School at Penn State has a rich tradition of design-build curricula, beginning in the first year of the five-year professional bachelor of architecture program. Students learn the importance of not only designing a structure, but the physical process of putting together their design projects by hand, using real building materials. Traditionally, students in the fourth year of the program are required to study for a semester in Rome at the Pantheon Institute, where they experience firsthand the historic and contemporary architecture, landscape architecture and urbanism of the city.
James Kalsbeek, an associate professor in the department since 1990, specializes in leading design-build projects with students in both the first-year studio and a more advanced seminar where students work exclusively with discarded and reclaimed building materials. He also has been involved with the Rome program since its inception in 1991 and led the program in fall 2005 when Denny studied in Rome. Kalsbeek’s familiarity with design-build projects and Rome itself put him at the top of Denny’s list of people she wanted involved in the chapel project.
“I was thrilled when Gill called and explained what she was up to,” said Kalsbeek. “It was a huge undertaking, sure, but it was something I knew she was quite capable of doing because she had done it here as a student. Maybe not to the same scale, but it became sort of a running joke that she was an expert at designing and building structures that were made to end up somewhere else.”
Denny did her fair share of designing installations around campus during her time as an undergraduate, and more specifically, she had experience building green structures. Denny was the lead designer for the Penn State team that conceptualized the MorningStar solar home during her fourth year of studies. That structure was built on campus and shipped to Washington, D.C., for the 2007 Department of Energy Solar Decathlon. It was then on display in several locations before returning to its home on the University Park campus.
“Getting that hands-on experience — actually getting in there and touching the materials you are working with and seeing how they respond to each other and the elements — was something I got away from in my career with a family, so it was really exciting to get back out from behind a desk,” said Denny.
The structural frame
Denny and Revie presented their design ideas to Kalsbeek during the summer of 2019 with the understanding that this was a large-scale green project. It would need to be fabricated and assembled in a modular fashion at Penn State, then taken apart and shipped to Italy where it would be reassembled and covered with tree and plant saplings by Italian botanists at the Rome Botanical Garden.
Kalsbeek located a workspace large enough for their needs — the Laundry Building on campus — and assembled a “dream team” of students and researchers with expertise in building foundations, methods of assembly, fabrication processes, green structures and materials research that could work together to build the traveling, green, artistic, musical structure Revie and Denny envisioned.
That core team included architecture doctoral student Elizabeth Andrzejewski, graduate students Elizabeth Rothrock and Kacie Ward, and research assistants Becca Newburg, Garrett Socling and Dani Spewak, an alumna of the School of Visual Arts.
“I honestly didn’t think the project would come together given how short the timeframe was for all of the work that needed to get done, but I wanted to help,” said Andrzejewski, a skilled welder whose master’s thesis at Penn State was on jointing systems for prefabricated architecture and her doctoral research focuses on the interaction of materials and processes. “It seemed impossible, but given the significance, of course I wanted to do what I could to see it through.”
First up was tackling the chapel’s structural frame, which is where the team encountered one of its first production challenges.
“It was obvious right from the start that while Lizz (Andrzejewski) is an amazing welder, we only have one of her and we just knew that we didn’t have the resources here that we needed to fabricate a structure of this size,” said Ward. “We had to look elsewhere to get help.”
That “elsewhere” ended up being 60 miles away at the Pennsylvania College of Technology in Williamsport, which is known for its welding and metal fabrication programs.
Kalsbeek and Denny met with Penn College officials, including James N. Colton II, co-department head of welding and metal fabrication.
“Gillean came to our campus to meet with the team of faculty and students we assembled in September [2019] and we were asked if we could build the four walls for the chapel here,” said Colton. “We were talking about the materials we could use and decided that in order to keep the structure from getting too heavy, using aluminum was our best bet.”
In total, 4,956 feet of aluminum was used to construct the walls, which is about 16 football fields in length, and 3,514 combined hours were spent by the Penn College team on the project.
“They literally were working miracles on that campus through Christmas break and into the new year,” she said. “But no way, no how, did the chapel get built without them. Period. They were amazing. Jim [Colton] and I were in constant contact every day, double-checking details as they worked and making changes as necessary.”
With the internal skeleton of the chapel completed and shipped to University Park in late January 2020, the Stuckeman School team got to work cladding the walls of the massive structure.
Building a musical, green chapel
Revie and Denny wanted to incorporate recycled and reusable materials into the chapel, so they started reaching out to friends and sharing details of their project in order to drum-up interest.
“One of my old Penn State friends has a connection we thought could help and long story short, that’s how we ended up getting more than 1,500 pounds of donated parts from two automotive metal stamping plants,” said Denny.
Revie also arranged for the donation of discarded oil drums and steel pan drums from a manufacturing plant. Each drum had a production flaw and would have been thrown out as scrap, yet they played beautifully.
With her strong welding background, Andrzejewski focused on the fabrication and mounting of steel pan drums from the donated parts on the chime wall, which was to be the chapel’s focal point. Newburg, a 2018 architecture alumna who has a background in fabrication, took interest in designing the series of drums that were to be part of Revie’s musical composition in the tradition of the instruments from the islands of Trinidad and Tobago. The drums are located inside the structural framework of the four walls. Newburg also worked with Denny to design the intricate metal screens of plants and suspended cross cutouts made from donated parts on the wall. Wind that flows through the chapel’s rolling layout will move the crosses to have a windchime effect while also reflecting light.
“When we had a good design [for the drums], we had to figure out how to make 37 of them that were rugged and durable so they would last,” she said. “At that point, we recruited 24 talented undergraduate architecture students to help and essentially set up a factory floor, explaining what they had to do at each station, so we could mass produce the pieces we needed.”
According to Kalsbeek, an additional eight students clocked dozens of hours on the CNC router in the Stuckeman Family Building, mass producing the custom-patterned metal panels with guidance from Jamie Heilman, the Stuckeman School’s digital fabrication and specialized technologies coordinator.
Meanwhile, Socling got to work designing the solar-powered irrigation system that circulates water through the green walls of the chapel. He also helped determine how the steel drums in the chapel framework would play.
“We have a frame around each drum that has brackets which hold a mallet that is positioned above the note on the drum it is to play,” explained Socling. “At the other end of the mallet, we fastened a 3D-printed cup that we made, which fills up with water from the irrigation system and brings the mallet down to strike the drum on the intended note while it empties with water into a cup with a mallet positioned on a specific note on the drum underneath it and so on.”
Rothrock, who graduated on May 9 with a master’s degree, is adept at understanding building materials and how they work with each other.
“Since our core team has a variety of research focuses, we were all able to benefit the design of the project in different ways,” said Rothrock. “We were all able to contribute our unique knowledge to the structure, which is why, I think, it is successful.”
Regrouping to bring the chapel ‘to life’
While the team from Penn State was set to travel to Rome to help Denny assemble the structure during spring break, with help from the fourth-year architecture students who were studying abroad at the Pantheon Institute, those plans were scrapped when the coronavirus pandemic erupted. The group needed to regroup and change course due to a hurdle no one could have predicted — a worldwide health crisis.
“We decided that to ensure everyone’s safety and to still meet the scheduled opening in mid-May, it was best to ask an Italian architecture firm to handle the assembly of the chapel,” said Denny.
Sequas, a Rome-based firm that was originally brought on to the project to verify the structural drawings for the chapel’s eventual installation in Assisi, handled the reassembly in the Rome Botanical Garden.
“Luckily, we designed and assembled the chapel in a modular fashion to begin with, so it is sort of meant to be taken apart and put back together without disrupting the systems,” said Andrzejewski.
The original plans for the chapel called for up to 10,000 saplings, cultivated from the Botanical Garden’s own trees and other participating nurseries, to be featured on or around the chapel. The idea was that the saplings would then grow enough to cover the structure by the time the chapel was unveiled.
Since those saplings continued growing while plans for the chapel were on hold as the COVID-19 pandemic surged, they are now too mature to install on the walls and are planted in pots throughout the chapel. Those trees will be distributed upon the chapel’s public opening to be planted in other parts of Italy where deforestation has taken place.
The green walls of the chapel are adorned with 3,000 perennial plants — a mix of evergreen leaves and flowers — that form a mosaic pattern. They are affixed to the walls with recycled fleece fabric that is stapled to PVC board. Other areas of the chapel also include trees and plants to reflect the rich biodiversity of Europe’s old growth forests, which have been almost entirely lost due to deforestation.
“The plants, which were grown by Verde Vertcale, were chosen based on how they would look in late May or early June when we originally were planning to have the chapel open at the Vatican,” explained Denny. “It was really important for us to present the opportunity of hope and being able to turn around some of the destruction that man has caused on ecosystems. We worked very specifically on the patterns of the plants, which becomes a visual concentration of the piece in and of itself.”
Coming full circle
While the project didn’t conclude with a grand opening at the Vatican next week with both the Penn State and Penn College teams in attendance as originally planned, Revie and Denny said they are thankful they were able to pull together virtually to debut the chapel.
“We did what we set out to do, and we can all be very proud of that fact. The Living Chapel exists as the message it was meant to be — one of reflection, serenity, hope and action to help our planet and the environment now,” said Denny. “People can see it digitally, for now, and hopefully — in the future — our teams and the wider world will be able to visit it in person, to fully appreciate the impossibility we made possible.”
The Stuckeman School team is also thankful to have been involved in such a meaningful, and historic, project that brings together art, architecture, music and nature in a sacred space.
“The Living Chapel project has brought together everything I love: students building real things, the creative use of discarded stuff, Rome, music and the ceremony of construction — and saving the planet isn’t bad either,” said Kalsbeek. “But what I love even more? That I was in a unique position to recruit a very select group of students from all levels of the department — from first-year students to Ph.D. students — to form a dream team that I knew could help Julian and Gill realize this important project. I knew it was a once in a lifetime opportunity for all of us, and I knew our students were up to the challenge.”
After the chapel moves to the Vatican, it will eventually make its way to its permanent home in Assissi, near the chapel built by St. Francis, patron saint for ecologists.
Updates on the Living Chapel and its June 5 opening can be found via Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – Low Design Office (LOWDO), an architecture and integrative design studio that was cofounded by DK Osseo-Asare, assistant professor of architecture and engineering design at Penn State, has been named to Domus magazine’s 50 Best Architecture Firms in 2020 list.
This is the second year that the leading Italian design and architecture publication has released a “best of” list. The first edition, in 2019, focused on the 100 most important architecture practices in the world while this second edition, according to editors, “…identifies the world’s 50 most creative, interesting and promising emerging architecture practices.”
LOWDO was informally established in 2006 by Osseo-Asare and Ryan Bollom while they were classmates at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. The firm – which is based in Austin, Texas and Tema, Ghana – explores the links between sustainability, technology and geopolitics through its work.
Domus lauds LOWDO’s work for how “construction content and technology of buildings by interweaving into the warp and weft complex materials and systems” can advance sustainable design strategies through inventive approaches to building construction. The firm does this by considering “architecture as part of a dynamic and heterogeneous ecosystem” and for integrating solutions for ventilation, solar shading, livability and energy performance into new models of co-living.
The editorial board for the 2020 Domus list was comprised of experts including Wowo Ding, Luis Fernández-Galiano, Lesley Lokko, Rahul Mehrotra and Sarah M. Whiting. The board states that 50 selected firms “could lead [us] to thoughts on what our houses and cities can and should do to represent and improve a world whose dramatic fragility no longer eludes us.”
Stuckeman School collaborates on new architecture journal
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – The Penn State Stuckeman School has collaborated with the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University and the Centre for Documentary Architecture at Bauhaus-University, Weimar (Germany) to publish a new journal that celebrates research as the source of architectural imagination.
FACTUR: Documents and Architecture is interested in different methods for presenting and discussing projects of architecture that consider journalistic research as fundamental to the cultural construction of aesthetic identities. The name of the journal comes from the German term for a dynamic concept and set of techniques that influenced the Russian avant-garde of the early 20th century.
“We want to engage in a conversation with different institutions about the role and impact of architecture in contemporary culture,” said Pep Avilés, FACTUR editor and assistant professor in the Department of Architecture. He also holds the Stuckeman Career Development Professorship in Design at Penn State.
Ron Henderson, a landscape architect and educator with broad international experience, is the new head of the Department of Landscape Architecture and chair of Integrative Design in the H. Campbell and Eleanor R. Stuckeman School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, Penn State College of Arts and Architecture, effective September 1.
Henderson came to Penn State from Tsinghua University in Beijing, China, where he served for six years on the inaugural faculty in its Department of Landscape Architecture, attracted by the opportunity to build a new program at China’s oldest school of architecture. A licensed architect and landscape architect, he is the founder of L + A Landscape Architecture, an award-winning design practice with projects in North America, Europe and Asia.
Henderson’s international experience helped him to obtain a 2012 Creative Artists Exchange Fellowship, sponsored by the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission and administered by the National Endowment for the Arts. He was one of five artists selected from more than 200 applicants and the first landscape architect chosen since the fellowship was initiated in 1978. In spring 2012, he will travel and study cultural landscapes in Japan as an extension of his previous research.
Henderson previously taught at Rhode Island School of Design and Roger Williams University. He holds master of architecture and master of landscape architecture degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and a bachelor of architecture degree from the University of Notre Dame. His teaching experience spans theory, ecology, landscape planning, hydrology, graduate theses and a decade of design studios.
“Ron’s interdisciplinary background and experience in collaborative work make him an ideal choice to lead the Department of Landscape Architecture, especially at a time when working across disciplines and professional boundaries is increasingly important,” said Barbara O. Korner, dean of the College of Arts and Architecture. “We are thrilled to have someone of Ron’s stature here in the College of Arts and Architecture.
Henderson has completed professional works in both Japan and China, including the China Pavilion roof garden, Jiuzhou Qingyan, at the 2010 Shanghai World Expo. He was design consultant for the Beijing Olympic Forest Park (2008) that was recognized in 2009 by an American Society of Landscape Architects Honor Award for Design and the international Torsanlorenzo Prize for Landscape Architecture. He developed that project while completing work on his forthcoming book, The Garden of Suzhou, to be published in 2012 by the prestigious University of Pennsylvania Press and supported by the J. Paul Getty Trust. Among his current projects is a garden for the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston.
Laurie Olin, who had recruited Henderson to Tsinghua University, described him as “a bit of a wonder … as a scholar, a designer and a teacher. He is also a marvelous individual best characterized as the salt of the earth.”
Henderson said his goals include raising the profile of the Department of Landscape Architecture by guiding faculty toward publishing their research in academic journals, books and other media for audiences both inside and outside the profession, increasing the internationalization of the landscape architecture profession, and working with the faculty to advance the department’s graduate programs.
Already have an account?
I’m new here
Click here to add your own text Click here to add your own text Click here to add your own text Click here to add your own text
We use cookies and other tracking technologies for performance, analytics, marketing, and more customized site experiences. By continuing to browse this site you are agreeing to our terms. Learn more about these in our Privacy Policy. ACSA reserves the right to delete content and suspend user accounts that it determines to be inappropriate.
Study Architecture 
ProPEL 
