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Pennsylvania State University

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UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – A book edited by Alexandra Staub, professor of architecture at Penn State, that reframes the discussion of modernity, space and gender is currently one of Routledge’s best-selling books on architecture.

In “The Routledge Companion to Modernity, Space and Gender,” Staub examines how “modernity” has been defined in various cultural contexts of the 20th and 21st centuries, how this definition has been expressed spatially and architecturally, and what effect this has had on women in their everyday lives.

Published in 2018, the volume presents theories and methods for understanding space and gender as they relate to the development of cities, urban spaces and individual building types in both the creation of and resistance to social transformations and modern global capitalism.

Staub is also the author of “Conflicted Identities: Housing and the Politics of Cultural Representation,” which was published by Routledge in 2015.

A member of the Taylor & Francis Group, Routledge is regarded as the world’s leading publisher in the humanities and social sciences.

Pennsylvania State University

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UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – Nearly 20 international scholars will come together at the Stuckeman Family Building later this month to discuss how historians and scholars have processed Italy’s sustained importance for architecture and its history over the 20th century.

Hosted jointly by the Stuckeman School and the Department of Architecture, “Italian Imprints: Issues and Influences in Architecture Culture in the Long Twentieth Century,” focuses both on how Italian architects and architecture have influenced architectural ideas and practice around the world, and on cases that throw that same influence into relief.

The event, which will be held Jan.16-18, has been organized by Denise Costanzo, assistant professor of architecture, and Andrew Leach, associate dean for research and professor of architecture at the University of Sydney who was named the 2019-20 Professor of Interdisciplinary Design by the Stuckeman School.

The symposium grew from Leach’s and Costanzo’s mutual interest in the place of Italian architecture in 20th century architectural criticism, history and practice.

For centuries, architects have made themselves familiar with Italy’s patrimony, from antiquity to the baroque. However, according to Leach and Costanzo, the assumption of Italy’s singular importance has been tempered by debate in architectural history, which has fostered an expansion of its scope beyond the once dominant European and North American spheres.

“This is an exciting development for the discipline, but it also means scholars must be prepared to approach Italian topics in new ways and for different reasons,” Costanzo said. “The symposium will demonstrate how a broader intellectual conversation enriches and deepens how we view Italy’s architectural influence.”

The event will include keynote lectures by world-renowned scholars of Italian architecture Dian Ghirardo, professor of architecture at the University of Southern California, and Maristella Casciato, senior curator of architectural collections at the Getty Research Institute.

Along with the keynote talks, guest speakers will discuss the wider impact of Italian architectural exhibitions from how the study of Italian architecture informs our thinking on climate change to what the Renaissance’s ties are to modern life.

According to Leach, the event will engage anyone interested in design, art and Italy’s cultural history.

“The speakers will explore Italy’s enduring pull on our imaginations and its importance to artists while reflecting on why this setting in particular remains such a vivid touchstone in an age of undifferentiated global access to precedents and ideas,” he said.

Costanzo and Leach hope those attending will leave the event with a better sense of how historians grapple with architecture, as well as with the ideas that have shaped the writing of architectural history over generations.

For more information and details regarding the Italian Imprints symposium, which is free and open to the public, please visit: https://sites.psu.edu/italianimprints/.

Pennsylvania State University

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Internationally recognized architecture firm to visit Stuckeman School

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – Yolande Daniels, co-principal of Studio SUMO – an award-winning architecture firm known for its thoughtful approach to design both in the United States and Japan, will speak on Oct. 30 as part of the Stuckeman School’s Lecture and Exhibit Series. Hosted by the Department of Architecture, the “Building and Unbuilding” lecture will begin at 6 p.m. in the Stuckeman Family Building Jury Space.

The firm’s name – “SUMO” – is a blend of co-principal Sunil Bald’s first name and Daniels’ nickname in graduate school (Momo) at Columbia University, which is where the two met. Founded in 1997, the SUMO name became even more fitting when the firm began designing buildings for Josai University in Japan in 2000. The pair was commissioned for an array of buildings for the private university’s campuses including a museum, dormitory and school of management.

That same year, Bald and Daniels were asked to design the Architectural League of New York’s exhibition and were invited to design a temporary new home for the Museum for African Art in Queens, New York. A year later, SUMO’s design was built and several years after that, the firm was invited to design the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporic Art in Brooklyn, which was completed in 2006.

SUMO, which is based in New York, has been featured as one of Architectural Record’s Design Vanguard and the Architectural League of New York’s Emerging Voices. In 2015, the firm was awarded the Annual Prize in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and also received a Young Architects award from the Architectural League. A finalist in the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program, SUMO has also received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and New York State Council on the Arts.

The firm’s work, which ranges from installations to institutional buildings to apartment buildings, has been exhibited in the National Building Museum, Museum of Modern Art, the Venice Biennale, the Field Museum, the GA Gallery and the Urban Center.

Daniels is currently an assistant professor at the University of South California School of Architecture. Previously, she was a visiting professor at Yale University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She has taught graduate-level courses at Columbia University, the University of Michigan, Pratt Institute and the City College of New York, and also served as the interim director of the Master of Architecture program at Parsons School of Constructed Environments.

Daniels holds a master of architecture from Columbia University and a bachelor’s degree in environmental science from the City University of New York.

Pennsylvania State University

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Stuckeman School participates in Textile Intersections conference in London

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – As part of a project developed for an architecture elective course on responsive fiber composites, two recent landscape architecture graduates and their instructor traveled to London in September to display their work at the Textile Intersections conference.

Julian Huang and Jimi Demi-Ajayi, who both graduated in the fall of 2018, along with Felecia Davis, an assistant professor in the Department of Architecture who also directs the SOFTLAB in the Stuckeman Center for Design Computing, installed their “Phototropic Origami Fiber Composite Structure” project at the two-day event. Hosted by the Textile Design Research Group at Loughborough University, the conference was designed to explore collaborations in textile design research.

The project was sponsored by the American Composite Manufacturers Association, which lent the group its expertise and project materials. Students from both the Stuckeman School and Carnegie Mellon attended a workshop for the project that was held at Penn State in February 2018. The purpose of the workshop was to introduce students and faculty to the architectural applications and case studies using fiber composites. Fabrication techniques for fiber composites were demonstrated in the Penn State Stuckeman Family Building Shop.

According to Davis, her team’s project was inspired by “Chakrasana,” an accordion art pavilion that was developed by Joe Choma, assistant professor of architecture at Clemson University. Davis and her architecture and landscape architecture students developed a responsive fiber composite foldable structure by embedding conductive and resistive yarns into a fiberglass knit fabric.

“We used origami as a method to make folds in the fabric allowing the structure to collapse and be flat,” Davis said. “We hoped to make a lightweight portable structure that could take on different shapes when clipped and positioned. This could be used as a shelter in a landscape setting or as a portable structure.”

Davis explained that they embedded a conductive thread that carries an electric current up a length of fiberglass knit that could then carry an electronic signal to a series of LED lights, which are sewn on to the front side of their origami project.

“These LEDs are connected to a photocell that turns the LEDs on and off according to the level of light,” Davis said. “In bright daylight, the LEDs are off and as evening arrives the LEDs are on.”

Demi-Ajayi said that one of the goals of the conference was to integrate cross-disciplinary collaborative research efforts beyond their current work.

“We set up our interactive origami pavilion structure at the conference and exchanged ideas with distinguished guests,” he said. “Overall the event was extremely informative and a lot was learned from the different demonstrations and lectures we attended at the conference.”

When asked about the importance of the conference to other students in architecture, landscape architecture or engineering, Huang added that some of the research that was presented at the conference has great potential for real-world applications.

“There was a chemist who spoke about his research on some interesting aspects of fabric including the development of a suit that could detect low heart rate and other health issues,” Huang said. “Sensors are embedded into the chemical level of the suit material so it would show you when your blood sugar or cholesterol level are high based on sweat. I think people need to know about this invention and be more informed of the potential of the textile industry.”

Pennsylvania State University

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Design by architecture, engineering professor featured in Architect magazine

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – The design of mobile low-carbon structures by DK Osseo-Asare, assistant professor of architecture and engineering design at Penn State, has been featured by Architect magazine, the journal of the American Institute of Architects (AIA). Titled “Fufuzela,” the experimental bamboo structures are designed to function at the intersection of architecture and furniture while integrating biology with environmental design and engineering.

As a finalist in the 2019 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) PS1 Young Architects Program, Osseo-Asare, who is also co-founder/principal of the Austin, Texas and Ghana-based architecture and integrated design firm Low Design Office, was commissioned to develop a proposal for the MoMA PS1 museum courtyard in the form of a series of images and a large-scale architectural model. The Fufuzela model and one of the renderings was exhibited over the summer at MoMA PS1, one of the oldest and largest contemporary art institutions in the United States, in Queens, New York. The model will next be on public view as part of an exhibition of architectural models in Austin, Texas, organized by the AIA.

The Stuckeman School provided production support for the development of the project. Architecture students in Osseo-Asare’s Humanitarian Materials Lab helped develop the project concept and build the final model. Danielle Vickers, an undergraduate architecture student, created concept images as part of the presentation delivered to MoMA’s design jury, while Sam Rubenstein, a master of architecture student, conducted bamboo research and created digital 3D models for computer-assisted machining. Rubenstein’s digital model was then used to fabricate all of the component pieces of the site model using a computer numerical control router. Jamie Heilman and Dani Spewak, staff members in the Stuckeman School’s Digital Fabrication Lab, provided instrumental support for iterative design development and production of the final model for MoMA PS1.

“We foresee a future wherein architecture is alive and mobile,” explained Osseo-Asare. “Our research is part of an anticipatory project toward that re-formation of spatial experience wherein architecture can sense and interact with people and its environment.”

The entire model, which measures more than 9 square feet, was packed flat in the Stuckeman Family Building and snapped together upon arrival in New York City, without the use of glue or fasteners. The individual architectural units were built out of laser-cut acrylic modules in the scale model. At full-scale, these architectural elements are a structural scaffolding for a variety of biomaterial systems, which architecture faculty continue to research at Penn State.

Yasmine Abbas, an assistant teaching professor of architecture and engineering design, was also involved in the project by providing materials research and specifying certain configurations to create specific ambiances within the courtyard setting by modulating lighting, humidity and proximity of people to the structures.

True to Osseo-Asare’s research interests in rethinking waste, the site model that was exhibited was constructed entirely out of the packaging crates from a large-format 3D printer. The printer, which was funded by the College of Engineering ‘s School of Engineering Design, Technology and Professional Programs, will be used to support interdisciplinary collaborative research around humanitarian materials through additive manufacturing by connecting architecture and engineering students through hands-on materials research.

Pennsylvania State University

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Stuckeman School research and design on display in Oslo Architecture Triennale

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – The interdisciplinary research and design of a project by several Stuckeman School faculty members and a recent alumna is currently on display at the 2019 Oslo Architecture Triennale (OAT) in Norway through November 24.

“Scorched Earth” is a proposal by Miranda Esposito, a 2018 alumna of the architecture program at Penn State; Marc Miller, assistant professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture; Laia Celma, assistant professor in the Department of Architecture; and Pep Avilés, assistant professor in the Department of Architecture and the Stuckeman Career Development Professor in Design that pays tribute to the once-thriving Pennsylvania mining town of Centralia, which has been burning underground since a coal mine fire erupted there in 1962.

Once home to more than 2,000 residents, by 2018 the population of Centralia had dwindled to just seven. The proposal, which began as Esposito’s thesis project, is a memorial to all that was lost in the evacuation and abandonment of the city in the months and years after the fire, which is anticipated to burn for another 50 to 200 years.

Funding for Scorched Earth was provided by the H. Campbell and Eleanor R. Stuckeman Fund for Collaborative Design Research at Penn State. Additional funding came from the Program for the Internationalization of Spanish Culture of Acción Cultural Española and the Museum of Architecture in Oslo.

The Penn State team traveled to Oslo for the installation and opening of the exhibit on Sept. 26 and was one of just three teams from U.S. universities invited to exhibit its work.

Held every third autumn at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design over a period of approximately ten weeks, OAT attracts citizens and users of the city, decision makers, professionals and international guests. It is known as one of the world’s prominent arenas for dissemination and discussion of architectural and urban challenges. The theme of this year’s event is “Enough: The Architecture of Degrowth.”

Pennsylvania State University

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UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – Dongsei Kim, an award-winning architect, urbanist and educator, will kick off the Stuckeman School’s 2019-20 Lecture and Exhibit Series on Sept. 25 with a talk on mapping and design projects that use the Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) as a proving ground to rethink the commonly exclusionary nation-state border spaces as inclusionary spaces. The lecture, which is hosted by the Department of Architecture, will begin at 6 p.m. in the Stuckeman Family Building Jury Space.

Based in New York, Kim is an assistant professor in the School of Architecture and Design at the New York Institute of Technology and the founder of axu studio. Both his research and practice examine architecture and urbanism’s relationship to nation-state borders across multiple scales.

Kim’s research on the Korean DMZ has been recognized through notable international publications and exhibitions such as the Golden Lion Award-winning “Crow’s Eye View” exhibition at the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale; “Real DMZ Project” in Seoul, Korea; “Over the Boundary” in Brisbane, Australia; and “(im)positions” at the Melbourne School of Design in Melbourne, Australia.

He was named the Sherman Family Emerging Scholar by the Korea Society in New York City in 2018 and was awarded the Gapado Artist in Residency in 2019.

Kim’s writings have been published in journals such as Toops, Volume, Inflection, Landscape Architecture Frontiers, Kerb, The Site Magazine, and in books such as The North Korean Atlas, Critical Landscapes, Crow’s Eye View: The Korean Peninsula and Chandigarh Rethink. His work has also been cited in such publications as Domus, The New York Times and Dwell Magazine.

Kim holds a master of design studies with distinction from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, a master of science in architecture and urban design from Columbia University and a professional bachelor of architecture from Victoria University of Wellington.

Pennsylvania State University

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Architecture faculty member awarded American Academy in Rome Fellowship
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Christine Gorby, associate professor of architecture at Penn State, has been named a winner of an American Academy in Rome Fellowship in Architecture for 2019-20.

The prestigious fellowships have been awarded annually by the academy for more than a century in an effort to support innovative and cross-disciplinary work in the arts and humanities.

Gorby was one of six fellowship winners chosen from a pool of nearly 1,000 applicants. While in Rome, Gorby will conduct research at the academy’s 11-acre campus, where she will focus on American architect Robert Venturi while collaborating with esteemed American and Italian artists and scholars.

The fellowship will support the reevaluation of Venturi’s early design work by placing it into dynamic, new interrelation with his Rome, Italy, and other American Academy-based studies; valued collaborations; and influential book “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture.”

“I’m very honored to receive a 2019-20 Fellowship in Architecture from the American Academy in Rome, an esteemed institution that supports a creative and intellectual environment where decades of artists, historians and others have been inspired to develop meaningful and consequential work,” Gorby said. “This recognition is also significant because it enables concentrated time for research and for sharing and engaging with the work of others.”

Gorby has been a member of the Stuckeman School faculty for nearly 20 years, where she has taught second-year undergraduate studio, fifth-year thesis design studio, design communication media, research methodologies and architectural theory with an emphasis on urban theory. Her research interests have focused mainly on design, history and theory in the built environment.

Pennsylvania State University

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Stuckeman School hosts Bauhaus symposium to Penn State in centennial celebration

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – More than a dozen international scholars will converge on the arts district at Penn State University Park this month to celebrate the teachings of the Bauhaus and to reflect on the immense impact the famous German art school has had on modern design, art and architecture over the past 100 years.

The Bauhaus Transfers international symposium will be held Sept. 19-21 at the Palmer Museum of Art and the Stuckeman Family Building. The event has been organized by Ute Poerschke, Stuckeman Professor of Advanced Design Studies in the Department of Architecture, and Daniel Purdy, professor of German studies in the Department of German and Slavic Studies and Literature at Penn State.

Founded in Germany in 1919 by architect Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus was designed to be an inclusive creative school that brought all forms of the arts together – design, architecture and the applied arts. The school, which operated in three German cities, aimed to reunite fine art and functional design to reach the masses, not just the elite.

Forced to close in 1933 under pressure from the Nazi regime, the Bauhaus became renowned for its faculty members, who subsequently led the development of modern art – and modern thought – to different areas of the world after the school’s doors were shuttered.

According to Poerschke and Purdy, the Bauhaus approach to teaching and understanding art’s relationship to society and technology continues to have a major impact in Europe, the United States, Mexico, Russia, China, Australia and around the world.

“If you want to understand what it means to be modern and forward thinking, then the papers presented in this conference should appeal to you,” said Purdy. “We will also have some discussions about gender, sexuality and queerness at the Bauhaus.”

Poerschke said that the event would be well suited for anyone interested in a wide variety of topics including painting, theater, graphic design, music, architecture, textile arts, philosophy, politics, industrial design and fabrication, and much more.

The organizers hope that attendees will take away from the interdisciplinary event the ability to recognize the liveliness and diversity inherent in the Bauhaus and its visible influence around the world.

“There is, of course, an established history of the Bauhaus architecture, which is well known,” said Purdy. “But this conference will reveal all sorts of overlooked and forgotten aspects to the Bauhaus legend.”

Also important is the recognition of celebrating 100 years of Bauhaus achievements, said Poerschke.

“I hope that people will recognize the many ways in which the Bauhaus is in our everyday lives,” she said. “The artists, along with their personal aspirations, political convictions, social ambitions and pedagogical strategies, developed artifacts and ideas in art, design and architecture as they transferred to new physical and virtual places. These transfers and modifications are part of the Bauhaus history.”

For more information regarding details about the Bauhaus Transfers symposium, which is free and open to the public, please visit the Stuckeman School website.

Pennsylvania State University

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Leach named Stuckeman School Professor in Interdisciplinary Design

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. – Andrew Leach, a prolific author and international leader in architectural design, theory and history, has been named the 2019-20 Professor of Interdisciplinary Design by the Stuckeman School.

Leach has been a professor in the School of Architecture, Design, and Planning at the University of Sydney since 2016 where he was the research director of architectural theory and history. He has since been named associate dean for research.

Leach is the author or co-author of 13 books and more than 60 essays, and has led dozens of international conferences, symposia, roundtables and workshops on architectural history and theory. He is the editor of the Architectural Theory Reviewand is perhaps best known among his peers as the leading English-language scholar of the 20th century Italian architectural historian and theorist Manfredo Tafuri.

Leach joined the University of Sydney in 2016 after six years ascending the faculty ranks at Griffith University, arriving as a postdoctoral fellow and senior lecturer in 2010 and leaving as a full professor. He previously held positions at the University of Queensland and the Wellington Institute of Technology. He has been the recipient of numerous fellowships, competitive funding and prizes, including: a Wallace Fellowship at the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies at Villa I Tatti (Italy), the Australian Research Council Future Fellowship and Australian Postdoctoral Fellowship, and fellowships from the Society of Architectural Historians and the Belgian Historical Institute at Rome.

A native of New Zealand, Leach holds a doctorate in architecture from Ghent University in Belgium and earned both his Master of Architecture and bachelor’s degree from Victoria University of Wellington.

The Interdisciplinary Design Professorship is awarded biennially to a visiting full professor or professor of practice who is nominated by a member of the Stuckeman School faculty. The visitor’s presence on campus is intended to enhance key aspects of the host faculty’s research/creative endeavors and/or an important element of the curriculum that will ultimately have far reaching impact for the host faculty, the department or program and the Stuckeman School.

Denise Costanzo, an assistant professor in the Department of Architecture, first worked with Leach as part of a project that examined the multivalent links between baroque and modernist architectural historiography in 2012. They are currently collaborating on an exploration of the ideologically complex imprint of Italy’s historic legacy on 20th century architectural culture and will be cohosting an international symposium on the topic at Penn State in January. Costanzo and Leach will co-edit a volume that presents new studies generated by this symposium.

During his time at Penn State, Leach has the opportunity to contribute to a wide range of activities within the Stuckeman School, including design reviews, introductory and advanced theory and history courses, and discussions on fostering an interdisciplinary design culture within a major research university.

Image: Maja Baska

 

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