The School of Architecture’s Historic Preservation Program and the 2010 and 2011 graphic documentation students won first place in the National Park Service’s Charles E. Peterson Prize competition. The team submitted measured drawings of Austin’s North-Evans Chateau (1874-1960), now the Chateau Bellevue and home of the Austin Woman’s Club, located at 708 San Antonio Street in the Bremond Block National Register Historic District.

 
Lecturer Clay Shortall and Assistant Professor Matt Fajkus were commissioned to design a sculpture in collaboration with Will Meredith of 5 Axis LLC for the President of the United States during his visit to Austin on July 17. The sculpture, titled “8,” featured inspirational words from the president in abstracted Braille on the exterior and large portions of the 2009 inaugural speech etched in the interior. The sculpture was composed of eight building blocks, representing eight administrative principles in the pursuit for equality of opportunity in humanity, and was presented to the president during an evening event. UTSOA graduate students Eliza Bober and Arman Halidou greatly contributed to the digital production, 3D-printing, and processing of the sculpture.

Dr. Nancy Kwallek, Gene Edward Mikeska Endowed Chair for Interior Design, is one of four UT Austin faculty members selected to hold a Dads’ Association Centennial Teaching Fellowship during the 2012-2013 academic year.

Wilfried Wang, O’Neil Ford Centennial Professor in Architecture, was elected to the post of Deputy Director of the Architecture Section at the Academy of the Arts, Berlin. He has also been appointed as the vice chair of the design review board for Munich Airport.


In July 2012, Adjunct Associate Professor Barbara Hoidn and Professor Wilfried Wang were invited to lead a team, which included UTSOA graduate students Melissa Seanard and Lauren M. Vogl, during the “Experimenta Urbana 7: Masterplan for the University of Kassel, 2012,” organized by the University of Kassel in Germany.

Additionally, in August 2012, Hoidn Wang Partner were commissioned with the design for an extension of a kindergarten in a Berlin housing settlement originally designed by Walter Gropius—the Gropius Stadt. During the summer, the Berlin Senate launched a city-wide program to make available more spaces in kindergartens, in order to fulfill a recent federal German law to provide a place for each newborn child beginning in 2013. The client is the International Federation, a German charitable society.

David Heymann, Harwell Hamilton Harris Regents Professor in Architecture, has received the Bradford Williams Medal, awarded by Landscape Architecture Magazine (LAM), the magazine of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA). Additionally, Professor Heymann just returned from a month as a scholar at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center in Italy, where he worked on an ongoing series of essays. His essay, “Some Ado About Nothingness,” about the Asia Society Texas Center, was published in the summer 2012 edition of CITE magazine.

Dean Fritz Steiner presented the keynote talk at the 10th International Urban Planning and Environment Association Symposium (UPE10), held July 24 to 27 at the University of Sydney, Australia. UPE10 was co-hosted by the U.S. Studies Centre and the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning. The keynote session topic was “Next City: Planning for a New Energy and Climate Future.”

Assistant Professor Igor Siddiqui‘s work is presented in “Interior Affair: a State of Becoming”, a refereed exhibition of design research that accompanies the Interior Design / Interior Architecture Educators Association symposium in Perth, Australia. This fall, Professor Siddiqui was invited to join the editorial board of ii, the International Journal of Interior Architecture + Spatial Design in the capacity of associate editor.

Dr. Danilo Udovi_ki-Selb was invited by the newly created Italian National Agency for the Evaluation of Universities and Research Institutes (ANVUR) to participate in the evaluation of the quality of research performed between 2004 and 2010 by researchers of all Italian universities and research institutes.Princeton Architectural Press has invited Udovi_ki to be the editor of and contributor to an anthology titled Architectural Theory: A Global Perspective. He will be responsible for the section on Soviet Modernism, 1900-1991.

Senior Lecturer and Architectural Conservation Laboratory director Fran Gale taught a training course for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs’ National Cemetery Administration (NCA). Beginning in 2010, Gale worked with Heritage Preservation, a nonprofit organization hired by NCA to coordinate assessments and review treatment proposals for monuments in NCA’s cemeteries and soldiers lots across the country.