The UWM School of Architecture and Urban Planning has recently published James W. Shields, FAIA:  Built Work with HGA Architects, Forward by Robert Greenstreet and Essay by Sebastian Schmaling, SARUP, 2012.  The 90 page book documents ten built award-winning buildings by Associate Professor Jim Shields with plans, sections, photos and text.  Shields also won an AIA Wisconsin Merit Design Award this year for the design of the Cambridge Commons Residence Hall, which has received LEED Gold certification.  Shields was also invited this summer to present his planned renovations and additions to the Milwaukee Art Museum at Taliesen, the home and studio of Frank Lloyd Wright in Spring Green, Wisconsin.  The presentation and subsequent discussion of the project was video taped, and will be available online as the first in a series of the “Taliesen Tapes”, sponsored by AIA Wisconsin.

LA DALLMAN, the architecture practice of Associate Professor Grace La and Adjunct Faculty James Dallman, was featured in Architect magazine (June 2012).  The article included LA DALLMAN’s unique practice environment and design process with detailed images of drawings, models, and studio space.  The National Endowment for the Arts has recognized the Harmony Project, designed by LA DALLMAN, with a $100,000 Our Town grant.  The Harmony Project is a collaborative building of the Milwaukee Ballet, the UWM Peck School of the Arts, and the Medical College of Wisconsin.  The work of Grace La and James Dallman’s UWM-KI studio, Learning Landscapes, is exhibited at Discovery World science and technology museum (August-December 2012).  The exhibition, entitled “DRIFT Seating” includes design process, models, prototypes, drawings, and research.  The studio is funded by the international furniture manufacture, KI.  Videos of the project can be viewed at http://www4.uwm.edu/sarup/news/kistudio-videos.cfm.  Grace La will deliver several guest lectures this fall including at North Carolina State University College of Art & Design (Sept 2012), and the Louisiana State University College of Art & Design (Nov 2012).

Professor Mark Keane, UWM, President of the non-profit design education website NEXT.cc, and Prof. Linda Keane, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Director of NEXT.cc, will be coordinating the K-12 Design Education Session at the March 2013 National ACSA conference in San Francisco. Streams of discussion will include project-based learning, environmental design in K-12, trans-disciplinary instruction, the state of architectural presence in high schools, and on-line options.  For more information, please contact Prof. Keane <keane@uwm.edu> In the meantime, please visit the current 2.0 version of NEXT <www.NEXT.cc>

Professor Don Hanlon has been recognized by the University of Wisconsin System for Excellence in Teaching. The UW Regents award is given to two teachers from among all the instructors in the 13 universities and 13 colleges that comprise the UW System, in recognition of outstanding career achievement in teaching.  This is just the most recent accomplishment for Professor Hanlon, who received the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Alumni Association Award for Teaching Excellence in 2001, which is given to just one instructor every year, and who continues, on a daily basis, to inspire, encourage and motivate students to aspire to greater heights.

Sustaining Cities: Urban Policies, Practices, and Perceptions, edited by Associate Professor Linda Krause is a collection of lively and intriguing essays examining cities in the aftermath of global development and recession.  The volume includes chapters by noted architects, landscape architects, urban and regional planners, geographers, and film and literary critics.  Included are essays by Associate Professor Mo Zell and former SARUP Professor Sherry Ahrentzen. The book will be available in December 2012 from Rutgers University Press. 

Associate Professor Mo Zell and Assistant Professor Jasmine Benyamin have been invited to participate on a panel entitled  “Educating Architects – The Next Generation,” as part of a two day reunion and celebration of Yale Women in Architecture to be held in New Haven, Nov 30–Dec 1.

“Empty Pavilion,” a project by Assistant Professor Kyle Reynolds and McLain Clutter with Ariel Poliner, Mike Sanderson and Nate Van Wylen, is a meditation on Detroit’s evacuated urban context and an experiment in the ability of architecture to make visible a latent public in the city. The project aspires to create an architecture that is physically and semantically empty, while solicitous of public interaction and imaginative projection. The creators of the “Empty Pavilion” have no specific use or meaning in mind – hoping instead that the project will invite unplanned occupancies and creative associations. This project was funded by a Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning Research Through Making grant. 

Adjunct Professor Ash Lettow has an article forthcoming in Iowa Architect featuring a project in Cedar Falls Iowa by the firm Invision Architects. A series of Lettow’s drawings and mixed media works will be on view at the Studio Lounge Gallery in Milwaukee Wisconsin in January 2013.

Associate Professor Arijit Sen received a UWM Research Growth Initiative Award for 2012-2013, for his work on “Intertwined Geographies of Transcultural Contact: Cultural Landscapes of Muslim Immigrants in Milwaukee and Chicago.”

Dean Bob Greenstreet has been granted the Freedom of the City of London. The Freedom is believed to date back to the Thirteenth Century. In Bob’s words, “privileges accorded to recipients have included the right to walk around London with an unsheathed sword (it used to be a lot rougher in my old neighborhood than it is now), the right to be hung with a silk, rather than hemp, noose should the occasion demand it (notably treason or murder) and, my personal favorite, the right to herd sheep over London Bridge. These days, the Freedom is seen as largely symbolic and tends to be more of a charitable and educational nature.” Former awardees of the honorary freedom include Franklin D Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, Luciano Pavarotti, Bill Gates, Nelson Mandela, Pitt the Elder (and Younger) and J. K. Rowling. The summer of 2012 was a busy one for the Dean, who found himself running from twelve angry bulls in Pamplona, Spain. This year Dean Greenstreet also became an American citizen.