ACSANEWS April 2009 18
Call
For Papers
Integrating Sustainability Into Architectural Education: Are We There Yet?
Making Sense of the Architectural Production of ‘Others’
John B. Hertz, University of Texas at San Antonio
Sabir Khan, Georgia Tech
Sustainability is now a key issue in the ethical and technical concerns of practicing professionals. This session will measure the progress of the integration of these same concerns into the broader architectural curriculum. This session will ask participants to take part in a discussion about the pedagogical changes that are integrating sustainability into the broader curriculum, including technical areas as well as studio, history/theory, and others. While case studies are important as a snapshot of where we are, papers should also reflect on how individual course experiences relate holistically to other academic offerings and to the curriculum as a whole. It is also open to more encompassing viewpoints regarding the greening of architectural education, including the role of external forces, such as accreditation criteria or calls by the AIA for greater responsibility in the preparation of future professionals.
For a number of well-intentioned, if under-reflected, reasons - globalization of practice, cross-cultural awareness, NAAB criteria, curricular breadth - there is general agreement that courses on the architecture of people, periods, and places outside the Greco-Roman diffusion stream ought to be included in the curricula of US architecture schools. This session proposes to give these courses - and the theoretical and pedagogical questions that their presence in architectural curricula raises - the comprehensive appraisal they rarely get. This session invites papers that unpack courses on architectural production in the ‘non-West’ in order to engage and map underlying epistemological and methodological questions. The larger goal of this session is to sponsor a clear-headed conversation about the relationship of such courses to architectural curricula and to architectural practice today.
John Enright, University of Southern California
Material Making: The Process of Precedent
Re-Generating Form: New and Old Methods of Conceiving, Finding, Generating, Composing, and Iterating Forms in Architecture
Intersecting Infrastructures: Public Works and the Public Realm Katherine W. Rinne, California College of the Arts
Infrastructure is the foundation of every community and it is the quality and extent of that infrastructure that determines in large part the economic and social health of towns and cities. Clean water, good schools, affordable housing, and reliable public transportation are all essential components of city building and for the creation of a stimulating and open public realm. This session will focus on architectural, landscape, and urban research, practice, and teaching that promotes deeper understandings of the connections between the construction of civic infrastructures and the construction of a public realm in cities and towns, and the creation of social equity. Papers that address how infrastructures can be used as generator of design thinking (rather than as afterthoughts left to engineers) are especially welcome as are those that address the rebuilding and restoration of existing or failed infrastructures as opportunities to create a more just environment.
Is Architecture Critical?
acsaNATIONAL
Marc J. Neveu, California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
Within the context of natural, designed, economic, environmental, and other disasters, the justification of architecture has been understandably put into question. What guides the making of architecture? Is it an immediate response to a crisis; the desire for long-term social well-being; the effect of building on natural resources; or is it simply an economic opportunity? What role does theory, if any, still play? This session asks the question: Can architecture still be critical? This session seeks papers that argue for, or against, demonstrate, reveal, or castigate architecture as a critical project. Papers may relate to projects that are historical, contemporary, future oriented, academic or professional.
Gail Peter Borden, University of Southern California
Making is a fundamental process of architecture. Material is essential to the activity of design as well as the resultant of the process. The role of making and the dialogue of a design with material is the focus of this session. The session will illuminate the potential of new materials, provide a re-interpretation of common “everyday” materials, and embrace the process of making as a generative mechanism of form. Papers should look at the particular the role of materials in architecture and their influence on precedents [both contemporary and historical] of design process, fabrication methodology, construction procedures and legibility and influence on built work. As in any case study method, papers should look for the deeper didactic lessons of the precedent. The lessons may be practical and technical in nature, or may address qualitative and aesthetic realms. Papers for this session should be founded in materials with the desire to identify lessons from their innate qualities and the process of their use through design precedents.
Public-Interest Architecture Elizabeth Martin, Southern Polytechnic State University
Architects and all design professionals are undergoing a major transformation that is both proactive (searching for roles with greater relevance) and reactive (responsing to the humanitarian and environmental crisis facing the world). The collaborative projects or research studies explored in this session takes the point-of-view that an architecture of public-interest might emerge in partnership with practice, ie, public health, environmental advocacy groups, or design/build clients. This session will demonstrate the modest, yet we believe productive ways to prepare architecture students to serve as stewards for our communities.
Re-Building Mobility: Mobile Architecture and the Effects on Design, Culture, Society and the Environment This topic addresses mobility and prefabrication in architecture and seeks proposals that examine new models and research that further the discussion of how mobility and prefabrication are affecting design and education. It has been fifty years since a group of Airstreams caravaned through Africa. Since that time, the notion of mobility in architecture has had a rich history, from Fuller’s early work involving mobility and pre-fabrication to today’s preoccupation with digital technologies. The recent Hurricane Katrina disaster produced the “FEMA trailer,” as provisional housing that remained for months as urban reminders of the tragedy. This topic asks for contributions that address the breadth of mobility and prefabrication in architecture from high-end prefab techniques and strategies, to possibilities involving efficient alternatives for disaster relief, to new paradigms in design technology and education.
William T Willoughby, Louisiana Tech University
As we rebuild architecture today, each era of designers must generate forms that best reflect their times’ available technology. Today, generative scripting for 3-D modeling application and tools allow designers to parametrically adjust, transform dynamically, and evolve forms that improve performance based on environmental or programmatic demands. The transparency of tracing paper allowed past generations of designers to overlay, deliberate over change, and explore subtle iterations of design. Computational equivalents now allow architects to explore, analyze, and generate variations in building form dynamically. In an attempt to critically assess new and old methods of form finding and responses to building performance issues, this session seeks current scholarship on form generation as well as historical examples of iterative design methods.
Shrinking Cities Syndrome: Agendas for ReBuilding Andreas Luescher, Bowling Green State University Sujata Shetty, University of Toledo
Cites all over the world are facing the prospect of declining populations, collectively becoming part of a global shrinking city phenomenon. While much of the discussion of shrinking cities has focused on Europe, the challenge is acute in the U.S., where, following suburbanization, many cities now present a classic ‘doughnut’ form – a sparse core surrounded by rings of smaller cities. Cities in the U.S. industrial mid-west are facing the additional consequences of the decline of the manufacturing industry and the housing foreclosure crisis. The session takes advantage of the conference themes to reflect on the challenge of preserving and reusing urban fabric with architectural and cultural interest within shrinking cities.