Renee Chow

Design as Inquiry: Speculations on Chinese Urbanism by Renee Chow

Renée Chow is Associate Professor of Architecture and Urban Design, and current holder of the Eva Li Chair in Design Ethics at the University of California, Berkeley. She joined the faculty in the Department of Architecture in 1993 and currently teaches design studios and seminars. Professor Chow is also principal of Studio Urbis, an architecture and urban design practice formed in collaboration with her partner, Thomas Chastain. Her work focuses on the intersection between architecture and its locale. One problem for contemporary design is to link the structure of the city and landscape with its individual pieces—to design how each affects and is affected by the other. In making pieces of our cities—highways and streets, parks and buildings—our current architectural culture too often strives for a degree of formal autonomy from surrounding circumstances. The experience of a city becomes a cacophony of competing markers. The experience of the textures of neighborhoods, the orientation of districts, and the collective practices of dwelling disappear as our design practices increasingly lose the tools to make them. To address this challenge, Chow’s practice and research focus on extending the concept of fabrics as fields, proposing new approaches for the design of the everyday environment (both urban and suburban) that emphasize the continuous, the shared, and the collective attributes of building design.

Therese Peffer

Designing Energy-Efficient Technology for Homes with People in mind by Therese Peffer

**Please note change of venue: The Lecture will be held in 104, Wurster Hall

Therese Peffer is currently a post-doctoral researcher in Architecture at UC Berkeley. Dr. Peffer completed her PhD in Architecture, emphasis building science, at UC Berkeley under Professor Ed Arens in Spring 2009. Her topic involved residential demand response enabling technology, including the design of an in-home energy display/smart thermostat device. She is an architect, and has worked in small firms in San Francisco and Pismo Beach. Before earning her M. Arch. at the University of Oregon (where she worked with G.Z. “Charlie” Brown), she lived on a solar and wind-powered homestead writing for Home Power magazine in southern Oregon. She earned her B.A in neurobiology and psychology at UC Berkeley in 1990.

Lauren Mallas

Emergence of the Mega-Civic in Tokyo by Lauren Mallas

Lauren Mallas is currently a Ph.D. Candidate in Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley. An architect for forty years, she obtained her professional degree in architecture from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. Prior to her doctoral studies she completed a Masters Degree in Asian Studies at the University of San Francisco, Center for the Pacific Rim, and is currently focussed on issues related to the architecture of contemporary urban Japan.

Himanshu Burte

Unravelling Place: An Analytical Framework for 'Place' by Himanshu Burte

Himanshu Burte is an architect based in Goa, India and is involved in practice, research and writing. He is a graduate of Sir J.J College of Architecture, Mumbai. He is a visiting Fullbright Scholar at the College of Environmental Design, UC Berkeley for the 2008-09 academic year. His work so far straddles the worlds of architectural practice, independent writing and research and initiatives towards building a cross-disciplinary discourse about architecture and urban space.

In his writing and teaching Himanshu continually attempts to build a humane critique of current architectural and planning practices and their larger societal implications. He has an established and continuing interest in the intersections of culture, urban management, politics and design in the construction of the public sphere.

Gabrielle Esperdy

Architecture's American Road Trip, or Notes from the Highway by Gabrielle Esperdy

Gabrielle Esperdy is an architectural historian and Associate Professor of Architecture at the New Jersey Institute of Technology. Her work examines the intersection of architecture, consumerism and modernism in the urban and suburban landscape, especially in the U.S. in the 20th century. She is especially interested in minor or everyday buildings and with the ways that social, economic and political issues shape the built environment, both historically and today. Her first book, Modernizing Main Street, was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2008.

Tom McDonough

A brief introduction to the situationists and the city by Tom McDonough

Tom McDonough is a critic and art historian who teaches at SUNY Binghamton. He is currently Visiting Associate Professor in the History of Art Department at UC Berkeley. His books include "The Beautiful Language of My Century: Reinventing the Language of Contestation in Postwar France" (MIT Press) and the forthcoming anthology "The Situationists and the City: A Reader" (Verso). He is an editor at Grey Room

Tiago Castela

A Liberal Space: The Informalized Extensions of Lisbon, 1960-1986 by Tiago Castela

Tiago Castela is a Ph.D. Candidate in History of Architecture and Urbanism at UC Berkeley. He graduated from the Technical University of Lisbon in 1999 with a professional degree in Architecture. Before starting his doctoral studies in 2005 with the support of a Fullbright Scholarship, he worked as an architect, having recieved first prize in the International Competition for an Administrative Center in Merida, Spain in 2004. His dissertation addresses the informal planning of working-class extensions of Lisbon during the late Twentieth Century.

Rachel Kallus

Designing diversity: How can Haifa foster the revival of Palestinian-Israeli urban life? by Rachel Kallus

Rachel Kallus is an Associate Professor of Architecture and Town Planning at the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology. She is an architect and a planner and has worked with grassroot groups and NGOs toward social and political justice. Her academic work concentrates on the sociopolitical production of the built environment and the formation of urban culture, focusing especially on the contested spaces of Israel/Palestine. In her work she considers policy measures (planning) and physical manipulations (architecture) as they construct everyday life. She is the author of numerous publications in book and in architecture and planning journals on the socio-cultural aspects of the built environment and its production. Her book "Architecture Culture: Place, Representation" and "Body" (co-authored with Tali Hatuka) has been recently published (Resling, 2005).

Gabriel Arboleda

Ethnoengineering: Building, Development and the Practice of Branding by Gabriel Arboleda

Gabriel is a Ph.D. candidate in architecture at U.C. Berkeley. He obtained his architecture diploma in Colombia in 1998, and his M.S. in Architecture at MIT in 2005. His work as a practitioner was focused on alternative technologies and participatory design and planning. This presentation draws on Gabriel's ongoing dissertation research in Ecuador.

Avigail Sachs

The Pedagogy of Learning from Las Vegas by Avigail Sachs

Avigail is an architect and a doctoral candidate in the Department of Architecture, UC Berkeley. She is currently preparing her dissertation, titled "Research and Environmental Design: Building a Discipline and Modernizing the Profession" for filing. In the dissertation project she re-examines the inception of modern architecture education in the United States in the mid-twentieth century. This change is conventionally viewed within a strictly disciplinary narrative, which emphasizes the influx of 'Bauhaus pedagogy' into American schools of architecture. Using a sociological and epistemological analysis this study places architecture edcuation in the context of social and economic institutions in the post World War II Military-Industrial Complex - specifically, the housing movement, the building industry and the American research university. She has recently published "The Postwar Legacy of Architectural Research" (Journal of Architecture Education 62/3) and "Marketing through Research: William Caudill and Caudill Rowlett Scott (CRS)" (Journal of Architecture 14/1).

Anne Nesbet

Soviet Montage and the Skyscraper: Sergei Eisenstein and the Cinematic Construction of Architectural Space by Anne Nesbet

Anne Nesbet is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and of Film Studies at UC Berkeley. She is the author of "Savage Junctures: Sergei Eisenstein and the Shape of Thinking" (IB Taurus, 2003 & 2007). Her research interests include Early Soviet Culture, Sergei Eisenstein, Silent Film, Soviet Film, GDR History and Culture, Children's Literature & Stalinism, The Soviet Union and American Minority Movements.

Ocean Howell

Building the Worker's Public Sphere: Improvement Clubs, Unions, and the Built Environment in San Francisco's Mission District, 1906-1930. by Ocean Howell

Ocean Howell is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Architecture. His essays appear in the Journal of Urban History and the Journal of Planning History (both forthcoming), as well as the Journal of Architectural Education; a review appears in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. He has held fellowships from the UC Labor and Employment Research Fund and the Institute for the Study of Social Change. He holds an M.S. in Architecture from Berkeley and B.A. in Modern Literature from UC Santa Cruz. Prior to returning to graduate school he worked as an editor at Jossey-Bass publishers, where he began a series on Community Building.

Charlie Huizenga

Green buildings as if people mattered by Charlie Huizenga

Charlie Huizenga is an Associate Adjunct Professor in the Department of Architecture and a Research Specialist with the Center for the Built Environment. His research interests include the design and operation of energy efficient buildings, monitoring and control or buildings, and the development of software for modeling building energy use, thermal comfort and window optical and thermal properties. He is a co-founder of Aqua Para La Vida, a non-profit organization dedicated to providing assistance to rural Central American communities in need of clean drinking water and Chief Technology Officer for Adura Technologies, a wireless lighting controls startup company.

Jean-Pierre Protzen

Navigating between Fields by Jean-Pierre Protzen

Jean-Pierre Protzen is Professor of Architecture, Department of Architecture, University of California at Berkeley. He studied architecture at the Swiss Institute of Technology in Zurich and Lausanne. In 1967 he was awarded a research fellowship by the Swiss National Science Foundaction. He joined the Berkeley faculty of architecture in 1968 to teach in the area of Design Theories and Methods. In 1982 he initiated research on the architecture of the Incas. As a result he published the seminal work on Inca stone masonry in Scientific American in 1986, and a book on Inca Architecture and Construction at Ollantaytambo (Oxford University Press, New York, 1993). In recent years he has expanded his research to include the architecture of Chavin de Huantar in central Peru, Tuahuanaco on the south shore of Lake Titicaca in Bolivia and Tambo Colorado on the south coast of Peru.

Jader Tolja

Body and Architecture by Jader Tolja

The focus of Professor Tolja's research is the understanding of how physical changes, mental changes and spatial changes are mutually related. He has started to study these relationships in the first European Department of Psychosomatic Medicine (San Raffaele Hospital, Milan '79) and from '82 he has been mostly interested by the role played by connective tissue in interfacing these aspects. He has also taught at the Pratt Institute of New York ('84) and since then worked with with different universities and private institutes in Europe and the US. Currently he is a Professor at the Faculty of Architecture at the Polytechnic University of Milan, teaching at the Universities of Barcelona and Bratislava and at the Domus Academy of Design in Milan.

Kimiko Ryokai

Objects with narrative memories: Breathing new life into objects by Kimiko Ryokai

Kimiko Ryokai is an Assistant Professor in the School of Information, UC Berkeley. Her research interests include Human-Computer-Interaction and Tangible-User-Interfaces. Kimiko's research focuses on building new expressive tools that take advantage of people's familiarity with the physical world, and studying how new media expand the interaction space and the change that could be brought out in the way people perceive this extended interaction space. For example, her research project, "I/O Brush: The World as a Palette" is an ongoing effort to design and develop tools that enable people to turn their world into a color palette consisting not only of colors, but also textures, movements and sounds. Her research investigates the potential of new interactive media that pushes us to actively expand the way we perceive the world and make new meanings.

Kimiko Ryokai completed her M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Lab.

Seung Wook Kim

Embodied Virtual Environments and Digital Architecture by Seung Wook Kim

Seung Wook Kim is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Architecture and a M.S. Candidtate in Computer Science at UC Berkeley. He recieved both Bachelors (2000) and Master (2002) degrees in Architecture from Hongik University, Seoul, Korea. His doctoral dissertation, titled 'Perception Action Loop in the Experience of Virtual Environment', focuses on embodied interaction in mediated space (Committee Members: Yehuda Kalay (chair), Galen Cranz and John Canny). His research interests also include Virtual Environments, Human-Computer Interaction and Computer-Aided-Design in Architecture. He expects to complete his doctoral degree with Designated Emphasis in New Media by Fall 2008.

William Littmann

Parlier: A farmworker community in the California Central Valley by William Littmann

William Littmann teaches at the University of California, Berkeley and the California College of the Arts. He recieved a Ph.D. in Architectural History from Berkeley and a M.A. in journalism at Columbia University. His essay on the history of student activism in early 20th century architecture programs will appear in an upcoming book on the architecture school at UC, Berkeley. He is also working on a book examining the architecture and landscape of El Camino Real in California.

Margaret Crawford

Towards a suburban Architectural History by Margaret Crawford

Margaret Crawford is Professor of Urban Design and Planning Theory at the Harvard GSD. Her interests focus on the history and theory of the built environment. She is the author of Building the Workingman's Paradise: The Architecture of American Company Towns, the co-editor of Everyday Urbanism and The Car and the City and has published articles on shopping malls, WWII housing, counterculture architecture, public space, and other topics. Next semester she will be a visiting professor in the Architecture department, teaching a course, Rethinking Suburban History, which will explore some of the themes of this lecture in greater depth.

Annmarie Adams

Kitchen Stories: Sigrun Bulo-Hube as Scientific Researcher by Annmarie Adams

Annmarie Adams is William C. Macdonald Professor at the School of Architecture, McGill University, Montreal, where she teaches courses in architectural history and directs the M.Arch. option in Housing, Cultural Landscapes/Domestic Environments. A native of London, Ontario, Adams graduated with Honours from McGill University in 1981. After a short stint reconstructing the Alaska Highway, she attended the University of California at Berkeley where she received her M.Arch. in 1986 and Ph.D. in 1992.

Adams is the author of Architecture in the Family Way: Doctors, Houses, and Women, 1870-1900 (McGill-Queens University Press, 1996) and co-author of Designing Women: Gender and the Architectural Profession (University of Toronto Press, 2000), with sociologist Peta Tancred. In 1999, Architecture in the Family Way was awarded the Jason A. Hannah Medal from the Royal Society of Canada, as an outstanding contribution to the history of medicine. She has also written many academic and popular articles on women/family and space, hospital architecture, and related topics. In 1995, she won the Hilda Neatby Prize from the Canadian Historical Association for her work on images of Canadian women architects, judged to be the best article in women’s history that year. In 2002 the YWCA named her a “Woman of Distinction” for her contributions to our understanding of Science and Technology.

Adams’ current work focuses on Canadian hospital architecture, complementing a more generalized expertise on gender and space. The foundations of her project, “Medicine by Design” are an eight-year, funded project (FCAR, Hannah Institute, SSHRC) which explored hospitals built in Canada and the United States during the interwar years, and a Canadian Institutes of Health Research Health Career Award (2001-06), focusing on Canadian hospital design since World War II. Adams’ most recent book, Medicine by Design: The Architect and the Modern Hospital,, 1893-1943, will be published by the University of Minnesota Press in February 2008.

The methodologies employed in Medicine by Design were developed in Architecture in the Family Way and her UCB doctoral dissertation. These methods involve the use of non-traditional, interdisciplinary sources to uncover the relationships people believed existed between their bodies and the spaces they inhabit. In more general terms, Adams’ work draws on the research methods of scholars who consider buildings as artifacts of material culture, and who assume that material and spatial evidence is as valid, or perhaps even a more accurate gauge of patterns of living than written texts.

Her new work continues to examine the interaction of space and women/family. It focuses almost exclusively on hospital design, but she remains committed to studying the world of domestic architecture. This is most evident in her graduate student supervision, as well as in an ongoing project that explores how critical changes in family structure affected spatial relationships in the late 19th-century home.

Richard Wittman

Architecture, Virtuality and the Public Sphere in the Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries by Richard Wittman

Richard Wittman is an Assistant Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Architecture at UC Santa Barbara. In Fall 2007, Prof. Wittman is a Visiting Professor and Joan E. Draper Architectural History Research Fellow in the Department of Architecture at UC Berkeley.

Richard Wittman specializes in the cultural history of architecture and town planning, especially of the modern and early modern periods, with secondary research emphases in theory and the historiography of architecture. His primary interest lies in the emergence of modern conceptions and experiences of space, whether architectural, political, personal, scientific, or virtual. His talks and publications explore these themes mainly in connection to seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century France, and, more recently, nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Rome

Professor Wittman's first book was entitled Architecture, Print Culture, and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France (Routledge, 2007)

Gianfranco Carrara

Over 25 years on Representation and Collaboration in Architecture by Gianfranco Carrara

Prof. Gianfranco Carrara is a Full Professor of Technology and Design of Architecture at the University of Rome 'La Sapienza' since 1975. He also directs a Masters program on the Architecture and Technology of Hospitals. He is the author of over 100 publications in the areas of Architecture Technologies, Hospital Design and Computer Aided Design.

Galen Cranz

Writing about Environmental Design: An academic's dilemma? by Galen Cranz

Professor Cranz is author of The Chair: Rethinking Culture, Body and Design and The Politics of Park Design: A History of Urban Parks in America. She is a Kellog National leadership fellow. She has received two Graham Foundation grants, and has been in design teams awarded First Prize in a national competition for an inner-city park for St. Paul, First Prize for Parc La Villette, Paris, and Seventh Place in the Spectacle Island Design Competition, Boston and has served as juror for several urban design and public art competitions. Teaches courses in the social and cultural bases of architectural and urban design, and research methods. Current research activity includes the body and the near-environment, the office of the future, environmental sociology, and sociology of parks.

Gwendolyn Wright

A Lunch meeting with Prof. Gwendolyn Wright Prof. Wright attended a Q&A with MS/PhD students over lunch.

Gwendolyn Wright is Professor of architecture at Columbia University where, in 1985, she was the first woman to receive tenure in the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. She also holds appointments in Columbia’s departments of history and art history. She received her M.Arch. and PhD. degrees from the University of California at Berkeley. Academic awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Getty Fellowship, and election to the Society of American Historians which honors literary quality.

Wright has focused principally on American architecture and urbanism from the late-nineteenth century to the present day. She has also written extensively about transnational exchanges, especially colonial and more recent neo-colonial aspects of both modernism and historic preservation. She is the author of six books and scores of articles.

Her newest book is USA, part of the Modern Architectures in History series from Reaktion Books. USA recasts established ideas about American modernism by highlighting key shifts and conflicts about work, homes, and public life from 1865 to the present. Architecture and the entire built environment provide a matrix that interweaves social norms and individual imaginations, high art and popular culture, prevailing conditions and visions of change.

Since 2003 Professor Wright has also served as a host of the popular PBS television series, “History Detectives.” This program traces the dynamic processes and quandaries of historical investigations. Attracting professionals and the general public alike, the show reveals how historians track ideas and weigh conflicting evidence about what happened, why, and history’s implications for the present.

Can Bilsel

Antiquity on Display: Techniques of the Authentic in Berlin's Pergamon Museum by Can Bilsel

Can Bilsel is the Chair of the Department of Art at the University of San Diego. He has a Ph.D. IN Architecture from Princeton University and is a recipient of the Getty doctoral fellowship. His dissertation work will be published by Oxford University Press and is titled 'Antiquity on Display: Techniques of the Authentic in Berlin's Pergamon Museum'.

Prof. Bilsel's research interests include the history and theory of architecture and urbanism in Europe from 1850 to the present, the history and theory of the art and archeology museum, the political and ethical debates surrounding the ownership and repatriation of the treasures of antiquity, theories of cultural and national heritage, and post-colonial and post-Orientalist critiques of art and culture.

Gail Brager

Center for the Built Environment: learning from buildings by Gail Brager

Gail Brager is a Professor in the Building Science area of the Dept. of Architecture at UC Berkeley. She joined the faculty in 1984 after receiving a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering, also from UC Berkeley. She is the Associate Director of the Center for the Built Environment, an industry/university collaborative research center focused on improving the design, operation and environmental quality of buildings. She is also just finishing her term as the first Chair of the US Green Building Council Research Committee.

Gail's research activities focus on the healthy workplace, with a particular interest in promoting operable windows and natural ventilation in office buildings, and post-occupancy evaluation methods combining both physical measurements of the indoor environment with surveys of occupant response. She has recieved numerous awards for her research and service from both Architecture and Engineering organizations.

Ronald Rael

Earth Architecture by Ronald Rael

Ronald Rael is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at UC Berkeley. Professor Rael's research examines the convergence of digital, industrial and non-industrial approaches to making architecture. He was the recipient of a Graham Foundation Grant for 'Constructed Topographies: Earth Architecture in the Landscape of Modernity', winner of the Architectural League of New York's Deborah Norden Competition for 'Wadi Hadramut: Cities of Earth' and is author of Earth Architecture (Princeton Architectural Press, 2008), which examines the contemporary history of the oldest and most widely used building material on the planet - dirt.

His practice, Rael San Fratello Architects, with Virginia San Fratello, works at the intersection of architecture, art, culture and environment and has won numerous words for their projects.

David Gissen

Experimental Practices in History, Theory and Criticism by David Gissen

David Gissen is an Assistant Professor at The California College of the Arts. Dr. Gissen is a historian, theorist and designer whose research operates at the intersection of architectural and geographical theory. Recent work specifically focuses on developing a novel concept of nature in architectural thought - considering what nature might become in architecture or what architecture might be 'after-nature'.

Dr. Gissen is the author of the forthcoming book Minor Nature: Architecture and its Immanent Environments; editor of a forthcoming issue of AD Magazine "Territory"; and editor of the book Big and Green. His design work includes installations, architectural technical experiments and speculations for institutional and municipal organizations.

He is the recipient of two Graham Foundation grants, the Richard J. Carroll Lectureship from Johns Hopkins University and the Chaisty Award at the California College of Arts.

Ipek Tureli

Exhibiting Istanbul: Public Life, Consumption Practices and Moving Images of the City by Ipek Tureli

Ipek Tureli is a Mellon Postdoctoral fellow at Brown University's Department of the History of Art and Architecture. She completed her PhD in Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley in 2008. Prior to her doctoral studies, she obtained her professional degrees in architecture from the Architectural Association in London and Istanbul Technical University, and has experience in architectural practice in Turkey and the U.K. Her current research interests include the history of post-war urbanism, architectural historiography, architecture and media and visual culture.

Gokce Kinayoglu

Making Sense of place: The role of sound in the creation of a sense of place in real, virtual and augmented environments by Gokce Kinayoglu

Gokce Kinayoglu is a PhD Candidate in Architecture with Designated Emphasis in New Media at UC Berkeley. He holds MArch and BArch degrees from Middle East Technical University in Turkey. A complete portfolio of his work can been found here.

Adriana Valencia

Demographic Change, Urban Change: Granada after the Morisco Expulsion by Adriana Valencia

Adriana Valencia is a PhD Candidate in Architecture at UC Berkeley where her dissertation research focuses on the changes that occured in three cities in the time period surrounding the expulsion of the Moriscos, a significant cultural minority, from Spain. She came to Architecture from a background in Near Eastern Studies, with an emphasis on textual analysis. Her main academic concern is that of the relationship between migrants/migrations and cities/urbanism. Her dissertation considers a seventeenth-century historical instance of mass migration; she hopes to study the same phenomenon in a contemporary context in the near future