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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.