Department of Architecture - UC Berkeley - The Death + Life of Social Factors: Bios

The Death + Life of Social Factors: Bios

A Conference
Reexamining Behavioral and Cultural Research in Environmental Design

College of Environmental Design, University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, California, U.S.A.
April 29–May 1, 2011

Bios

Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, Professor of Urban Planning; Associate Dean of the School of Public Affairs, University of California, Los Angeles

Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris is the Associate Dean of Academic Affairs and Urban Planning Professor at the UCLA School of Public Affairs. Professor Loukaitou-Sideris' research focuses on the public environment of the city, its physical representation, aesthetics, social meaning and impact on the urban resident. Her work seeks to integrate social and physical issues in urban planning and architecture. An underlying theme of her work is its "user focus"; the author of numerous articles, the co-author of the book Urban Design Downtown: Poetics and Politics of Form (University of California Press, 1998), the co-editor of the book Jobs and Economic Development in Minority Communities (Temple University Press, 2006). Her book, Sidewalks: Conflict and Negotiation over Public Space, about the social uses of sidewalks was published by the MIT Press in 2009, while a new edited book titled Companion to Urban Design has just been published by Routledge Publishers.

Avigail Sachs, Lecturer, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Avigail Sachs teaches architecture and landscape architecture history and theory. In 2009 she completed a doctoral degree at the University of California, Berkeley. In her dissertation study, Research and Environmental Design: Building a Discipline and Modernizing the Profession, she reexamined the inception of modern architecture education in the United States in the mid-20th century and placed architecture education in the context of the housing movement, the building industry and the American research university. This study was also an opportunity to examine the overlaps between architecture, city and regional planning and landscape architecture education and professional ideas in postwar USA. She is currently working with Prof. Joan Ockman on a chapter for a book marking the 100th anniversary of the Association for Collegiate Schools of Architecture. This chapter will survey the changes in architecture education in the United States after World War II, which include the birth of social factors. She holds a Master of Architecture from MIT and a Bachelor of Architecture from the Technion, Israel Institute of Technology.

Clare Cooper Marcus, Professor Emerita in the Departments of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley

Clare Cooper Marcus has lectured and consulted in the United States, Canada, Britain, Scandinavia, Australia, and China. Her firm, Healing Landscapes, offers services related to the programming, design, and evaluation of outdoor spaces in healthcare settings. Her areas of special interest include medium-density housing, public housing modernization, public open-space design, children’s environments, housing for the elderly, post-occupancy evaluation of designed settings, design guidelines, healing environments, and the psychological meaning of home and garden. Professor Marcus has written six books — Easter Hill Village: Some Social Implications of Design; Housing as if People Mattered: Site Design Guidelines for Medium-Density Family Housing (with Wendy Sarkissian); People Places: Design Guidelines for Urban Open Space (with Carolyn Francis); House as Mirror of Self: Exploring the Deeper Meaning of Home; Healing Gardens; Therapeutic Benefits and Design Recommendations (with Marni Barnes); and Iona Dreaming: The Healing Power of Place — A Memoir. She has contributed numerous articles to design and academic journals. She is currently working on a new book — The Case for Healing Gardens (working title) to be co-authored with Naomi Sachs. Honors include a National Endowment for the Arts Award for Exemplary Design Research, a Career Award of the Environmental Design Research Association, a Guggenheim Award, Honorary ASLA, as well as awards from the American Institute of Architects, the American Society of Landscape Architects, and the American Horticultural Therapy Association.

Jilly Traganou, Assistant Professor, Parsons New School for Design

Jilly Traganou, Associate Professor, Parsons New School for Design Jilly Traganou (PhD, University of Westminster) is an architect and Associate Professor in spatial design studies at the School of Art and Design History and Theory at Parsons The New School for Design. Her work examines space and architecture in intersection with the fields of design studies, media studies, and cultural geography. It is currently focusing on relations between design, critical territorial practices and travel, and on design’s role in the configuration of national and postnational identities. She is the author of The Tôkaidô Road: Traveling and Representation in Edo And Meiji Japan (RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), and a co-editor with Miodrag Mitrasinovic of Travel, Space, Architecture (Ashgate, 2009). Traganou’s forthcoming book, Designing the Olympics: (Post)national Identity in the Age of Globalization, has been contracted by Routledge. She is currently the Reviews Editor of the Journal of Design History. In the last seven years, she has participated and co-organized action-based research projects that involve issues of migration and identity formation, and has collaborated with schools in Austin (Texas), Brooklyn, and Manhattan in introducing design thinking concepts to students of preschool and K–12 ages.

Karen Franck, Professor, New Jersey Institute of Technology

Karen A. Franck is a professor in the College of Architecture and Design at the New Jersey Institute of Technology where she also serves as Director of the Joint Ph.D. Program in Urban Systems. She has a Ph.D. in environmental psychology from the City University of New York. Karen has written about a wide range of topics: designing for human needs in Architecture from the Inside Out; possibility and diversity in urban life in Loose Space, relationships between food, architecture and the city in issues of the journal Architectural Design (AD); types in architecture and design in Ordering Space; and alternative housing in New Households, New Housing. Her most recent work, written with Teresa Howard, is Design through Dialogue: A Guide for Clients and Architects. She is currently working on a book about the design and people’s experience of memorials.

Louise Mozingo, Associate Professor, Univeristy of California, Berkeley

Professor Mozingo received her Master in Landscape Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley, and undergraduate degrees in Biology and Art History from the College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia. Professor Mozingo’s research and creative work focuses on ecological design, landscape history, and social processes in public landscapes. Landscape architectural research usually considers ecology, history, and social factors separately; the purpose of Professor Mozingo’s scholarship is to breach the intellectual boundaries between them to produce a synthetic critical perspective of landscape architecture as a complex cultural artifact. Her particular concern is the planning and design of collective and public open spaces that produce both ecological and social sustainability, and thrive to support civil society in an increasingly multi-cultural world. Her research contributes to landscape architectural scholarship, as well as to a profession eager for discernment and insight.

Professor Mozingo has been the recipient of Harvard University's Dumbarton Oaks Fellowship for Studies in Landscape Architecture, the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture Award of Recognition for Excellence in Teaching, Writing, and Service, and the University of California, Berkeley Chancellor's Award of Recognition for University and Community Partnerships.

Mark Gillem, Ph.D., AIA, AICP. Associate Professor of Architecture, University of Oregon

Mark Gillem addresses sustainability, social responsibility, and historic preservation through his teaching, research, and professional practice. He is the author of America Town: Building the Outposts of Empire (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), which received the Environmental Design Research Association’s Book Award in 2008. His planning and urban design work has received four national planning awards from the American Planning Association’s Federal Planning Division for projects in Aviano, Italy, Iwakuni, Japan, Tacoma, Washington, and Kunsan, South Korea. Other honors include a Design Excellence Award from the U.S. Air Force and the Crocker Award for Teaching Excellence at the Air Force Institute of Technology. His diverse portfolio also includes a renovation honored by the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association (California) and pro bono designs for projects in New Guinea, Guatemala, and Indonesia. Gillem serves as the Director of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments and Director of the University of Oregon’s Urban Design Lab. He holds a Ph.D. in Architecture and a Master’s in Architecture from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Bachelor’s in Architecture with Highest Distinction from the University of Kansas. He is a licensed architect and certified planner.

Sam Gosling, Professor, University of Texas, Austin

Professor Gosling supervises a psychology lab that investigates how how personality is revealed in real-world contexts in everyday life. He is especially interested in the relationship between individual personality and the features of the spaces where people spend their time, including bedrooms, offices, and virtual spaces such as Facebook pages. Other work centers on animal psychology, the history of the discipline of psychology, and a long-standing interest in the implications of collecting data through the internet. Professor Gosling and his collaborators have developed several scales, including a short form of the five-factor model of personality and the Personal Living Space Cue Inventory, which allows researchers to comprehensively inventory objects and residents’ self-ratings of their living spaces.

Organizing Committee

Lusi Morhayim, Ph.D. Candidate, University of California, Berkeley

Lusi Morhayim’s dissertation, Contesting Public Space: Car-free Streets Events and Advocacy, focuses on the ways in which various grassroots movements challenge the use of streets and question notions of public space. Prior to her Ph.D. studies, she studied at the Jacob Blaustein Institutes for Desert Research, measuring suitability of of various building technologies into desert climate. She received her professional degree and M.Sc. from Yildiz Technical University in Istanbul, with a master thesis titled Evaluating of High-rise Office Buildings in Istanbul according to Ecological Design Criteria. After receiving her masters degree, she worked in architectural offices in Istanbul and Berlin, and taught architectural design studio courses in Yildiz Technical University.

Georgia Lindsay, Ph.D. Candidate, University of California, Berkeley

Georgia Lindsay holds a Master of Liberal Arts from the University of North Carolina, Asheville, and a Bachelor of Arts in Art and Psychology from the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is currently working on her dissertation, Architecture of Ideals: The Denver Art Museum as a Case Study in Museum Purpose and Design, which uses a variety of methods to address how the institution of the museum finds expression in built form, and how the public responds to that form.

Jonathan Bean, Ph.D. Candidate, University of California, Berkeley

Jonathan Bean’s work centers on the intersection of cultural meaning and space. His dissertation, Consuming Hygge at Home: Perception, Representation, Practice, compares how upper middle class households in Denmark engage the cultural metaconcept of hygge, which is usually translated as coziness, with how Americans express analogous concepts in the home. Other current work includes a coauthored investigation of how home design blogs such as Apartment Therapy constitute taste through a narrative process. He holds an Master of Science in Architecture and a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture, both from UC Berkeley.

Organizing Advisers

Galen Cranz, Professor of Architecture, University of California, Berkeley

Professor Cranz, Ph.D. Sociology, University of Chicago, has taught social & cultural processes in architectural and urban design, including research methods, for 35 years at Berkeley and Princeton. She is the author of two books, each considered classics in their fields — The Chair: Rethinking Culture, Body and Design (pbk, 2000) and The Politics of Park Design: A History of Urban Parks in America (1982, 1989) — and numerous articles. Her interdisciplinary team won the Latrobe Fellowship 2005-2007 for an evidence-based approach to the design of hospitals. As member of design teams, she has won 1st Prize in a national competition for an inner-city park for St. Paul, MN, 1st Prize for Parc La Villette in Paris, France, and 7th Place in the Spectacle Island Design Competition for Boston, MA. Current research activity includes body conscious design, the office of the future, sustainable urban parks, and ethnographic research for architecture. She is currently working with professor Eleftherios Pavlides on a textbook to introduce architecture students to the social sciences with a fieldwork component combining architectural and social science sensibilities to investigate users' experiences of buildings and landscapes.

Margaret Crawford, Professor of Architecture, University of California, Berkeley

Margaret Crawford teaches courses in the history and theory of architecture, urbanism, and urban history as well as urban design and planning studios focusing on small-scale urbanity and postmodern urbanism. Her research focuses on the evolution, uses, and meanings of urban space. Her book, Building the Workingman's Paradise: The Design of American Company Towns, examines the rise and fall of professionally designed industrial environments. Crawford is also known for her work on Everyday Urbanism, a concept that encourages the close investigation and empathetic understanding of the specifics of daily life as the basis for urban theory and design. In 2005, Doug Kelbaugh characterized Everyday Urbanism as one of three contemporary paradigms of urbanism on the cutting edge of theoretical and professional activity.

Another interest is Los Angeles urbanism, which led to The Car and the City: The Automobile, the Built Environment and Daily Urban Life, edited with transportation planner Martin Wachs. She has also published numerous articles on immigrant spatial practices, shopping malls, public space, and other issues in the American built environment. Since 2003, Crawford has been investigating the effects of rapid physical and social changes on villages in China’s Pearl River Delta.

Michael Southworth, Professor of City & Regional Planning and Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning; Co-Chair, Master of Urban Design Program

Michael Southworth’s work has included design of information systems to enhance the education and communication functions of cities, especially for children’s needs; reuse and preservation plans for older cities, neighborhoods and buildings; design of urban open space; and research on large scale urban design theory and methods. He created the award-winning conceptual plans for the Lowell Urban National Park and the Boott Mill Cultural Center Community in Lowell, Massachusetts.

Many of his recent research projects and publications have focused on the evolving form of the American metropolis, particularly the urban edge. His recent book Streets and the Shaping of Towns and Cities (with Eran Ben-Joseph), as well as several journal articles, examine the role of street design standards and development patterns in creating successful neighborhoods and communities.