ALLEY FLAT INITIATIVE UNVEILS FIRST PROTOTYPE
Alley Flat Initiative hosted a housewarming on June 6 to publicly unveil its first prototype home.
Alley Flat Initiative (a collaboration between the University of Texas Center for Sustainable Development, the Guadalupe Neighborhood Housing Development Corporation, and the Austin Community Design and Development Center) unveiled its first prototype with a housewarming on June 6. People gathered at the 1804 E. Second Street site in Austin to look at the new home and to learn about its green design features.
Representatives from Wells Fargo, Lincoln Property Company, Meridian Solar, Esperanza Development, and Advantage Mortgage Network, all major funders of the project, attended the event. Other sponsors include Autodesk, HGTV, Perry Lorenz, Suzi Sosa, Bercy-Chen, Z-works, Direct Expansion Solutions, Ecocreto, the Walter Elcock Family Foundation, and Alexa Werner.
The Alley Flat Initiative began in 2005 thanks to a generous grant from the Henry Luce Foundation to the UT Center for Sustainable Development. Principle investigator Professor Steven Moore launched the project and soon recruited Visiting Associate Professor Sergio Palleroni to lead the Sustainable Design and Development Workshop (SDDW) that would ultimately conduct the research and develop the prototypes.
"Alley Flats" are small, detached residential units, accessed from Austin's extensive network of underutilized alleys, that can be built by homeowners on the back of their lots to generate additional income, house family members, or locate a small home-based business.
These structures, each less than 850 square feet, create a secondary independent living space within a single-family lot. The designs are environmentally sustainable and ecologically sound. Additionally, with their small footprints and site-sensitive design, alley flats are easily woven into existing neighborhoods. They provide an outstanding opportunity to create affordability and increase density without requiring changes to existing zoning regulations or causing disruptive changes to the character of our neighborhoods.
The long-term objective of the Alley Flat Initiative is to create an adaptive and self-perpetuating delivery system for sustainable and affordable housing in Austin. The "delivery system" would include not only efficient housing designs constructed with sustainable technologies, but also innovative methods of financing and home ownership that benefit all neighborhoods in Austin.
DEAN'S JOURNAL
JOINT STUDIO WITH BEIJING'S TSINGHUA UNIVERSITY
Assistant Professor Ming Zhang (at far right) with students at China's Great Wall.
Following the spring commencement ceremonies, I returned to Beijing for my third visit. Fifteen students and two faculty accompanied me. O'Neil Ford Professor Wilfried Wang, Assistant Professor Ming Zhang, and I are teaching a joint studio next fall with Tsinghua University. To avoid conflicts with the Summer Olympics, we decided to visit early. The studio is "joint"--both in our collaboration with Tsinghua and with the inclusion of architecture, landscape architecture, and planning students from both universities. With an approximately equal number of students from each discipline, we formed five teams that also included Tsinghua students.
View of I.M. Pei's Suzhou Museum.
Tsinghua faculty identified a complex, challenging site in Beijing for our studio. During our stay, we visited the site twice. Also in Beijing, we visited the Forbidden City, Bei Hai Park, the new Central Business District, and the Beijing Urban Planning Museum.
On May 27, we were given a tour of the new Olympic Forest Park by Yixia Wu. She is second in charge of design and planning for this huge, new park, which is twice as large as New York's Central Park.
That evening, we took a night train to Suzhou, where we visited several Chinese private gardens and I.M. Pei's new art museum.
On May 30, we drove to Hangzhou. We spent time at several sites around West Lake before visiting a tea farm. Later, we visited Wang Shu's magnificent China Academy of Art campus. Wang Shu masterfully merges references to traditional Chinese design motifs in a contemporary manner integrated in a lush landscape.
On Sunday, June 2, we flew back to Beijing. Our group was treated to lunch by Tsinghua Architecture Dean Wenyi Zhu. While the rest of the group visited The Great Wall, I gave a lecture at Peking University. Our visit to China was concluded by a second site visit on Monday, followed by a farewell dinner (generously sponsored by Wilfried Wang's mother) on the 50th floor of the CITIC Capital Mansions Tower in the company of some of our Beijing friends and colleagues. Keeping the breathtaking views we saw of the city in mind, the majority of us returned to the States on June 3.
FRIENDS OF ARCHITECTURE TOUR OF SEATTLE
JULY 17-20, 2008 -- SPACE STILL AVAILABLE
Join the Friends of Architecture for a walking tour through some of Seattle's most compelling downtown buildings, neighborhoods, and public spaces.
This exciting tour will be led by Professor Larry Speck, a former Dean of the School of Architecture, founding Director of the Center of American Architecture and Design, and a principal with PageSoutherlandPage.
While in Seattle, we'll spend three nights at the Alexis Hotel in the heart of downtown, minutes from the famous Pike Place Market, Space Needle, Seattle Waterfront and Aquarium, Symphony Hall, and nationally acclaimed, award-winning theaters.
Among the highlights of our upcoming tour:
- SEATTLE PUBLIC LIBRARY by Rem Koolhaas and LMN Architects -- Sam Miller, a principal with LMN Architects, who partnered with the Office of Metropolitan Architecture on the project, will serve as our tour guide through this downtown Seattle architectural icon. This 363,000 sq. ft. structure of steel and glass skin is divided into eight horizontal layers and features the "Dewey Ramp," a four-story ramp that allows people to browse through books in a continuous sequence. Other architectural features include the top floor Reading Room with views of Puget Sound and the "Living Room" lobby located under a 50-foot-high sloping glass wall.
- ST. IGNATIUS CHAPEL on the campus of Seattle University --
Co-principal-in-charge of the Chapel project, Tom Kundig, will serve as our tour guide through this amazing realization of architect Steven Holl's "A Gathering of Different Lights" concept, which won a design award from the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects. Tom is the winner of five National AIA Institute Honor Awards and a recipient of a 2007 Academy Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
- SEATTLE ART MUSEUM (SAM) -- This 300,000 sq. ft. expansion of the downtown location, designed by Allied Works Architecture, will allow the museum to accommodate its growing collections with new gallery and public spaces. Design features of this expansion project include five interlocking double-height galleries; innovative use of natural light to expose museum activities to passersby; and unique, vertically organized museum space rising 155 feet above street level.
- OLYMPIC SCULPTURE PARK by Weiss Manfredi --
This convergence of art and urban design has won numerous awards including the American Institute of Architects 2008 Institute Honor Awards for Architecture, the American Society of Landscape Architects 2007 Professional Awards: General Design Honor Award, and the Harvard University Graduate School of Design's Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design. Tour attendees will enjoy a private lunch at the Art Lab in the Paccar Pavilion. Daniel Friedman, Dean of the College of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Washington, will serve as our lunch speaker.
- EXPERIENCE MUSIC PROJECT by Frank Gehry -- This museum of music history founded by Paul Allen features Gehry's signature sheet metal construction and was inspired by the shape of electric guitars. No right angles exist on the building's exterior, which is covered by approximately 21,000 shingles, uniquely cut and bent to fit into each specific location.
Spaces are filling quickly, so contact Events Coordinator Barbara Terrell at bdt@mail.utexas.edu or 512.471.8187 for information about tour registration.
Friends of Architecture would like to thank our Corporate Silver members and supporters Curtis & Windham Architects and Lucifer Lighting Company.
FACULTY SCHOLARSHIP
Cover, Urban Land, May 2008, featuring Specht Harpman's zeroHouse.
Associate Professor Louise Harpman's firm, Specht Harpman, continues to generate international acclaim with its design for the zeroHouse. The zeroHouse is featured on the cover of the May 2008 issue of Urban Land, the journal of the Urban Land Institute.
ZeroHouse is a 650-square-foot prefabricated house designed to operate autonomously, with no need for utilities or waste connections. It generates its own electrical power, collects and stores rainwater, and processes all waste. It can be installed in places unsuitable for standard construction, including in water up to 10-feet deep or on slopes of up to 35 degrees.
CENTER FOR AMERICAN ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN
Cover, O'Neil Ford Monograph 1: Álvaro Siza: Bouça Residents' Association Housing, edited by Brigitte Fleck and Wilfried Wang.
Cover, O'Neil Ford Duograph 1: Chilé, edited by Wilfried Wang and Kevin Alter.
Two stunning new books in the O'Neil Ford Series have just been published jointly between the Center for American Architecture and Design and Ernst Wasmuth Verlag.
O'Neil Ford Monograph 1: Álvaro Siza: Bouça Residents' Association Housing, Porto 1972-77, 2005-06 was edited by Brigitte Fleck and O'Neil Ford Centennial Chair in Architecture Wilfried Wang. The monograph includes a foreward by Álvaro Siza and was designed by UTSOA alum Cameron DeLargy [B.Arch. '08].
From start to finish, it took the Modernist Portuguese architect Álvaro Siza, winner of the 1992 Pritzker Prize and designer of The Serpentine Gallery's 2005 Summer Pavilion, 33 years to construct the Bouça Residents' Association Housing in the northern city of Porto--which he realized in association with architect António Madureira. During those years, Siza completed numerous important commissions, including the architecture faculty building at the University of Porto in 1985 and the Fundação Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art in that same city in 1999. In 1988 he restored the Chiado district of Lisbon, Portugal, after a devastating fire; and his Portuguese Pavilion for Lisbon's EXPO 98 was internationally recognized. While Siza was busy with all of these buildings and plans, the first phase of the Bouça project was falling ever deeper into disrepair, hampered by municipal neglect. It has since been brought up to Siza's standards, and this publication appraises the project, now happily completed. Siza's sketches, many of which are published here for the first time, reveal the tenacity of his search for the right solution.
O'Neil Ford Duograph 1: Chilé: House at Punta Pite, 2003-06 by Smiljan Radic & Crypt in the Cathedral of Santiago de Chilé, 1999-2006 by Rodrigo Pérez de Arce was edited by Wilfried Wang and Associate Dean Kevin Alter, with additional essays by Rodrigo Pérez de Arce and Smiljan Radic. It was designed by UTSOA alum Matthew Slusarek [M.Arch. '05].
This volume focuses on two architectural projects that, taken together, provide a telling glimpse into the Chilean culture and landscape--from its colonial legacy to its magnificent coast. Smiljan Radic's House in Punta Pite merges vernacular architecture with a crisp, Modernist sense of design to create a structure that blends intimately with the expansive coast, while Rodrigo Perez de Arce, in creating a newly designed crypt for the centuries-old cathedral of Santiago de Chile, manages to seamlessly synthesize his own contemporary language into the existing layers of the building's history. On the face of it, these two projects could not be more different, yet the conceptual framework and design constraints successfully confronted by each delineate Chile's contribution to contemporary architecture. This is the first volume in the O'Neil Ford Duograph Series, which selects two contrasting projects in order to explore the best of today's overlooked global architecture.
O'Neil Ford Series editors include Associate Dean Kevin Alter, Professor Michael Benedikt, Visiting Associate Professor Barbara Hoidn, and Professor Wilfried Wang. Production editor is Center Associate Christine Wong.
WANG AND LONG ARCHIVES: COLLABORATIVE AGREEMENT BETWEEN VISUAL RESOURCES COLLECTION AND ARTSTOR
ARTstor is collaborating with the UT-Austin School of Architecture to distribute more than 600 images of modern European and American architecture in the digital library. These images will be digitized from slides housed in the school's Visual Resources Collection and created by two of its faculty members, Wilfried Wang and Christopher Long.
Wilfried Wang is the O'Neil Ford Centennial Professor in Architecture at the School of Architecture, as well as a practicing architect. Together with Visiting Associate Professor Barbara Hoidn, he founded the office of Hoidn Wang Partner in Berlin. Wang will contribute approximately 460 images of modern European and American architecture, with a special focus on museum architecture. Christopher Long, Associate Professor for Architectural History at the School of Architecture, will contribute an additional 215 images of Central European architecture. Long specializes in the history of modern architecture, with an emphasis on Central Europe from 1800 to the present; his interests also include modern design in Central and Eastern Europe.
ARTstor is a digital library of approximately 700,000 images in the areas of art, architecture, the humanities, and social sciences with a set of tools to view, present, and manage images for research and pedagogical purposes. The ARTstor Digital Library is used by educators, scholars, and students at a variety of institutions including universities, colleges, museums, public libraries, and K-12 schools.
ALUMNI NEWS
ALUMNI CONNECTIONS
We want you to stay involved and connected to the school, so join us for one of our many upcoming alumni events:
- Houston Alumni Reception at The Grove Restaurant - Thursday, October 9, 2008
- TSA Alumni Reception in Fort Worth - Thursday, October 23, 2008
- AIA Alumni Reception in San Francisco - Thursday, April 30, 2009
More details will become available on the School of Architecture Alumni web page as the events approach, or if you have questions please do not hesitate to contact Stacy Manning at smanning@austin.utexas.edu or 512.471.0617.
The School of Architecture is continuing its effort to find (and maintain) the most accurate contact information for all of our alumni. From young alumni receptions to 50-year reunions, and everything in between, we hope you will stay in touch. Would you like to mentor a student? Do you need to hire a fellow Longhorn? Looking for networking or continuing education opportunities? We can help, but we need to know how to reach you!
Stay in touch with former classmates--update your records and contact preferences by logging on to the University's online alumni directory.
Thanks for helping us improve our relationship with you. We look forward to hearing from you!
WILDFLOWER CENTER TO BE HONORED FOR WORK ON GREEN LANDSCAPES
The Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center at The University of Texas at Austin has been selected to receive the 2008 Olmsted Medal for contributions to landscape architecture from the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA).
The award is given for contributions to landscape architecture policy, research, education, project planning, and design. The center was nominated for its "bold move to develop sustainable standards for landscapes nationwide" in partnership with the ASLA and the United States Botanic Garden. The Sustainable Sites Initiative will "play a significant role in advancing the profession of landscape architecture to a commanding position at the forefront of the environmental movement," the nomination said.
The award will be presented October 6 during the ASLA annual meeting in Philadelphia. The medal is named for Frederick Law Olmsted, considered the founder of American landscape architecture, and honors organizations and individuals outside the profession of landscape architecture for environmental leadership, vision, and stewardship. (Dean Fritz Steiner received ASLA's Community Service Award in 2007 for "his sustained, pro bono service to the community.")
"The Wildflower Center has lived up to Lady Bird Johnson's hope that it would preserve the diversity and splendor of native landscapes," said Nancy Somerville, ASLA executive vice president and chief executive officer. "Their research in land management, fire ecology, native green roofs, and their land restoration projects are important contributions to the environment and stewardship."
The center, founded in 1982 by Lady Bird Johnson, former first lady, and actress Helen Hayes, is a 279-acre botanic garden in Austin, Texas, that hosts about 90,000 visitors each year. It became part of the university in 2006.
Events
For the latest updates, check out the online UTSOA Calendar.
EXHIBIT
Plan for house and garden, Mies van der Rohe, 1914.
February 1, 2008, through August 15, 2008
Visual Resources Collection
Sutton Hall 3.128 (Monday-Friday, 8-5)
"Landscape Architecture's History:
Marrying Research and Teaching through the Camera's Eye"
During the course of her academic career, Professor Mirka Beneš has documented a wide range of landscapes and supporting materials such as rare prints, maps, drawings, and written documents. From Professor Beneš' extensive slide collection, a group of almost 8,000 teaching slides--used in support of her two lecture courses in the history and theories of landscape architecture--were selected, cataloged, and digitized by the school's Visual Resources Collection (VRC). The selection of images in this exhibit represents a small sampling of images selected from the group that are available for use by the university community as part of the VRC's online Image Collection.
CONTACTS
In this fast-paced world, there's a lot of news to keep up with. We know you are doing great things, and we rely on you not only to share your stories, but also to keep us up-to-date on your contact information so that we can share our stories with you. Alumni, please send your news and contact updates to our new Associate Director of Constituent and Alumni Relations, Stacy Manning at smanning@austin.utexas.edu. Students, faculty, and staff may send updates to eNews editor Pamela Peters at p.peters@mail.utexas.edu.
UT-Austin School of Architecture
soa.utexas.edu
Dean's Office
512.471.1922, fax 512.471.0716
Center for American Architecture and Design
christinewong@mail.utexas.edu, 512-471-9890
Center for Sustainable Development
teresacarr@mail.utexas.edu, 512.475.7995
Assistant Dean for Development
Julie Hooper, jhooper@austin.utexas.edu, 512.471.6114
Assistant Dean for Undergraduate Programs
Jeanne Crawford, jcraw@mail.utexas.edu, 512.471.0109
Graduate Program Coordinator
Rosemin Gopaul, gopaul@austin.utexas.edu, 512.471.0134
Associate Director of Constituent and Alumni Relations,
Stacy Manning, smanning@austin.utexas.edu, 512.471.0617
Director, Career Services Center
Carrie O'Malley, carrie.omalley@austin.utexas.edu, 512.471.1333
Publications Editor
Pamela Peters, p.peters@mail.utexas.edu, 512.471.0154
Events Coordinator
Barbara Terrell, bdt@mail.utexas.edu, 512.471.8187
Materials Lab
http://soa.utexas.edu/matlab, 512.232.5969
Visual Resources Collection
http://soa.utexas.edu/vrc/, 512.471.0143
Architecture and Planning Library
www.lib.utexas.edu/apl/, 512.495.4620
Webmaster
Christopher Rankin, crankin@mail.utexas.edu, 512.495.4620
UTSOA Mailing Address
The University of Texas at Austin
School of Architecture
1 University Station B7500
Austin, TX 78712-0222
