Archinect - News

Aki Ishida appointed director of the Sam Fox School College of Architecture and Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design

2024-04-15T13:16:00-04:00

Washington University in St. Louis has announced the appointment of Aki Ishida as the next director of the Sam Fox School College of Architecture and Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design. The current associate professor and interim associate director of Virginia Tech’s School of Architecture will take over duties effective July 1st. Her appointment follows the departure of Heather Woofter, who left St. Louis to become the new Dean at the University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture last summer.

"Aki is an accomplished architect and designer, a respected scholar and a dedicated teacher and mentor. She is fascinated by the ways social conditions can shape the built environment, and she has a long history of collaborating with artists, engineers and health-care professionals, among others. I am confident Aki will be an inspiring leader who will connect deeply with our community and advance the strategic goals of the school and university. We are proud to welcome her t...

Virginia Tech team completes world-first observation tower with innovative low-carbon timber

2022-04-20T11:51:00-04:00

A team of students and faculty at Virginia Tech has completed an innovative observation tower in rural Virginia. The design and delivery of the project saw the development and certification of a new custom timber product, off-site prefabrication, and the discovery of the ruins of a historic building.

Photography by Kay Edge and Edward Becker

The project, formally titled the New River Train Observation Tower, was delivered to the city of Radford, Virginia. In 2018, the city commissioned Virginia Tech to design and build a train observation tower that would create publicly accessible views over the city’s New River and a historically significant railroad bridge. With a budget of $100,000, the city requested that the tower used clean-tech, low-carbon building products to showcase the city’s transition away from its industrial past.

Photography by Kay Edge and Edward Becker

The student/faculty team initially sought to construct the tower from cross-laminated timber (CLT) due to its durab...

University of Virginia's School of Architecture names C.L. Bohannon as its first Associate Dean for Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion

2022-03-25T16:57:00-04:00

The University of Virginia’s School of Architecture has announced the appointment of C.L. Bohannon, PhD, ALSA, as its first Associate Dean for Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (AD JEDI), effective July 25, 2022. He joins the faculty as Associate Professor in the Landscape Architecture Department.

Bohannon is currently an Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture and the Associate Director in the School of Architecture + Design at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. He is also the Director of the Community Engagement Lab and Faculty Principal at the Leadership and Social Change Residential College at Virginia Tech.

Bohannon’s research focuses on the relationship between community engagement and design education. His pedagogy, through the lens of landscape architecture, examines the asymmetrical power relationships and systems that produce social and environmental inequities in marginalized communities, or as he describes it, “uneven geographies,” t...

Get Lectured: Virginia Tech, Fall '20

2020-10-29T16:54:00-04:00

School of Architecture + Design at Virginia Tech shares their Fall lecture series and focuses on new modes of practice. According to the school, they ask, "How do we make architecture for today?"

Archinect's ongoing Get Lectured series features each school's lecture series and their graphic design prowess with graphic lecture posters.

Want to share your school's lecture series? Send us your lecture series poster and details to connect@archinect.com.

The school shares, "For New Modes of Practice we have invited a group of young practitioners working in new ways both in how they represent architecture and in how they redesign the relationship between practice, politics, society and criticism to share and discuss their work with us this fall." Since September, their exemplary speaker line-up has expanded on this focus. "Our speakers for the fall all are moving beyond modes of design that dominated architecture during the late 1990s and early 2000s. They are less interested in technic...

Aaron Betsky appointed new director of Virginia Tech School of Architecture and Design

2020-03-12T17:03:00-04:00

Acclaimed architecture academic, critic, author, and curator Aaron Betsky has been appointed as the new director of Virginia Tech's School of Architecture + Design in the College of Architecture and Urban Studies.

In a press announcement published on March 10th, Richard Blythe, the current Dean of the College of Architecture and Urban Studies, shares, "Aaron is a proven leader with demonstrated dedication to cross-disciplinary exploration, academic excellence, and educational innovation. His international standing and connections in architecture and design are considerable and will undoubtedly help the college expand its global reach, activities, and influence. Aaron's career path exemplifies the Beyond Boundaries approach of disciplinary interconnectedness and depth, as well as breadth."

Betsky’s move to Virginia Tech follows follows his decision in November 2019 to leave the School of Architecture at Taliesin (SoAT), where Betsky served as the dean from 2015 - 2017 and is current...

Richard Blythe appointed as dean of Virginia Tech College of Architecture and Urban Studies

2017-05-17T15:07:00-04:00

Richard Blythe will join the Virginia Tech College of Architecture and Urban Studies (CAUS) as its new dean starting October 10. Blythe will replace A.J. (Jack) Davis, who served as the College's dean for 11 years. Davis will step down on June 30 at the end of his second term.

Prior to Virginia Tech, Richard Blythe was a professor and the dean of RMIT University School of Architecture and Design in Melbourne since 2012. Under his leadership, the RMIT School of Architecture Design acquired $6.8 million to support multi-university research alliances, particularly a grant from the Australian government to lead a 15-university Design and Architecture Practice project.

Blythe also lectured at the University of Tasmania for 14 years, while he was deputy head of the School of Architecture as well as the vice chancellor’s representative on the Tasmanian government’s Building and Construction Industries Council. He continues to work as a founding director to the architecture practice TERROIR ...

Virginia Tech Center for Design Research exhibition showcases experimental digital fabrications

2015-03-16T17:48:00-04:00

We are in the midst of another industrial revolution – softer, less obtrusive, faster, and more pervasive. All aspects of daily life are changing through the integration of things made of atoms and things made from bits. Surrounded by an increasing number of sophisticated devices, digital heartbeats, and sensors are now standard components in products. How should architecture education respond?

Advances in digital technology are creating an explosion of possibilities related to the basic building blocks of design: material and form, light, movement, and pattern. Virginia Tech student work featuring 3-D printing, robotics, and dynamic fenestration is currently on display in Clark Nexsen’s office and gallery space in Town Center, Virginia Beach.

Exhibition materials were developed with digital tools in an undergraduate studio called CRD – (trans)LAB at Virginia Tech’s School of Architecture and Design. Students from different disciplines explore how the advancement of technological and computational processes can challenge and inform the practice of architecture and design. The exhibition examines how architecture education should change in response to an environment where analog, mechanical, and electronic technologies are being replaced by rapidly emerging digital technologies.

Students participating in the exhibition include Laura Escobar, Ryan Hawkins, Brian Kato, David Ko...

Design Dialogue: Brian Mackay-Lyons

2014-09-29T00:41:00-04:00

On August 22nd, 2014 Brian Mackay-Lyons hopped off his tractor and wiped the diesel fuel off his hands to discuss architectural education with Keith and Marie Zawistowski, co-founders of the design/buildLAB at Virginia Tech and partners of OnSite Architecture.

Brian MacKay-Lyons is the founding partner of MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects, a professor at Dalhousie University, and the founder of Ghost Lab – the now legendary 2-week summer design/build program that took place on his family farm in Nova Scotia from 1994 to 2011. While relentlessly local, Brian’s work has been recognized internationally with more than 100 awards, 300 publications, and 100 exhibitions. In 2012, the American Institute of Architects recognized the collective work and influence of Ghost with an Institute Honor Award for Architecture.

Keith: So what do you think the education and the architect ought to look like?

Brian: Well, what I don’t think it needs to look like is an all design/build curriculum. I guess I have also learned that it has its limitations, like everything. One reason that Ghost has taken this hiatus is because I realized that I was being insincere.

I believe an architect’s role is not to be the builder. The architect’s role — like a conduc...

Reality Check at Arquiteturas Film Festival Lisboa

2013-09-01T19:37:00-04:00

In 2012, filmmaker Leon Gerskovic chronicled the journey of 16 design/buildLAB students as they conceived and realized the Masonic Amphitheatre. The project consisted of the complete redevelopment of a post-industrial brownfield into a public park and performance space. Reality Check is their inspirational story.

"Reality Check" by Leon Gerskovic and including time-lapse photography from Jeff Goldberg has been selected for inclusion in the Arquiteturas Film Festival Lisboa and will make its European Premiere on Friday September 27th at 6PM in the Cinema City Alvalade. The screening will be followed by a talk about "designing for the 99%" with Tiago Mota Saraiva of Ateliermob and a moderated discussion including Marie and Keith Zawistowski of design/buildLAB.

More about the film, including a trailer, clips, stills, and reviews by: Scott Poole, Dean at UTK; Jeff Day, Partner at Min Day and Director at UNL; and John Cary, Founder at Public Interest Design can be found at www.realitycheckfilm.com

More information about the festival can be found at www.doyoumeanarchitecture.com