Heather Roberge named Chair of UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design

2017-07-14T19:15:00-04:00

Associate Professor Heather Roberge has been appointed to the position of chair of the UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design effective July 1, 2017. She will take over for interim chair, Professor Neil Denari, alongside whom she has served as interim vice chair during this past academic year.

A designer and educator who has served on the faculty at UCLA since 2002, Roberge is the founder and principal of Murmur, an award winning practice based in Los Angeles. Roberge’s research and professional work investigate the spatial, structural, and atmospheric potential that digital technologies have on the theory and practice of building. Her teaching emphasizes innovative approaches to material, computation, and manufacturing to expand the formal vocabulary and spatial implications of building envelopes and assemblies.

"En Pointe" by Heather Roberge strikes a balance between past and present

2015-07-15T11:08:00-04:00

In his Untimely Meditations, Friedrich Nietzsche asserts, “…We must seriously despise instruction without vitality, knowledge which enervates activity, and history as an expensive surplus of knowledge and a luxury…” History must be at the service of living, he advocates, not the other way around. At the same time, history has its uses, and total amnesia is neither possible nor desirable. The German philosopher wrote in an era he perceived as detrimentally historicist; we, on the other hand, are coming out of a period of unhistorical thinking, where the past seems to have become obscured by a fin de siècle fog, the discharged by-product of technological novelty – at least according to one possible reading.

Spurred by the development of computer-aided design technologies, the architectural styles at the vanguard of the last few decades have largely abandoned historicist tendencies, reveling instead in the vast potentials of parametric modeling. But, the novel quickly loses its shiny ve...

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Heather Roberge named Chair of UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design

"En Pointe" by Heather Roberge strikes a balance between past and present