Panel Discussion: Interdisciplinary Research in Architecture, Opportunities and Challenges

ARCC is delighted to announce a panel discussion on: “Interdisciplinary Research in Architecture, Opportunities and Challenges” The panel will be held as part of the upcoming EAAE ARCC 2020 Conference: The Architect and the City, which will take place in Valencia Spain on June 10-13, 2020and will be hosted by the Universitat Politècnica de València. The panel will explore issues related to interdisciplinary research in architecture including the importance and future potential offered by interdisciplinary research to the discipline and profession, the barriers that may discourage architecture faculty from pursuing interdisciplinary research opportunities, whether current architectural curricula sufficiently prepare students for interdisciplinary collaboration, major differences between the US and Europe in this regard, among other topics. The discussion features a highly distinguished group of panelists including Prof. Dr. Oya Atalay Franck, Director of the School of Architecture, Design and Civil Engineering at ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences and EAAE President, Professor Lynne Dearborn, Associate Professor and Chair of Health and Wellbeing, Illinois School of Architecture and 1st VP and President-elect of ACSA, and Dean Brook Muller, Dean of the College of Arts + Architecture, University of North Carolina at Charlotte. The panel will be moderated by Professor Hazem Rashed-Ali, Associate Professor of Architecture at UTSA and ARCC President. Brief bios of panel participants are included below. We hope you can join us for this important discussion. More information about the conference can be found at: https://www.eaae-arcc-ic.upv.es/

Prof. Dr. Oya Atalay Franck is an architect, architectural historian and academician. She is the Director of the School of Architecture, Design and Civil Engineering at ZHAW Zurich University of Applied Sciences in Winterthur, Switzerland. She studied architecture at Middle East Technical University METU in Ankara and at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute RPI in Troy, NY, USA. She received her PhD from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH in Zurich. She acts as an expert in various scientific bodies, a.o. the Swiss National Foundation of Research (SNF) and The Research Foundation Flanders (FWO), as well as in peer review committees and in quality audits. Professor Atalay Frank is the president of the European Association for Architectural Education (EAAE).

Lynne Dearborn, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor and Chair of Health and Wellbeing, Illinois School of Architecture and 1st VP and President-elect of ACSA. Her research focuses on the mutual interaction of people and their environments, particularly the relationship between residential environments and cultural change. She studies the Hmong of SE Asia and Hmong immigrants in the US, African Americans in inner-city neighborhoods, and Native Americans. She is heavily involved in FAA’s Illinois Action Research. Her work and courses address issues of social justice, equity among minority peoples, engaging physical, social, economic and political aspects of the environment to address human health and wellbeing as well as the preservation of cultural heritage.

Brook Muller is Dean of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte College of Arts + Architecture. His research focuses on how site scale works of architecture can support broader scale ecological processes and the design implications of resilient urban water systems. With Behnisch & Partner Architects of Stuttgart, Germany, he served as co-project leader for the design of the National Institute for Forestry and Nature Research (IBN) in Wageningen, The Netherlands, a European Union pilot project for environmentally friendly building. Professor Muller is author of Ecology and the Architectural Imagination.

Hazem Rashed-Ali, thepanel moderator, is an associate professor of Architecture, University of Texas at San Antonio and President of ARCC. His research focuses on sustainable and high-performance architecture and urbanism. He is the recipient of several research grants both individually and as part of interdisciplinary collaborative teams. Examples of his projects include conducting a neighborhood sustainability assessment for the City of San Antonio, developing an augmented reality system for the teaching of passive energy and energy efficiency principles, and investigating the energy efficiency potential of historic homes in humid climates. In 2014, Professor Rashed-Ali was the recipient of the University of Texas System Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award.