Congratulations, Professor Lynne Dearborn!
Congratulations, Professor Lynne Dearborn!
Congratulations, Professor Lynne Dearborn!
Congratulations, Professor Lynne Dearborn!
ACSA 2024 Distinguished Professor Award - Professor Lynne Dearborn
ACSA 2024 Distinguished Professor Award - Professor Lynne Dearborn
The ACSA Distinguished Professor Award recognizes individuals that have had a positive, stimulating, and nurturing influence upon students.
Advocacy for equity and justice in the built environment is the guiding force of Lynne M. Dearborn’s forty-year career as an architect and educator, and as a leader in key national organizations such as ACSA and AIA. Through her change-focused tenure as president of ACSA and as a steadfast member of the AIA’s Design and Health Leadership Committee and the AIA-ACSA Design and Health Research Consortium, Lynne has brought awareness of the critical role the built environment plays in the every-day lives of all people. Her efforts in ACSA and the AIA to advance racial equity and wellbeing through design and organizational policy broadly impact students, educators, and professionals. Lynne is a scholar and educator who amplifies diverse worldviews and explicates power structures to influence professional and educational policymaking. Her research and public engagement with low-income and minority communities have been supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Fetzer Institute, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, HUD’s Office of Native American Programs, and Illinois Department of Public Health and she has authored over 150 publications and reports disseminating the results of her work. Her equity lens has influenced several thousand students at the University of Illinois through her role as teacher, mentor, and advisor. Because of her twenty years of community-engagement studios in historically under-resourced cities in the U.S. Midwest, Haiti, and São Tomé, community partners can imagine more livable communities for their residents and have secured vital infrastructure improvements in streets, sidewalks, sewers, parks, housing, and community spaces. Likewise, her foresight and energy in developing and teaching the University of Illinois’ Health and Wellbeing curriculum have transformed the perspective of several generations of architecture and planning alumni who are now empowered to make a difference in the lives of those with the least political, social, and economic capital in society.
Congratulations, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Professor Lynne Dearborn!
Congratulations, Assistant Professor Joseph Altshuler!
Congratulations, Assistant Professor Joseph Altshuler!
Congratulations, Assistant Professor Joseph Altshuler!
Congratulations, Assistant Professor Joseph Altshuler!
2024 ASCA Creative Achievement Award - Assistant Professor Joseph Altshuler
2024 ASCA Creative Achievement Award - Assistant Professor Joseph Altshuler
The ASCA Creative Achievement Award recognizes a specific creative achievement in teaching, design, scholarship, research, or service that advances architectural education.
Project: “Serious Play: Reimagining Children’s Playscapes, From Speculation to Fabrication”
Serious Play is a new graduate design program and community-engaged fabrication curriculum for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s semester-long residency program in Chicago. The program includes an Advanced Design Research Studio and a Fabrication Seminar that collectively explore contemporary playscapes—spaces where play and learning converge, and where architecture becomes an active character that sparks curiosity and care, nurtures physical and emotional risk, and strengthens multi-generational relationships. As an institutional lens aligned with this agenda, the program re-imagines the future of children’s museums. While conventional children’s museums typically operate as a container for discrete exhibits designed by others, this curriculum challenges students to transform children museum’s architecture into a dynamic and interactive installation of its own, where the normative dichotomy between architecture as container versus architecture as content is strategically dismantled.
The program brought together architecture and landscape architecture students, setting up interdisciplinary teams where playscapes seamlessly mediate between building- and landscape-oriented strategies engaged with specific Chicago neighborhoods. With an emphatic effort to empower the students to work closely with real-world community partners, stakeholders, and collaborators and to take advantage of the fact that students from Urbana-Champaign were spending a semester “abroad” in Chicago, Altshuler initiated creative working partnerships with cultural institutions (the Chicago Children’s Museum and Design Museum of Chicago), local fabricators (Building Brown Workshop), and a K-8 public school community (KIPP One Primary).
Outcomes of this creative achievement include an award-winning student design proposals for speculative children’s museums (recognized by multiple departments at University of Illinois and the AIA Chicago), a well-attended exhibition at the Design Museum of Chicago that broadcast research on the future of playscapes to broad audiences, and a fabricated permanent play structure installed in a local elementary school informed by a participatory process that engaged the school’s 4th students.
Congratulations, Assistant Professor Joseph Altshuler!
Congratulations, Associate Professor Kevin Erickson!
Congratulations, Associate Professor Kevin Erickson!
Congratulations, Associate Professor Kevin Erickson!
Congratulations, Associate Professor Kevin Erickson!
2024 ACSA Design Build Award - Associate Professor Kevin Erickson
2024 ACSA Design Build Award - Associate Professor Kevin Erickson
The ACSA Design Build honors the best practices in school-based design-build projects.
Project: “The Hip-Hop Xpress: Double Dutch Boom Bus”
The Hip-Hop Xpress is an internet-connected mobile classroom, recording studio, and performance venue that links communities across our state through a variety of programmed events and outreach initiatives. Inspired by George Washington Carver’s Jesup Wagon, Xpress travels to parks, community centers, schools, universities, and parking lots to spark connections among different generations, highlight Black cultural legacies, and invite young people to try new activities, all inspired by Hip Hop and its antecedents.
Our team undertook a multi-year process of engagement with community stakeholders, hosted participatory design events, and toured the emptied bus to test functionality. Three primary needs emerged that shaped the interior configuration: a gathering space for collaboration, a multipurpose workbench, and seating booths for focused work.
We envisioned the interior as a scaffolding that can evolve over time. Ten furniture pieces were developed with multiple functions: seating, storage, power supply, sound production, lighting, acoustic dampening, transportation safety, and overall durability considerations for a moving vehicle.
The bus is powered by a solar array, providing enough capacity for most interior functions – except subwoofers. The majority of materials were sourced within a 500-miles radius. Items removed during demolition were recycled, reused or will be incorporated into a future design-build project.
Over sixty students – freshman to doctoral – from music, architecture, engineering and business participated in a 3-credit seminar taught by faculty and community leaders. Our goal, bring a diverse group of individuals together, discuss hip-hop from different perspectives, and create a mobile laboratory. Youth from the Boys & Girls Club and other constituencies attended our weekly course in what we term as ‘communiversity’.
University students lead every aspect from: community engagement, design, materials research, procurement, fabrication, assembly, installation, trades coordination, fixtures & finishes, budget, and client transition. They were evaluated based on effort and achievement.
Congratulations, Associate Professor Kevin Erickson!
