SPEAKERS
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Natasha Iskander
New York University
Natasha N. Iskander, Associate Professor of Urban Planning and Public Policy, conducts research on the relationship between migration and economic development. She looks at the ways that immigration and the movement of people across borders can provide the basis for the creation of new knowledge and of new pathways for political change. She has published widely on these questions, looking specifically at immigration, skill, economic development, and worker rights.
Ana Maria Leon
University of Michigan
Ana María León is an architectural historian, she studies how spatial practices of power and resistance have shaped the modernity and coloniality of the Americas. León serves in the boards of GAHTC and SAH and is co-founder of several collectives laboring to broaden the reach of architectural history including Nuestro Norte es el Sur and the Settler Colonial City Project. She teaches at the University of Michigan where she holds appointments in the departments of History of Art, Romance Languages and Literatures, and Architecture.
Vernelle Noel
Georgia Institute of Technology
Vernelle A. A. Noel, Ph.D. is a design scholar, architect, artist, and Director of the Situated Computation + Design Lab. An Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech., her research examines traditional and digital practices, human-computer interaction, interdisciplinary creativity, and their intersections with society. She builds new expressions, tools, and methodologies to explore socio-cultural, and political aspects of computational design, and emerging technology for new reconfigurations of design practice, pedagogy, and publics. Her work has been funded by the Graham Foundation, Mozilla Foundation, and more. She is a 2021 DigitalFUTURES Awardee for exceptional research and scholarship in critical computational design
RESPONDENTS
INVITED RESPONDENTS
Erica Cochran Hameen
Carnegie Mellon University
Dr. Erica Cochran Hameen, Assoc AIA, NOMA, LEED AP is an Architectural Designer and Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, the Co-Director of the Center for Building Performance and Diagnostics (CBPD), Track Chair of the Doctor of Design Program and an Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). Dr Cochran Hameen also serves as the Board of Trustees Chair for the Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens and the Board of Directors Treasure for the Green Building Alliance. Erica holds a B.Arch from Virginia Tech, a MS in Sustainable Design and a Ph.D. in Building Performance & Diagnostics from CMU. Erica’s Architectural and Design expertise includes educational, media and broadcast, residential, community, and transportation facilities. Erica’s research is widely published and she leads global research projects focused on Equitable Sustainability, Indoor Environmental Quality (IEQ), and energy policy. Dr. Cochran Hameen holds multiple honors including the Pittsburgh Courier Women of Excellence Award, an AIA award for Diversity Recognition for the UDream program, and the 2021 AIA Pennsylvania Impact Designer of the Year.
Tao DuFour
Cornell University
Tao DuFour is an assistant professor of architecture at Cornell University. His work investigates questions of embodied spatial experience, intersubjective and intergenerational understandings of architecture, landscape and territory, and the ways in which these both constitute and are embedded in the historicity of environments. DuFour directs the Landscape and Urban Environmentalities Lab, an interdisciplinary collaborative research group that studies spatial and territorial relationships between cities and their hinterlands. DuFour’s current research focuses on the regional context of the Caribbean and Guianas. He holds a BArch from The Cooper Union and an MPhil and PhD in the history and philosophy of architecture from the University of Cambridge. He is the author of Husserl and Spatiality: A Phenomenological Ethnography of Space.
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA FACULTY RESPONDENTS
Laia Mogas Soldevilla
Assistant Professor of Architecture
Laia Mogas-Soldevila is an Assistant Professor of Graduate Architecture and Director of DumoLab Research at the Stuart Weitzman School of Design. Laia's research focuses on new material practices bridging science, engineering and the arts. Her pedagogy supports theory and applied methods understanding cultural, industrial, economical, and ecological aspects of materials and materialization in architecture. She has built scholarship over the past ten years reconsidering matter as a fundamental design driver and partnering with scientists to redesign it towards unprecedented capabilities. She holds an interdisciplinary doctorate bridging materials science, engineering, and design from Tufts University School of Engineering, two master's degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is a licensed architect with a minor in Fine Arts by the Polytechnic University of Catalonia School of Architecture.
William Braham
Professor of Architecture
William W. Braham, PhD, FAIA is a Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, where he previously served as Chair, and is currently Director of the MSD Environmental Building Design and of the Center for Environmental Building + Design. He has worked on energy and architecture for over 30 years as a designer, consultant, researcher, and author of numerous articles and books. He recently published Architecture and Systems Ecology: Thermodynamic Principles for Environmental Building Design, in three parts (2015). He also co-edited Energy Accounts: Architectural Representations of Energy, Climate, and the Future (2016), Architecture and Energy: Performance and Style (2013), and Rethinking Technology: A Reader in Architectural Theory (2007).
Sonja Duempelmann
Professor of Landscape Architecture
Sonja Dümpelmann is Professor at the University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design. Her research and writing sit squarely within the environmental and urban humanities. She is the author and editor of several books, most recently the award-winning Seeing Trees: A History of Street Trees in New York City and Berlin (YUP, 2019). She lectures internationally and has served as President of the Landscape History Chapter of the Society of Architectural Historians and as Senior Fellow in Garden and Landscape Studies at the Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, Washington DC.
Dr. Franca Trubiano
Associate Professor of Architecture
Dr. Franca Trubiano is associate professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, Graduate Group Chair of the doctoral program (2021-22), and a registered architect with l’Ordre des Architectes du Québec. Her research on “Fossil Fuels, the Building Industry, and Human Health” was sponsored by the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy. Amongst her book projects are the co-edited Women [Re]build: Stories, Polemics, and Futures (2019, ORO ar+d), the edited Design and Construction of High-Performance Homes: Building Envelopes, Renewable Energies and Integrated Practice (Routledge Press, 2012), the forthcoming single author Building Theories: Architecture as the Art of Building (Routledge, 2022), and the co-edited Bio/Matter/Techno/Synthetics: Design Futures for the More than Human (Actar, 2022). Franca was president of the Building Technology Educators Society in 2015 (BTES); a founding member of the editorial board of the journal Technology, Architecture and Design (TAD) in 2015-2016; and a member of the Journal of Architectural Education (JAE) (2013-2016).
Dorit Aviv
Assistant Professor of Architecture
Dorit Aviv, PhD, AIA, is Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design, where she directs the Thermal Architecture Lab, an interdisciplinary laboratory focused on the intersection of thermodynamics, architectural design, and material science. Her work examines how architectural materials and forms can impact airflows, energy interactions, and human health. She is a licensed architect and holds a PhD in architectural technology from Princeton University.
A recipient of a 2020 Holcim Award for Sustainable Design and Construction, Aviv’s current projects include a combined evaporative and radiative cooling prototype for desert climate, development of radiant cooling for hot-humid climates, a distributed environmental sensing network, and indoor environmental quality control and assessment technologies.
PAPER PRESENTERS
HISTORY / THEORY
Phillip M. Crosby
Temple University
Phillip M. Crosby is Adjunct Associate Professor of architecture and urbanism at Temple University. He was the Associate Editor of DIRT (MIT Press, 2012) and the co-author (with Kate Wingert-Playdon) of Library as Stoa: Public Space and Academic Mission in Snøhetta’s Charles Library (ORO Editions, 2021). His current research focuses on examining the relationship between the city and the cinema, with a particular focus on how cities are depicted in science fiction films. He holds a B.Des. from the University of Florida, an M.Arch. from Georgia Tech, and an M.S. from the University of Pennsylvania.
Patrick Jaojoco
Princeton University
Patrick Jaojoco is a Filipino American writer, organizer, and musician researching land use-based decolonization practices in solidarity with international peoples’ struggles. They organized the Decolonial Mapping Toolkit, a project that attempted to reframe colonial histories in public space; and have curated exhibitions and public programs independently and in arts organizations throughout New York. His writing has been published in exhibition catalogues including Mark Dion: Our Plundered Planet (2019) and Constructing Paradise (2017); and in Artforum, the Brooklyn Rail, and the Avery Review. He is currently a PhD student in the History and Theory of Architecture at Princeton University
Melissa Rovner
University of California, Los Angeles
Melissa Rovner is an Architect, educator, and historian living and working in Los Angeles. Her research focuses on the racialization of labor and discourses of progress that have historically underpinned uneven housing development. In teaching architecture history, Rovner seeks to challenge dominant narratives within the discipline, interrogate their imbrications with race, ethnicity, gender, and colonization, and introduce a more globally inclusive and equitable perspective to the discipline. She explores these topics as a Teaching Fellow and Doctoral Candidate in Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA.
Aparajita Santra
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
I am a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Architecture at UIUC. My specialization falls within the History and Theory concentration of the department. My research interests lie at the intersection of gender, subaltern urbanism of the global south while focusing on aspects of empowerment and right to the city. I have a masters in Urban Design and an undergraduate degree in Architecture, both of which were completed in India. Before the Ph.D. I was involved as a researcher and consultant with a social organization in India under UNESCO and worked on gender, culture and sustainability issues for rural communities
Qiran Shang
University of Pennsylvania
I am a Ph.D. student in history and theory of architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. I received my MArch (2019) and BArch (2016) from Southeast University in China before coming to Penn. My research interest focuses on how urban space and architecture engage in the power dynamics embedded in everyday practice, especially leisure activities. My dissertation studies the spatial history of popular dancing in the 20th century, and I am currently looking at case studies in three contexts, including the 1920s Berlin, the 1960s San Francisco, and the 1980s Beijing.
PROJECT
Alex Blanchard
Newcastle University School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape
I am a doctoral candidate researching the implications of an architect’s tools for their practice. While computational methods hold capacity to determine the designer’s limits of possibility, I seek to re-construct them toward dialogical alternatives. Through a reading of the nature of digitality and the materialisation of its processes within entangled technical and cultural milieu, I explore how previous manifestations of the digital may be gathered to form a critique of the present.
Mohamed Ismail
MIT
Mohamed Ismail is a PhD Candidate in Building Technology at MIT and a 2020 Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow. He is trained as both a civil engineer (BS, Duke University) and architect (MArch, University of Virginia), and studies the potential for structural and material optimization in the alleviation of housing insecurity in the Global South. At MIT, Mohamed serves as a Diversity Ambassador for the Office of Graduate Education, and works with the National Organization for Minority Architecture Students (NOMAS) to support minority students and represent their needs in and out of the discipline.
Virginia Melnyk
Tongji University College of Architecture and Urban Planning
Virginia Melnyk is a computational and material designer and researcher with a background in Architectural design and craft. She is currently a PhD student in the DigitalFUTURES International PhD program at Tongji University; Advisor Philip Yuan. She graduated with a Master of Architecture from Weitzmann School of Design 2010. She also holds a Bachelor of Science in Architecture from the University at Buffalo 2007.
Her research interests consist of material design with textiles, tensegrity and architecture. Her wide range of experience in Digital Fabrication, computational design, craft and feminist culture all are integrated into her research interests. She explores applications for temporary light-weight structures within a contemporary architectural context. Her work responds to environment, social and contextual elements within the design aspects. Her work balances between digital and craft working with her hands equally as much as CNC knitting machines and other digital fabrication tools.
She previously worked at Studio Pei Zhu in Beijing where she had experience working on large scale architectural projects. She volunteers as a working member of US Architects Declare, Steering Committee member and Associate Director at DigitalFUTURES, and Faculty Mentor at Architecture if Free. She is currently employed as a full time research assistant at University of Michigan Taubman School of Architecture .
Kyle Stover
UCLA
I'm a writer, historian, and architect currently based in Los Angeles. I hold a B.S. Arch. from the University of Cincinnati, a M. Arch from Yale University, and am ABD PhD at UCLA. My dissertation Intangible Property: Architecture, Ornament and Insurance reconsiders the history of modern architecture through the usefulness of ornament manufactured in Lambeth from 1769 - 1821. I previously practiced architecture in New York City at Asymptote Architecture and Acconci Studio where I was augmented by the gig economy before starting my own research practice. My work has been exhibited at MoMA New York, the New York Transit Museum, Land of Tomorrow Gallery, Yale Gallery, and has been published in YSOA Press, CreativeSpace Independent Publishers, and Moleskin.
Zenovia Toloudi
Dartmouth College Studio Art
Zenovia Toloudi, D.Des., is an architect. artist, and Assoc. Professor of Studio Art at Dartmouth College. Zenovia has exhibited internationally, including at the Biennale in Venice, Le Lieu Unique in Nantes, France, the Center for Architecture in New York, the Boston Architectural College, the Athens Byzantine Museum, the Thessaloniki Biennale of Contemporary Art and the Onassis Cultural Center in Athens. Research Fellow at Art, Culture, and Technology Program at MIT, and a Fulbright Fellow, Zenovia received her doctorate from Harvard's GSD, a M.Arch. from the Illinois Institute of Technology, and a diploma in Architectural Engineering from Aristotle University.
TECHNOLOGY
Debanjali Banerjee
University of Cincinnati
Debanjali Banerjee is a Ph.D. student in the School of Architecture and Interior Design at the University of Cincinnati. Her research focuses on the urban heat island effect, heat vulnerability, and building energy use to gain insight into indoor overheating, energy burden during summer months, and heatwaves. She is particularly interested in understanding shared patterns and potential causal factors in low-cost vulnerable housing with present-day spatial patterns of inequitable exposure to intra-urban heat. Her doctorate work is focused on developing a new method and approach to study Heat Vulnerability Index.
Anwar Basunbul
University of Pennsylvania
Anwar holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Effat University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and a Master of Sustainable Design from Thomas Jefferson university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Prior to the Weitzman School, she taught as a lecturer at Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, where her teaching mainly focused on sustainability and building technology. Before that, she practiced as an architectural designer in a firm in the US. As a graduate student at the Weitzman School, she hopes to expand her research in the fields of environmental building design, her research focuses on natural cooling strategies in hot-humid climates.
Abhishek Mehrotra
Ajou University, South korea
I am pursuing a PhD program in the Department of Architecture, Ajou University in the field of adaptive facade control and building energy optimization under the supervision of Professor Hwang Yi. Earlier, I did my graduation and post-graduation in Physics from M.J.P Rohilkhand University, India and Master of Technology (M.Tech) in Energy Studies from Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. I did my M.Tech dissertation in “Solar PV Design and Implementation aspects” and after the M.Tech i worked in an organization for 8 years in the field of renewable energy product development. Currently, I am planning to develop Artificial Intelligence based control for building facades for energy saving.
Mandi Pretorius
Yale School of Architecture
Mandi Pretorius is an architect and Ph.D. Candidate with the Yale School of Architecture, and Yale School of the Environment. Her research investigates the interfacing biophysical and socio-cognitive conditions between human, architectural, and environmental systems at the building envelope. Her research focuses on how the building envelope makes provision for the multiple roles of water ( in vapor and liquid phases) as a thermodynamic & photocatalytic medium, a human need, and equitable scarcity, and as a biophilic affordance in the built environment. She received her M.Arch (Prof) from the University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa, and an MSc. in Architectural Science from the Center for Architecture Science and Ecology (CASE), Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), New York.
Tasneem Tariq
Pennsylvania State University
Tasneem is an energetic and creative individual, who loves to solve critical problems with analytical thinking. Currently, she is pursuing her MS. in Architecture at Pennsylvania State University with excellent performance. She has completed her B.Arch and M.Arch from BUET, the leading university of Bangladesh, and achieved three prestigious scholarships- Vrooman Memorial Postgraduate Scholarship, Ahsanur Rahman Gold Medal, and Sorfuddin Scholarship. Tasneem is a LEED AP, Assistant Professor at BUET, and has been taking environmental courses both at the undergraduate and postgraduate levels since 2010. Tasneem has eight peer-reviewed publications and won first and third prizes in highly competitive national design competitions in Bangladesh.
ORGANIZERS
Sara Alajmi
University of Pennsylvania
Sarah Saad Alajmi is a PhD student in History and Theory of Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research examines the interrelationship between architecture and ecology in Arabia in the late 19th and 20th centuries, where she focuses on sedentarization processes and modern settlements in the Arabian desert. Sarah obtained her professional Bachelor of Architecture from Kuwait University in 2017 and she holds a post-professional Master of Architecture II from Yale University. Sarah practiced as a junior architect in Kuwait and has taught at Kuwait University and Yale University. She is the recipient of the Kuwait University Master’s and PhD scholarship. Sarah’s work is concerned with transience, informality, domesticity, and poetry in contested urban landscapes.
Mostafa Akbari
University of Pennsylvania
Mostafa Akbari is a computational designer and researcher with a unique background in architectural design and computation. He is currently a PhD student in Computational Design and Advanced Manufacturing at the University of Pennsylvania. He previously earned a Master of Science in Design in Advanced Architectural Design (MSD-AAD) at the Weitzman School, where he also received one of the highest merit-based scholarships. He received his Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Tehran and a Master of Architecture from the University of Shahid Beheshti.
His Research interests consist of structural form finding utilizing 3D Graphic Statics and specially focused on Shellular Minimal Surfaces, which is a novel surface-based design language in the subject of Graphic Statics. He is also interested and has done research for many years in Digital Fabrication background, computational design, and human-computer interaction. He tries to explore contemporary architecture’s nascent opportunities to rethink tectonics and material systems within design due to the convergence of innovative developments in Robotic Fabrication, Computation, Mathematics, and Material Science. He has collaborated with renowned international offices such as Gensler and has design and construction experience as a freelance architect as well.
Anwar Basunbul
University of Pennsylvania
Anwar holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Effat University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, and a Master of Sustainable Design from Thomas Jefferson university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Prior to Weitzman School, she taught as a lecturer at university of building technology in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, her teaching experience mainly lie in sustainability and building technologies. Before that, she practiced as an Architectural designer in an architectural firm in USA.
As a graduate student at Weitzman School, she hopes to expand her research under the primary field Environmental Design, her research interest is natural cooling strategies at extreme climate which will be investigated through field monitoring of series of case studies in Hot-Humid climates. Her research will investigate the luminous and thermal environments in the chosen buildings.
The larger purpose of this research is to investigate and understand the nature of the interaction between the climate of the site, the building form, and the occupants' living patterns
Rami Kanafani
University of Pennsylvania
Rami is a second-year PhD student in the History and Theory of Architecture program at the University of Pennsylvania. His work considers the historical relationship of architecture and plants with a particular focus on the rationalization of plant growth through symbolic motifs, organizational principles, and scientific measurement. He has been looking closely at plant labs in the post-World War II American context and the persistence of organic principles in 20th century American architecture. Rami received his Post-Professional Masters degree from Princeton University, where his work was awarded the Suzanne Kolarik Underwood Prize and the School of Architecture’s History and Theory Prize. His Princeton thesis investigated the spatial implications of the urban ecology of The Green Line in Beirut and reimagined the lost human-plant relations in a post-Lebanese Civil War context. Rami’s scholarly interests center on organicism, human-plant relations, environmental history, and the field-lab border.
M.C. Overholt
University of Pennsylvania
M.C. is a first-year Architecture Ph.D. student in the History and Theory track and a recent graduate of the Master of Environmental Design (M.E.D.) program at Yale School of Architecture. Her Master’s thesis, titled “Space-Praxis: Towards a Feminist Politics of Design,” explored an array of feminist spatial interventions into the built environment from the 1970s to present day. The project was positioned to challenge the disciplinary boundaries of ‘architecture’ by attending to self-help design principles made manifest in women’s abortion clinics, community centers, co-operative housing projects, and community land trusts. Her scholarly interests include Black feminist theory and women of color feminisms, histories of sexuality, affect theory, and entanglements between architecture and social scientific expertise in the last half of the 20th century.
Antonios Thodis
University of Pennsylvania
Antonios Thodis is a fourth-year PhD student in Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania. He acquired his diploma of Architect-Engineer (2012) from Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. He holds a master’s degree (2015) from Architectural Association’s Design Research Lab program -AA DRL- in London and a master’s degree (2018) from Harvard Graduate School of Design, MDes History and Philosophy of Design program. His scholarly research interests include modern architecture and urbanism across varied regions, modernity’s interpretation of ancient peoples’ art and architecture, the origins of architecture, the discourse and debates within early modernism over the status of ornament and their reappearance in the digital and post digital period. His dissertation asks about the meaning(s) of the Orders in the Archaic and Classical Greece. The questions about meaning to be asked of the ancient material are elaborated in a section that examines early 20th century study materials; specifically, the art and architecture of fin-de-siècle Vienna.