Architecture Commons^™

Visualizing The Operative And Managing Complexity: Communicating The Design-Fabrication Feedback Loop With The International Tile Industry, Josh Vermillion

Creative Collaborations

School of Architecture faculty members Joshua Vermillion and Paul Morrison led a multi-disciplinary group of students from Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Theater in a design-build elective, sponsored entirely by companies in the tile and coverings industry. The key to these sorts of collaborations between industry and academe is to see the production, fabrication, and assembly process as something that can inform design, and as a result, the design can augment production by strategic design decision-making. This feedback loop, connecting both ends of the design-production continuum, can yield interesting design research questions. One such question arose repeatedly throughout this semester of …

Robotics In Architecture <> Robotic Architecture: Why Can’T A Building Be As Smart As A Car?, Josh Vermillion

Creative Collaborations

The built environment is rich with opportunities for embedding and integrating digital technologies and sensors to create responsive and adaptable systems—to become smarter. This poster outlines selected moments from a thirteen-year body of work in research, design, and prototyping of responsive systems that act spatially with the environment at installation scale.

Robotics, sensing, physical computing, and digital fabrication are all topics that have been prioritized by U.S. funding programs such as the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Education. This poster presents the start of a framework--based around the concept of tinkering--for introducing these systems …

Iterating The Design Process Using Ai Diffusion Models, Josh Vermillion

Creative Collaborations

These studies span research and creative work to interrogate the generative capacity of text-to-image diffusion models that leverage artificial intelligence to produce architectural concepts, ideas, and imagery. These systems can generate an enormous amount of imagery in a very short amount of time based entirely from the written word, and we are still just beginning to understand how these digital tools might augment and/or disrupt, both, the design process, and design pedagogy within the discipline of architecture.

These AI models occupy a quickly evolving technology space with tremendous implications for how we design, as well as how we visualize—and verbalize—our …

Archaeology Of The International Space Station, Justin Walsh, Alice Gorman, Wendy Salmond

Art Faculty Data Sets

The explicit goal of the International Space Station Archaeological Project (ISSAP) is to provide an understanding of material culture as a key component of life in space, on par with the research by biomedical and psychological scholars that has been ongoing since the 1960s. We take as our inspiration a phrase first used in the National Academy of Sciences report Human Factors in Long-Duration Spaceflight, which described a crewed spacecraft as “a microsociety in a miniworld” (Lindsley 1972, 23). One of our primary methods is the cataloguing of people and elements of material culture (objects and built spaces) from photographs …

Covid-10, Healthcare Interior Design + Provider Experience - How Does Your Space Work For You?, Ruth E.P. Deibler

Graduate Research Posters

The lack of research on healthcare staff experience and interior design of the spaces they work in is evident. A focus on staff perspective is needed, particularly staff who navigated the COVID-19 pandemic. This research seeks to capture those stories to develop further research in order to improve staff experience. The initial phase of this mixed-methods approach is a survey. Hypothetically, by placing providers at the center of qualitative research related to healthcare interior design, we can better understand existing healthcare spaces. Ideally, we can develop additional evidence-based, human-centered solutions to transform interior environments in healthcare.

The 20-year Women’s Health …

Community Health Interventions To Reduce The Burden Of Radon-Related Lung Cancer, Benjamin Weaver

Family Medicine Clerkship Student Projects

Exposure to radon is the second leading cause of lung cancer in the United States. One in seven homes in Vermont has elevated levels of radon, but most patients are unaware of radon as a risk factor for lung cancer or that radon testing and mitigation services are available to them. To promote increased testing and mitigation of radon we screened patients presenting to a Family Medicine practice in Vermont about whether they had had these services done in their home. We also developed a patient education resource for providers to give to patients who had more questions about radon …

Affordances And The Potential For Architecture, Bob Condia, Andrea Jelić, Harry Francis Mallgrave, Sarah Robinson, James R. Hamilton

NPP eBooks

Affordances and the Potential for Architecture divulges our engagement with the built environment is a deeply rooted experience. In a biological and philosophical sense, it reveals that the mind is inseparable from the body, just as the body is inseparable from its environment. The world displays itself before us as rife with potential movements, activities, engagements, for which we continuously rehearse the myriad possibilities and choose the best course of action in the moment. It defines our phenomenological natures through this readiness-for-action, and thereby suggests we will improve the spaces, buildings, and landscapes that we inhabit by mastering how we …

Kastra: Architecture And Culture In The Aegean Archipelago, Constantine E. Michaelides

Books and Monographs

Final version of Kastra: Architecture and Culture in the Aegean Archipelago, published Summer 2018. “Kastra: Architecture and Culture in the Aegean Archipelago,” is a sequel to “The Aegean Crucible: Tracing Vernacular Architecture in Post-Byzantine Centuries,” published in 2004. “The Aegean Crucible” focused on the vernacular architecture of the Aegean archipelago, while “Kastra” focuses on the collective fortification, a building type vital to survival in the region, during the thirteenth-to- eighteenth-century period. “Kastra” was also written on the conviction that what we identify today as the vernacular architecture of the Aegean islands emerged from the building of Kastra, the medieval collective …

Re-Live Downtown Pine Bluff, Community Design Center

Project Reports

Once a prosperous cultural urban center in the Mississippi River delta, but now the nation’s second fastest shrinking city, Pine Bluff (population: 42,700) is Arkansas’ Detroit. Indeed, a study of black wealth conducted by famed sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois in 1899 found that Pine Bluff had the fourth highest rate of black wealth in the nation behind Charleston, Richmond, and New York City. The school’s community design center prepared a downtown revitalization plan, Re-Live Downtown Pine Bluff, a housing-first initiative focused on building neighborhoods around downtown “centers of strength”. While the revitalization approach is triaged around a …

Center For Farm And Food System Entrepreneurship, Community Design Center

Project Reports

The average age of the American farmer is 58. Since communities are not reproducing the next generation of farmers, universities are establishing training centers to model new concepts and technologies in farming. The Farmers Training Center is both an immersive program in the rhythms of farm life and a public facility for hosting gatherings that celebrate value-added food products. Part of the University of Arkansas’ farm operations near campus, the center is the public face of agriculture where farmers and the public meet. Student farmers learn by farming, from organic vegetable production in fields and greenhouses, to machine repair, marketing, …

Willow Heights Livability Improvement Plan, Community Design Center

Project Reports

Willow Heights is a 43-year old public housing complex owned by the Fayetteville Housing Authority (FHA) within the federal public housing portfolio administered by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). The school’s design center was commissioned by a local foundation to study an alternative to the FHA’s plan to sell the downtown Willow Heights complex to a developer of high-income housing, necessitating relocation of low-income residents to another complex outside of downtown. Using equity as a driver of decision making, the studio introduced scenario planning to organize reluctant stakeholders in considering transformations to the five-acre complex.

New Beginnings Homeless Transition Village, Community Design Center

Project Reports

More than three million Americans experience homelessness annually. Emergency shelter capacity is limited while local governments are unable to provide even temporary housing. Informal housing involving interim self-help solutions are now popular adaptive actions for obtaining shelter despite nonconformance with city codes. Unfortunately, most informal solutions have resulted in objectionable tent cities and squatter campgrounds where the local response has simply been to move the problem around. Our homeless transition village plan prototypes a shelter-first solution using a kit-of-parts that can be replicated in other communities. Village design reconciles key gaps between informal building practices and formal sector regulations, creating …

The Freeman Performing Arts Center, Community Design Center

Project Reports

The Freeman Performing Arts Center marks the threshold between prairie and civic life. This small agricultural community of 1,300 has an outsized Anabaptist music tradition recognized nationally. The 37,000 sf hall-type building unifies a miscellaneous collection of public buildings and landscapes at the southwest corner of the town’s one-mile grid. The center’s massing projects an ascending system of familiar gable roofs, which absorb the fly tower into a composition reflective of pragmatic building forms. The principal face of the building is a translucent curtain wall that illuminates interior massing—a beacon on the prairie. A thru-Porch celebrates transitions between the prairie’s …

Ralph Bunche Agape Neighborhood Vision Plan, Community Design Center

Project Reports

The Ralphe Bunche Neighborhood Vision Plan provides a general design framework to spur reinvestment in this 100-year old historic African-American neighborhood in Benton, AR. The plan aggregates attainable housing (under $100,000/unit) around two neighborhood parks―one existing, and one proposed. Since the city cannot afford comprehensive street and drainage improvements to accommodate redevelopment, the proposal retrofits streets and open space with Low Impact Development (LID) landscapes to remediate urban stormwater runoff. Housing unit types between 1,000 and 1,750 square feet are amassed around these LID landscapes and amenitized with screened rooms, balconies, terraces, and multiple-height living spaces.

Macarthur Park Master Plan, Community Design Center

Project Reports

Like waterfronts and transit stops, parks leverage value in urban areas. While much recent attention has been given to the signature mega-park, the value of the small-scale neighborhood park in reinventing the city has been overlooked. Once connecting neighborhoods of differing character, and sponsoring more than 80 residential structures along its edges, the historic MacArthur Park at the edge of downtown Little Rock is radically underutilized as an urban neighborhood asset. Severed from its neighborhoods along two edges by interstate construction in the 1960s, this moribund 40-acre municipal park is left with only 16 residential structures along its frontage. The …

Porchscapes: Between Neighborhood Watershed And Home, Community Design Center

Project Reports

Located on the Ozark Plateau, this 43-unit housing development is a LEED-ND (Neighborhood Development) pilot project to be built for $60/sf plus $2.3 million in infrastructure costs. The studio objective is to design a demonstration project that combines affordability with best environmental practices as designated by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC). Porchscapes is a pioneering Low Impact Development (LID) project funded under the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Section 319 Program for Nonpoint Source Pollution. LID manages stormwater runoff through ecological engineering technologies. A contiguous network of rainwater gardens, bioswales, infiltration trenches, sediment filter strips, green streets, and wet meadows …

Maine Guide To Energy Efficient Residential Construction : A Manual Of Accepted Practices, State Of Maine Energy Conservation Division

Maine Collection

Maine Guide to Energy Efficient Residential Construction : A Manual of Accepted Practices

State of Maine Energy Conservation Division, Department of Economic and Community Development, 59 State House Station, Augusta, Maine 04333-0059

Second Edition - November, 1997

Contents: Dedication / Acknowledgements / Introduction / Part 1. Summary of Maine's Residential Energy Standards / Part 2. Siting and Initial Design Considerations / Part 3. Important Considerations for the Design Phase / Part 4. Recommended Construction Practices / Appendixes

The Modern Defenses Of The Coast Of Maine, 1891 - 1945 (Vol.1), Joel W. Eastman

Maine Collection

The Modern Defenses of the Coast of Maine, 1891 - 1945 (Vol.1)

by Joel W. Eastman.

Contents: Preface and Acknowledgements, I. History, II. Inventory of Sites and Structures, III. Evaluation of Specific Sites and Structures, IV. Appendices, The Author.

Prepared for Maine Historical Preservation Commission, Augusta, Maine

October 31, 1988

The Modern Defenses Of The Coast Of Maine, 1891 - 1945 (Vol. 2), Joel W. Eastman

Maine Collection

The Modern Defenses of the Coast of Maine, 1891 - 1945 (Vol. 2) - Annexes.

by Joel W. Eastman

Contents: Annex 1 -- Maps of Forts, Reservations and Locations., Annex 2 -- Representative Batteries and Ordnance., Annex 3 -- Plans of Representative Structures., Annex 4 -- Photographs of Representative Structures.

Prepared for Maine Historic Preservation Commission, Augusta, Maine

October 23, 1988

Maine Guide To Museums And Historic Homes, Peter D. Bachelder (Ed.)

Maine Collection

Maine Guide to Museums and Historic Homes

Peter D. Bachelder, Editor - Fifth Edition

"A Publication of The Maine Publicity Bureau In Cooperation with the Maine Historic Preservation Commission, 1984-85".

The Forts Of Maine, 1607-1945: An Archaeological And Historical Survey, Robert L. Bradley Ph.D

Maine Collection

The Forts of Maine, 1607-1945: An Archaeological and Historical Survey

by Robert L. Bradley, Ph.D. - Maine Historic Preservation Commission

This booklet was co-published in September, 1981 by the Maine Historic Preservation Commission and the Maine Bureau of Parks and Recreation, with Federal funds provided by the Commission through the National Park Service, Department of the Interior, matched by State funds provided by the Bureau of Parks and Recreation. Earle G. Shettleworth, Jr., State Historic Preservation Officer

The Maine Competition: Architectural Design For Low-Cost Housing, Maine State Planning Office

Maine Collection

The Maine Competition: Architectural Design for Low-Cost Housing - Submissions - October 1976.

Sponsoring Agencies: Allen Pease, Director, State Planning Office; Genevieve Gelder, Director, State Housing Authority; Evan Richert, Sam Ely Community Services Corp.

"The Competition was funded in part by grants from the Maine State Commission on the Arts and Humanities and a HUD Comprehensive Planning and Assistance Grant."

Maine Granite Quarries And Prospects, John R. Rand

Maine Collection

Maine Granite Quarries and Prospects : Minerals Resources Index No.2

John R. Rand, State Geologist - Maine Geological Survey

Department of Economic Development, Augusta, Maine : May 1, 1958.

Contents: Introduction / Acknowledgements / Explanatory Considerations / Selected Bibliography / Granite Quarries and Prospects -- Alphabetical Index / Granite Quarries and Prospects -- Country-Township Index / Buildings and Structures Built of Maine Granites / Granite Quarries and Prospects-Map Index (missing).

Maine Forts, Henry E. Dunnack

Maine Collection

Maine Forts by Henry E. Dunnack, State Librarian.

Foreword by Percival P. Baxter, Govenor of Maine, State Capitol, Augusta - September 1, 1924.

Sections include: Introduction, Fort Machias, Fort Knox, Fort St.George's, Fort Edgecomb, Forts Popham and Baldwin, North and South Sugar Loaf Islands, Fort McClary, Indians and Their Wars, Fortifications in Maine , List of Old Forts.

Account Of Services Performed And Money Due Ignatius Goulding, 1783 And 1788, Worcester, Massachusetts., Worcester County, Ignatius Goulding

Broadus R. Littlejohn, Jr. Manuscript and Ephemera Collection

Debit account detailing money due Ignatius Goulding by Worcester County for services performed and expenses incurred.