Architectural Engineering Commons^™

Earthquake Resistant Buildings, Admin Stem For Success

STEM for Success Showcase

Students learn about earthquakes and engineering by building a structure that can survive an earthquake.

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 …

Fractal Dimension As Objective Function In A Genetic Algorithm For Application In Architectural Design, John Charles Driscoll

Systems Science Friday Noon Seminar Series

One of the goals of The Green New Deal Resolution reads, “upgrading all existing buildings in the United States and building new buildings to achieve maximal energy efficiency, water efficiency, safety, affordability, comfort, and durability, including through electrification.”

How can this realistically be done given the sheer number of buildings in the United States? This presents a ‘wicked’ problem that calls out for a systems approach. This is also, in essence, a design problem. As data scientists we are used to using models to analyze data but there is another aspect to these models that can be used not to …

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 …

The Steel Yard, Architecture Department, Sculpture Department, Bruner Foundation

Rudy Bruner Award | 30 Years of Urban Excellence

The Steel Yard redeveloped a historic steel fabrication facility into a campus for arts education, job training, and small-scale manufacturing in Providence, Rhode Island. The 3.5-acre property in the city’s Industrial Valley required extensive environmental remediation to meet regulatory requirements while retaining the industrial urban character of the site. The Steel Yard offers classes, workforce training, and fabrication space for local artists, creating an industrial arts incubator where they can share ideas, materials, and space. It has become a center for creative activity, bridging the gap between the traditional arts community on the affluent east side of Providence with manufacturing …

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 …

Habitat Trails . . . A Manual For Affordable Green Neighborhood Development, Community Design Center

Project Reports

Habitat Trails is a green affordable neighborhood development consisting of 17 Habitat for Humanity homes. The site is designed as a sponge to work in accord with existing hydrological drainage, catchment, and recharge patterns. Stormwater runoff is retained and treated through a contiguous network of bioswales, infiltration trenches, stormwater gardens, sediment filter strips, and a constructed wet meadow. The integration of a treatment landscape with open space substitutes an ecologically-based stormwater management system for the expensive curb-gutter-pipe solution in civil infrastructure.

The Providence River Relocation Project, Architecture Department, Bruner Foundation

Rudy Bruner Award | 30 Years of Urban Excellence

The Providence River Relocation project in Rhode Island’s capital city redirected rivers, overhauled transit infrastructure, and created a new riverfront downtown. Thirty years in the making, the relocation of the Woonasquatucket and Moshassuck rivers, construction of a new rail station, highway interchanges, and twelve bridges restored historical links among Providence’s Capital Center, College Hill, and downtown. The project improved traffic flow in and through downtown and added pedestrian-friendly spaces, including 1.5 miles of river walks, along with a new urban park including a restaurant, amphitheater, fountain, and boat landing.

Redirecting the rivers created new, marketable commercial land without demolishing …

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 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."