ARCC James Haeker Distinguished Leadership Award

Amos Rapoport is a psychologist, professor, architect, and founding figure in Environment-Behavior Studies (EBS). He has authored over 200 academic publications in this field, and his works have been translated into several languages, including French, Spanish, German, Persian, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. He has held honorable and visiting positions at numerous universities globally and is a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Prof. Rapoport has taught at prestigious institutions such as the University of Melbourne, the University of California, Berkeley, University College London, and the University of Sydney. From 1972 until his retirement in 2001, he was a distinguished professor at the School of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. His primary aim was to underscore the significance of culture in the built environment and architecture, a theme particularly evident in his 1969 book “House Form and Culture.” He has also held visiting appointments in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Israel, Mexico, Puerto Rico, India, Switzerland, Turkey, and the U.K.

Rapoport’s work primarily focuses on cultural variables, cross-cultural studies, and the development and synthesis of theories. His influential book “House Form and Culture” delves into how culture, human behavior, and the environment influence house form.

Mary Kihl Distinguished Service Award

Philip D. Plowright, Ph.D. NCARB, is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Design in the College of Architecture and Design at Lawrence Technological University. He is a registered Architect in the State of Michigan and Editor-in-Chief of the architecture research journal, ENQ, published by the Architectural Research Centers Consortium. His research focuses on cognitive semantics, social semiotics, embodied processes, and cognitive methodology in relation to spatialized contexts. His most recent book, Urban Design Made by Humans (2023), was co-authored with Dr. Anirban Adhya and addressed embodied concepts at the core of how humans understand and make sense of the built environments at an urban scale. His previous books are Making Architecture Through Being Human: A Handbook of Design Ideas (2020) which addressed spatial semantics, and Revealing Architectural Design: Methods, Frameworks & Tools (2014), an exploration of the intellectual history of architectural design methodologies. These join more than thirty-five articles and book chapters on topics ranging from theoretical issues of wilderness to sustainable development, spatial analysis, conceptual metaphor, and design competitions. Plowright works across and publishes in multiple disciplines, applying research processes from cognitive sciences and discourse analysis to engage issues of the built environment.

ARCC Book Award

Dr. Ming Hu is an Associate Professor at the School of Architecture and the College of Engineering, University of Notre Dame, USA. She is also the Associate Dean for Research at the School of Architecture. Her expertise as a Building Scientist and Environmental Engineering Researcher encompasses extensive practical and theoretical experience in decarbonizing the built environment, aiming to mitigate its environmental footprint and human health impacts. Specifically, she investigates the life cycle environmental impacts associated with building technologies and policies, as well as how community and societal priorities can be better incorporated into decision-making processes. Her research methods encompass life cycle assessment, energy modeling, computer vision, and complex relationship modeling (SEM). Three specific research areas are:

• • life cycle environmental impacts associated with construction activities
  • Embodied carbon associated with building materials
  • Health risks associated with housing condition

Mid-Career Award

Gundula Proksch is an Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Washington in Seattle. She is the founding director of the Circular City and Living Systems Lab, an interdisciplinary research group investigating transformative strategies for sustainable urban futures. Her research investigates the built environment integration of living systems, urban food systems, and the application of circular city principles, with a focus on aquaponics, Controlled Environment Agriculture (CEA), urban agriculture, and Engineered Living Materials (ELMs).

Professor Proksch is the principal investigator (PI) of the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded research project CITYFOOD, which investigates the urban integration of aquaponics alongside an international research consortium and of the UW Belmont Forum-funded Aquaponics Optimization group with seven international partner teams. She is also a Co-PI of the NSF EFRI ELiS grant on Engineered Living Material for the built environment. Her book Creating Urban Agricultural Systems: An Integrated Approach to Design (Routledge, 2016) is the first sourcebook on approaching urban agriculture from a systems perspective. Professor Proksch’s interdisciplinary research builds on her professional practice in Europe and the United States with architects David Chipperfield in London and Richard Meier, Stan Allen, and Roger Duffy of SOM in New York City.

ARCC New Researcher Award

Kateryna Malaia, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Utah. She studies the evolution of quotidian architecture and politics of monument demolition and construction in times of social change through the lenses of cultural practices and material culture, particularly in relation to the collapse of the USSR. As part of her interest in change, she also examines architectural transformations brought forth by housing insecurity in the United States and beyond. Malaia’s writing has been published in venues including East/West: Journal of Ukrainian Studies, PLATFORM, Architectural Histories, and the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians. Her first book Taking the Soviet Union Apart Room by Room: Domestic Architecture Before and After 1991 was published with NIUP/Cornell University Press in 2023. Together with Philipp Meuser, she is working on a catalogue of mass-built housing series in Ukraine to be released by DOM Publishers in 2024.

ARCC Dissertation Award

Farzad Hashemi currently serves as an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA). He received a Ph.D. in Architecture from the Pennsylvania State University, with a focus on Sustainability. In his doctoral research, Hashemi introduced a novel methodology that couples Local Climate Zones (LCZs) with the Urban Weather Generator (UWG) to create climate data specifically designed for urban environments to accurately reflect the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effects. This methodology aims to surpass the limitations of Typical Meteorological Year (TMY) data, which is generally gathered from open spaces such as airports and often fails to capture the specific climatic conditions of urban neighborhoods. Utilizing this methodology, Hashemi generated a series of urban-centric climate data for seven U.S. cities, each located in a distinct climate zone. This modified data was applied in energy simulations for commercial and residential building prototypes provided by the International Energy Conservation Code (IECC), offering a detailed evaluation of how the UHI effect influences energy consumption in buildings. Hashemi’s work is dedicated to providing architects and urban planners with a more accurate workflow for evaluating and reducing urban buildings’ energy demands, steering towards more sustainable urban development.

ARCC Research Incentive Award

Annicia Streete, M.Arch. is an Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture at Louisiana State University. Her academic and professional background is multi-disciplinary, where she received a Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering with an emphasis in Structures from the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology and a Master of Architecture from the University of Colorado, Denver. Her research situates within studies of Afrofuturism, focusing on heritage documentation and building technology practices within African Diasporic communities throughout the Caribbean, Latin America, and Southern Louisiana. She has exhibited at the Colorado History Center where she presented “Explorations in Afrofuturism” as part of the “Building Denver: Where Corners Meet” exhibition. Branches of her research include documentation using terrestrial and drone 3D Laser Scanning, and studies in Festival Architecture and Technology. Annicia serves as a co-chair for the EDUCATE pillar of the National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA) and is a founding member of the Colorado professional chapter of NOMA.

 

 

 

Brendan Harmon, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture at Louisiana State University. He received a Master of Landscape Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, a Master of Philosophy in Geography and the Environment from the University of Oxford, and a PhD in Design from North Carolina State University. He has expertise in computational design, geographic information systems, and lidar and drone data analytics. His research interests include remote sensing for heritage conservation. Brendan has experience digitizing cultural landscapes using terrestrial laser scanning and unmanned aerial systems.

Nicholas Serrano, Ph.D. is an Assistant Professor in the College of Design Construction and Planning at the University of Florida. Nicholas previously taught at the Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture at Louisiana State University where he held the Neil Odenwald Professorship. He has a Bachelor of Science in horticulture from North Carolina State University, a Master of Landscape Architecture from Ball State University, and a Ph.D. in the design program at North Carolina State University. His main research looks at the history of landscape architecture and urban development of the American South. His writing spans the disciplines of Landscape and Environmental History, Southern Studies, and Material Culture to consider the construction of racial identity through the built environment. His secondary research and teaching interests are in historic preservation and cultural landscapes.