research, teaching, and student works
selected works from university of Idaho Architecture, 2018 to present
THE PAUL G. WINDLEY FACULTY EXCELLENCE AND DEVELOPMENT AWARD
As the discourse and practice of public infrastructure in the United States expands to include ecological systems, social justice, and new conceptions of public space, municipalities seeking public works improvements are leveraging arts and cultural programs to execute the next generation of infrastructure projects. Percent-for-art programs and ordinances, designating a percentage of public-funded project budgets to include public art, are significant and effective tools for municipalities to integrate art and design professionals into public infrastructure improvement projects. The integration of architects, landscape architects, urban designers and artists with city engineers and managers into interdisciplinary project design teams has arguably become one of the most effective uses of percent-for-art funds within municipal public works and a catalyst for design innovations in infrastructure addressing sustainability, ecosystem health, and social equity.
Research on these new infrastructure models led to the co-authorship of The Boise Public Works Arts Master Plan, a 10-year arts and culture planning document commissioned by Boise Public Works and Boise Arts and History departments. The document identifies strategic opportunities within future public infrastructure projects in the City of Boise to integrate art and design professionals into design and construction teams, addressing each of the public works department programs: air quality, storm and wastewater renewal, material conservation, reuse, recycling and upcycling, and a unique geothermal water system.
This award funded a presentation of The Boise Public Works Arts Plan at EDRA 53, the annual Environmental Design Research Association conference. The award also contributed to continuing research surveying key public infrastructure and percent-for-arts collaborations, projects that establish interdisciplinary design teams, critically engage their communities, develop new public space typologies, and expand social, cultural, and educational programming.
link to: The Paul G. Windley Faculty Excellence and Development Award
ESSAY: PRECEDENT AND INFLUENCE
“Precedent and Influence” presents a graduate studio investigating the uses and limits of precedent in architectural and urban design. Setting aside issues of originality, historical and contemporary precedents are utilized as direct source material for student works. Combining overtly appropriated precedents with collage techniques such as cut-up, sampling, and remix, students explored alternative design methods toward the development of a heterogeneous and inclusive urbanism.
Image: Arch 554 Architectural Design Vertical Studio : The Ecstasy of Influence. District plan. Samantha Jesser, 2020
ESSAY: DRAWING FORM FROM FICTION
“Drawing Form from Fiction” presents undergraduate and graduate student collage drawings from an architecture seminar on spatial form in literary fiction. Students develop allegorical architectures based on their analyses of spatial attributes within a literary text: ‘physical’ settings, such as architectures, cities, and landscapes; relational structures of character and plot; compositional arrangements of time and movement; and the architectonic form of the texts themselves.
Image: Arch 504 Architecture and Spatial Form in Modern Literature. Threshold Study. Mason Miles, 2022
ESSAY: A TECTONICS OF ONTOGENETIC MATERIALISM
The effects of human activity at global scale are largely absent from architectonic discourse. Our habit of evaluating buildings as artifacts, as autonomous objects, ‘articulations’ of assembly, ‘expressive details,’ or ‘transparencies’ of program or assembly too often limits building to representation, to mere signifiers of ecological, cultural, and political realities. Our collective focus on building systems ‘performance’ can also limit our understanding and responsibilities relative to larger systems, for example, the fuel of said systems, the impacts of material extraction, production, distribution, assembly, disassembly and waste. Furthermore, our human entanglement with dynamic, complex planetary systems is at odds with our dominate hylomorphic model of thinking, an ontology of separation: between human and non-human, organic and inorganic, matter and form, thing and idea.
Presenting three recent student architectural thesis projects alongside concepts from ‘new materialist’ scholars, the essay argues that reframing our epochal perspective from that of the Holocene to the Anthropocene productively alters our ontological biases. Repositioning our inextricable and complex relations with terrestrial systems is crucial to a truly engaged practice of architecture. The paper speculates on the potential of the design strategies and materialist concepts found within recent student works that potentially shift and expand our seemingly limited tectonic conceptions.
Image: Arch 556 Architecture Graduate Project, Absolute Uncertainty: An Inductive Approach to Material Tectonics, Kelsey Ramsey, 2022.
link to essay: A Tectonics of Ontogenetic Materialism: Three Projects
STUDENT WORK
Treefort Music Festival/University of Idaho Architecture, 2021 installation, fourteen structures.
STUDENT WORK
Reggie Mace, Architecture 553: Integrated Design Studio: Black Box Theater, Fall 2022. Building Technology Educators’ Society (BTES) Edward Allen Student Award, 2023.
STUDENT WORK
Andrew Shearman, The Crying of Lot 49, Topological Section. Arch 504 Architecture and Spatial Form in Modern Literature, Spring 2023.
STUDENT WORK
Treefort Music Festival/University of Idaho Architecture, 2024 installation, one of three towers with seating.
STUDENT WORK
Mason Miles, The Castle, Topological Section. Course: Drawing Form from Fiction, Spring 2022. Design Communication Association (DCA22) Award of Distinction, 2022.
STUDENT WORK
Samantha Jesser, Graduate Project, Ecological Tectonics, Spring 2021. Architectural Research Centers Consortium (ARCC) King Medal Award and American Institute of Architects (AIA) Northwest and Pacific Region Award of Merit, 2021.
STUDENT WORK
Kelsey Ramsey, Graduate Project, Absolute Uncertainty: An Inductive Approach to Material Tectonics, Spring 2022. Building Technology Educators’ Society (BTES) Edward Allen Student Award and American Institute of Architects (AIA) Henry Adams Medal Award, 2022.
ESSAY: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL EPOCHÉ FOR BEGINNING DESIGN
Within the context of first year undergraduate design and drawing coursework, a series of phenomenologically driven assignments disrupts and enriches the traditional curriculum of orthogonal conceptions and projections of space. Automatic drawing techniques are combined with empirical analysis via drawing and modeling. The essay linked below argues that while ‘rational,’ Cartesian spatial language, thoroughly embedded in the theories and practices of art and architecture, is a necessary and productive convention, it is nonetheless imperative that the beginning student also discover space as a profoundly subjective encounter with the larger, intersubjective world.
Image: Arch 154 Introduction to Architectural Graphics, Ezra Carson, 2018
link to essay: A Phenomenological Epoché for Beginning Design
STUDENT WORK
Arch 554 Architectural Design 2020 was a design/build architectural installation for the Treefort Music Festival, an annual 4-day event drawing more than 20,000 people and 10 million dollars to downtown Boise’s economy.
The studio advanced student abilities by providing services for the design and construction of a re-useable gateway/pavilion for the Treefort Music Festival. The studio facilitated the development of research and analytical skills related to program, context, public space, and event. It also developed student abilities in client presentations, material selection, assembly, and methods of de-mountable construction. Installed for the first time in September 2021, it has subsequently been re-installed for the March 2022 and 2023 festivals.
STUDENT WORK
Samantha Jesser, ARCH 553 Integrated Design Studio: Natatorium 3.0, Fall 2019
STUDENT WORK
Kolbie Jones, Graduate Project, Reimagining the Void, Spring 2022