As energy and environmental issues loom ever larger in the public consciousness, architecture schools around the nation are seeing an explosion of interest in sustainable design.
At WUSTL, students and faculty in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts have increasingly integrated environmental principles and techniques into the architecture curriculum, through required and elective courses as well as through special events and voluntary groups such as Green Givens.
However, over the next several weeks, the Sam Fox School’s Graduate School of Architecture & Urban Design will take on the issue with special intensity, through a series of intensive “Master Classes in Environmental Design.” The half-dozen one-credit workshops — each open to 12 graduate and undergraduate students — run weekends through April 23.
Topics range from building technologies and sustainable building design to landscape design and urban and regional planning.
“We tend to think of energy efficiency as a transportation issue — about cars and gas mileage,” said Jerry Sincoff, dean of Architecture. “But in developed countries, buildings account for nearly half of energy consumption. It’s becoming a major issue for contemporary architects and something that students feel very strongly about.”
Sustainability is a topic close to Sincoff’s heart. During his tenure as president and chief executive officer of architecture giant Hellmuth, Obata & Kassabaum Inc. (HOK) from 1990-2001, the firm began a major initiative to incorporate sustainable design into many of its projects and even published The HOK Guidebook to Sustainable Design (2000), one of the most influential and widely read books on the subject.
(Coincidentally, The HOK Guidebook, now in its second edition, is co-authored by two WUSTL alumni — Mary Ann Lazarus [1978] and Sandra Ford Mendler [1981] — along with William Odell.)
The environmental master classes — which Sincoff conceived last fall, and which are organized by Peter MacKeith, associate dean of architecture and associate director of the Sam Fox School — will feature more than a dozen experts from around the country.
These include Mendler, now vice president and sustainable design principal for HOK’s San Francisco office; as well as the University’s own Paul Donnelly, the Rebecca and John Voyles Professor of Architecture; and John Hoal, associate professor of architecture and a nationally recognized urban designer. Also featured will be alumnus Bryon Stigge of Buro Happold Engineering in New York and London.
“Each class is based on a case-study methodology and hands-on, ‘charette’-style participation,” Sincoff said. “Students will be placed in the role of decision-makers, studying real-world projects straight from the drawing boards, with some of the most distinguished practitioners and scholars in the field.”
MacKeith — who previously organized “The Sustainable University Campus: The Chancellor’s Sesquicentennial Colloquium” (2004) as well as a campus stop for Ten Shades of Green (2003), the first important exhibition of sustainable design — noted that the case-study materials, along with resulting student drawings and sketches, will form the basis for an in-house sourcebook on environmental design, which should be completed next fall.
“These sorts of activities — the master classes, the sourcebook, additions to the curriculum — are all intended to bring sustained attention to the issue of sustainable design,” MacKeith said.
“It’s a way of raising expectations within the school, within the University and throughout the profession.”