Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts

Courtesy photo*Delta Primer*Is California vulnerable to a New Orleans-style levee break? The land in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, where California’s two great rivers drain into San Francisco Bay, lies as much as 20 feet below sea level, warns Jane Wolff, author of Delta Primer: A Field Guide to the California Delta (2003). A breach on the scale of that in New Orleans would prove catastrophic for California — the world’s sixth-largest economy, home to approximately 10 percent of the U.S. population. In addition to property destruction, salt water from San Francisco Bay would migrate upstream, contaminating the water supply for much of Southern California, including major cities such as Los Angeles and San Diego.

Matthew Coolidge, founder and director of the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Los Angeles, will be participating.

The report is by Peter MacKeith, associate director of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts and associate dean of Architecture.

Forget purple mountains and fruited plains. The contemporary American landscape is more typically composed of parking lots and shopping malls, factory towns and industrial developments, argues Matthew Coolidge, founder and director of the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Los Angeles. From Oct. 26-29, Coolidge will host a number of events exploring St. Louis’ urban landscape as part of the yearlong series “Unsettled Ground: Nature, Landscape, and Ecology Now!” co-sponsored by the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts and the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts.

Ebony Patterson has won the Jury Prize in Jamaica’s 2005 Super Plus Under-40 Artist-of-the-Year Competition.

Soumen Rakennustaiteen Museo (SRM)McDonald’s-Finland Headquarters in HelsinkiHas corporate architecture doomed the city? Over the last century, corporate headquarters — as well as churches, universities and government institutions — have been pillars of the urban environment, embodying the culture, values and aspirations of their societies. Yet today’s corporations — competing in global, open-market economies; distanced and disassociated from the means of production — have increasingly situated themselves on the suburban periphery, replacing civic engagement with simple displays of technological prowess. As a result, “corporations must be seen as potential ‘dissolving agents’ of the cities in which they have chosen to locate,” argues Peter MacKeith, associate director of the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis, where he also serves as associate dean of Architecture.

The first time Jerry Sincoff designed a house, he failed. Literally. As a ninth-grader at Hanley Junior High in University City, Sincoff — a voracious draftsman with an affinity for buildings and rocket ships — was required to enter the inaugural Greater St. Louis Science Fair. Instead of a science display, he submitted a conceptual […]

Healy is serving as the Sam Fox School’s Ruth and Norman Moore Visiting Professor of Architecture for 2005-06.

Paul WarcholBrian Healy ArchitectsBrian Healy, founder and principal of Brian Healy Architects in Boston, will launch the fall Architecture Lecture Series, sponsored by the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts, with a talk at 7 p.m. Monday, Sept. 26.

“Unsettled Ground: Nature, Landscape, and Ecology Now!” is co-sponsored with the Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts.