Spring Break
College of Architecture hosts global research symposium
By: Liang Liang
Issue date: 10/29/04 Section: News
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The College of Architecture at Texas A&M is hosting its sixth annual faculty research symposium Friday at the Langford Architecture Center, setting the stage for faculty members in the college to show what they accomplished last year in research.
The "Research on the Built and Virtual Environments: Global Symposium Presentations 2004" will last one day with 40 presentations selected from 300 papers written in the past year presented by faculty members of the college in 34 nations, including Italy, Denmark, Germany, China and Mexico.
J. Thomas Regan, dean of the Department of Architecture, said faculty colleagues and graduate students are left at home when faculty members travel to a distant symposium to deliver the latest in thinking on a timely topic and that it's fitting that the largest college of its kind in the nation would couple scholarly research with professional education.
Topics of the presentations range from healthy community design to earth-building techniques to digital innovation in art design. The presentations are in categories of sustainability, health and visualization - the academic core of the college, said Louis G. Tassinary, associate dean for research of the College of Architecture.
The presentations on Friday include issues of land tenure of low-income communities in Texas, integration of structural and architectural design, using matrix structure in digital art, applying three-dimensions to design caricatures and history and applications of facial animation.
"The most exciting part is the diversity of the presentations," said Phillip Rollfing, communication specialist of the college.
Tassinary said the College of Architecture developed its interest in collecting data and making evidence-based design in the past 50 years.
"The dean has been pushing very hard on faculty doing research," Tassinary said. "The core idea (of having the symposium) is to create a sense of intellectual community and to give everybody an opportunity to see the breath of what is going on in this college."
In addition to faculty presentations, Morad R. Atif, director of the Indoor Environment Research Program for Canada's National Research Council-Institute for Research in Construction (NRC-IRC) and A&M graduate of 1992, will deliver a keynote on NRC-IRC's projects collaborated with academia.
To encourage student participation, the College of Architecture suspends all classes and studios scheduled on Friday.
"It is unusual for a college such as ours to take 'time out' from our usual schedule of classes, design studios and meetings to hear our colleagues report on their current research," Regan said.
The daylong symposium is free of charge to current A&M students, faculty and staff, but a $10 fee will be charged for lunch.
"I think the symposium is a good idea. Usually, we see our professors in classrooms," said Sarai Akin, a senior landscape architecture major. "We don't know much about their research side, as we are not exposed to it. The symposium gives us a chance to see what is going on in the college."
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