UB News Center, NY
11-06-06
UB Center for Virtual Architecture Receives Major Grant
BUFFALO, N.Y. -- A team of faculty members in the University at Buffalo School
of Architecture and Planning have been awarded a $553,045 research grant from
the U.S. Department of Education Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary
Education (FIPSE) to develop educational materials that use advanced media to
teach important building principles to architecture students.
The funded project, "Building Literacy: The Integration of Building Technology
and Design in Architectural Education," will focus in particular on the
development of a new interactive, multidimensional software program to help
students develop a better understanding of building systems integration.
The project team will be headed by Shahin Vassigh, an architect and civil
engineer with an international reputation in the field of computer-assisted
architectural pedagogy. Vassigh is an associate professor of architecture in the
school and co-director of its Center for Visual Architecture (CVA).
"An understanding of building technology and the integration of building systems
in the design process are central to the education of an architect," she says, "but
today, technology education in American architecture programs is a fundamental
curriculum weakness.
"This failure to adequately prepare future architects in building technology
already has had national consequences," she says.
"First, since the American building industry is one of the major consumers of
energy and materials, the built environment suffers from inefficient energy and
materials use," she says. "Second, under-prepared architecture graduates pose
a significant risk to the quality of the built environment. Third, inadequate training
is one reason the U.S. lags behind other industrialized nations in building
innovation.
"The software we will devise in this project will harness the capabilities of
advanced graphic media, such as dynamic modeling programs, in a way that will
help students visualize concepts that otherwise are difficult to comprehend,"
Vassigh says. Software programs developed by the project, she added, will be
disseminated by a nationally recognized publisher for use in other architecture
programs.
Co-principal investigators include Omar Khan, assistant professor of architecture
and co-director of the CVA, whose practice spans architecture,
installation/performance and digital media, and Kenneth S. Mackay, assistant
professor of architecture whose scholarly work involves natural and artificial light,
building systems integration and the role that each of these play in generating
form and space.
Additional co-principal investigators are Annette LeCuyer, professor of
architecture, whose work focuses on the integration of design and construction in
contemporary architecture, and Gary Scott Danford, Ph.D., associate professor
of architecture, an applied behavioral scientist with advanced degrees in
psychology and expertise in facilities evaluation.
Beverly McLean, Ph.D., UB research assistant professor of architecture, will be
on the student performance evaluation team; Xiufeng Liu, Ph.D., associate
professor of learning and instruction in the UB Graduate School of Education,
provided expertise in student evaluation methods. Patrick Tripeny, associate
professor of architecture at the University of Utah, will run a parallel study for the
purpose of project evaluation.
Ken English, Ph.D., deputy director of UB's New York State Center for
Engineering Design and Industrial Innovation (NYSCEDII) and adjunct professor
of mechanical and aerospace engineering, played a key role in project and
proposal development. English will collaborate with UB alumnus Eliot Winer,
Ph.D., assistant professor of mechanical engineering at Iowa State
University, to produce the Web-based visualization environment. Winer
specializes in computer-aided design and graphics, scientific visualization and
virtual-reality modeling for large-scale design.
The Center for Virtual Architecture, one of the newest research centers in the UB
School of Architecture and Planning, is dedicated to projects that explore the
impact of digital media on architectural theory, production, representation and
pedagogy.
Vassigh was the director of a 2001 FIPSE-funded project to develop methods of
teaching structures to architecture students using advanced media. She also
worked with Khan to help produce multi-media pedagogical software for the UB
School of Dental Medicine, a project funded by a 2003 UB Educational
Technology Grant.
A second Educational Technology Grant in 2005 funded collaborative work by
Vassigh, MacKay and Venkat Krovi, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department
of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering in the UB School of Engineering and
Applied Sciences, that produced a teaching/learning tool to facilitate the
integration of various technology course content in the architecture curriculum
into a single digital learning environment.
Vassigh's research focuses on structural and architectural design, and on the
application of digital media to structural pedagogy and instructional materials.
Her work has been published in Architectural
Design, International Journal of Architectural Computing, Journal of Association
for Computer Aided Design and Teaching with Technology.
Her awards include a Technology Literacy Grant, an Architectural Research
Centers Consortium Award, an American Institute of Architects Award Research
Fellowship and a Construction Materials and Technology Research Fellowship.
As a civil engineer, Vassigh has worked on structural and infrastructure related
engineering projects throughout New York State.
The University at Buffalo is a premier research-intensive public university, the
largest and most comprehensive campus in the State University of New York.