sustainability

As a semifinalist in a national solar power design competition, a student team from the Texas A&M College of Architecture’s Design Process class is building a portable solar-powered umbrella capable of powering portable electronic devices.

The Center for Housing and Urban Development at Texas A&M’s College of Architecture is part of a new research, educational and engagement network focusing on providing sustainability science to South Texas policymakers and communities.

The renovation of Texas A&M’s historic YMCA building, overseen by Nancy McCoy ’81, FAIA, an outstanding alumna of the College of Architecture, is mostly complete. McCoy, a founding principal at Quimby McCoy Preservation Architecture, LLP, is an award-winning preservation architect.

Texas A&M environmental design graduate Shawn Evans ’93 is overseeing the preservation of Ohkay Owingeha, a 600 year-old Native American settlement in New Mexico as the director of preservation and cultural projects at Atkin Olshin Schade Architects, a Philadelphia design firm.

A single Navajo mother and her 10-year old son are living in The Windcatcher House, a sustainable home in southwest Colorado co-designed by Mark Olsen ’07, a former Texas A&M environmental design student completing his graduate work in the University of Colorado at Denver.

Walter Gillis Peacock, professor of urban planning at Texas A&M, is on a National Academy of Sciences committee hosting a two-day January public workshop in Houston to examine issues relating to sustainability and human-environment interactions in the Houston metropolitan area.

Anat Geva, associate professor of architecture, has been appointed president of the Southeast Society of Architectural Historians, which promotes scholarship on architecture and related subjects.

Former Texas A&M environmental design student Brian Goeken ‘87 is overseeing the nation’s largest, most successful and most cost-effective community revitalization program as the new chief of the National Park Service’s Technical Preservation Services Office.

The 13th Annual Texas A&M College of Architecture Research Symposium: Built, Natural Virtual was held Monday, Oct. 24 at the Langford Architecture Center on the Texas A&M campus.

A report published by the Texas Transportation Institute, authored in part by Tim Lomax, a lecturer in urban planning, suggests too little progress is being made ensuring the nation's transportation system will be able to keep up with job growth when the economy improves.

Private property rights are prevailing over efforts to avoid building in hazardous areas, said Sam Brody, professor of urban planning, in the Sept. 2011 issue of Architect, the magazine of the American Institute of Architects. He was quoted as part of the magazine’s coverage of a rise in natural disasters.

Tom De Blasis, global design director for Nike soccer and a champion of design as a vehicle for solving some of the world’s intractable problems, presents “Nike: The Game Changer,” Sept. 19 in Preston Geren Auditorium. The lecture kicks off the Texas A&M Department of Architecture’s Fall 2011 Lecture Series.

Two Texas A&M urban planning professors have garnered a two-year, $313,000 National Science Foundation grant to research the effectiveness of using 100-year floodplains in predicting property damages from floods, and to develop improved criteria for assessing the risk of inundation in low-lying coastal areas.

Two faculty members from the College of Architecture were among researchers presenting their National Science Foundation-funded projects to U.S. senators Sept. 6, 2011 at an NSF expo in Washington DC.

Momentum is mounting for the creation of a National Science Foundation-funded network of researchers dedicated to investigating disaster resilience, vulnerability and risk reduction, said Walter Gillis Peacock, director of the Hazard Reduction & Recovery Center and champion of the interdisciplinary network proposal.