building a better texas

The use of durable construction materials in maintenance and renovation projects can lower a building’s carbon footprint while lengthening its service life, said Manish Dixit, an architecture Ph.D. student at Texas A&M.

After two decades focused on improving the quality of life for residents of the impoverished, relatively undeveloped villages, or “colonias,” clumped near population centers on the U.S. side of the Texas-Mexico border, the Texas A&M University Colonias Program is celebrating its achievements.

Relationships between architectural design and health care for the under and uninsured are the focus of the Center for Health Systems & Design’s Spring 2012 Architecture-for-Health Lecture Series.

Xuemei Zhu, assistant professor of architecture, co-authored a paper summarizing the research behind active living — a new, comprehensive way of tackling obesity involving the built environment — in the new edition of a journal published by the Institute for Comprehensive Community Development.

Two former Texas A&M landscape architecture students, Elizabeth Chapman ’10 and Trace Unruh ’11, helped develop the city of Austin’s new invasive species management plan while working as interns at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center .

Michael Percifield ‘93, a former environmental design student, is leading an effort to put a 19th century steam locomotive back in service in North Texas. He oversees operations for the Grapevine Vintage Railroad, which operates train rides in vintage passenger cars from Grapevine to the Fort Worth Stockyards.

The Texas A&M Department of Architecture is recruiting members for its newly formed Architecture Council of Excellence, which is committed to supporting and enhancing architecture program excellence, building relationships with students, and bridging gaps between the academic and professional worlds.

A group of environmental design students are contributing to a weeklong flurry of construction for the TV show “Extreme Makeover Home Edition,” building a brand new home for a Bastrop County family.

Bachelor and master’s degree programs in landscape architecture and the Master of Architecture program at Texas A&M were recently ranked among the nation’s best by the Design Futures Council.

Graduate engineering students at Texas A&M advised by Ken Joh, assistant professor of urban planning, earned first place and $10,000 in scholarship money in a sustainable transportation planning contest sponsored by the Central Texas Regional Mobility Authority.

Sam Brody, professor of urban planning at Texas A&M, was interviewed on PBS Newshour about Galveston’s efforts to build a healthier city after Hurricane Ike. He is also the Mitchell Chair in Sustainable Coasts at TAMU-Galveston and director of the Center for Texas Beaches and Shores.

As higher education leaders across the nation wrangle with budget constraints and consider reforms aimed at doing more with less, Texas A&M College of Architecture educators continue to embrace the studio, the time-tested cornerstone of design education, as the most critical component of modern design pedagogy.

Valuable sociological and economic data collected by the federal government but not available to the general public will soon be available to select researchers from Texas and the surrounding region with the opening this fall of the Texas Census Research Data Center at Texas A&M University.

A new report by the Texas Transportation Institute ranks 328 seriously congested highway corridors across the U.S. for the first time by morning and evening drive times, middays and weekends. It also identifies "reliably unreliable corridors with the most day-to-day variations in congestion.

Chris Grossnicklaus ‘06, a Texas A&M Master of Architecture graduate is editor-in-chief of Columns magazine, the quarterly publication of the American Institute of Architects’ Dallas Chapter. Grossnicklaus is currently working as an architect for RTKL's Healthcare group.