global college

Texas A&M University President R. Bowen Loftin had a chance to see how former students are redefining the entertainment industry during a Nov. 16 visit to the Bay Area campuses of Pixar Animation Studios and DreamWorks Animation SKG.

Designs for an eye hospital in Puyang, China, created by students in a Texas A&M health facility design studio in collaboration with students at Southeast University in Nanjing, China and the University of Oklahoma, were unveiled in a public presentation Dec. 5 in the Wright Gallery.

One former and one current student from Texas A&M’s College of Architecture were roommates for a week in Leogane, Haiti in November, part of a Habitat for Humanity effort to build homes in the city ravaged by a 2010 earthquake and hurricane.

Peter Lang, associate professor of architecture at Texas A&M, joined curators, designers, artists and architects from across the globe to discuss experimental curating for design and architecture exhibitions at “Curating and Counter Curating,” a September 2011 conference in Stockholm, Sweden.

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.

The American Bureau of Shipping’s latest quarterly publication includes an article about a centuries-old Portuguese shipwreck brought back to life in an immersive, 3-D model created by former Texas A&M Master of Visualization Sciences student Audrey Wells ’08.

The collaboration between design programs at Texas A&M University, top schools in China and at the University of Oklahoma continued during the week of Oct. 10, 2011 during a trip to China by George J. Mann, Texas A&M professor of architecture, and colleagues from OU.

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.

Texas A&M construction science students who spent the spring 2011 semester studying abroad in London praised their academic and social experiences in a story and video posted on TAMU Times, the university’s news website.

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.

Southern Ellis, who holds two design degrees from Texas A&M, will be at HKS Inc.’s Dallas office working on healthcare projects and performing research as its 2011-12 healthcare fellow. “I have found an amazing opportunity to directly affect the lives of people through the creation of healing environments,” said Ellis.

Gabriel Esquivel, professor of architecture at Texas A&M, collaborated with students at Monterrey Tech to create “Diaphanus,” an architectural installation that resembles a bouquet with laser-cut polypropylene flowers that provides a 1,350-square-foot rainwater collection surface.

Forster Ndubisi, head of Texas A&M’s Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning, and his counterparts at two leading Chinese universities have agreed to explore the possibility of academic exchanges by signing letters of cooperation during meetings in China.

Visitors to the 2011 Luleå Art Biennial in Sweden are taking a virtual trip in an underground ant colony in “atta,” an immersive installation by Carol LaFayette and Fred Parke, professors of visualization. At left, patrons wear Stereovision glasses to view the colony on four screens arranged in a semicircle.

With a 2011 fellowship from the American Institute of Architects, Amy Kircher, an M.Arch student at Texas A&M, will design a prototype outpatient healthcare facility based on her research that suggests a new direction for preventative care building design and a new way of thinking about healthcare architecture.