Faculty Publications: Fall 2025
SPOTLIGHT PUBLICATIONS
Compositional Intelligence: Architectural Typology through Generative AI
Daniel Koehler; Routledge, 2025 | ISBN: 9781041030539
A comprehensive framework that positions Generative AI as an intellectual partner for rethinking architectural typology across scales.
Generative AI tools are increasingly adopted in architectural practice, yet many offices still use them primarily for image generation. Compositional Intelligence shows how to move beyond surface imagery and embrace the inductive reasoning that drives large language‑vision models. Drawing on information theory, computational linguistics and architectural history, Assistant Professor Daniel Koehler reveals how AI’s synthetic knowledge can fuse climate, culture and capital into genuinely new building types—inductive types—that answer the multi‑scalar crises of density, equity and decarbonisation.
Maggie Hansen, Nick Jenisch, Emilie Taylor Welty, Ann Yoachim; Applied Research and Design Publishing, 2025 | IBSN: 978-1-966515-09-8
The book, by Assistant Professor Maggie Hansen and others, illustrates the design process and product of a community design center in New Orleans, providing a blueprint for future projects aimed to support community goals.
The Albert and Tina Small Center for Collaborative Design, the outreach arm of Tulane’s School of Architecture, partners with nonprofits and community groups to provide design services for underserved communities. Its work emphasizes equitable participation, meaningful outcomes and design excellence. Smallx20 tells the story of the Center’s founding, its role in post-Katrina recovery, and its ongoing commitment to public interest design shaped by community voices. Recognized for leadership in community-based design, the Center’s collaborative approach is showcased through guest reflections, case studies and photographs that highlight its methods, outcomes and traditions that shape the culture of New Orleans.
Lidia Cano Pecharroman, Melissa Oberon Tier, Elke U. Weber; Frontiers in Climate, Volume 7, 2025 | ISSN 2624-9553
This research, by Assistant Professor Lidia Cano Pecharroman and others, shows that there is a growing interest among policymakers, community members and academics in designing and documenting best practices for environmentally-just climate adaptation and resilience policies, and a need to better incorporate vulnerability indicators into climate adaptation policy planning.
In this research, Assistant Professor Lidia Cano Pecharroman and the authors draw on an international urban survey in Buenos Aires, Argentina; Johannesburg, South Africa; London, United Kingdom; New York City, United States; and Seoul, South Korea that collected data on: exposure to various types of extreme weather events, socioeconomic characteristics commonly used as proxies for vulnerability (i.e., income, education level, gender, and age), and additional characteristics not often included in existing composite indices (i.e., Queer identity, disability identity, non-dominant primary language, and self-perceptions of both discrimination and vulnerability to climate hazard risk). They use feature importance analysis with gradient-boosted decision trees to measure the importance that these variables have in predicting exposure to various types of extreme weather events. Their results show that non-traditional variables were more relevant to self-reported exposure to extreme weather events than traditionally employed variables such as income or age. Furthermore, differences in variable relevance across different types of hazards and across urban contexts suggest that vulnerability indicators need to be fit to context and should not be used in a one-size-fits-all fashion.
Richard L. Cleary; University of Texas Press, 2025
This book by Emeritus Professor L. Richard Cleary offers a novel exploration of playing fields as aesthetic and architectural spaces that frame athletes' creativity and spectators' evolving experiences of sport.
The Architecture of the Playing Field explores the aesthetic and physical experiences of the grounds on which we compete. It regards playing fields as laboratories of invention where athletes and coaches create new uses for the human body in response to the constraints and affordances of space. Like other forms of architecture and landscape architecture, playing fields reflect sports' entwinement with societies at large.
Anthony Alofsin and Richard L. Cleary; Milwaukee: Frank Lloyd Wright's Burnham Block, Inc.; distributed by Yale University Press, 2025
This study, by Emeritus Professors Anthony Alofsin and Richard L. Cleary, probes beyond stylistic labels of influence to examine Wright's efforts at a pivotal moment in his career to apply principles that he believed are embedded in global cultures to the design of an urban house in Milwaukee.
The house Frank Lloyd Wright designed for Frederick C. and Katherine G. Bogk in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, in 1916 occupies a unique position in Wright's career: it is the only fully realized house designed in the teens that demonstrates his fascination with Primitivism, the use of non-Western sources as an inspiration for modern design. This book traces Wright's exploration alongside the stories of an immigrant family's rise and Milwaukee's emergence as a vibrant city. It also documents the interiors, relatively unchanged for over a century, that represent Wright's approach to total design.