Spring 2024 Visiting Faculty
We are excited to introduce this semester’s slate of visiting faculty teaching at The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture. Visiting professorships like these help us expand the voices and perspectives represented within the school, introducing students to fresh ideas and accomplished practitioners in the disciplines of the built environment.
Lisa Iwamoto and Craig Scott of Iwamoto Scott will jointly serve as the Ruth Carter Stevenson Regents Chair in the Art of Architecture and will teach an Advanced Architecture Studio alongside Lecturer Will Powell, entitled “High Rise Living: New Metropolitan Hybrids.”
Lisa Iwamoto and Craig Scott established IwamotoScott Architecture in San Francisco in 2002. Over the past decade, the award-winning and internationally recognized architecture practice has honed its designs through a process of research and experimentation, and they are leaders in the arena of architectural technology. The firm has been at the forefront of digital fabrication, design computation, and materials for over a decade; they use this experience to contribute fresh ideas for the benefit of their clients—whether the project is a piece of furniture, house, tech office, mixed-use building, or speculative vision for the future of the city.
Iwamoto and Scott’s Advanced Studio will engage the instructor’s home city of San Francisco as the basis for their work this term. Considering the city’s housing shortage, students will design a high-density experimental mixed-use residential tower for a site near the Transbay Transit Center, a significant civic infrastructural addition to the city dubbed the “Grand Central Station of the West.” The aim: To create new possibilities for urban housing and tap into and further evolve this important new addition to the city’s public realm.
Walter Rodriguez Meyer and Tricia Meyer of LOCAL Office Landscape Architecture & Urban Design will jointly serve as the Dr. Nancy Panak Kwallek Endowed Chair in Design & Planning and will teach an Advanced interdisciplinary studio titled “NYCHA Cloudburst: Regenerative Landscape Design for Public Housing.”
Walter Rodriguez Meyer is the Founding Principal of LOCAL Office Landscape Architecture & Urban Design and leads resilient infrastructure systems design for all LOCAL projects. Tricia Martin is an Associate Principal at LOCAL and a licensed architect with over twenty years of experience working on complex urban sites ranging in scale from the region to a small lot. Based in Brooklyn, their research-based design firm is well-versed in best-practice resilience urbanism and is deeply rooted with a strong understanding of coastal cities and landscapes. LOCAL’s built metrics have helped shape national resiliency policy with three federal administrations. Currently, they are designing NYC’s first net zero neighborhood as well as three New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) campuses for cloudburst rains.
Meyer and Martin’s interdisciplinary advanced studio is engaging these NYCHA projects as their site of investigation this semester. Open to students in landscape architecture, architecture, and urban design, the studio will introduce students to a multi-scalar, green infrastructure design project to address various social and environmental concerns related to these NYCHA campuses, many of which were built in areas vulnerable to flooding. Drawing inspiration and tactics from the early Lenape Nation, which preserved and managed these low-lying sites for thousands of years, the studio will be guided by a regenerative design approach that engages multifaceted and dynamic design solutions.