We only know their given names, but Mack, Adam, and Ned gave shape to Austin. They were among the enslaved Blacks who, in 1839, cleared the land and erected the first buildings to realize Edwin Waller’s plan for the capital city of the Republic of Texas. Black members of the building trades continued to shape the city after Emancipation. Their presence in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries can be glimpsed in construction photographs of landmarks including the Capitol and the buildings of the The University of Texas at Austin.
Apocalypse comes from the Greek word that meant "revelation" or "unveiling." The pandemic and the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor among others laid bare a landscape of injustice and oppression that have long been in existence. Addressing systems of harm will never be easy, but it is necessary work. For too long, design has often been complicit in that harm. This talk will explore what it means to wrestle with that and explore what it could mean to negotiate issues of race and space in service of healing.
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This two-part virtual workshop explored hempcrete, a low-carbon building material that utilizes rapidly renewable hemp. Part 1 began with a virtual presentation led by Henry Valles, an Austin-based, NAR Green Certified realtor and co-founder of the Hemp Industries Association, Texas Chapter, and the US Hemp Building Association. Valles spearheaded efforts to build a tiny hempcrete house at Community First!
Downstream, a sophisticated outdoor laboratory automatically analyzes the chemistry of the river every 30 minutes. Upstream, micro-architectures suspended under trees collect rain containing Sulphur. These are just a few of the devices that constitute a Critical Zone Observatory, a landscape fully equipped with scientific instruments that record nature's variations to understand environmental disturbances caused by human activities.
Please join Principal, Claire Hempel, of Design Workshop for a virtual presentation on the firm, current work and hiring practices on September 24. The event will be held at 11:00am on Zoom for students (link to be emailed out and shared in the newsletter). The event will also be livestreamed to the Texas Architecture YouTube Channel.
This lecture examines a report of findings of research into the architectural and urban implications of the logistics industry along with efforts to translate those findings into design work.
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It is timely in the Anthropocene, more than ever before, to search for a non-anthropocentric mode of reasoning, and consequently also of designing.
On Friday, September 11, the Center for American Architecture and Design will host Ernesto Bilbao as part of the Friday Lunch Forum series, presenting "The Site of Condors, Airplanes, Kites...and Drones."
Peter Eisenman (Yale) and Mario Carpo (UCL Bartlett) examine the history, state, and prospects of an architectural project through computation. The two lectures followed by an open discussion moderated by Daniel Koehler (UT Austin).