ARCHITECTURE — Professor Anjali Joseph was invited to participate in the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) Director’s Roundtable Series in October. This series was titled, ‘A Call to Action to Improve Healthcare Safety Significantly and Sustainably’. This series of virtual meetings brought together healthcare experts from various parts of the healthcare industry to help start the process of “designing safety into the system.” Joseph discussed the role of the physical environment as a critical part of this system and the importance of leveraging the facility design process to minimize built environment latent conditions that adversely impact patient safety.
ARCHITECTURE — Sara Kennedy, a doctoral student working with Anjali Joseph at the Center for Health Facilities Design & Testing, received the 2023-2024 Arthur N. Tuttle Jr. Graduate Fellowship in Health Facility Planning from the AIA Academy of Architecture for Health (AAH) to support her dissertation research. She is studying the impact of the built environment on workflows and team communication during robotic-assisted surgery. The Tuttle fellowship aims to advance graduate students’ knowledge of planning and design for healthcare environments, resulting in a research-informed design approach and proposal. Kennedy received $8,600 through this award to support the completion of her dissertation study.
CONSTRUCTION SCIENCE AND MANAGEMENT – Associate Professor Jason Lucas and Assistant Professor Dhaval Gajjar organized a first-of-its-kind “Build Your Future” Upstate Hardhat Field Day Event on October 27th at Carolina High School in Greenville. The event was sponsored by The Stanley Black and Decker Foundation and the Carolina AGC Foundation. The event brought 60 students from three Greenville County High Schools together to participate in a construction-focused curriculum developed by Lucas and Gajjar and construction science and management Ph.D. student Cayla Anderson Thomas. They were supported by members of the industry and the South Carolina Be Pro Be Proud Simulation truck in exposing high school students to possible careers in the construction industry.
LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE – Professor Mary G. Padua was invited by the University of Nevada’s School of Architecture (UNLV-SoA) to deliver the special lecture entitled, “Speculations on the Landscape”, on October 17th in Las Vegas and sponsored by Klai Juba Wald as part of UNLV-SoA’s fall lecture series. Padua’s lecture discussed the impact of technology on trends in designed landscapes since the late 20thcentury and her current research on “traumatic” urbanism and the post-World War II Asian-American diaspora and post-pandemic Health-based Axioms for Designed Outdoor Immersive Restorative Environments.
CITY AND REGIONAL PLANNING – Assistant Professor Enrique Ramos Santiago recently presented a peer-reviewed paper at the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning (ACSP) Annual Conference in Chicago. The presentation of the paper titled ‘Planning and Urban Design Lessons from an Overlooked New Deal Village: Eleanor Roosevelt in San Juan of Puerto Rico’ was well attended, and an extended version of the paper is now under review in a high-ranking transportation science journal. Ramos-Santiago presented a novel approach to measuring accessibility to opportunities on foot that helps in evaluating distinct urban designs’ effectiveness in providing walking accessibility as a key attribute in human settlements. In addition, the paper presents a revelatory case of a New Deal village that has been overlooked in the city planning, urban design, and architecture literature for more than eight decades. Of the four cases compared, Eleanor Roosevelt Village more closely represents the attributes of new urbanist developments and registers markedly higher scores and ranking related to accessibility to multi-activities by foot. It also reveals the influence of context, culture, and governance regimes in the long-term evolutive trajectories of change and pedestrian accessibility in each case.
ART – Associate Professor Anderson Wrangle presented “The Outer Banks, The Carolinas, and Reflections on Topographic Photography Projects” at the SPE South Central/SouthEast Conference on October 22 at Columbus State University. In October, Wrangle’s work was also shown in the 2023 SECAC Members’ Exhibition at the SECAC Annual Conference in Richmond, VA; the 2023 Society for Photographic Education South Central and Southeast Members’ Exhibition at Columbus State University; and the 2023 Hambidge Art Center Auction in Atlanta.