News
NEU?
April 27, 2010
| Between the Fenway, Symphony, and Mission Hill sits Northeastern and its School of Architecture, about as urban as it gets. As frazzled students race to finish the term, we learned yesterday that director George Thrush and his staff are in a race of their own: to launch a new degree program in urban landscape design next fall. |
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| We snapped George with professor Lucy Maulsby and students Casey Hartman and Melissa Miranda. George says being urban has not only shaped what the school is teaching and the degrees it offers, it also informs how it teaches future designers to look at the profession. Rather than focus on one heroic building at a time, say a great art museum, NEU asks them to concentrate on the ?95% of built environment that's market driven and where most people actually live and work.? Since urbanization is the global design trend, George?s students do their semester abroad in Berlin, a center for sustainable design, or Beijing and Shanghai to observe the most rapidly urbanizing nation in the world. |
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| Talk about urban, the school?s studios are on the ground floor of the Ruggles T stop. Just outside the entrance, we snapped professor Tim Love; students Travis Blake, Andrea Leveille, Melissa Miranda, Michelle Mortensen and Christine Nasir. Tim, also a principal at Utile, is working with Boston to set up systematic planning guidelines to encourage development that makes economic and aesthetic sense. In fact, he's helping to establish new standards for the available development sites around the Greenway. Tim says he's ?the guy on the other side from Don Chiofaro,? who wants to build a pair of towers overlooking the parkland that city planners consider too tall. |
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| Professor Peter Wiederspahn, principal at Wiederspahn Architects, dropped in on students Jeff Montes, Hope Blanchette, Danielle Babineau and Scott Swails. Continuing the trend of revolutionizing the profression through technology (think Building Information Modeling and Parametric Modeling), Peter is working with NEU engineers to develop a new Structurally Insulated Panel System. Environmentally friendly, these wall panels have built-in sensors, are quick to assemble, and provide more efficient insulation as well as resistance to horizontal and vertical forces. They're tighter and stronger than traditional materials but probably won't be on the market for a few more years. |
