One of the many good things about the society's annual conference is the opportunity to learn from recipients of SCUP's awards, either in formal professional development sessions or more informal settings.

The SCUP's 2011 Excellence Award recipients have been announced. Congratulations to you all.

We're taking this opportunity to once more bring out information about the 2010 recipients, via SCUP's 2010 Tribute to Excellence newspaper. It is a useful resource that some may overlook, as are the web pages about the recipients. 

• middle colleges,
• a Suffolk University restoration, 
• mission driven planning,
• UMass Lowell Inn and Conference Center,
• landscape urbanism,
• Gordon College science center,
• a new housing project at URI,
• taking stock of existing buildings,
• campus heritage, and more.

Fast Company magazine has a section devoted to the intersection of design and business. In it, Jack L. Robbins writes about Active Design. Here is, also, the Wikipedia article on Active Living by Design.

Given the size of the nation's obesity problem, intentionally integrating active design elements into every campus facilities and landscape planning process - especially in areas of student services, housing, pedestrian circulation, and so forth - seems a no-brainer. We've seen campuses to things that align with this philosophy, although unintentionally, or for other reasons. If you know of campus planning that has incorporated this in an integrated fashion, please share information about it in the comments, below, or in SCUP's LinkedIn group. Thanks.

Here's more from the Fact Company article:

Environments that are unwalkable are boring, feel vast and scaleless, and present blank unvaried views. Contrast a vast parking lot with a lively café-lined street and it’s clear what makes an environment walkable.

Variety and stimulation is especially important for the young digerati who have grown up in a wired world that brings a universe of entertainment and social interaction to them through a screen and a keyboard.

To motivate the under-25 crowd to use their legs—instead of their thumbs—to explore the world, the real world must compete with the digital one in terms of stimulation. Dense, multi-use urban environments with a variety of offerings can provide the stimulating surroundings that encourage walking and real-life social interaction.

What next for architects? What are the big issues to be faced in the next decade? In Architectural Record, Clifford A. Pearson, assembles recognized experts to share their expectations.

Among them is SCUPer Bob Berkebile of BNIM (Kansas City, MO) from SCUP's North Central Region, who has made valuable contributions to sessions at SCUP's international and regional conferences. Bob has worked diligently through professional organizations such as SCUP, AIA, and USGBC.

• William F. Baker on Structures
• James P. Barrett on BIM
• Robert Murray on the Economy
• Bob Berkebile on LEED
• Paul Nakazawa on Big Firms
• Rickey Burdett on Cities
• Sheila Kennedy on Materials
• June Williamson on Suburbia
• Alexandra Lang on Criticism
• George Baird on Theory

An upturn for commercial construction is expected in 2012, but institutional construction is projected to be steady, according to AIAarchitect:

The nonresidential construction market is expected to recover this year, but late enough in the year that 2011 spending levels are unlikely to see any growth over 2010 levels. A consensus 2 percent construction spending decline in 2011 will hopefully indicate the bottom of the recession trough and set the stage for a recovery in 2012. After falling around 30% on an inflation-adjusted basis last year, commercial construction is expected to see a modest decline this year, while the downturn for manufacturing should be greater. Institutional building activity is projected to stay near 2010 levels.

As the nonresidential recovery strengthens, 2012 is expected to produce stronger gains. Overall building construction should rise around 5 percent, with growth twice that rate for the more cyclical commercial sector. Spending on institutional buildings is projected to increase a more modest 1.6 percent.

This new book, The Owner’s Dilemma: Driving Success and Innovation in the Design and Construction Industry, is by SCUPer Barbara White Bryson, Associate Vice President for Facilities, Engineering & Planning, Rice University. 

Every manager of facility acquisition as well as the architects, engineers, construction managers, and builders who work for these new leaders should read this insightful book. --Charles Thomsen

The Owner's Dilemma should be required reading for anyone involved in the A/E/C industry -- owners, architects, and construction managers alike. It offers a clear diagnosis about what's wrong with the industry and a compelling vision about how to move forward. --Scott Simpson

The Owner's Dilemma asks us to understand that two things are crucial. First, that each of its five elements is considered individually and given equal weight and second, that the five elements are considered collectively and this collective thinking must be maintained throughout the entire project. If the individual keys are managed well, the collective group will clearly be successful. --Michael Graves

Book Description

The design and construction industry is one of the most inefficient on the planet, wasting billions of dollars a year of public and private owners' money. Architects, engineers, builders, and developers have struggled in this environment for years. Architects are commoditized, and contractors struggle with the same risk they have carried for centuries; critical design information is withheld until the submittal process; no practical risk management instrument has been developed; and buildings are still created one brick at a time. Owners have played their part in this inefficiency. Some continue to believe in the value myth of competitive bidding, sentencing themselves to be eternally locked in inefficient processes. But it is owners who can impact the industry most deliberately and aggressively. It is owners who can drive innovation on their projects and create profound change in the industry. In fact, it is owners who are uniquely positioned to innovate. By planning the design and delivery process, becoming team leaders, collaborating deeply throughout the industry, and applying key elements documented in The Owner's Dilemma, owners can summon meaningful and lasting change. The Owner's Dilemma explores how best to use the power of the owner and how that power can recreate the building industry.

More about Nugent Hall at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, specifically designed for the accommodation of students with very difficult disabilities.

Each of the rooms on the first floor, which houses 17 disabled students and three personal assistants, has adjustable hospital beds and high-tech accessibility features. The rooms have a motorized ceiling-lift system, which some of the students use to move from their beds to their bathrooms. Students slide or are helped into a sling suspended from the ceiling; then, with a remote-control device, they or their assistants activate the lift, which runs along tracks built into the ceiling.

The building is designed to integrate students with and without disabilities. The top three floors include disabled students who are able to live more independently, as well as students without disabilities, and both groups share the dining hall. A cardio room includes exercise machines that a student can use from a wheelchair. Buses stop at the dorm every half-hour during class times to take students anywhere on the campus.

Here is more from the university website. 

Charles A. Birnbaum says that there is a lack of landscape architecture criticim and media coverage, and, he says, writing in The Huffington Post, that's a problem.

Birnbaum is a keynote speaker at SCUP's national Campus Heritage Symposium next November 2-3 in Washington, DC.

Here's a game I like to play. Try to find decent criticism about landscape architecture, planning and design, particularly regarding public space, in any of the major US dailies. Go ahead... I'll wait why you think about that.

Actually it's no game... it's a problem, especially considering the role that landscape architecture and planning plays in shaping our communities and cities. We have no shortage of architecture critics (who on occasion cover landscape), and there are a fair number of garden writers, but criticism about landscape architecture, planning and design is essentially restricted to publications geared to professionals, and largely absent from major dailies.

So will design coverage in New York and elsewhere transcend traditional buildings as objects (Zaha's latest) or industrial design (sleek toasters and iPhones) and recognize the new possibilities that public landscape offers? The time is now for mainstream print and web to pick up on the signals in this white noise, because the future resides in systems-based design solutions that affect our everyday lives in new and sometimes unconventional ways. If not, design remains marginalized as a commodity and the public is poorly served.

This blog post by Steven Litt of The Plain Dealer, notes that Case Western has narrowed the design field for its new landmark facility to four firms. Litt shares his provides insights into the challenges and issues of this new urban building and its placement among landmarks:

The site presents enormous physical and conceptual difficulties. It's irregular in shape. It includes a large underground parking garage, which serves Severance Hall and the Kelvin Smith Library. And it's surrounded by buildings in a variety of clashing styles, with oddly shaped outdoor spaces around them.

"We recognize that the building has to hold its own against some very prominent neighbors," Campbell said. "It's a tough problem to solve."

Severance Hall and the Cleveland Museum of Art are neoclassical, and date from the early 20th century, although the museum's expansion, designed by Raphael Vinoly, takes inspiration from the Brutalist architecture of Marcel Breuer, who designed a prior museum expansion in 1971.

The Kelvin Smith Library, designed by the Washington D.C. firm of Hartman Cox in the early 1990s, is a bland, post-modern neoclassical building. Nearby on Bellflower Road, there's Frank Gehry's explosively sculptural Peter B. Lewis Building, clad in shiny stainless steel.

The schizophrenic environment in part symbolizes CWRU's uneven and uncertain approach to architecture and campus planning in recent decades. The University Center represents an opportunity to pull everything together -- but it won't be an easy task.