Kristina Hill in the News
Wednesday, October 7, 2009
The University of Virginia School of Architecture will host the 2009 John E. Woltz Memorial Symposium, "Adaptation: Urban Infrastructure and Climate Change," Oct. 8-10 at Campbell Hall.
William Hudnut III, senior fellow emeritus at the Urban Land Institute in Washington, D.C. and a former mayor of Indianapolis and of Chevy Chase, Md., will give the keynote address, "What is the Scope of the Infrastructure Challenge that Faces American Cities?," on Oct. 8 at 6 p.m. in Campbell Hall, room 153.
The Woltz Symposium was first held in 2001 and has been held periodically "to address interdisciplinary topics related to the city and to foster new visions that explore the interdependence of architecture and landscape architecture," according to the document establishing the fund. The symposia are held in memory of John E. Woltz, a 1947 graduate of U.Va.'s College of Arts & Sciences and a longtime friend of the Architecture School.
The goal of the 2009 symposium is to produce a set of essays, cases and visionary ideas that address the potential of adaptive infrastructure to meet the challenges of climate change in cities.
A series of discussions initiated by invited panelists will take place on Oct. 9 and 10, and audience members will be encouraged to join panelists on the stage, one or two at a time, to ask questions or offer comments, once the panelists have shared their initial thoughts.
Kristina Hill, associate professor and director of the Program in Landscape Architecture, is the symposium's organizer. She has identified several key questions she hopes the panelists and attendees will address during the symposium, including:
• Whose health and safety will be most vulnerable in the climate we can expect in 2050 and beyond, and what investments will protect our most vulnerable citizens?
• What multi-functional approaches might allow urban regions to make these investments to produce fundamental benefits to quality of life and a robust urban economy?
• Are there any insights we can gain from these challenges about what it means to be human in our time?
The invited panelists include both national and foreign academics and practitioners in the fields of design, urban history, water conservation and engineering. Among the panelists are: Alex Nickson, City of London ; Piet Dircke, ARCADIS, a leading international engineering and design firm; Martin Prominski, Liebniz University, Germany; Kongjian Yu, Peking University; Anne Sprirn, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and Jane Wolff, University of Toronto.
Several University of Virginia faculty from the schools of Architecture and Engineering and the College of Arts & Sciences will also contribute.
The symposium is free and open to the public.
Tuesday, March 24, 2009
A warmer world means higher seas. Global warming not only accelerates glacial melt, but also causes ocean water to expand in volume. Projections vary widely, but seas will likely rise by at least seven inches by 2100—and possibly by as much as several meters, according to NASA climate scientist James Hansen. It doesn’t take a climatologist to realize one of the immediate, pressing consequences of these figures: flooding. And since many of the world’s largest cities sit on low-lying coasts, these rising oceans could lead to many more Hurricane Katrina-level disasters.
[for complete article, follow link]
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
[UVa News Services, by Maggie Graves] For Kristina Hill, working on the South Bronx project has been a way of coming full circle.
A University of Virginia associate professor of architecture and the director of the landscape architecture program, she and a group of U.Va. students are working with a citizen organization in New York called Sustainable South Bronx to help residents of the area promote sustainable improvements in the neighborhood. Through this effort, Hill hopes to help the local kids who, she said, "grew up like me."
Born in 1964, Hill was raised in Worcester, Mass., a decaying urban community. She attended what she described as a violent high school, where many students were expected to drop out or fail. "We were all just trying to stay out of serious trouble," she recalled.
Hill's parents were teachers who encouraged her academically. "My family's all about education," she said. "We really believed that was your ticket." An honors student, she graduated from high school in three years and was accepted to Tufts University....[for complete article, follow link to UVa News]
Thursday, July 17, 2008
[by Jane Ford, UVa News Services]:
July 17, 2008 ? New York City's South Bronx neighborhood is poised to become a model for urban sustainable development on a large scale, and a group of University of Virginia Architecture School graduate students have helped citizens and community leaders there visualize their dreams.
For 19 U.Va. students in two studio design classes, the experience was a lesson in urban ecologies, collaboration across disciplines and working with a coalition of South Bronx organizations dedicated to promoting sustainable initiatives.
The South Bronx neighborhood has long been marginalized and neglected, said Kristina Hill, associate professor and director of landscape architecture, who led a studio that explored plans for affordable housing, retail stores and light industry ? all while employing sustainable building principles and the creation of a linear park that would connect various parts of the community.
The South Bronx was transformed by a wave of property abandonment in the 1960s and '70s, and a subsequent period of appropriation by government agencies of what was once private property ? sometimes to create new public housing, and sometimes to build highways that cut through vital parts of the Bronx and isolated them from each other and from the Bronx River. In addition, the South Bronx is now a crazy quilt of experiments in housing density, from single-family ranch homes to super-blocks with high rises ? and contains New York City?s only remaining surface stream; the rest are underground in pipes. The neighborhood provides "a great way for students to think about what the American city is, both socially and ecologically, and what it means to the American psyche," Hill said.
Communities like the South Bronx, whose population is about 60 percent Hispanic and 40 percent black, too often bear an inequitable environmental burden of pollution, industrial facilities and very limited access to parks, clean air and water, Hill said.
"In a time of increased awareness of the need for equitable conditions for all, the design professions need to take a more active role in becoming advocates, or helping advocates make an argument for responsible design/planning decisions," said Toshihiko Karato, who is pursuing dual graduate degrees in architecture and landscape architecture. "There is a need for the profession to be able to effectively become leaders in the public sphere, so that they can at the least advise government decisions, if not participate in the political process."
Through research and meetings with community members, the students learned that a major barrier for the South Bronx is the under-utilized Sheridan Expressway, which impedes neighborhood access to the Bronx River and does not serve the transportation needs of the community, of which only 20 percent own cars. Neighborhood groups are already working with the state of New York to have the expressway removed.
[for complete article, see article on UVa News website]
Monday, January 14, 2008
Several UVa School of Architecture faculty members have collaborated to form Grow: DC, one of 24 finalist teams in the ?City of the Future? design competition organized by the History Channel. The competition stipulates that teams select one of three cities (San Francisco, Atlanta, or Washington, D.C.) and imagine what it would look like in 100 years. Eight finalists have been selected for each city. The winner of each city competition will be given $10,000 and the opportunity to compete for the national title which will be decided by a public online vote.
GROW:DC is a design collaborative and urban think tank based in Charlottesville, Virginia. The team is led by Assistant Professors of Architecture Jason Johnson and Nataly Gattegno (Future Cities Lab LLC) and also includes Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture Julie Bargmann and Lecturer in Landscape Architecture Christopher Fannin (D.I.R.T. Studio), as well as Elwood R. Quesada Professor William Morrish. The team is consulted by Associate Professor and Director of Landscape Architecture Kristina Hill and environmental engineer Byron Stigge of Buro Happold Engineers in New York.
The team?s proposal, "Harvest the City," aims to gather together the diverse and fluctuating patches of the city: ?Beyond the brilliant tyranny of its master plan, DC has to simultaneously grow at a finer street-by-street scale, while embracing the poetics of larger infrastructural systems and global networks.
We envision the fufture of D.C. as a thriving ecology of multiple sites. These sites are already embedded in the messy urban, suburban, and coastal fabric of DC. They provide a framework for interconnectivity and opportunity. They engage a series of ecologies and landscapes that could be industrious and working places, productive landscapes that could yield innovative, creative and cultural change.?
Competitors were given one week to assemble a three-dimensional design that is representative of their vision for the city. The finalists for D.C. presented their projects to the judges and the public at Union Station on January 15th where a team from the firm Beyer Blinder Belle was named the winner.
For additional information, see the Washington Post's article 01/16/08: "Visions of a Brave New Washington", by Michael Ruane.
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Two $5,000 development grants were awarded to School of Architecture faculty through UVa?s NIH Fogarty International Center Framework Program in Global Health
IEN Senior Associate Tanya Denckla-Cobb and Teresa Heinz Professor of Sustainable Communities Timothy Beatley were awarded a grant to establish their joint course, ?Healthy Communities, Healthy Food Systems: Global-Local Connections.? Denckla-Cobb will work on the project during summer 2007.
Associate Professor and Director of the Program in Landscape Architecture Kristina Hill was awarded a grant to develop a course on the topic of assisting cities to become more adaptable to climate change through their use of water. The course will address methods by which to provide emergency potable water for situations like the New Orleans hurricane, or slums in Kenya that don't have enough water on a daily basis -- and connect that "treatment train" of water to improvements in nearshore aquatic habitats, which often suffer the greatest impact from polluted urban stormwater runoff.
Monday, August 14, 2006
The University of Virginia School of Architecture has named Kristina Hill as associate professor and director of the Program in Landscape Architecture. The appointment, which was announced by architecture school Dean Karen Van Lengen, will begin in Spring 2007.
