| Data Visualization by Eric Field A picture is worth a thousand words -- or 20,000 data points? |  |
| "1+1=3" by Eric Field Joseph Albers once described the phenomenon when two objects are placed next to one another. At first, the two objects are discrete – each has its own form and identity, and exists in its own space. There are clearly two independent objects. Then as the two objects, usually two very like figures, are brought closer to one another, they begin to interact with one another in our eye visually. The space between them, and the interaction between them, at a point suggests something new - a third object - that is formed by the simple juxtaposition of the initial two, as the derivative construct of the two source objects. Such an interaction could be conceived as noise, or if read differently (or structured more precisely) as the creation of insight. |  |
| Cape Coast Castle Analysis by Jason Truesdale, with Louis Nelson and Eric Field Founded by the Swedes in the sixteenth century, but significantly expanded in the eighteenth-century by the British, Cape Coast Castle was the hub of the British African trade in slaves. The purpose built dungeons at Cape Coast were the final stop on the African leg of the journey of slavery for hundreds of thousands of Africans as they were carried from Africa to the Caribbean and mainland British colonies, and later to the United States. This project creates a digital model that reconstructs those spaces in an attempt to accurately understand the conditions of containment in this, the largest of British castles along the West African coast. Shown in the attached images are the measured drawings of the dungeons and cutaway of the dungeons with in the larger castle structure. ... |  |
| Food Heritage Mapping by Eric Field, with Tanya Denckla Cobb, Natalie Raffol, Patrick Torborg Begun as an Insight Lab student fellowship with Paul Hughes, the Virginia Food Heritage mapping project is now becoming a platform for local food heritage community research! |  |
| UVA Global: On the Map by Eric Field, with Alex Kaplan, Margie Crowell Working collaboratively with the UVa International Affairs office - now called UVa Global - Insight Lab staff produced a live visualization tool that literally puts UVa "on the map". |  |
| Parametric Design of Spatial Behavior by Weishun Xu, with Michael Beaman Recent advances of digital design tools have enabled architects to re-define spaces via more powerful and insightful form-fi nding logics through parameter driven processes. Such form fi nding processes off er comprehensive views from an infinite number of perspectives, creating complexity through the collapse of time and space. Despite its advantages, this methodology creates new problems for designers. Spaces shaped by these parameter-driven processes registered as the mere outcome of the logic of the enclosure. In the end, the parametrically deigned space is more of an index data, than it is the space perceived, or the space utilized. |  |
| Renaissance Drawing and Problems of Representation by Kirsten Sparenborg, with Dr. Cammy Brothers Typically, historians have either let Renaissance drawings speak for themselves, or they have drawn perspective lines on top of them. Professor Brothers and I worked together to create a series of images that explicate an important drawing that is a subject of her research in a more sophisticated way. The ingenuity of this collaborative project lies in its synthesis of hand, technology and artifact: drawing, digital rendering and Renaissance architectural drawing delicately combined to bring to the surface the salient features of the original drawing. The resulting analysis reveals and interprets the drawing process and, perhaps, the mind of the architect. ... |  |
| Food Heritage Mapping by Paul Hughes, with Tanya Denckla-Cobb On a basic level, the study of food heritage seeks to find the origin of plants and animals, where they were first cultivated, as well as locations where people have traditionally processed, prepared, sold and eaten foods. A deeper understanding of food heritage defines a sense of place from a community’s food and culinary traditions. This projects aims to enhance a sense of place within the Thomas Jefferson Planning District Commission by creating an interactive mapping portal as part of the Virginia Food Heritage Project’s website. This portal will map the various aspects of the area’s food heritage, creating an opportunity for people to learn more about their community’s food traditions as well as to contribute their own knowledge and family traditions to the project. |  |
| FABRICated FORMwork by Nicholas Wickersham, with Melissa Goldman, Eric Field Last semester, Melissa Goldman and I investigated the process of creating concrete casts via sewing materials. While exploring this idea, we found that Visqueen (plastic sheeting used for painting drop cloths and construction sites) responded to the pouring process the best. For this process, I digitally drew honeycomb patterns and sewed them on the new CNC sewing machine. I cast concrete into the sewn channels, or piped part of the honeycomb pattern, allowing the hexagon to be the void. We were testing for an easily reproducible formwork and thickness |  |
| Laser Fabrication of Microfluidic Devices by Eric Field, with Scott Williams, Ali Dhanaliwala, Dr. John Hossack Biomedical Engineering researchers are working with Architecture to use the school's laser prototyping facilities to fabricate micro-fluidic devices for drug delivery. |  |
| SEED Network by Eric Field, Bryan Bell, Lisa Abendroth SEED - Social, Economic, Environmental Design - maintains the belief that design can play a vital role in the most critical issues that face communities and individuals, in crisis and in every day challenges. To accomplish this, SEED provides tools - the SEED Network and SEED Certification - that guide design professionals toward community-based engagement with design practice. These tools support a public-interest methodology that is increasingly recognized as an effective way to sustain the health and longevity of a place or a community as it develops over time. |  |
| BLAST Spraybooth by Bill Sherman, with Alexander Kitchen, Delia Kulukundis, Eric Field "Blast" is a naturally ventilated spray booth for the School of Architecture that is also a demonstration of solar thermal technology, photovoltaics, and passive ventilation principles. |  |
| ecoMOD | Simulations by Eric Field, John Quale, Paxton Marshall An integrated piece of the larger ecoMOD design/build/evaluate project, this work is pursuing computational energy performance simulation of the several houses designed and built under the ecoMOD and ecoREMOD/LEAP projects. Work includes performance simulation as a feedback tool for assessing design strategies in the early and ongoing design and retrofit stages, as well as comparison of design simulations against collected data from post-occupancy sensors. This is a critical piece of work for assessing the ongoing ecoMOD series and developing its potential market distribution as a model for partners including Habitat for Humanity and the Charlottesville Local Energy Alliance Program.... |  |
| Morven Research | Information Space by Eric Field, Bill Sherman, Laura Voisin George, Jeffrey Plank The Morven Research website was developed as a collaboration and community space for the many different researchers and projects that are happening on the UVa's Morven property. The property itself is a form of a working lab on projects ranging from Archaeology and the history of Jefferson and Short's relationship to the physical characteristics and uses of the Gardens, the Adaptive Re-Use of the barns and other buildings, and the experiment that the entire property is under today surrounding Ecosystem Services. Research crosses the boundaries of Architecture, History, Archaeology, Environmental Science, and new forms of Information Technology and Visualization that are being used to study them. |  |
| The UVA Food Collaborative | Information Space by Eric Field, Ben Cohen, Paul Freedman, Jeffrey Plank, Meghan Welford, with Ben Cohen, Paul Freedman, Jeffrey Plank, Meghan Welford The Food Collaborative is a collective of University of Virginia personnel working to promote research, teaching, and community engagement in pursuit of more sustainable and place-based food systems. Functioning as a working group of faculty, staff and students, the collaborative is constituted both through its multidisciplinary membership and its engagement with community members and practitioners. While public debate about the relationships between environmental sustainability, regional food, land use, and resource management has proliferated in the last decade, work on-the-ground to establish and research the long-term validity of new food systems remains disparate and diffuse. This group provides a focal point for university and community efforts to study and improve those systems. Our goal is to make the University of Virginia a nationally recognized locus of research and traini... |  |
| The UVA Bay Game | Visualizations by Eric Field The UVA Bay Game is a large-scale agent-based simulation of the Chesapeake Bay watershed that allows players to take the roles of stakeholders, such as farmers, local policy-makers, watermen, and developers, make decisions about their livelihoods and professional expertise, and see the impacts of these decisions on the watershed and on each other over a twenty-year period. The Game is an educational tool for raising awareness about watershed stewardship; a tool for exploring and testing policy choices; and a tool for basic resarch in complex systems modeling. |  |
| Falmouth Field School by Louis Nelson For the past several years, Louis Nelson, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Architectural History at the University of Virginia School of Architecture, has brought students to Jamaica for a unique hands–on learning experience in historic building documentation and renovation. Since 2006, this effort has been organized as The Falmouth Field School in Historic Preservation and managed in partnership with Falmouth Heritage Renewal, a Jamaican non–profit preservation organization. |  |
A picture is worth a thousand words -- or 20,000 d... [+]
Joseph Albers once described the phenomenon when t... [+]
How are our physical lives and activities being tr... [+]
Federal, state and local agencies responsible for ... [+]
Founded by the Swedes in the sixteenth century, bu... [+]
