Publications

Urgent Matters

The Urgent Matters series highlights the major projects of the faculty and students at the University of Virginia School of Architecture.

Trojan Goat

A self-sufficient house
by John D. Quale, preface by Kenneth Frampton, distributed by UVa Press

This first volume in the Urgent Matters series traces the design and construction of “The Trojan Goat,” The University of Virginia’s entry in the 2002 U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon. The author gives a first hand account of the creation of an award-winning 750 ft² solar-powered house, designed and built by a team of students and faculty, that combines sustainable materials with thoughtful design and technological innovation. Along the way, the author argues for greater support for sustainable building practices in the United States, including an increase in design/build opportunities for students of architecture.

Building After Katrina

Visions for the Gulf Coast
edited by Betsy Roettger, distributed by UVa Press

After the devastation caused by Hurricanes Katrina and Rita in the fall of 2005, entire towns, neighborhoods, and ecologies were destroyed. What remains is a complex web of social, economic, environmental, and cultural issues that demand new strategies for inhabiting this land.

During the spring semester of 2006, the University of Virginia School of Architecture took on a school-wide initiative to incorporate these issues into the research and course work of the school.  For a school of architecture devoted to learning through public service, this disaster and the resulting collaborative work in the school marked a strengthening of our long term commitment to incorporating “urgent matters” into the curriculum.  The intention of this collection of work is to communicate the pedagogical values of our school, to contribute case studies for applied design research, and present innovative strategies for re-building to the Gulf Coast communities.

While this is a critical time for the future of the Gulf Coast communities, the work in this publication is applicable to global design problems. How does one design an intervention for a specific culture, ecology, and time?  How do we respond to both disaster relief and long term restoration?   How does the design profession advance work at the intersection of disciplines?  How do we propose designs that improve the environmental underpinnings of a place while serving the many cultures that shape public space?  And how can the role of the design professional become an essential voice in shaping policies that affect our physical and cultural landscape?

Independent Publications

The Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Architecture

The First Forty Years (1966-2005)
edited by Jayne Riew, Lydia Mattice Brandt, and Karen Van Lengen, distributed by UVa Press

The Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medal in Architecture is one of the most prestigious honors awarded in the discipline of architecture and its related fields, arising from the unique environment afforded by Jefferson's design for the University of Virginia. Since 1966, the medal has recognized the architects, historians, politicians, and benefactors behind some of the most influential designs of the last half century, including Shigeru Ban, Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, Richard Rogers, Jane Jacobs, Frank Gehry, Robert Venturi, and many others.

This book catalogues the first forty recipients of this honor, outlining their achievements in brief biographies and showcasing their most famous work in color photographs. As Dean Karen Van Lengen writes in the introduction, the medal “acknowledg[es] the comprehensive nature of the design and development of our public realm.... As democracy is a process, so too is design a process that shapes current aesthetic and technological innovations and gives our culture meaning. the Medalists in this book reflect these values and principles in many different ways.”

Webcasts

Terragrams - delivering the landscape

by Craig Verzone

Terragrams is a podcast designed to deliver a series of conversations about the fundamental and all too often invisible role that landscape plays in our lives. This series of interviews aims at putting on record and archiving the voices of professionals in the world of landscape architecture and its related fields. The Terragrams podcast dispatches a collection of diverse and at times surprising personal narratives in a mobile, easy to use format.

Launched by Myles H. Thaler Visiting Professor, Craig Verzone, at the University of Virginia on March 13, 2006, Terragrams has featured associate professors of landscape architecture Julie Bargmann and Elizabeth Meyer. In 2007, Reuben Rainey, William Stone Weedon Professor Emeritus, hosted an interview with Robert Royston, the former partner of the late Garrett Eckbo. Additionally, Elias Torres and Michael Vergason, both former Thomas Jefferson Foundation Visiting Professors, have been guests. Other prominent guests include James Corner, Niall Kirkwood, Bet Figueras and Dan Kiley. Terragrams aims at being an open-ended project, continuing to collect a broad and varied array of voices through the next several decades.

Studio Publications

Samples, Scenarios, Catalysts: Towards an Ecology of Strangers

Venice Research Studio, 2004

“ ... This document closes, for now, [the] cycle of sampling, taking away, giving back to Venice. The research of the semester will attain its true life in the city it emerged from; we aim to be a new voice in the complex conversations that should, and do, surround change and possibility in a complex, interconnected system of natural and manmade. We look forward to a continued conversation.”

Student Publications

The students of the School of Architecture produce a variety of publications of their own work and investigations in design. These include work from traveling fellowships, studio work catalogs and various student published journals.

See Student Publications for more.