The A-School's Mona El Khafif and Ali Fard selected for ACSA Architectural Education Awards

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Left: Postcards from The Biophilic Region exhibition showcase student work from Mona El Khafif’s Urban Strategies seminar with photographs of Central Virginia by Woody Wingfield; Right: MIST Lab's design speculations envision Northern Virginia fifty years from now, when today’s twenty-year data centers have reached obsolescence. Photos: Tom Daly.

Each year, the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) recognizes architectural educators whose work exemplifies excellence in building design, community engagement, scholarship, and service through its annual Architectural Education Awards program. These honors celebrate faculty who inspire and challenge students, expand the discipline’s knowledge base, and extend their impact beyond the academy into professional practice and the public realm.

In the 2026 ACSA Architectural Education Awards, UVA School of Architecture faculty members Mona El Khafif (Associate Professor, Architecture and Urban + Environmental Planning) and Ali Fard (Assistant Professor, Architecture) were recognized with the Creative Achievement Award and the Faculty Design Award, respectively.

The Creative Achievement Award honors a specific accomplishment in teaching, design, scholarship, research, or service that advances architectural education. The Faculty Design Award recognizes work that strengthens the reflective relationship between practice and teaching, encouraging innovative design investigation in architecture and related environmental design fields—particularly projects that expand the boundaries of design through formal experimentation, community engagement, sustainability, resilience, and human-centered approaches.
 

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The Biophilic Region: A Vision for a Nature-Connected Future 
Mona El Khafif

Project Abstract:

Anchored in Charlottesville and Albemarle County, The Biophilic Region: A Vision for a Nature-Connected Future reframes the region as a prototype for the world’s first designated biophilic region—a territory intentionally structured to integrate human and nonhuman life through interdependent landscapes, infrastructures, and community networks. The project extends beyond a single exhibition to encompass an interdisciplinary seminar, an innovative pedagogical framework, and sustained civic engagement that collectively advance architectural education.

At the core of the work was the Urban Strategies seminar taught by El Khafif that brought together students from architecture, landscape architecture, and urban planning. In the first phase of the course, students mapped and critically assessed the region’s biophilic assets—ecological, cultural, and infrastructural systems shaping long-term resilience—through layered cartographies and annotated drawings. The framework examined seven thematic domains: recreation, water management, land conservation, agriculture, sustainable development, cultural heritage, and wildlife. In the second phase, students developed speculative yet grounded design strategies to strengthen these assets, transforming ecological data into spatial agency through creative, multi-scalar interventions. 
 

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Central to El Khafif’s pedagogy is the positioning of collaboration itself as a creative act. Students worked in interdisciplinary teams to develop thematic frameworks, share research, and construct collective visualizations that bridged architecture, planning, and landscape architecture. The seminar extended beyond the classroom, exposing students to faculty research, civic leaders, and community organizations. In this way, the course functioned as both a research incubator and a platform for civic engagement.

The public exhibition emerged as the culmination of this process, bringing together students, faculty, administrators, and local activists to translate research into visual and spatial forms accessible to professionals and the broader public. It argued that socio-ecological responsibility must evolve beyond administrative boundaries toward regional frameworks capable of sustaining human life while supporting resilient multispecies ecologies. Faculty-led investigations in material innovation, habitat connectivity, planning approaches, and tactical operations further expanded the work, reinforcing a multi-scalar vision for biophilic integration.
 

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Clockwise from top left: Before Building Laboratory's Kyle Schumann (right) talking about Tangential Timber model, 2024–2025, by Katie MacDonald and Kyle Schumann; Mona El Khafif and student at The Biophilic Region opening event; Tim Beatley, founder of the Biophilic Cities Network contributed a sapling tree to the exhibition; a student views the biophilic asset analysis produced by El Khafif's students. Photos: Corbett Smithson

As both pedagogical platform and civic forum, The Biophilic Region convened city and county officials, biodiversity advocates, and academic partners through exhibitions, public programs, and lectures. Together, the seminar and exhibition demonstrate how design education can operate as civic infrastructure—cultivating collective imagination, strengthening regional partnerships, and shaping more nature-connected futures.

Related Videos

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Click images to watch the Biophilic Region panel discussions: Opening Event (top), Biophilic Material Research (bottom left), Biophilic Tactics (bottom center), and Biophilic Building Blocks (bottom right).

Contributing Participants

CURATORS:
Mona El Khafif, Associate Professor, Architecture and Urban + Environmental Planning, Graduate Urban Design Program Director, University of Virginia School of Architecture, with Student Research Assistants: Joyce Fong, MLA '25, Julia MacNelly, MLA '25, Katherine Shi, B.S.Arch '25 

CONTRIBUTORS: 

• Biophilic Asset Analysis by ARCH/PLAN 5614 Urban Strategies Students (2024, Instructor: M. El Khafif)
• Biophilic Cities Network (Executive Director Timothy Beatley, Program Director JD Brown)
• Before Architecture (Directors Katie MacDonald and Kyle Schumann)
• Computational Tectonics Lab (Director Ehsan Baharlou)
• James Barnes, Assistant Research Professor, NC State University College of Design
• Leena Cho, Chair and Associate Professor, Landscape Architecture, UVA
• John Comazzi, Associate Dean of Academics and Associate Professor, Architecture, UVA
• Karen Firehock, Lecturer, Urban + Environmental Planning, UVA
• Lara Gastinger, Botanical Artist and Lecturer, UVA
• Jennifer Roe, Professor Emeritus, UVA
• Matthew Seibert, Associate Professor and Graduate Program Director, Landscape Architecture, UVA
• Barbara Brown Wilson, Associate Professor, Urban + Environmental Planning, UVA
• Bev Wilson, Professor, Urban + Environmental Planning, UVA
• Images by Woody Wingfield, AeroWingVA LLC

FUNDING:
The project was made possible with generous support from the Jefferson Trust.

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In the Shadow of the Cloud 
MIST Lab / Ali Fard

Project Abstract:

The modern spatial history of Northern Virginia is inextricably tangled with the development and growth of digital technologies and their networks of dissemination. As the most significant data center market in the world, the rapid expansion of data infrastructure in Northern Virginia has produced a highly fragmented urban territory that caters to the needs of technology corporations while consistently ignoring the adverse environmental impacts and the challenging socio-spatial conditions that data centers leave in their wake.

The exhibition In the Shadow of the Cloud presents multimedia narratives and speculative design interventions that recount the region’s emergence as a global technopole and reconsiders its intertwined relationship with data infrastructure. At the center of the installation, a 1:20,000 scale model of Northern Virginia forms a multimedia palimpsest that captures the tangled histories, forces, and actors that have contributed to the region’s development and continue to inform its future trajectory. 
 

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Projected maps, drawings, videos, and images interact with the topographic surface of the model to create a complex and multifaceted reading of the infrastructural landscapes that lie hidden in plain sight. A textural soundscape accompanies the unfolding narrative of the project while emulating the experience of living in proximity to data centers.

Complementing the central model, speculative design interventions reimagine three prominent spatial typologies—data centers, highway interchanges, and quarries—along the Washington and Old Dominion Trail, which forms the infrastructural spine of the region.
 

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Clockwise from top left: Ali Fard (left) introduces In the Shadow of the Cloud at the exhibition opening in the School of Architecture’s Elmaleh Gallery; visitors engage a 1:20,000-scale model of Northern Virginia’s topography, animated with multimedia projections tracing the region’s rapid development; speculative design models explore the afterlife of a big-box data center (bottom right) and the transformation of a former quarry to help meet rising water demands in Loudoun County (bottom left). Photos: Tom Daly

Interspersed with photographs that capture the creeping of data centers ever closer to everyday urban spaces, these design provocations reveal moments of failure and triumph, efficiency and struggle, degradation and repair, and respite and rebirth in the technical landscapes of contemporary urbanization. These interventions ultimately envision alternative forms of data infrastructures and strategies for the afterlife of data centers in NOVA and beyond.
 

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Related Video

Contributing Participants

PROJECT LEAD: 
Ali Fard, Assistant Professor, Architecture, University of Virginia School of Architecture,
Director, MIST Lab

COLLABORATOR: 
Stephen Voss (Photography and Videography)

STUDENT RESEARCH ASSISTANTS: 
Ari Bell, MLA '25, Sarah O'Donnell, MLA '26, Dorothy Philip, B.S.Arch '27, Leo Wehner, M.Arch '26, Treston Yetso, M.Arch '26

CONTRIBUTORS:
UVA School of Architecture Fabrication Lab (Manager Melissa Goldman, Assistant Manager Trevor Kemp, Lab Technician Andrew Spears), UVA School of Architecture Exhibition Team (Directed by Associate Dean of Strategic Initiatives Kyle Sturgeon)

FUNDING: 
This project was made possible with generous support from the UVA School of Architecture Dean's Office and UVA Environmental Institute.