Announcing the 2025 A-School Research Grant Recipients

UVA School of Architecture is pleased to announce this year's research grant recipients, including seven projects or activities led by faculty members across the departments of architecture and urban and environmental planning. Administered through the Office of the Dean, the program provides seed or top-off funds in support of research activities that substantively contribute to the development of faculty members’ research agendas. The program was established to provide financial support for immediate research expenses, often for current established projects, and support one calendar year of activities.

This cycle's projects represent research ranging from sustainably reprocessing materials, using parametric design to develop textiles, studying community engagement methods for infrastructure projects, and examining Hong Kong’s housing density, among others.

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Recycled Plastic: Sheet Production, Calibration and Fabrication

JT Bachman
Assistant Professor, Architecture

A continuation of Bachman’s larger research project titled Waste Not, Want Not, this project brings together a faculty and student research team to examine the processes of recycling plastic waste into new formats suitable for design applications. The project is part of UVA Sustainability’s Decarbonization Academy and collaborates with JunkLabz, a nonprofit plastic recycling lab based in Charlottesville. The research team will learn how to shred, melt, and press recycled #5 polypropylene plastic waste into large sheets, while testing, calibrating, and documenting various material parameters and workflows. Ultimately, students will design and build a small demonstration project for use within the larger UVA community, while reporting the total amount of plastic recycled and as well as the amount of energy expended, and carbon offset through the process. This research extends Bachman’s ongoing work on reprocessing “waste” materials into new building material prototypes and long-lasting functional objects.

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MIST Lab Exhibition

Ali Fard
Assistant Professor, Architecture

MIST lab, directed by Fard, investigates the transformative role of technology and its spatial imprints in the future of urbanization. In the form of a multimedia exhibition, this specific project of the lab examines the past, present, and future of urbanization in Northern Virginia — through an analysis of the historical trajectories and sociotechnical dynamics that have, over the last 50 years, contributed to the region’s emergence as a global technopole and one of the fastest growing urban areas of the country. The exhibition features drawings, videos, animations, and digitally augmented physical models that elaborate on themes of resource scarcity, environmental degradation, the struggle for housing, alienated landscapes, and digital ruins left over as technical infrastructures and their spatial demands migrate. In addition to providing a rich analysis of what has led to the form of this technical landscape, the exhibition shares MIST lab’s creative responses that speculate on the region’s next 50 years.

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Community Engagement Methods for Hard-to-Reach Populations in Environmental and Climate Justice Contexts

Vanessa Guerra
Assistant Professor, Urban and Environmental Planning

This project will conduct a focused literature review of community engagement methods for hard-to-reach populations in environmental and climate justice contexts. Using the former Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP) — a proposed, but cancelled, natural gas pipeline from West Virginia to North Carolina — as an anchor case, Guerra and the research team including Associate Professor Barbara Brown Wilson, will catalog and analyze academic, governmental, and NGO resources to assess how engagement methods have been employed, adapted, and evaluated in similar contexts. This work will serve as a first phase in a larger research agenda exploring community engagement in contested infrastructure projects. It aims to establish the foundation for ongoing fieldwork, stakeholder interviews, and framework development through the compilation and analysis of academic and grey literature to identify best practices and gaps in engagement strategies.

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Fashion-to-formwork: Digital knitting for low-carbon concrete construction

Mohamed Ismail
Assistant Professor, Architecture

For this project, Ismail (Director the Open Structures Research Group) will explore how parametric design and adaptive fabrication methods can be applied to textile forms, bridging between research on responsive and inclusive garments and lightweight formwork for low-carbon concrete fabrication. This research will start by exploring digital fabrication tools such as Grasshopper, Kangaroo, and CLO3D, enabling material simulation at the scale of both the body and building structures. The resulting work will explore responsive clothing systems that adjust to the wearer while contributing to ongoing work in the design of fabric formwork for low-carbon concrete construction. The Fashion-to-formwork team will document and disseminate best practices learned through this project on garment construction and parametric design, providing a resource for all students to advance their knowledge in structural optimization and digital fabrication.

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Field Fiber Fold: Intersecting Textile Weaving Technics, Biogenic Material Design, and Plant Knowledge

Ghazal Jafari
Assistant Professor, Urban and Environmental Planning

Tapping into textile traditions and untested territories in emerging material design, this project aims to develop and clearly index the processes, methods, and technics of fabrication as a backbone for a new field of research in biogenic material. Jafari will test methods of fabrication based on weaving expertise established in the field of textile and fiber arts. Working with natural fiber as a building block, this work is rooted in plant knowledge, cultural landscapes, labor and social ecology of production, and environmental literacy — with attention to soil types and nutrients, hydrology, and biodiversity. Jafari will produce a series of woven prototypes, examining biological weather treatment and binding material (such as tree sap, bacteria, and mycelium), the ecological contingencies of plant and animal farming, and the process of turning fiber into yarn (including labor, tools, and technical skills). 

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Disaster Resilience Planning in Central Appalachia

Jennifer Lawrence
Assistant Professor, Urban and Environmental Planning

Central Appalachia is a complex region that reveals important patterns, practices, and possibilities for disaster resilience planning. The ecological diversity, rich resource deposits, abundant water, and unspoiled lands position the region as a key site for climate-adaptive development and in-migration. As climate impacts intensify, the region also faces heightened risk of catastrophic flooding linked to a legacy of extractive industrial activity which compounds the perpetual challenges associated with broken infrastructure, significant health disparities, and underinvestment into housing, education, social services and economic development. Drawing from insights from interviews, this project explores how the region is planning for climate resilience while simultaneously addressing whether recent disasters, including catastrophic flooding associated with Hurricane Helene, has shifted regional priorities for hazard mitigation and climate resilience.

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Livable Cities

Esther Lorenz
Associate Professor, Architecture

Lorenz will present two papers at international conferences this summer focused on various themes related to Livable Cities. This work contributes to her ongoing research into density, urban morphology, mobility and the embodied experience of cities. Lorenz’s authored papers are part of her current book project “Hong Kong: The Corporeal City,” and expand upon two aspects of Hong Kong’s urbanization: 1) Nested public transit networks and 2) High-density urban living. Her research elaborates on the ecosystem of public transit in Hong Kong where pedestrian movement is integrated with mass transit rail, buses, trams, and ferries. It also frames a theory of the sustainability of high-density urban culture that is more radically developed in Hong Kong than anywhere else in the world. Lorenz will present her research at the Livable Cities 2025 conferences in Barcelona and Lisbon.

The UVA School of Architecture Research Grants are open to applications on an ongoing basis. For more information please contact sarc-reserach@virginia.edu.