This campaign is organized by the Lebanese Club at MIT and the MIT Arab Alumni Association. All proceedings collected will go to the Beirut Emergency Fund, launched by SEAL, which you can learn more about here .
The Beirut Emergency Fund's disbursement of the funds will be strictly governed with full transparency about recipient organizations. To date the following NGOs have been selected: AlGhina, Arcenciel, Beit El Baraka, Lebanon Needs, Lebanese Red Cross, Nusaned and Offre Joie. Additional ones are currently in the vetting process and we will be regularly updating the list.
August 6 2020 | Living, Learning, and Working after COVID-19
On August 6, 2020, MITArchA (MIT Architecture Alumni) held its second COVID-19-focused online webinar event. Liz Burow, M.Arch '05, Workplace Strategy and Design Research Consultant, and Elliot Felix M.Arch '06, Founder of Brightspot Strategy joined forces to discuss education and work after COVID-19. Over 130 alumni registered for the event. The webinar was moderated by Kenneth Namkung, M.Arch '03 and Marilys R. Nepomechie, M.Arch '83.
The talk was wide-ranging in its scope and breadth. The speakers touched upon short-term, medium-term, and long-term responses to the questions of life and work during and after the pandemic. Other pressing issues, including questions of equity were also touched upon.
Alumni in attendance asked a number of detailed and incisive questions, concluding the event on a positive and intellectual note.
Call for Nominations to the MITArchA Board
Are you passionate about Course IV and want to give back and get to know other alumni? Do you know a fellow alum who is interested in volunteering? The MITArchA Board is inviting it's members to nominate an MIT Architecture Alum to serve on the MITArchA Board. To make a nomination please become a member, and forward your nomination to Jacob Kain, MITArchA Nominating Committee Chair, kain@alum.mit.edu, by August 2nd.
Video: MITArchA Holds Online Panel Discussion: Architecture Alumni on the Covid-19 Frontlines
On June 30th, 2020, MITArchA held the first of a series of online panel discussions focused on current events including the COVID-19 pandemic currently sweeping the country. This first event, titled “Architecture Alumni on the Covid-19 Frontlines”, focused on the Course IV alumni response to the pandemic.
The event featured three panelists: Jeffrey Berman ’80, Marcel Botha SMArchS ’06, and William Gilchrist ’77 M.Arch ’82 SM’82, and was moderated by Pamela Tang, Marilys Nepomechie, and Kenneth Namkung (all members of MITArchA’s Board of Directors).
The event began with a short presentation from each panelist, followed by two questions from the moderators. A Q & A session, in which attendees were able to ask directed questions followed the moderated portion of the event.
The panel discussion ended with a closing statement from each panelist, ending the event on a bright and positive note.
Call to Alumni: Virtual Opportunities for Students
This is a call for any virtual opportunities that can be offered to students, undergraduate and graduate, for the summer or as employment for this year's graduating class.
As always, students are looking for professional experience. However, it is as challenging as ever for our architecture and design students to get their footing in practice; given the various economic impacts of COVID-19, some businesses have rescinded or delayed previously confirmed offers. These seemingly small experiences can have big impacts on individuals' career trajectories, and we reach out to you, our community, to see how we can help each other.
These opportunities can range from full-time, virtual internships offered by an organization/employer to short-term, defined projects or tasks lasting a few days. In addition to regular project work, creatively consider where you could use a bright mind and helping hand (mens et manus)!
Does your firm have graphics, renderings, presentations, reports that need assembling? Is there a research topic or software program your firm has been wanting to dive into, but has not been able to get to? These experiences do not need to be in architectural practices as our Course 4 students and alumni are interested and skilled in not only architecture but also design, research, and more.
Compensation is strongly encouraged. If compensation is not feasible for you at this time, please be clear about that and what students will learn from the experience.
If you have ways to support, reply with a brief description, approximate start and end dates, basis of compensation, and contact info to:
Paul Pettigrew, M.Arch '88, AIA, NCARB
Director, Undergraduate & Alumni Outreach, Career Development,
Department of Architecture, MIT
MITArchA Department Liaison
paulpett@mit.edu
617.715.5778 (office)
SA+P Team awarded in MIT’S 2020 15K Arts Competition
Note: this article is reposted from the MIT Council for the Arts. Read original here.
Eight years ago, MIT launched a novel competition designed to foster arts-focused startups at the Institute. “There were a number of arts prizes awarded at semester’s or year’s end,” says Leila W. Kinney, Executive Director of Arts Initiatives at MIT. “But we realized that startup competitions were where the action is at MIT.”
The action was electric at Wednesday’s final round of the $15K Creative Arts Competition at MIT. Because of COVID19 restrictions, the six finalist teams made virtual presentations to a jury composed of CEOs, arts administrators, entrepreneurs, and designers. Team Elements, which produces individual art making kits to promote creative thinking, took the $15,000 first prize. Rarify, an online platform that uses big data to assess and market classic furniture pieces, won $2,500 with second place, while Material Futures Lab, which uses biology to produce environmentally friendly pigments, was awarded the $1,000 third prize.
“We were honestly stunned by the level of all the entries,” said first prize winner Michael Stradley, SMArchS ‘20, who along with Maria Esteban Casanas, SMArchS ‘20, created Elements. “All of the teams were super impressive, and each one brought something different to the table. It’s one of the beauties of this competition. MIT has a great ecosystem of innovation and entrepreneurship. We were fortunate to get our start with DesignX at the beginning of the year which helped us build our initial idea into a venture.”
The $15K Competition has attracted close to 200 student teams since 2013. Each year, groups of aspiring arts entrepreneurs submit proposals, attend workshops, and meet with mentors to hone their business plans and pitches. The projects span the ecosystem of creative projects; past winners include a virtual reality device for the blind and crowdfunding site to invest in music labels.
“At other schools, entrepreneurship and the arts usually means giving students management training,” says Kinney “For us, it means helping students acquire the capacity they need to launch viable ventures that have the arts at their core.”
This year’s competition drew a total of 17 entries. As in past years, each team met remotely with a mentor through Mentorly, an online platform that pairs students with professionals in an applicable field. Beginning in mid-March, due to COVID19, all competition workshops and events were moved online including last week’s final pitch critique session and the final presentations.
It’s Not Just About Winning
While the cash prizes can help winning teams pivot into the marketplace, the competition is intended to benefit all participants. “This competition isn’t an endgame,” says Shannon Rose McAuliffe, who took over as Manager of Student Art Programs at MIT last September. “It’s an infrastructure to support students who learn to face and overcome obstacles over time. Win or not, everyone who participates leaves with skills that will help them thrive in whatever field they choose.”
Past winners readily cite the acumen they gained from the Competition. “I learned to look at projects through two lenses—the human lens, and the financial lens,” says Marwan Aboudib SM’15, MArch ’15. Aboudib’s Tekuma team took first prize in 2015 with a project that brought artworks to Airbnb hosts, increasing their rental values while providing income for artists. Today, Aboudib and his Tekuma partners work at Tekuma Frenchman, a global urban design and placemaking firm with offices in Boston and Dubai. “Even today, when I’m trying to win projects to design cities, I use those same lessons. I tell an amazing human story. And then I back it up with numbers.”
In addition to acquiring new skills, participants learn to collaborate, comparing notes and strategies with teammates and with other teams. “Our idea has probably gone through 100 iterations since we first thought of it,” says Jeremy Carmine Bilotti, SMArchS ‘20. “And a big part of that process was talking with other teams and learning from their experiences during the competition.”
The Value of Mentorship
Throughout the competition process students receive guidance and feedback from mentors, much like they might in an art or architecture studio. “All the students here are intelligent and motivated,” says Hailey Fuqua, a Boston-based vocalist and arts entrepreneur who mentored two of this year’s entrants. “But there are basic parts of launching a brand you can’t know until you’ve done it.”
For Rebecca Hui, MCP’18, who reached the final round of the 2016 competition and won first prize in 2017, the competition mentors showed her a path forward. “It was inspiring to meet MIT alumni who started with an idea and were then able to launch it,” says Hui, founder and CEO of Roots Studio, a Brooklyn New York based company that digitizes artworks from traditional artists around the world and licenses them to high end fashion and retail. “By the time I left MIT, after two $15K Competitions, I had a much clearer idea of what I wanted to do and how I could work towards it.”
The learning flows both ways between students and mentors. “These students are incredibly flexible in their thinking,” says Aithan Shapira, an artist, consultant, and Lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management who mentored teams in 2019 and 2020. “They know there is more than one way to approach and solve a problem and are eager to find the best one. It’s an important reminder for all of us, especially in this climate where we’re talking about finding a new normal.”
While the $15K Creative Arts Competition is conceived to bring business acumen to the arts, it also brings artistic acumen to business. “Art is a way of thinking,” says Nir Hindi, founder of Artian, a Madrid based business consultancy. Hindi mentored the 2019 winning project “Teach to Learn,” an online global music mentorship program. “It’s a mindset that supports curiosity, imagination, and teaches us to deal with ambiguity. This type of competition shows that there are possibilities well beyond the boxes we try to fit ourselves into.”
Robert Alexander González SMArchS '93 named Dean of UNM School of Architecture and Planning
The following is a press release from University of New Mexico School of Architecture and Planning naming Robert Alexander González as the new dean of its School of Architecture and Planning.
University of New Mexico Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs James Holloway has named Robert Alexander González as dean of the School of Architecture and Planning (SA+P) effective July 1, 2020.
“I am excited to bring Robert González to UNM as our next dean of Architecture and Planning. His ability to connect with external communities will bring great benefits to our faculty and students in their scholarship and professional service to New Mexico,” Holloway said.
González looks forward to his new role at UNM including the opportunity to work with faculty, staff, students and the people of New Mexico.
“I am excited about joining the UNM School of Architecture and Planning family. I found the School to be unlike any other program with its diverse faculty and staff dedicated to serving a culturally rich region, especially with two standout design research centers, DPAC, the second oldest community design center in the country, and the Indigenous Design and Planning Institute,” said González. “This is a model for other institutions that want to integrate multiple disciplines that are strongly rooted in community engagement. I’m inspired by the opportunity to help strengthen the fulfillment of the School’s mission and share the School’s formula for success, which has been spearheaded by excellent educators and a legacy of recognized visionary leadership.”
González, who comes to UNM from Texas Tech University (TTU), fills the position held on an interim basis by Mark Childs since July 2019 following the departure of former dean Geraldine Forbes Isais. A registered architect in the State of Texas, González is currently the Director of both the Architecture Program, where he has led the professional program, managing undergraduate education (supervising all faculty on the El Paso campus), student recruiting, admissions, fundraising, strategic planning and graduation, and the TTU El Paso Regional Site.
He helped expand the site to include Historic Preservation Studies, with a new graduate degree in this field, as well as new degrees in Retail, Hotel, and Institutional Management. González worked for nine years to engage TTU in the city’s downtown renaissance, and he hopes to encourage the same kind of partnerships between the SA+P and Albuquerque and Santa Fe, where he currently resides.
González is particularly excited about the opportunities provided by his appointment as dean of UNM’s SA+P. “As the only New Mexico School offering professionally accredited degrees in Architecture, Community Regional Planning, and Landscape Architecture, the School has impacted the region with planning and design excellence,” he said. “I’m very excited to find new ways to broaden the students’ professional trajectory and career opportunities, not just across the state, but nationally.”
“Robert has done many exciting things in his career, and grown the TTU program in El Paso considerably. He was visionary in finding a way to place the program in the El Paso Union Depot train station, a historic building designed by legendary architect Daniel H. Burnham,” Provost Holloway said. “That took some real out-of-the-box thinking. Our architecture and planning faculty are creative thinkers, and I’m confident that having Robert leading the school is going to result in some really exciting new directions for UNM.”
González’s research focuses on U.S.-Latin American relations and representations of Pan-Americanism in the built environment. He also examines U.S.-Mexico border issues as built form, ephemeral installations, and public rituals. He published Designing Pan-America: US Architectural Visions for the Western Hemisphere, a field-leading book in U.S. diplomacy and World’s Fair studies and he has published numerous articles and book chapters.
A rising voice in architectural education, González led a $5.9 million Department of Education Hispanic-Serving Institution STEM Grant, serving as Project Manager and Principal Investigator, and working closely with a community college partner. He is the incoming President-Elect of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA), and former board member of the Society of Architectural Historians and the Journal of Architectural Education. He is the founding editor of the international journal AULA: Architecture & Urbanism in Las Américas. During his career, he earned the TTU Hemphill Wells New Professor Excellence in Teaching Award, the ACSA Creative Achievement Award and the Faculty Design Award, and is a Ford Foundation Fellow.
González received his B.Arch in Architecture from the University of Texas at Austin (1990), a S.M.Arch.S in Architecture (History, Theory and Criticism) from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1993) and his Ph.D. in Architectural History from the University of California, Berkeley (2002).
4/30/2020: Leong Leong Lecture + Online Alumni Social
Image: MITArchA
On April 30, 2020 the MIT Department of Architecture held an online lecture by Leong Leong (the webcast is here). The lecture was hosted by the MIT Chapter of NOMA (the National Organization of Minority Architects).
The online social, held via Zoom, included Chris Leong and Dominic Leong, founders of Leong Leong, Nicholas de Monchaux, Head of the Department of Architecture, and multiple Course IV Alumni, including many board members of MITArchA.
A lively discussion ensued, including many introductions between geographically dispersed alumni and discussions of the role of design during the current COVID-19 crisis.
Course IV PhD Student Mohamed Ismail Receives Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans
Note: this article is excerpted from Archinect.com. Read original here.
An MIT architecture PhD student, Mohamed Ismail, is one of 30 immigrants and children of immigrants nationally, chosen as this year's recipients of The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans's $90,000 fellowship for graduate school students.
The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans, is a national merit-based Fellowship that honors the contributions of continuing generations of New Americans in the United States.
As a PhD student in building technology at MIT, Mohamed Ismail is researching the application of structural optimization to the alleviation of housing insecurity in the Global South. Born to Sudanese parents in the United States, Mohamed moved to the Philippines when he was eight. His parents had moved to the United States for an education and his father’s career in academia and research later brought them to the Philippines. Mohamed received his bachelor’s in civil and structural engineering at Duke University before receiving his Master of Architecture at the University of Virginia, where he received the Design Education Fellowship and Faculty Award for Design Excellence. After graduating, Mohamed became a faculty lecturer at the UVA School of Architecture, teaching parametric structural design and digital workflows to both undergraduate and graduate architecture students.
Chosen from a pool of 2,211 applicants, a record-breaking number, Mohamed and the 29 other 2020 Fellows were selected for their potential to make significant contributions to the United States. They will each receive up to $90,000 in funding over two years to support their graduate studies. The 2020 Paul & Daisy Soros Fellows are all the children of immigrants, green card holders, naturalized citizens, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival (DACA) recipients, or visa holders who graduated from both high school and college in the United States.
In addition to receiving up to $90,000 in funding for the graduate program of their choice, the new Fellows join the prestigious community of recipients from past years. The active alumni network includes former US Surgeon General Vivek Murthy; California Surgeon General Nadine Burke-Harris; Stanford AI leader Fei-Fei Li; computational biologist Pardis Sabeti; legal expert Jeannie Suk-Gersen; CEO Andrei Cherny; award-winning writer Kao Kalia Yang, and more than 650 other New American leaders.
MIT named No. 1 University Worldwide for Architecture / Built Environment
Note: this article is reposted from MIT News. Read original here.
MIT has been honored with 12 No. 1 subject rankings in the QS World University Rankings for 2020.
The Institute received a No. 1 ranking in the following QS subject areas: Architecture/Built Environment; Chemistry; Computer Science and Information Systems; Chemical Engineering; Civil and Structural Engineering; Electrical and Electronic Engineering; Mechanical, Aeronautical and Manufacturing Engineering; Linguistics; Materials Science; Mathematics; Physics and Astronomy; and Statistics and Operational Research.
MIT also placed second in five subject areas: Accounting and Finance; Biological Sciences; Earth and Marine Sciences; Economics and Econometrics; and Environmental Sciences.
Quacquarelli Symonds Limited subject rankings, published annually, are designed to help prospective students find the leading schools in their field of interest. Rankings are based on research quality and accomplishments, academic reputation, and graduate employment.