“It is time to re-tune the expectations of our programs,” says Fung. “As the practice of architecture transforms, and it will, it is the schools and their programs which must look ahead to exploit the opportunities of new, practical and effective roles for the profession.”

Fung will serve on the ACSA Board for a three-year term, beginning on July 1, 2013, with the first year served as Vice-President, the second as President, and the third as Past President.

In her role, Fung will be part of a variety of ACSA committees, including Finance and Publications, will head the committees for Scholarly Meetings and Planning, and will nominate the chairs of ACSA conferences to be held during her term as President.

Committed to architectural education for nearly thirty years, Fung was appointed Director of Academic Affairs at SCI-Arc in 2010, after eight years of teaching and serving as the school’s Director of Graduate Programs. Previously, she has taught at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, for 16 years, with stints at Yale University as the Eero Saarinen Professor in 1995 and 2000, and at Ohio State University as Herbert Baumber Professor in 1996.

An AIA registered architect, Fung is principal and Director of Design for the renowned Los Angeles-based architecture firm Hodgetts+Fung (H+F). Since founding H+F in 1984 with partner Craig Hodgetts, FAIA, she has overseen the design of distinguished projects such as the renovated Hollywood Bowl, the Menlo-Atherton Performing Arts Center, the Wild Beast Pavilion at California Institute of the Arts, and a host of other influential designs. Current projects include renovation of the historic Robert Frost Auditorium in Culver City, the Rosa Parks Metro station, a mixed-use development in West Hollywood, the Chapel of the North American Martyrs at Jesuit High School in Sacramento, and the Diamond Head Theatre in O’Ahu.

Fung’s studio has also earned a reputation for high-caliber exhibition design through such installations as the Library of Congress/Ira Gershwin Gallery at Walt Disney Concert Hall, and the landmark exhibitions Blueprints for Modern Living: History and Legacy of the Case Study Houses, The Work of Charles & Ray Eames, and most recently at LACMA, California Design, 1930-1965: “Living in a Modern Way.” The firm also received numerous prestigious awards, including the Fellowship Architecture Award, the Gold Medal from the AIA/LA, the AIA California Council Firm of the Year Award, the GSA Design Excellence Award, and most recently, the R+D Award for their innovative fiberglass roof design for LAUSD modular classrooms.

More information:  www.ACSA-arch.org |  www.sciarc.edu

Going Local
San Diego County, California

Sometimes pie charts are worth a thousand words. And, in the case of San Diego County, they represent millions of acre-feet of water and billions of dollars.

Twenty years ago, San Diego County was strung out – quite literally. Most of its water was imported from mountains hundreds of miles away, and the region was in the grip of an epic drought. The tipping point came when the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MWD) — which provided 95% of the County’s supply — had to cut deliveries to by 20%.

We said ‘never again’ would we depend so heavily on a single water source,and we committed to a long-term strategy of diversification to protect whatis today a region of 3.1 million people with a $188 billion economy.
-Mark Cafferty, President & CEO of the San Diego Regional Economic Development Corp

Since then, San Diegans have launched a comprehensive set of strategies to move from imported water to locally controlled supplies. Today, San Diego buys only 45% of it’s water from MWD, and they plan to bring that down to 30% by 2020.  San Diego County Water Authority and its 24 member agencies have leveraged low-flow bathroom fixtures, low irrigation landscaping and behavior changes to reduce individual residential water use by 30% over the last seven years. In addition, agreements with Imperial Valley farmers to fallow lower value cropland, line canals, and transfer conserved water has reaped impressive returns – 27% of the county’s water now comes from these agreements, and that is expected to grow over the next decades.

Finally, a controversial seawater desalination plant, the largest in North America, is under construction on the coast, and the county has substantially increased the availability of water for emergencies by raising the San Vicente Dam.

San Diego’s experience demonstrates that for communities reliant on imported water from vulnerable ecosystems, diversifying their supply portfolios with an emphasis on local sustainability is the smart path forward.

Pacenti currently directs the Design School at Domus Academy in Italy, and she brings the Domus Academy emphasis on advanced design methodologies for anticipating needs and trends in a continuously evolving society. The academy has received recognition from around the world, including being nominated three times by Businessweek magazine as one of the best design schools in the world. The academy also received the prestigious Compasso d’Oro award for the quality of its academic and research approaches, and it was included in the 2012 publication of Masterclass: Product Design: Guide to the World’s Leading Graduate Schools from Frame Publishers.

NSAD also recently announced the formation of the Domus Academy School of Design at NSAD Advisory Board with some prominent design experts from around the world and San Diego. Some of these names will be very familiar to the design community here in San Diego:

• Viveca Bissonnette (FIIDA, Assoc. AIA, CID, LEED AP), design principal and vice president at Hollander Design Group in San Diego
• Robin Wilson Carrier (ASID, CID, LEED AP), president of the San Diego chapter of the American Society of Interior Designers (ASID) and principal of Robin Wilson Interior Design in San Diego
• Dante Donegani, director of the Design Department at Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti Milano in Milan, Italy, and former director of the master’s program in design at Domus Academy
• John Mills Davies (ASID, CGBP, CAPS I, CAPS II), who established the design program at Marrokal Design & Remodeling, a prominent San Diego design build/remodeling firm where he worked for nine years prior to launching his own practice
• Ezequiel Farca, one of Mexico’s most prominent designers and the chief creative and executive officer of EZEQUIELFARCA, an international design firm in Mexico City
• Paolo Giachi, an Italian architect and interior designer who has more than 16 years of experience designing retail stores for luxury fashion brands such as Prada, Miu Miu, Louis Vuitton and Jimmy Choo in locations around the world
• Claudia Salazar (Assoc. AIA), design director of the San Diego office of Gensler, a global design firm that has 42 offices and 3,500 employees worldwide

Read More:

Elena Pacenti: https://www.newschoolarch.edu/news-events/1219.htm

Domus Academy School of Design at NSAD Advisory Board: https://www.newschoolarch.edu/news-events/1211.htm

See more about the event on our calendar.

Register to attend this free discussion on the AIASF website.

Cinda Gilliland, a principal at SWA Group in Sausalito, reacts to a recent article in 

I am intrigued by the human resilience angle in the case for better urban design implied by Eric Klinenberg in his article in the New Yorker. In the article ‘Adaptation: How can cities be “climate-proofed?”’, Klinenberg discusses disaster preparedness in general and describes several large scale engineering solutions to climate change, solutions that are of necessity government backed, but he also writes about the role of resilient civil society can play in increasing an individual’s chance of survival in a disaster. Klinenberg, a Professor of Sociology, Public Policy, and Media, Culture, and Communications at New York University, writes, “Whether they come from governments or from civil society, the best techniques for safeguarding our cities don’t just mitigate disaster damage; they also strengthen the networks that promote health and prosperity during ordinary times.” He writes of Robert J. Sampson, a sociologist at Harvard University, who “has been measuring the strength of social ties, mutual assistance, and nonprofit organizations in Chicago communities for nearly two decades. He has found that the benefits of living in a neighborhood with a robust social infrastructure are significant during ordinary times as well as during disasters.”

“Alonzo Plough, the director of emergency preparedness and response for the County of Los Angeles, says, ’But it’s not just engineering that matters. It’s social capital. And what this movement is bringing to the fore is that the social infrastructure matters, too.’”

Enter the urban designer and landscape architect. How social infrastructures are enhanced by landscape infrastructure and open space is the focus of various studies by the Landscape and Human Health Laboratory at the University of Illinois, and the subject of an earlier Social Impact Design blog post. We have an opportunity here step up to the plate and play an important role in enhancing and creating that social capital that makes our communities and our society resilient. While I love and value aesthetics and believe fervently that beauty matters, our work as urban designers and landscape architects is more than a matter of creating artful places, we can and should learn to design to increase social connectedness. What would that look like?

For me, but perhaps not obviously, this brings me to questions of morality, and of shared societal values. Shared societal values are one of the ways that a group of people create cohesion and a sense of mutual responsibility. The lack of a shared moral system tears down the sense of social connectedness. In the entry on morality in Wikipedia it says,“The phenomenon of ‘reciprocity‘ in nature is seen by evolutionary biologists as one way to begin to understand human morality.” Reciprocity, as in the Golden Rule. Remember that quaint idea?

I was bowled over by movie critic Mick LaSalle’s mentioning of morality in his recent piece in the San Francisco Chronicle, ‘Violent Media Poisoning Nation’s Soul’. He derides the violent movies that the Hollywood industry makes so much money from and argues that violence should be rated at least as stringently at sex. He also calls on critics when reviewing ‘cruel and nilihistic’ movies to say as much. He imagines a movies critic’s inner dialogue when confronted with a ‘soul-crushing’, ‘antilife’ movie, writing, ”Yes, it’s sick, but isn’t that a moral judgment? And is it my place to comment on morality and decency?” I know the feeling of wondering if I have a right, or if its my place, but when did we cede the right to comment on morality and decency? When did we cede our right to act morally by acting in the best interests of our community by calling a sickening movie, sick?

Did it start in the sixties, when youth culture rebelled against the hypocrisy of the dominant morality of the time? And now, given that legacy and in our age of multi-culturalism, how could we arrive at an all encompassing moral code? We could start by agreeing on human ‘virtues’. Again from Wikipedia on morality: “certain virtues have prevailed in all cultures …examined. The major virtues …identified include wisdom / knowledge; courage; humanity; justice; temperance; and transcendence. Each of these includes several divisions. For instance humanity includes love, kindness, and social intelligence.” Social intelligence, temperance, wisdom, humanity, kindness: does this sound like a lot of movies you’ve seen lately?

We need to stop with the violence. For those of us who believe that art is part of architecture can we aspire, to paraphrase author David Foster Wallace who was writing about fiction, to create landscapes and builds that are “passionately moral, and morally passionate”,that help all of us to “become less alone inside”? We need to start creating an environment where we and our fellow citizens are empowered to act in their own and their communities best interests. It’s shocking to me that the one of the solution proposed for gun violence is armed guards. Really? It’s depressing to think that the solution to too many guns is more guns. Instead those of us who are still committed to finding real and lasting solutions to societies problems,

We optimists, need to get serious about putting our creativity and intelligence, our wisdom, to work to learn how to create art (places, communities, environments) that support each of us in our individual efforts to be humane, kind, and just. We designers need to learn how to design places, objects and tools that foster civil society: we need to build resilience. At the risk of alienating everyone, I would call that a moral imperative.

ACEEE’s Rachel Young addresses the growing need to forge collaborations between water and energy providers in this recent blog article. First posted by USGBC-Northern California on February 14, 2013. Reprinted with permission from www.usgbc-ncc.org

The President’s inauguration speech sparked renewed dialogue about the need for a comprehensive energy plan to address climate change. Recent decrease in lake levels in Texas is causing the city of Wichita Falls to look for new ways to stabilize their water supplies. Frequently missing from both of these discussions is the inherent relationship between water and energy.  This relationship should be capitalized on when crafting programs and policies aimed at solving these tough issues at the national and municipal level.

Energy is needed to transport, treat, heat, cool, and recycle water and, conversely, water is needed in energy extraction, production, and processing. As a result, saving water saves energy and saving energy saves water. This overlap between energy and water has come to be known as the “energy-water nexus.” Recognizing and taking advantage of the energy-water nexus is beneficial to both the energy and water communities because when they coordinate they can simultaneously reduce consumption of these two resources through accounting for those embedded savings.

Saving electricity at the end-use (customer) level saves water because it avoids additional baseload electricity generation and water required for that generation process. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates thermoelectric-power withdrawals account for 49 percent of total water use and 53 percent of fresh surface-water withdrawals; an average of 23 gallons of water used per kilowatt-hour. This is a large amount of water saving potential that could be captured simply through increased energy efficiency.

In addition, reducing the use of all fossil fuels also saves water needed for resource extraction, production, processing, etc. The recent increase in hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) to access natural gas has brought a significant amount of attention to the impacts natural gas extraction has on water. Fracking uses large volumes of pressurized water to create fractures in the rock layer and releases the natural gas. Furthermore, some observers are also worried about underground water pollution from gas leaks during fracking. Despite these concerns, little attention has been given to the fact that if we utilize natural gas and electricity generated by natural gas more efficiently we not only reduce energy consumption and extend the life of our domestic natural gas resources, but we also save significant amounts of water and potential pollution of water sources.

Saving water at the end-use (customer) level and throughout the distribution system can save energy because it reduces the energy needed for water withdrawal, transportation, and treatment. Water supply and wastewater treatment are often provided by municipal governments and the energy required for these services is one of the largest energy expenditures for a local government, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Increasing water efficiency can greatly reduce operating costs for local governments. Without proper water-energy nexus planning in government and in the private sector, embedded savings can go unnoticed or uncalculated and the full benefits of efficiency are underestimated.

Energy and water utilities have worked together to implement efficiency measures that save both energy and water (e.g., efficient clothes washers and better cooling towers), but experience has been limited. In addition to expanded cooperation between the water and energy sectors, utilities can undertake numerous other activities to promote demand-side reductions at the residential and commercial level, such as offering education and outreach programs, combined energy and water audits, energy and water efficiency kits, and rebate and installation programs. However, in order to reach greater, more sustained dual savings, utilities, policymakers, and the private sector should focus on creating programs that implant the energy-water nexus into their operation and planning.

Programs that work collaboratively to reduce energy and water often involve partnerships among government, utilities, and companies. These collaborations can be challenging, but they are ultimately mutually beneficial and can result in enhanced outreach capabilities and customer contacts, increased staff, and financial resources, and a greater body of knowledge to draw from.

American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) and Alliance for Water Efficiency (AWE) recently released a report, titled Tackling the Nexus: Exemplary Programs that Save Both Energy and Water, detailing some of the exemplary programs that save both energy and water. The successful programs profiled in the report, and also in the ACEEE online Water-Energy Directory, help highlight the value of the energy-water nexus and designing innovative energy-water efficiency programs.

Rachel Young will be presenting at the 10th Annual Water Conservation Showcase, March 19, 2013 at the Pacific Energy Center. The event is free to attend, and you can register and learn more at http://www.usgbc-ncc.org/water2013.

Under Bob’s leadership, CAF developed a comprehensive strategic plan with a new and bolder mission and vision for the organization. The wheels set in motion in 2008 have led CAF to have its first Executive Director and a clear purpose of promoting healthy and sustainable communities throughout California using the research and expertise of our design schools and firms. Representatives of all ten of California’s accredited architectural programs serve as Regents with CAF as a direct result of Bob’s efforts. In addition, CAF’s multi-year collaboration with the Arid Lands Institute at Woodbury University has put water scarcity issues on the profession’s agenda and has tied water resources and energy usage together. This relationship between CAF and one of California’s academic institutions will be a model for future CAF initiatives and is directly linked to the efforts begun while Bob was CAF’s President.

Bob has also been an active participant in AIA activities both locally with AIA Inland California (AIAIC) and at the state level with AIA California Council (AIACC). He served as the AIAIC President in 1999 and was the recipient of their 2009 Lifetime Achievement Award. Since its inception, Bob has lead the Health Care Practice Group of the AIACC Capitol Forum making it one of the most successful and powerful of the AIACC’s thought leadership groups.

During Bob’s tenure at HMC he led them through substantial growth and developed the firm’s outstanding reputation for innovation in healthcare planning and garnering recognition from the American Institute of Architects Academy of Architecture for Health as well as Modern Healthcare, and Healthcare Design magazines. From 1995 to 2004, he served as HMC’s Chairman of the Board and President/CEO directing the firm’s corporate governance and its strategic vision. Bob helped expand HMC from a single office to an international firm with ten offices.

After leaving HMC, Bob plans to continue his role with several civic organizations. He currently serves as trustee of the Riverside Art Museum, commissioner of the Riverside Planning Commission, and chair of the American Heart Association/ID Board of Directors. In addition, Bob is an active member of the Riverside Region of the Porsche Club of America.

This issue has two inspirations. One is that many of us are off to Phoenix for the 2012 ASLA Annual Meeting and EXPO. Phoenix is a place of beguiling extremes of heat and dryness, and the adaptations people make (or not) to live there and in places like it are fascinating. In climate terms, Phoenix is not unique. About one-third of the world’s population lives in arid regions; in the United States, millions of people are living on land you would call desert.

The other inspiration was the Drylands Design Conference I went to this past spring, held by the Arid Lands Institute at Woodbury University in Burbank, California. The institute’s directors, Hadley and Peter Arnold, have struck an important vein of thinking about development in dry lands. They brought together a range of experts in design, science, and public policy, all around a competition they staged to explore better ways of dealing with water, energy, and their scarcity in the dry places people insist on living. (Hadley Arnold writes about the competition and its revelations for us in Forward, on our back page.)

Click the image below to read Hadley Arnold’s overview of the Drylands Design competition and conference, reprinted here courtesy of Landscape Architect Magazine.