Category: Research + Publications
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Living Libraries and Forever Wars: A Case Study from Kherson, Ukraine
We are living in a time of protracted conflict and seemingly forever wars. What is the role of architects and architecture during a time of endless wars? This work considers a case study from a library in Kherson, Ukraine.
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The Voices of a People: Homes in the Native Village of Tyonek, Alaska
How can academic research support culture and community in extreme climates? This work examines the design and construction of housing for the Tebughna people of the Native Village of Tyonek, Alaska.
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Architecture of Culture, Community, and Climate: A Library for Kherson, Ukraine
How can architects support a community and a people during a time of war? How can libraries play an active role? This work centers on the design of a library in war-torn Kherson, Ukraine.
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UF Team Wins First Place in the US DOE Solar Decathlon 2023 Design Challenge New Housing Division
The University of Florida won First Place in the New Housing Division of the U.S. Department of Energy Solar Decathlon 2023 Design Challenge. Competition award winners were announced at the conclusion of the Solar Decathlon Competition Event in Golden, Colorado, April 20–23, 2023. Students from 55 Finalist Teams represented 43 collegiate institutions from around the…
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“Oculata Manus” published by Routledge
The essay “Oculata Manus: On the Role of the Body in the Making of Creative Minds” was published as a chapter in Developing Creative Thinking in Beginning Design, edited by Stephen A. Temple and published by Routledge, an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group. The chapter was co-authored by Bradley Walters and Lisa Huang.…
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Quinlivan Net-Zero Energy House included in 2018 National Solar Tour
The Quinlivan Net-Zero Energy House was included in the 2018 National Solar Tour, organized by the American Solar Energy Society and Solar United Neighbors. Visitors toured the house and were able to study the ground-mount photovoltaic system as well as the conditioning energy recovery ventilator (CERV) system. Citation:Walters, Bradley. 2018. “2018 National Solar Tour: Quinlivan…
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“Here be Dragons: On the Value of Incompleteness in Drawing” published in Representation Journal
The essay “Here be Dragons: On the Value of Incompleteness in Drawing” was selected for publication in Representation, the Journal of the Design Communication Association, edited by M. Saleh Uddin, Ph.D. This essay was originally prepared for the 2014 Conference of the Design Communication Association, held at Kennesaw State University in Marietta, Georgia. Citation:Walters, Bradley.…
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Oculata Manus: On the Role of the Body in the Making of Creative Minds
How can materiality be engaged earlier in design education? This essay probes alternative approaches to design education that invert traditional approaches by engaging materiality, matter, and detail early to promote deep learning by students of design.
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Walters Curates UF Superstudio Exhibit at the AIA Conference on Architecture 2017
Bradley Walters curated and prepared the Superstudio exhibit of student work from the University of Florida at the AIA Conference on Architecture 2017 in Orlando, Florida. Citation:Walters, Bradley. 2017. “Superstudio: University of Florida.” AIA National Convention on Architecture, Orlando, Florida, April 25 – April 30. Image: Superstudio Exhibit at AIA Conference on Architecture 2017. Photo…
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“Oculata Manus” published in Vorkurs Journal
The essay “Oculata Manus” was included in the inaugural edition of the Journal Vorkurs, edited by Zachary Wignall and Elizabeth Cronin. The essay probes pedagogies based in materiality and making, with particular reference to a new curricular structure introduced in Graduate Program at the University of Florida School of Architecture. Citation:Walters, Bradley and Lisa Huang.…
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Vicenza 3.0: Imparando dal Passato International Exhibition of Student Work
Working with Giancarlo Busato and Sotirios Papadopoulos, Bradley Walters co-curated an international exhibition of work prepared by students from the University of Florida School of Architecture. The exhibition included prints and engravings prepared by students in the Vicenza Institute of Architecture study abroad program in Vicenza, Italy. Citation:Walters, Bradley, Giancarlo Busato, and Sotirios Papadopoulos. 2016.…
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Visiting Critic, University of Tennessee at Knoxville
Bradley Walters served as an Invited Visiting Critic at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville for the Fall 2014 reviews. Walters, Bradley. 2014. “Final Undergraduate and Graduate Studio Reviews.” School of Architecture, University of Tennessee at Knoxville, Knoxville, Tennessee. For more information: http://archdesign.utk.edu/visiting-critics-attend-fall-2014-architecture-reviews/ Image: University of Tennessee at Knoxville, Art and Architecture Building.
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The End of Innocence
“Ralph looked through him. Here at last was the imagined but never fully realized place leaping into real life. Ralph’s lips parted in a delighted smile and Piggy, taking this smile to himself as a mark of recognition, laughed with pleasure.” William Golding, Lord of the Flies: Casebook Edition (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1954), 13.…
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Here be Dragons: On the Value of Incompleteness in Drawing
As a warning to unwary seafarers, the Lenox Globe (ca. 1503-07) included the following cautionary inscription on the eastern coast of Asia: “HC SVNT DRACONES” (hic sunt dracones). The Latin phrase offers an ominous warning, translated directly as “here be dragons” (1, 2). For some, this alludes to the presence of mythological figures lurking unseen,…
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Dead Letter Office
What is the role of unbuilt or unbuildable work in the education of architects? This research reconsiders Live Projects by reflecting on the role of speculation and incompleteness in architectural education.
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Ends and Means: Inquiries Into the Role of the Solar Decathlon in Architectural Education
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea. – Antoine de Saint-Exupery Architectural education often perpetuates a feud between the mind and the hand. To one side we find…
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On Tightness and Looseness
Unique amongst sustainable building programs, the Passive House Building Energy standard is both a building energy performance standard and a set of design and construction principles used to achieve that standard. Buildings that meet this standard use 80 percent less energy than conventional equivalent buildings and often provide superior air quality and comfort. Passive House…
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Urban Seams and Sutures: Strategies for Intervening in Pre-Industrial Urban Landscapes
The urban condition has become “a space of spontaneous self-organization and emergence, it is inherently dynamic, connected, interactive, a messy assemblage of networks, systems, ecologies, all competing with and contaminating, each other” (Furján 2008, 52). While these conditions and phenomena are experienced by many, they pose particularly acute problems for those in the design fields…
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Detours and Denouements
Architectural education is challenged by the pressing needs of a changing profession. With increasing costs and diminishing fees, firms deploy digital tools and/or outsource work to more efficiently deliver design services. Schools are similarly streamlining processes, responding to charged professional and political environments. With constrained funding, curricula at many schools are being abridged, shifting programs…
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Sketch: An Exhibition of Speculative Drawings at Lincoln Center’s Center Gallery, NYC
Sponsored by the Fordham University School of Visual Arts in association with New York-based curators d3, the Sketch exhibition for 2013 seeks to investigate the possibilities of drawing by embracing the full range and potential of sketching in conceptual design. Individual work by Bradley Walters as well the work of nine of his students was…
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Drawing Space
To say that the drawing has been displaced by building may be all too self-evident, both in practice and in academia. It is interesting that the displacement has been caused in part by the success of architectural drawings, drawings that evolved from two-dimensional ideas to three-dimensional models to photorealistic renders to full-motion video. The drawing…
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Unmoored Architecture: On Modules, Mobility and Manufacturing
In many classic variants on design/build as implemented in our schools, architects learn how to build or builders learn how to design, with individuals expanding their skill sets laterally such that they are able to understand more aspects of the design and construction processes. This is most readily accomplished when the building assemblies or design…
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Speculative Making: Engaging Mass and Matter
Young designers and beginning design students are often motivated more by emotion, immediacy, and sensuality than by ideologies, theories, and/or abstract principles. Close and/or causal relationships that are remote in perception, time, and/or space are less relevant than those that are immediate, present, and concurrent. Even when students understand the presence of these remote relationships,…
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Figures and Fields
Univerza v Ljubljani Fakulteta za Arhitekturo │Plečnikova Predavalnica | Ljubljana, Slovenia | 29 March 2012 This lecture weaves together professional work, research, and student work within a narrative that engages space, field theories, surface, landscape, environment, and ecology. Image: Lecture poster. Poster background image: Mapping of bee movements, responding to specific environmental conditions. Student work from Architectural Design…
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Active Lines: Liminal Marks + Material Constructions
The planning and development of large-scale projects requires investors to commit significant capital resources to their realization. These commitments are made based on the promise of a return, whether it is in the form of financial gain, an icon in one’s name, or both. The promises are materialized in words, numbers, and in visual documents:…
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Solar Decathlon Europe 2010: Towards Energy Efficient Buildings
From the introduction by William Gillett, Head of Unit for Renewable Energy, Executive Agency for Competitiveness and Innovation European Commission, Brussels (page 8): The EU is committed to the reduction of its greenhouse gas emissions by 20%, mainly by using energy more efficiently and by increasing the overall share of renewable energy up to 20%…
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Out of Thin Air
We cannot expect to extract ideas and schemes from the student without first feeding his mind and imagination. Bernhard Hoesli and Colin Rowe, 1954 (1) As informational networks bind us ever more tightly together, they also introduce unseen gaps and fissures within fields of knowledge. While in some cases, these are the product of distraction…
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Materialisms and Excess
Waste not, want not.1 Austerity is in the air. Excess is out; efficiency is in. Quantitative measures supercede the qualitative just as performative and operative strategies displace poetics and play. And in these historical moments, the serious obligations of professional practice are often drawn into the academy. The balance shifts from open-ended speculation to applied,…
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Independent Research in the Final Year: Masters Research Projects at the University of Florida, 2000 to 2010
Submission to the Journal of Architectural Education JAE 65:1 Ending Design | Spring 2011Collaborative Work with Martha Kohen, Ann Lindell, and Kevin Fitzgerald Abstract The Graduate School of Architecture at the University of Florida is conducting institutional research regarding the changing nature and gradual evolution of its end-of-studies Masters Research Project (MRP). Covering a decade…
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Instrumental Lines and Productive Paths
The territories of contemporary cultural production are marked by those at the extremes. On the one hand, we find a sustained fascination with celebrity and stardom; on the other is an enduring pursuit of the commonplace and/or normative. While seeking the extraordinary, it is often the anonymity of the everyday—the automobile, big-box retailer, or matching…
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Urban Fabrications
As the physical topography of the city is displaced by its constituent processes, flows, and non-physical motivators, these become the precise embodiment of a changed urbanity. As Manuel Castells has written, the “informational city is not a form but a process, a process characterized by the structural domination of the space of flows.”(1) To study and operate on this emergent and…
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Analog Alchemy and Digital Digressions: Hybrid Practices
Over the course of the last decade, the critical discourse around contemporary architectural practice has tended to eschew celebration of singular, expressive, and emotive authors in favor of collaborative team-based practices. It has been represented increasingly by a successive shift in production from active (and willful) actions towards passive (analytic or found) actions. The most…
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Knots and Nurbs: Relational Spaces in Variable Fields
Legibility of constructed space is largely based on relationships internal to a work, relationships that can be read or understood through the terms of the construct itself. Components are set in relation to one another, marking purpose and intent, shaping space through their interactions within a field. It is through numerous iterations, constant study and…
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Powder Puffed Faux Fat & Safe Sex
Following completion of my undergraduate studies in architecture at the University of Florida and work in practice, I prepared a portfolio of work to accompany applications for graduate studies. This document, compiled in January 1997, was titled “Powder Puffed Faux Fat & Safe Sex.” The document included an introductory preface, included here to provide additional…
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