Throughout history, we’ve seen shifts in how people communicate regarding design. The question of how communication happens between architect and builder is as fundamental today as it was hundreds of years ago. While the dynamics of these communication processes are nuanced, our understanding of them has been colored by a narrative of the past. One CBE faculty member is challenging the standard narrative about how buildings get made, from design to construction through design communication and knowledge exchange. Today, we…
Person: Ann Huppert
PhD in the Built Environment
The College of Built Environments consists of five departments that together provide one of the country’s few comprehensive built environment programs within one academic unit: Architecture, Construction Management, Landscape Architecture, Real Estate, and Urban Design and Planning. Together, this combination of departments enable faculty and students to engage almost the entire development process, from economic and environmental planning, real estate, regulatory processes, siting and design, through actual financing and construction, to facility management and adaptive reuse in subsequent stages. Thus, the college is inherently multi-disciplinary, not only in terms of the dimensions of reality that it treats, but also in regard to the specialized disciplines, methods, and practices that it employs: history, theory, cultural criticism, engineering, design, planning, urban design, energy sciences, acoustics, lighting, environmental psychology, ecology, real estate analysis, statistics, management, horticulture, soil science, law, public policy, and ethics. In addition, because of the College’s focus on comprehensive analysis and practice concerning the built environment and its interrelation with society, it is substantially engaged in interdisciplinary work with other units on campus and outside of the campus, including mechanical, civil, and electrical engineering; with public policy and the health sciences; with art and art history; with textual interpretation in the humanities; with many of the computing and digitization activities that range from digital arts to the information school and technical communications; with education and social studies and services; with sustainability and ecological programs, including urban ecology, geography, the College of Forest Resources (especially urban horticulture and urban forestry), and Ocean Science and Fisheries; with environmental and land use law.
The College’s interdisciplinary character is a good fit with the emerging trends in today’s complex world, where only a pluralistic and collaborative approach will generate the necessary learning and teaching, research, and service. If we are to provide, in the end, both disciplinary and professional means to promote environmental well-being, the diverse environmental specializations must be fully integrated. Thus, working outside traditional disciplinary and departmental categories, the College’s faculty will advance solutions to problems that demand interdisciplinary perspectives and expertise. Other UW units bring much to bear on the built environment and students are wholeheartedly encouraged to explore possible cross-campus connections both in obvious and seemingly unlikely places. The Technology and Project Design/Delivery specialization especially connects with Psychology, the Information School, Technical Communication, Computer Science and Engineering, and Industrial Engineering; the Sustainable Systems and Prototypes field with Civil Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Industrial Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, the Information School, Technical Communication, the College of Forest Resources (especially Eco-System Science and Conservation, Urban Horticulture and Urban Forestry), the Evans School of Public Affairs, Geography, Public Health, Ocean Science and Fisheries, and Social Work, Urban Ecology, and perhaps Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Processes and Nanotechnology; the area of History, Theory, and Representation with Textual Studies, Art History, Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences at Tacoma, and Comparative History of Ideas.
Ann Huppert
Ann C. Huppert offers classes on architectural history, focusing particularly on urbanism, drawing and the architecture and art of the Renaissance. Recent courses have included the Drawing and the Design Professions, (Re)Building Rome 1400-1800, Architecture of Mediterranean Cities, 1300-1600, Drawing and Artistic Process in the Italian Renaissance (Department of Art History), and Italian Renaissance Art (Department of Art History). She also teaches survey courses including Architecture of the Ancient World, Medieval and Renaissance Architecture, and Appreciation of Architecture I.
Professor Huppert received an B.A. in Philosophy from Vassar College, and an M.A. and Ph.D. in Architectural History from the University of Virginia. Before joining the faculty at the University of Washington, she taught in the architecture and art history departments at the University of Kansas, the Ohio State University and Syracuse University. She has been a fellow at Worcester College in Oxford and at the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome, and has received additional fellowships from the American Philosophical Society and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation.
Professor Huppert’s book, Becoming an Architect in Renaissance Italy: Art, Science, and the Career of Baldassarre Peruzzi, (Yale University Press, 2015) investigates the close connections between the figural arts and architecture in the early sixteenth century through the lens of a remarkably large group of period drawings. Among the topics the book explores are the close connection of Peruzzi’s mathematical aptitude with his skill in perspective, and the influence of antiquity on his designs. Other publications have examined the role of perspectival drawings in the building workshop and designs for new St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican, in the Journal of Architectural Historians, and Renaissance practices of mapping ancient Rome, in Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome. Recently published book chapters include “Practical Mathematics in the Drawings of Baldassarre Peruzzi and Antonio da Sangallo the Younger,” “Giorgio Vasari and the Art of Siena,” and “Material Matters: Training the Renaissance Architect.” She has presented her research at numerous academic conferences in the United States and in Europe.