Gundula Proksch is a scholar, licensed architect, and Professor in the Department of Architecture and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture. She is the Founding Director of the Circular City + Living Systems Lab (CCLS), an interdisciplinary research group investigating transformative strategies for sustainable urban futures. The CCLS leverages research and design methods to investigate the potential of synergetic systems to apply circular economy principles and integrate living systems in buildings and cities. These approaches produce and circulate resources within the food-water-energy nexus toward efficient, just, and sustainable urban built environments.
Professor Proksch is the Principal Investigator of the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded research project “Belmont Forum Collaborative Research: CITYFOOD.” As part of an international research consortium, with partners in Germany, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands and Brazil, CITYFOOD investigates the potential of integration of aquaponic systems into cities on a broad scale, as an innovative solution to mitigate daunting environmental, economic, and social challenges. Her book Creating Urban Agricultural Systems: An Integrated Approach to Design (Routledge, 2017) is the first source book on how to approach urban agriculture from a systems perspective. It explores the ways urban farms provide integrated environmental systems, innovative operational strategies, and design approaches to create environmentally sound and economically viable urban agricultural operations.
Professor Proksch’s interdisciplinary sustainability research builds on her professional experience spanning fifteen years of practice in Europe and the United States. She practiced with renowned architects, David Chipperfield in London and Richard Meier, Stan Allen and Roger Duffy of SOM in New York. She holds a Master of Architecture from Cornell University and a master-level degree from the Technical University Braunschweig in Germany. She received a DAAD scholarship for independent studies at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, ETH Zurich in Switzerland.
Dr. Vikramaditya “Vikram” Prakash is an architect, architectural historian and theorist. He is Professor of Architecture at the University of Washington with adjunct appointments in Landscape Architecture and Urban Design and Planning. He received his B. Arch. from Chandigarh College of Architecture, India and his M.A. and PhD in History of Architecture and Urbanism from Cornell University.
Vikram works on issues of modernism, postcoloniality, global history and fashion & architecture. His books include Chandigarh’s Le Corbusier: The Struggle for Modernity in Postcolonial India, A Global History of Architecture (with Francis DK Ching & Mark Jarzombek), Colonial Modernities (co-edited with Peter Scriver), The Architecture of Shivdatt Sharma and Chandigarh: An Architectural Guide. A Global History is widely used as a textbook and being translated into five languages. His next book, One Continuous Line: Art, Architecture and Urbanism of Aditya Prakash, is due in summer 2020.
Vikram is Associate Dean for Academic Affairs in the College of Built Environments. He previously served as Associate Dean for External Affairs, Chair of Architecture and Director of Undergraduate Interdisciplinary Programs. His public service includes terms on the Boards of Seattle Center and the Seattle AIA. He also directed Chandigarh Urban Lab, a series of interdisciplinary international studios.
Vikram is co-PI (with Mark Jarzombek, MIT) of three successive grants of $1.0 million (2014), $1.5 million (2016) and $1.0 million (2019) awarded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. These resulted in the creation of GAHTC – a collective of over 200 teachers of global architectural history.
Vikram is host of ArchitectureTalk – a bi-weekly podcast based on curated conversations with invited guests. In its first two years, ArchitectureTalk received over 60,000 unique downloads and has been independently reviewed in The American Scholar.
The 2020 Annual meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture recognized Vikram with the title of ACSA Distinguished Professor.
Ken Tadashi Oshima is Professor in the Department of Architecture at the University of Washington, where he teaches in the areas of trans-national architectural history, theory, representation, and design. He has also been a visiting professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and taught at Columbia University and the University of British Columbia. He earned an A.B. degree, magna cum laude, in East Asian Studies and Visual & Environmental Studies from Harvard College, M. Arch. degree from U. C. Berkeley and Ph.D. in architectural history and theory from Columbia University. From 2003-5, he was a Robert and Lisa Sainsbury Fellow at the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures in London.
Dr. Oshima’s publications include Kiyonori Kikutake: Between Land and Sea (Lars Müller/Harvard GSD, 2015), Architecturalized Asia (University of Hawaii Press/Hong Kong University Press, 2013), GLOBAL ENDS: towards the beginning (Toto, 2012), International Architecture in Interwar Japan: Constructing Kokusai Kenchiku (University of Washington Press, 2009) and Arata Isozaki (Phaidon, 2009). He curated “Tectonic Visions Between Land and Sea: Works of Kiyonori Kikutake” (Harvard GSD, 2012), “SANAA: Beyond Borders”” (Henry Art Gallery 2007-8), and co-curator of “Crafting a Modern World: The Architecture and Design of Antonin and Noemi Raymond” (University of Pennsylvania, UC Santa Barbara, Kamakura Museum of Modern Art, 2006-7). He served as President of the Society of Architectural Historians from 2016-18 and was an editor and contributor to Architecture + Urbanism for more than ten years, co-authoring the two-volume special issue, Visions of the Real: Modern Houses in the 20th Century (2000). His articles on the international context of architecture and urbanism in Japan have been published in The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Architectural Review, Architectural Theory Review, Kenchiku Bunka, Japan Architect, L’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui, and the AA Files.
Peter Cohan teaches graduate and undergraduate architecture design studios in the Department of Architecture. He has twice received the Lionel Pries Prize for excellence in teaching. He also leads an architecture practice, Peter Cohan Architect, specializing in single-family residential design. His research interests focus on the nature of materials, their expressive role in construction, and the practical application of tectonic theory to architecture. He has written a number of papers and articles on this subject in addition to exploring these issues in teaching and practice.
Cohan also has an abiding interest in Scandinavian architecture. He is the director of the Scan|Design Visiting Guest Professor Program, which annually brings a distinguished Danish architect to teach in the CBE, and the Scan|Design Architecture Internship Program, which provides internships in Denmark for students enrolled in the Master of Architecture programs.
Robert B. Peña, Associate Professor and Graduate Program Coordinator in the Department of Architecture, teaches in the areas of architectural design and building science with an emphasis on ecological design and high-performance buildings. Professor Peña is also an adjunct faculty member in the Landscape Architecture department. He received a B.S. in Architectural Engineering from the University of Colorado and an M.Arch. from the University of California, Berkeley. Professor Peña has over a decade of professional experience gained while working as a principal at Van der Ryn Architects and the Ecological Design Institute in Sausalito, California; EHDD Architects in San Francisco; Mazria Architects in Santa Fe, New Mexico; and in private practice in Washington, Idaho, Montana and Oregon. Professor Peña has held teaching appointments at Montana State University, The University of Oregon, and Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and has taught as a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley.
Professor Peña’s academic and professional work can be characterized by three interconnected themes: critical practice in the architecture sub-discipline of ecological design; teaching through the development of the knowledge and methods for sustainable design; and service in the university and community aimed at ecological literacy, environmental health, and resource conservation. In partnership with the UW Center for Integrated Design, Professor Peña works regionally with design teams on the development of high performance and net-zero energy buildings. Since the inception of the Bullitt Center, he worked with the Bullitt Foundation, the Miller Hull Partnership, and Schuchart Construction on the design and development of this groundbreaking high performance building.
Elizabeth Golden is an architect and an Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture at the University of Washington, where she teaches in the areas of design, materials, and building technology. Her teaching, academic research, and creative work are dedicated to revealing the systemic complexities that shape our physical and cultural realities. Golden investigates the relationship between people and their environments, both at the micro and macro scales, analyzing architecture as an index to its larger cultural context.
Golden is a licensed architect in Washington and New York state and has practiced nationally and internationally for over 25 years. She holds a Master of Science in Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia University GSAPP and a Bachelor of Architecture (professional degree) from the University of Arkansas. She currently serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Architectural Education. Underpinning her practice is an ongoing analysis of the complex relationship of architecture and the built environment to systemic issues such as social marginalization and economic globalization. Together, her built and speculative work, research, and community activism demonstrate architecture’s dynamic potential to drive social change.
Research + Practice
Golden cultivates a reciprocal relationship between her research and practice, treating them as integral parts of an interconnected feedback loop. She frequently collaborates on design initiatives that combine expertise from the University of Washington, local nonprofits, governmental agencies, and other educational institutions. A recent example is the Seattle Street Sink and Clean Hands Collective, a community effort to promote hand hygiene in the midst of COVID-19. Her collaborative projects have received numerous honors including a National Honor Award from the American Institute of Architects (AIA), an Award of Merit from AIA Seattle, and an R+D Award from Architect Magazine. They have been published internationally including features in Architectural Record, Architectural Review, and the BBC World Service.
Across her research and teaching, Golden is committed to transforming the discipline of architecture by building productive connections between academia and professional practice. Her recent book Building from Tradition: Local Materials and Methods in Contemporary Architecture (Routledge, 2018) offers a critical analysis of traditional building practices and their contemporary resurgence in the context of globalization. A belief in the power of collective intelligence drives the practice, with the expertise of local professionals, craftspeople, and user groups integral to each project. Ultimately, Golden is concerned with the mutual exchange between people and place, studying ways in which architecture can evoke our shared humanity.
David Strauss combines professional practice as a principal with SHKS Architects with teaching undergraduate classes in architecture theory and graduate architecture design studios in the College of Built Environments.
The focus of Strauss’s professional practice and research is public places. His doctoral dissertation at the University of Pennsylvania, In Campo Verde: The Project of the Piazza Nuova in Ferrara, described the symbolism and experience of early modern public space. His architectural practice has focused on work with existing buildings where the relationships between the imagined, the concrete, and the contingent have been subjects of research.
Strauss’s design projects include the Magnolia Library Addition and Renovation, Seattle Fire Stations 31, 18, and 8, the UW Facilities Services Training Center, the Ferndale Library, and the Eddon Boat Building. He has served on the Pioneer Square Preservation Board and the Washington Trust for Historic Preservation Board.
Nicole Huber is a licensed architect in Germany where she graduated as Diplom-Ingenieur (M.Arch.) from the Technical University Darmstadt and held a Post-Graduate Research Position at the University of the Arts Berlin. She was a Visiting Scholar at the History, Theory and Criticism Section of the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2003) and holds a PhD from the Bauhaus University Weimar (Dr. des., summa cum laude, 2006). Before joining the faculty of the UW, she taught architectural and urban history, theory and design at the University of the Arts Berlin (1996-2001), where she also co-directed the Program for Urban Processes (2001-2004) focusing on the interrelationships between urbanization, globalization, and representation.
At the University of Washington’s Department of Architecture Professor Huber teaches in the areas of architectural and urban history, theory and design. Her studios and seminars use the Pacific Northwest and Northern Europe as laboratories examining the relations between processes of urbanization, strategies of sustainable development and emerging visual technologies in regionalizing and globalizing contexts.
Her research focuses on comparative urbanization processes and urban representation in Europe and the US. It has been presented at numerous international conferences; single and co-authored articles have appeared in publications such as the Journal of Urban History, aafiles, Informationen zur Modernen Stadtgeschichte, Topos, Bauwelt, DAMn, Places, and various anthologies. She has published Urbanizing the Mojave Desert: Las Vegas (Berlin 2008) and is co-editing an anthology entitled Visionary Urbanism: Representations of the Postwar American West (both with Ralph Stern). Her book on German conceptualizations of natural environment, national identity, and design education The Architecture of “Sachlichkeit”: Visuality, Nationality and Modernity, 1890-1919, forthcoming as a German-language edition (Weimar: Bauhaus-University Press) is currently under revision for an English-language edition. Her next book project will map the transfers of urban design strategies between Europe and the US impacting recent North-American theories such as “everyday,” “landscape,” “postmodern,” and “postcolonial” urbanisms.
Brian McLaren’s teaching and scholarship are influenced by a background in cultural history and an ongoing interest in Marxist and contemporary critical theory, as well as postcolonial studies. The broad focus of his concerns have been on the relationship between architecture and politics during the Fascist period in Italy, with particular attention to the tensions that linked modernism and regional expression.
McLaren’s dissertation research and initial publications concentrated on the colonial context of Libya, in particular the relationship between modern architecture and local culture under the auspices of tourism. These publications include an edited collection with D. Medina Lasansky, Architecture and Tourism: Perception, Performance and Place, and a completed major book project, Architecture and Tourism in Italian Colonial Libya: An Ambivalent Modernism. More recently, this research has appeared in the Journal of Architecture and Giovanni Arena.
McLaren’s current research is related to a new book project, Modern Architecture, Colonialism and Race in Fascist Italy, 1935-1945, which was presented at the Annual Conference of the College Art Association in New York (February 2015) and Society of Architectural Historians in Chicago (April 2015). It is also published in abbreviated form in a themed issue of Architectural Theory Review (Fall 2015). McLaren is a member of the Race and Modern Architecture Project, a research collaborative co-directed by Professors Mabel Wilson (Columbia University), Charles Davis (University of North Carolina – Charlotte) and Irene Cheng (California College of the Arts).
Roark Congdon is an instructor of technology, drawing, and art history at several colleges and universities in Seattle. He has taught 3D modeling, rendering, sculpture, drawing, art history, and design at the university and high school levels in both in the U.S. and China for over 15 years.
Congdon is a McNeel certified Rhinoceros trainer, and the author of Architectural Model Building, Tools, Techniques, and Materials.