Our Washington Pacific Coast is vulnerable to tsunami waves. These waves will wash over coastal communities that do not have ready access to high ground. The Institute for Hazards Mitigation Planning and Research has been working with these at-risk communities at the direction or the State Emergency Management Division to identify locations for vertical tsunami refuges. Currently, the Institute is applying an evacuation model developed by the USGS to corroborated locations suggested by residents. These suggested locations were the product of Institute research conduct over the past 8 years and which lead to the construction of structures in Tokeland and Westport, Washington.
Research Theme: Design & Building
Built environment scholarship at the scales of the interior space to the building
Renée Cheng: Change Agency, Value Change
Collisions are violent. The greater the mass or velocity of objects, the greater the energy released. The crises of the pandemic, economic crash, and social justice outcries are massive and still accelerating. In the wake of their collision, they will reveal new questions for our profession—and newfound energy to address them. Previously, architects pondering whether a new building was worthy of adding to our canon would ask “What does it look like?” and maybe “How well does it function?”…
Urban@UW
Urban@UW extends the understanding of cities—from people, buildings, infrastructure, and energy to economics, policy, culture, art, and nature—beyond individual topics to dynamically interdependent systems so that we can holistically design and steward vibrant and welcoming cities in which future generations will thrive.
A partnership between the Office of Research and the College of Built Environments, and engaging colleges, schools, and departments across all three of University of Washington’s campuses, Urban@UW amplifies UW as a leading university in urban issues. Together, we catalyze the evolution of Seattle as a model city—a boundary-pushing laboratory and knowledge hub that leverages innovation to create a place of opportunity and health for all—and build new ideas that can be used in metropolitan regions around the globe. Urban@UW leverages deep understanding, leading-edge analysis, and an ethos of partnership to create the pathway for Seattle as the city of the future.
Urban@UW works with scholars, policymakers, and community stakeholders to develop cross-disciplinary and cross-sector collaborative research. We aim to strengthen connections between research and solutions to today’s urban challenges. We do this through intellectual partnership, drawing upon the many scholars and centers on campus to cultivate new, path-breaking ideas, projects, and research-practice collaborations.
Urban@UW is a large network of scholars and practitioners with leaders and supporters engaging in different projects and initiatives across all three campuses. Supported by the Office of Research and the College of Built Environments as well as external grants and partnerships, the Urban@UW institution-wide community includes our Executive Committee, Urban@UW Fellows, and Urban@UW Affiliates.
Stephanie Carlisle
Stephanie’s work investigates the interaction between the natural and constructed environment, including embodied carbon, life cycle assessment (LCA), urban ecology, landscape performance and supply chains and toxicity of building materials. Combining a background in environmental science and architectural design, she builds bridges between research and practice, bringing data-driven analysis and topical research to complex design problems. This experience will be applied towards improving the EC3 tool as well as other carbon data initiatives at the Carbon Leadership Forum.
She most recently was a Principal at KieranTimberlake Architects where she was an environmental researcher in the firm’s interdisciplinary research group. She is also a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design and a Co-Editor-In-Chief of Scenario Journal.
Meghan Lewis
Meghan uses her background in architecture, supply chain sustainability, and life cycle assessment to pursue broad, system-wide policies and initiatives that support the vision of carbon neutral, circular building material supply chains. Meghan has been an active contributor at the Carbon Leadership Forum, and played a crucial role as a contributing editor to the Practice Guide for the Life Cycle Assessment of Buildings. She also chairs the Building Focus Group in the CLF Online Community. As a staff member she’ll be responsible for leading policy research to support Buy Clean initiatives.
She was recently the Head of Global Energy and Sustainability at WeWork, where she also launched the supply chain sustainability program in 2018 to drive efforts to source sustainable materials across their global portfolio. Before joining WeWork, Meghan was an architect at Mithun, where she worked on a range of project types and developed office-wide sustainability guidelines as part of the firm’s sustainability team. She also led internal efforts to integrate whole building life cycle assessment and low carbon material selection into the design process, through R+D and implementation on active projects.
Applied Research Consortium
The Applied Research Consortium (ARC) is rooted in the idea that collaboration across academia and industry will accelerate progress in our fields. ARC brings together an interdisciplinary group of built environment firms with faculty experts and graduate student researchers at the University of Washington’s College of Built Environments (CBE) to address the most vexing challenges that firms face today. The next generation of practitioners and scholars apply their creativity and knowledge of the latest scholarship and practices, accelerating progress and preparing for future work at the leading edge of our fields.
Through the ARC initiative, built environment firms with a presence in the Seattle area partner with College of Built Environments graduate students and faculty for research that is targeted at the specific needs of the firms. Firms work with faculty to shape research priorities for the consortium based on their needs and the latest research in our fields. ARC then matches graduate student fellows with firms for multi-quarter applied research projects that directly relate to the firms’ current work. Faculty mentors and supervisors at firms work with the fellows, contributing to their academic and professional development in the program and ensuring that the projects fit with longer term research goals.
The unique set of fields under the College of Built Environments umbrella—architecture, construction management, landscape architecture, real estate, and urban design and planning—allows ARC projects to leverage creative, interdisciplinary approaches to the most vexing problems that firms–and the disciplines themselves–face today.
ARC builds on CBE’s prioritization of equity and diversity, thus ensuring that the next generation of built environments practitioners and scholars bring the broadest possible range of perspectives and experiences to their work.
Michael Lindell
Michael K. Lindell has conducted research on emergency preparedness and response for a wide range of natural and technological hazards over the past 40 years. He has conducted research or provided technical services to 40 different organizations in the public and private sectors. He has provided technical assistance on radiological emergency preparedness for the International Atomic Energy Agency, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the Department of Energy, and nuclear utilities and also worked on hazardous materials emergency preparedness with State Emergency Response Commissions, Local Emergency Planning Committees, and chemical companies. He has served eight times as a consultant to National Research Council committees examining environmental hazards, and has been a member of three National Research Council committees—Disasters Research in Social Sciences, Assessing Vulnerabilities Related to the Nation’s Chemical Infrastructure, and Inherently Safer Chemical Processes: The Use of Methyl Isocyanate (MIC) at Bayer CropScience. In addition, he has reviewed research proposals for 20 different foreign, federal, and state agencies as well as performed manuscript reviews for over 75 different journals in the social and environmental sciences and engineering. He has written extensively on emergency management and is the author of 80 technical reports, 125 journal articles and book chapters, and nine books.
Julie Kriegh
As principal and founder of KRIEGH ARCHITECTURE STUDIOS | Design + Research, Julie Kriegh brings her clients’ project goals to fruition while adhering to the values of sustainability, high-performance construction principles, exceptional craft and attention to detail. These principles apply to custom single-family, multi-family, and residential community developments, as well as religious, medical, educational, and municipal facilities. She offers collaborative, team-oriented architectural services that result in custom designs that are aligned with her clients’ project needs. As a passive house designer, Julie uses state of the art energy modeling software to design and consult on net-positive energy buildings.
Dr. Kriegh is currently working on several research initiatives at the University of Washington, Seattle. Collaborating with a team of university researchers and industry partners on sustainability issues, Dr. Kriegh is leading research on building and occupant performance using wireless sensing devices and tailored feedback on energy use in residential settings. As a Research Scientist, she belongs to a consortium between UW, UA, Microsoft and Google researching the future of sustainable Data Centers. In addition, Dr. Kriegh worked with the UW Carbon Leadership Forum investigating materials for the Carbon Storing Data Center of the future to advance Microsoft’s goal to be carbon neutral by 2030 and carbon negative by 2050.
Julie received a PhD from the University of Washington in 2018, where her research focused on high-performance buildings, building user behavior and environmental psychology.
Teresa Moroseos
Teresa Moroseos is a Post-Doctoral Scholar at the Integrated Design Lab (IDL) in the University of Washington’s College of Built Environments. In this role, she provides daylighting and energy performance analysis for projects throughout the United States. She collaborates with design teams to find solutions that respond to the environment and maintain design intent, determines appropriate metrics of evaluation, and performs daylight and energy simulations. Teresa also conducts research related to building performance.
Teresa has a background in engineering, architecture, and academics, and enjoys combining the computational aspect of daylight and energy analysis with the qualitative aspect of design in her work. Prior to working at the IDL, she worked as a designer at a Seattle architecture office, where she worked on civic buildings from schematic design to construction administration. Teresa has also taught undergraduate students at the University of Washington in topics of climate analysis, energy principals for buildings, passive solar design, and daylight simulations.
Urban Form Lab
The Urban Form Lab (UFL) research aims to affect policy and to support approaches to the design and planning of more livable environments. The UFL specializes in geospatial analyses of the built environment using multiple micro-scale data in Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Current research includes the development of novel GIS routines for performing spatial inventories and analyses of the built environment, and of spatially explicit sampling techniques. Projects address such topics as land monitoring, neighborhood and street design, active transportation, non-motorized transportation safety, physical activity, and access to food environments.
Research at the UFL has been supported by the U.S. and Washington State Departments of Transportation, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Institutes of Health, and local agencies.
The Urban Form Lab is directed by Anne Vernez Moudon, Dr es Sc, a leading researcher and educator in quantifying the properties of the built environment as related to health and transportation behaviors. Philip M. Hurvitz, PhD, a veteran of geographic information science and data processing, leads data management and GIS work.