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Research Theme: Design & Building

Built environment scholarship at the scales of the interior space to the building

Institute for Hazards Mitigation Planning and Research

The Institute for Hazards Mitigation Planning and Research is an interdisciplinary academic institute housed in the College of Built Environments. The Institute is dedicated to exploring ways to enhance Community Resilience, through integration of hazards mitigation principles across all aspects of community development. Its mission is to build a resource center that will enhance risk reduction and resilience activities through research and analysis of hazards, policies related to mitigation, and outreach to the community.

The Institute for Hazards Mitigation Planning and Research is dedicated to integrating hazards mitigation principles into a wide range of crisis, disaster, and risk management opportunities. The Institute provides expertise in disaster preparedness, response, and recovery with a special emphasis on mitigation and planning in the promotion of community sustainability. It is interdisciplinary in focus and structure, and the capabilities of the Institute are enhanced by its close relationship with other academic and research organizations. This incorporates collaboration with several other disciplines within the University of Washington.

The Institute’s faculty and researchers are involved in numerous innovative and path-breaking research initiatives with the ultimate goal of enhancing community capacity to anticipate, respond to, cope with, and recover from natural and man-made hazard events.

Green Futures Research and Design Lab

Green Futures Lab is dedicated to supporting interdisciplinary research and design that advances our understanding of, visions for, and design of a vital and ecologically sustainable public realm. The Lab’s goal is to develop green infrastructure solutions within a local and global context. 

The Green Futures Lab explores and promotes planning and design for active transportation, including cycling and pedestrian environments; conducts research and design projects that aim to improve the ability of public spaces to build community and provide recreation and revitalization; works to improve the health of our water bodies and sustain our water resources through green infrastructure innovations, ecosystem restoration, and open space protection; innovates strategies for creating quality habitat, particularly within urban environments where it is most limited; and explores low-carbon urban design solutions to mitigate climate change.

Working with the University of Washington, local communities, and international partners, the lab provides planning, design, and education for healthy, equitably accessible, and regenerative urban and ecological systems.

Chandigarh Urban Lab

The Chandigarh Urban Lab is dedicated to creating a forum to understand the contemporary Indian city in transformation. 

The Lab is an investigation into issues of globalization, urbanization and preservation that are at play in Chandigarh today. Besides infrastructural and logistical support, the Lab offers linkages with local and national architects, academics, activists and citizens.

The Chandigarh Urban Lab is conceived as an ongoing forum on contemporary Indian architecture and urbanism. The Lab invites interested academic and research organizations to engage the Lab, either to simply access our facilities and framework and/or to propose full- fledged collaborations.

Center for Integrated Design

The University of Washington’s Center for Integrated Design (UW CID) is a Research Center operated by the Department of Architecture in the College of Built Environments at the University of Washington. Its research organization, the Integrated Design Lab (IDL), is a self-sustaining lab that includes interdisciplinary faculty, staff, students, professional collaborators, and partner organizations.

Our mission is to discover solutions that overcome the most difficult building performance barriers, and to meet the building industry’s goals of moving towards radically higher performing buildings and healthy urban environments. We advance our mission through interconnected research, technical assistance, and education and outreach.

Center for Education and Research in Construction

The Center for Education and Research in Construction (CERC) is a locus of research, scholarship and discovery in the University of Washington’s Department of Construction Management and allied disciplines of architecture, engineering and real estate. Focused on the people and practices of a dynamic, innovative construction industry, CERC develops new concepts and innovative solutions as well as improves methodologies for design, construction and operations. 

With labs focused on Safety and Health, Project Delivery and Management, Virtual Design and Construction, Infrastructure Development, and Sustainable Built Environments, the CERC faculty are not only experts and researchers in a wide array of topics, but also lead the field in translating that expertise into excellent construction education practices and pedagogy to train tomorrow’s construction professionals.

CERC develops and delivers continuing education for professionals within the built environment disciplines. Examples of past and ongoing partnerships include those with Skanska and the National Electrical Contractors Association. In addition, the Center supports the Department of Construction Management (CM) by hosting meetings of the program’s advisory council (CIAC), graduate and undergraduate classes, and teaching laboratories.  

With generous support from the local construction industry, the Department of Construction Management took on an ambitious project to develop a research and education center at the old naval base at Sand Point located in Magnuson Park, Seattle, WA near the University of Washington’s main campus. The facility features more than 25,000 square feet of space on two levels, providing a home for the Center for Education and Research in Construction.

Labs associated with CERC include:

  • PDM Lab
  • LCR Lab
  • ESC Lab
  • CTOP Lab
  • SHARE Lab

CTOP Lab supports the Internet of Things (IoT) project, studying devices which are increasingly a standard component of buildings. As these sensors are connected to the internet and networked to building technology (such as heating and lights), they introduce potential security vulnerabilities. Although technical solutions exist to counter security issues, implementation of these solutions are often impeded by the challenges that an organization’s Information Technology (IT) staff and a building’s Operations and Maintenance (O&M) staff have when they work closely together and share their knowledge about computer security and how buildings operate. These difficulties arise from different ways of working and different points of view about how technology works. These challenges, in combination with a policy environment that rarely regulates IoT devices, increases risk, leaving buildings vulnerable to attack.

This project will address these challenges by studying two critical areas: (1) how O&M and IT groups currently share their knowledge and skills in order to improve IoT security and (2) how public policies and an organization’s own rules regarding privacy and security impact how IT and O&M collaborate. The results of this study will generate knowledge around how IT and O&M professionals can work more effectively together to improve the security of our nation’s buildings and offer insights into how public policy may affect professional cybersecurity collaboration to manage IoT risk.

This project is a joint venture of the Communication, Technology, and Organizational Practices (CTOP) Lab as well as the Cyber-BE lab.

Center for Asian Urbanism

The Center for Asian Urbanism was established to promote and undertake interdisciplinary and collaborative research of urban conditions and processes in Asia and the “Global Pacific”, for example, the relevance of cities and city-regions in Asia to each other, to the Pacific Northwest of the U.S., and to the world at large. 

The Center integrates research and action-oriented activities in the field to develop new knowledge and inform policy, decision-making and professional development. It provides a platform locally and internationally for critical discussion of urban issues in Asia and beyond.

The Center serves as a platform to explore the intersection of architecture, construction, landscape architecture, and urban design and planning. It is also the goal of the collaborative to establish the University of Washington as a national and international leader in the field of urban research in Asia. The College, together with other units at the University of Washington, including especially the Jackson School of International Studies, the Asian Law Center and the Foster School of Business’s Global Business Center, currently has one of the strongest concentrations of scholars on Asian cities and urbanization in the United States.

Tomás Méndez Echenagucia

Tomás Méndez Echenagucia is an Associate Professor at the University of Washington’s department of Architecture. His research is focused on the use of simulation, computational geometry and optimization algorithms to make building components more sustainable. He holds a double degree in Architecture from the Universidad Central de Venezuela and the Politecnico di Torino, as well as a PhD in Architecture and Building Design also from the Politecnico di Torino. He has practiced as an architect and consultant in Europe and South America. His work includes several research pavilions and prototypes, including the “Armadillo Vault” for the Venice Biennale in 2016 and the ETH Pavilion in New York City in 2015. He completed a five year postdoctoral researcher position at the Block Research Group in the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH Zürich, where he was a project lead in the HiLo research unit. Tomás is a co-developer of the COMPAS framework, an ecosystem of modeling, design and simulation tools, ranging from Finite Element Analysis to geometric acoustics.

Catherine De Almeida

Trained as a landscape architect and building architect, Catherine’s research examines the materiality and performance of waste landscapes through exploratory methods in design research and practice. Her work has ranged in scale from large bio-cultural and sacred indigenous landscapes, to site design and architectural work, to furniture design and materials research. Through her design work, research, teaching and engagement, she explores ways of creating multiplicity within a single entity, space, building or site to form greater efficiencies and performative capabilities in design. Since 2014, Catherine has developed her design research—landscape lifecycles—as a holistic approach that synthesizes multiple programs, forming hybrid assemblages in the transformation of waste landscapes and materials. She uses landscape lifecycles as a framework for investigating the performance, visibility, citizenships, emotions and injustices of waste materials and landscapes.

For several years, she was a researcher for the Materials Collection at Harvard University, where she analyzed and developed new methods for the lifecycle assessment of materials used in built environments. This led to a passion for incorporating the lifecycles of materials and sites in the multi-scalar design of waste landscapes. She was awarded a Penny White Fellowship to research the lifecycle and use of geothermal energy in Iceland, which led to her graduate thesis, “Energy Afterlife: Choreographing the Geothermal Gradient of Reykjanes, Iceland,” and has been published and presented in various outlets. More recently, she was awarded several grants to continue her research in Iceland, focused on the Blue Lagoon and its waste reuse strategies. She continues to expand this research through documenting case studies of waste landscapes that have evolved from bottom-up processes, advancing landscape lifecycles as a critical lens for evaluating the landscape performance of existing sites that engage with waste reuse.

Before joining the Department of Landscape Architecture at UW, Catherine was an Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, where she developed courses examining the multi-scalar implications of materiality and waste. Prior to this, Catherine was a lecturer at Cornell University where she taught undergraduate and graduate design studios focused on brownfield transformation. She was also an Associate at Whitham Planning and Design in Ithaca, New York where she worked as a landscape architect and planner on numerous urban infill projects, including the transformation of a deindustrialized Superfund site into a mixed-use district known as the Chain Works District.

Catherine received her MLA from Harvard University and her BARCH from Pratt Institute. She is a certified remote drone pilot, an Honorary Member of the Tau Sigma Delta Honor Society in Architecture and Allied Arts, and a Fellow of the Center for Great Plains Studies. Her work has been supported by numerous grants, and recognized in national and international publications and media outlets, including the Landscape Research Record, Journal of Landscape Architecture, and Journal of Architectural Education.

Podcast: Leveraging the Life Cycle Assessment for Useful Carbon Accounting

Kate Simonen joins the NORI podcast to share the ins and outs of life cycle assessments, or LCAs. Kate Simonen is a carbon accounting expert and professor in the Department of Architecture at the University of Washington. As a licensed architect and structural engineer, she has an extensive background in high-performance building systems, seismic design and retrofitting, and net-zero energy construction. Kate’s research is focused on environmental life cycle assessment and innovative construction materials and methods. She is also the founding…

Storytelling in the Podcast Age

The spoken word has much in common with the built environment. Both pervade our lives without asking us to interrogate their origins or intentions—but, generously, they reward us if we make the time to do so.  Vikram Prakash‘s podcast, ArchitectureTalk, leaves us looking at the everyday space around us with greater curiosity, piqued by the weirdest and most beautiful of stuff. Read more