Mehlika Inanici, Ph.D. is a Professor and the former director of the Design technology track of the Master of Science in Architecture program at the University of Washington, Department of Architecture.
The focus of her research is computational lighting design and analysis. The underlying presumption in her research and teaching is that analytical approaches employed throughout the design processes help architects envision the performance of their designs, accelerate and improve design decisions, and reduce the uncertainty of the outcome. A large body of her research centers on developing and utilizing computer-based (day)lighting analysis techniques and metrics that can facilitate occupant comfort, satisfaction, health, and productivity improvements, in conjunction with significant energy savings.
Inanici has authored or co-authored highly influential papers on the use of high dynamic range (HDR) photography to measure and evaluate existing environments and to conduct psychophysical studies on visual comfort and preference. Her work on lighting measurements with HDR photography was selected as one of the “25 classic papers” in the 50-year history of the Journal of Lighting Research and Technology (2018) among the 2048 papers published between 1969 to 2018. Some of her papers are on the most cited list in Leukos (the journal of Illuminating Engineering Society) and Lighting Research and Technology.
She developed Lark Multispectral Lighting tool in collaboration with ZGF Architects LLC. Lark is an open-source software to simulate the non-visual effects of light that entrains the human circadian system. She also co-developed hdrscope in collaboration with Viswanathan Kumaragurubaran.
Her research has been funded by the US Department of Energy, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, the University of Washington Royalty Research Fund, UW Built Environments Innovations Collaborative Grant, and the Nuckolls Funding for Lighting Education.
Prof. Inanici’s teaching focuses on graduate-level courses on building performance simulation (Arch 524 Design Technology V, Arch 582 Computational Lighting Research, and 598 Performance-Driven Design) and research methodologies. She supervises students from the Master of Architecture, Master of Science in Architecture, and the Ph.D. program in Built Environments.
Inanici has received her Ph.D. degree from the University of Michigan. She has Master of Science degrees both in Architecture (University of Michigan) and Building Science (METU), and a Bachelor of Architecture degree (METU). Previously, she worked at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley California. Dr. Inanici is a member of the Illuminating Engineering Society, the International Commission on Illumination, and the International Building Performance Simulation Association.
Louisa Iarocci, Ph.D., is an Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture at the University of Washington, where she teaches in the areas of architectural history, theory and design. She is a licensed architect who has worked in architectural firms in Toronto, New York, St. Louis and Boston after receiving her professional architectural degree at the School of Architecture at the University of Waterloo in Canada. She completed a Masters in Arts and Science (1994) and a Masters in Liberal Arts (1992) at Washington University in St. Louis. She received her Ph.D. in the history of art and architecture from Boston University (2003). She served as editor and contributor to Visual Merchandising: The Image of Selling, published by Ashgate in 2013. Her monograph, The Urban Department Store in America was published by Ashgate in 2014.
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.
Heerwagen’s abiding intellectual and professional interest is the identification of how buildings can be created to serve the occupants who will live and work within them. Thus, the principal goal of his work has been to characterize, first, the range and natures of activities which occupants wish or need to accomplish in buildings and, second, the types of services which should be present in buildings (i.e., to enable occupants to perform these activities). These services include, generally, means for ensuring the health and safety of building occupants, as well as means for supporting other human physical, physiological, and perceptual psychological requirements.
Throughout his teaching and research he has sought to acquire and communicate knowledge about how to design and construct buildings so that occupants have settings that satisfy these requirements. In his teaching, research, and writing he has concentrated on how the presences of heat, light, sound, and good air quality in buildings can be controlled so that occupants can be assured comfortable environments which operate efficiently. In his work he seeks to examine and describe how to create buildings whose internal environments are well-conditioned (i.e., to suit occupants’ needs and wishes). Basic examples of what he addresses include how to establish buildings that are thermally comfortable, well-daylighted, suitably quiet (while also enabling good communication by speech and music), and adequately ventilated. Necessarily, achievement of these performance attributes can rely, for instance, on various active control systems (e.g., mechanical and electrical systems) or on passive devices.
Kimo Griggs’ teaching is centered on the development of individual design strategies informed by a deep knowledge of materials and hands-on experience with processes of making, from hand-work to advanced digitally-enabled fabrication. Core teaching includes Design Studios as well as a required, workshop-based introductory Materials & Making course. Courses in Digital Craft and Materials are also offered, developed with the goal of advancing knowledge about, and incorporating the use of Digital-Design-and-Manufacturing in design practices.
Kimo’s current research is based on understanding how existing and proposed manufacturing technologies – particularly those which are digitally-enabled – can be absorbed into the well-established delivery systems that produce our buildings and infrastructure. These interests include looking at how alternative design practices can operate as well as how contracting and management of construction processes might change as digital technologies mature. Kimo is also keenly interested in specific processes and products with craft-based histories that have altered or widely affected how we build today, and in how craft and material concerns register culturally, particularly in our built environment.
Lecturer Jennifer Dee teaches beginning architectural design studios for graduate and undergraduate students. She also teaches several courses in architectural theory. A winner of the College of Architecture & Urban Planning Lionel “Spike” Pries Teaching Award, she serves as faculty advisor/editor of the Department’s architecture journal, Column 5, and has taught in several foreign study programs, including Scandinavia in 1998 and Rome in 1999 and 2001 in an interdisciplinary course with the Comparative History of Ideas Program. She received her Master of Architecture degree from the University of Washington.
Rob Corser, AIA is an architect, educator and designer who has worked and taught in the US, Italy and the UK. Educated at the University of Virginia and Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, Corser has won numerous academic awards including Harvard’s Peter Rice Prize for the integration of engineering and architecture. Design Intelligence magazine named him one of the “30 Most Admired Educators” in design for 2013. He has taught at Syracuse University and the University of Kansas before joining the faculty at the University of Washington where he teaches architectural design, computer applications and digital fabrication courses. Corser is a licensed architect in the states of California and Washington, and his professional experience includes work in San Francisco and London.
Dedicated to design in the service of diverse communities, he has led collaborative design-build programs in Italy, and in post-Katrina New Orleans. In Washington, he has led award-winning programs working in collaboration with community groups in Twisp and Forks. His research focuses on collaborative design, and construction systems and strategies for deployable and sustainable structures. Some of this work continues areas of research born during his time as a member of ARUP’s Advanced Geometry Unit in London. Several of his furniture and building system designs have been featured in publications and exhibitions like the recent book: “The Shape of Green: Aesthetics, Ecology, and Design” and the exhibit “Design for the Other 90%” at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum in New York.
Meredith L. Clausen, born in Los Angeles to a highly musical and literary middle-class family, with close ties to members of the avant-garde in L.A. in the postwar era; her father was on the faculty, then served as chair of music department at LACC for over 40 years. She obtained both M.A. (in Medieval) and Ph.D. (in Modern) in architectural history at UC Berkeley, taught briefly at Stanford, then at the University of Washington where she continues to teach in both the architecture and art history departments.
Her courses are all in architectural history: Architecture 20th c. and Beyond, American Architecture, Architecture Since 1945, Paris: Architecture & Urbanism; graduate seminars in architectural history.
Her scholarship and research interests range widely, from 19th c. Parisian department stores and pioneering shopping centers to Le Corbusian historiography, Michael Graves, and postmodernism. She has published on Craig Ellwood, Gehry, Koolhaas, and Tschumi, but is perhaps best known for her work on Pietro Belluschi, the Italian-born American architect who was a leading regional modernist in the Pacific Northwest in the ’30s and ’40s before becoming dean of architecture and urban planning at MIT in Boston. She subsequently published a book on the Pan Am Building, which Belluschi designed in collaboration with Walter Gropius, as well as a book on Belluschi churches. Her dissertation was on the Samaritaine department store in Paris of 1905-1910; it was published in 1986, and led to her being asked to contribute an essay on the building’s history in a recent book, La Samaritaine, Paris, 2015, as the well-known historic building on the Right Bank abutting the Pont Neuf just down from the Louvre undergoes major remodeling by the Pritzker prize winning office of SANAA Architects, Tokyo.
Current research interests include John Yeon, architect of the Pacific Northwest; Le Corbusier (then Jeanneret), and his first encounter with Paris in 1908; revisionist perspectives on American postmodernism; and the experiential aspect of architecture, especially as is playing out in the work of SANAA Architects.
Heather Burpee, Research Professor at the University of Washington Integrated Design Lab, is a nationally recognized scholar in high-performance buildings — buildings that reduce energy and promote healthy indoor environments. Her work bridges practice, research, and education with collaboration between practitioners, faculty, and students. Her research addresses both qualitative and quantitative aspects of buildings including tracking health impacts and synergies between environmental quality, natural systems, sensory environments, and energy efficiency. She has led several efforts to create protocols for performance-based tracking and auditing for hospitals, higher education, and commercial buildings. She regularly applies these roadmaps in practice, consulting with leading design teams nationally that are charged with implementing high-performance buildings.
As the Director of Education and Outreach at the UW IDL, she leads a tour program at the Bullitt Center “The World’s Greenest Building,” and develops curriculum and implementation of other educational opportunities related to high-performance buildings to multi-faceted audiences. Heather is a Pacific Northwest native and received her Master of Architecture degree from the University of Washington College of Built Environments and her undergraduate degree in biology from Whitman College.
Ann Marie Borys is an architect and scholar who studies practice and the built environment as material culture. Her research explores the relationship of construction, intention, and meaning. She examines the processes and influences that contribute to design and their relationship to the physical and experiential qualities of architecture. She published the first English-language book on the 16th century northern Italian architect Vincenzo Scamozzi in 2014, and is currently at work on a study of American Unitarian churches. She has practiced architecture full time in Boston, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati, and is licensed in several states; she has served on the Conservation Board of the City of Cincinnati and the Board of the Unity Temple Restoration Foundation. She serves as the Department of Architecture’s Undergraduate Program Coordinator as well as its Architect Licensing Adviser, encouraging the next generation of architects to engage in the rapidly changing profession and be among its leaders.