News

A Canadian couple quit their jobs, sold their cars, moved across the country and hunkered down for months to turn their pet project of affordable, designer prosthetic covers for amputees into reality, creating a product to fill a void in an industry dominated by medically oriented prosthetists.

The University of Calgary’s Environmental Design School has created a major Jewish ritual object for the observance of the holiday of Sukkot which celebrates the 40 years of wandering in the Sinai wilderness after the Exodus from slavery in Egypt.

Rabbi Shaul Osadchey, of the Beth Tzedec Congregation in Calgary, says non-Jewish professors and students embarked on a design project to create a sukkah or hut that is reminiscent of the Israelites’ temporary shelter in the desert.

The flourishing of experiments in responsive design is a direct result of designers and architects taking the means of production into their own hands, as technology becomes more accessible to them. For instance, many interactive devices employ Arduino microcontrollers, tiny circuit boards designers can program to read and respond to sensors.

Hosted by the Faculty of Environmental Design (EVDS), the Design Matters lecture series brings to Calgary a range of important people to explore issues in architecture, urban design, product design, and landscape ecology. The series kicks off this year with Lise Anne Couture.

Couture is a principal of Asymptote Architecture, the highly acclaimed New York-based practice she co-founded with Hani Rashid in 1989.

Incoming Faculty of Environmental Design (EVDS) master and PhD students explored ways to activate urban spaces and make them more resilient through a series of walking tours and a "design intervention" with local practitioners in Calgary’s downtown.

Continuing a longstanding tradition of hosting a student-organized, faculty-supported Student Orientation Week, EVDS engaged students, faculty and local practitioners, many of whom are alumni, in this year’s orientation.

Like all good students, while researching a master's degree project focused on wildlife management, Mary Benjamin allowed herself to become sidetracked by a topic that captured her interest more deeply — the mountaineering experience.

"I found I was reading more about the mountaineering experience for personal pleasure than I was about my original thesis topic in an attempt to understand why I love it so much," Benjamin explained.

EVDS Architecture Professor Tang Lee was interviewed on CBC radio Homestretch Sept 4, 2013 about a partially completed concaved building in the United Kingdom that has melted parts of a car, burned carpeting, made paint buckle and tiles to delaminate from neighbouring buildings.

Reflective window glass is installed on buildings to reduce air-conditioning cost but it becomes a mirror that can focus the sun’s rays onto the city streets.

Affordable housing may be the most prominent public issue in Calgary. The most recent Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey pegs the median price for a single-family home in Calgary at $358,400. By comparing that to our median family income, Demographia considers Calgary housing “seriously unaffordable,” with the average home overpriced by about $110,000 (before the flood, which has reportedly increased prices by seven per cent).

Armaghan Baghoori described her plans for a more pedestrian-friendly inner city at this year’s Making Cities Livable Conference on Reshaping Suburbia into Complete Healthy Communities held in Portland, Oregon, June 23-27.

Students from the University of Calgary and Mount Royal University are celebrating the completion of their solar house, Borealis, with a public event today and open houses this weekend marking the latest milestone in the journey of the home from Calgary to an international design competition in California.

One of two Canadian entries in the 2013 Solar Decathlon competition, Borealis is an 84-square-metre home that is net-zero, which means it produces as much electricity as it consumes.