Faculty Research

Too many people are living in badly designed houses. Too many houses have rooms that don t get used, kitchens that are hard to work in, living rooms that are difficult to furnish, and front entry spaces with no closets. There are supersized houses and those that, in spite of their actual size, feel too small and cramped. In his bestselling book, What’s Wrong With This House? Brown offers a practical guide to avoiding these problems. Based on the Slow Home design philosophy the book offers practical, down-to-earth design advice that focuses on the substance of the way a house works rather than on its superficial appearance.

The Earth’s surface is an incredibly dynamic environment that supports nearly all life and human activity. We often don’t appreciate how dynamic the Earth’s surface really is until we are faced with a significant event that disrupts our daily rhythm. Sometimes these events involve natural processes, other times they are exacerbated by human activity. The more we rely on and alter the Earth's surface resources, the more we must understand how the surface responds to human and natural forces.

Many categorical problems of complexity and indeterminacy have already been codified through software as explicit territories [program]. Of fundamental importance to these programs is their ability to mediate and reify informational bodies – inputting, conditioning and outputting data such that program-specific value and meaning are added to all three phases. Within this mode of design, discretely structural strategies become a new challenge for architecture when materializing information into physical assemblies.

Professor Catherine Hamel raises awareness of the consequences of forced displacement due to war, human security, adaptation and post-conflict reconciliation through her writing and traveling exhibitions. Hamel's interests lie in the potential role of architecture as an instrument for social reconstruction and her current work explores the potential for justice through subtle disturbances. It is a potential to instigate change, not by altering existing systems, but the attitudes towards them.

Dr. Sinclair’s research into agile architecture and open building systems, emphasizes the need for integration and sustainability in design and construction. Our times are interesting and challenging, with escalating uncertainly, complexity and chaos commonplace regardless of country, culture and context. From global warming and climate change to national unrest and international conflict we struggle, as a civilization, to gain understanding and to determine the most appropriate paths forward.

Dr. Noel Keough is co-founder of Sustainable Calgary, a grassroots group of Calgarians that promote and support community-level initiatives towards a more sustainable future. For some time now, in order to fuel its insatiable appetite, our economy has been borrowing heavily against our natural and social capital stocks. Despite having recklessly converted critical social and natural capital into economic capital, the economy has tanked. And the solution we are being offered? Keep feeding the beast.

The aesthetic appreciation of a product is concerned with the human senses, and the corresponding responses towards a product. Through the human senses: vision, hearing, touch, taste, and smell, information which resides in the material world is received via the correlated receptors located throughout the human body. The received information will then undergoes transduction, a process in which the received raw data are transformed into a type of language the human brain understands. Thereafter, the information will be sent to the brain for neural– processing.

Since 2007, Professor Graham Livesey has been undertaking research on landscape ecology and the concept of assemblage as developed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. He has been applying this theoretical framework to a study of the early Garden City movement and the development of the first example at Letchworth, England.

In Fallout Shelter, Associate Professor David Monteyne traces the partnership that developed between architects and civil defense authorities during the 1950s and 1960s. Officials in the federal government tasked with protecting American citizens and communities in the event of a nuclear attack relied on architects and urban planners to demonstrate the importance and efficacy of both purpose-built and ad hoc fallout shelters. In his book Monteyne shows that architecture for civil defense was a contested and often inconsistent project, reflecting specific assumptions about race, gender, class, and power at that time.

Laser scanning is currently being used in various areas of the world to document ancient architecture. University of Calgary Professor’s Richard Levy of environmental design and Peter Dawson of archaeology along with Chris Tucker, President of Point Geomatics Ltd. investigate the use of 3D laser scanning to document one of the most remote scientific station in the Canadian Arctic, Fort Conger, Nunavut under a grant from Parks Canada.