UVA Today News Blog

UVA Today’s Robert Hull reports:

For many of her fans, Beyoncé’s halftime show at Super Bowl XLVII in New Orleans on Sunday was perhaps the game’s finest moment. She brought her A-game to the event, performing a medley of her hits before being joined by Destiny’s Child bandmates.

The show featured plenty of fire, ice and smoke, and used lots of energy to light up the stage. After the power outage during the Super Bowl’s second half, broadcast and online commentators even joked that Beyoncé’s electrifying performance was to blame. (For the record, stadium officials have said that the performance did not cause the outage, as the halftime show brought its own generators.)

Beyoncé appeared on a rising platform, and was clad in an all-black ensemble with heels and a leather get-up. Her outfit, along with the costumes of her numerous fellow dancers and performers, underscored the halftime theme of female empowerment.

The halftime show’s eye-catching outfits were designed by the company Chromat, one of New York City’s leading fashion labels and the brainchild of Becca McCharen, 28, a 2006 graduate from the U.Va. School of Architecture.

Continue reading…

Alumni, News, People, School of Architecture, Sports | Wednesday, February 6th | By: Dan @5:15 pm | 2 Comments     

As we gather at our Thanksgiving banquet tables there will be favorite dishes contributed by family members and friends — a sweet potato casserole from Aunt Sue, an apple pie from Grandma, a brined turkey Uncle Bob prepared.

But, where did all that food really come from?

Continue reading…

News, School of Architecture, Sustainability | Thursday, November 15th | By: Dan @4:29 pm | 4 Comments     

U.Va. Architecture School professor Edward Ford’s house has been the topic of conversation in Charlottesville since he and his family moved in in 2001. Cars often stop in the middle of Farish Street to gaze at the bright green and orange steel on the façade that is part of the home’s structure. Others knock on the door and he invites them in for a tour.

The house is a mechanism for understanding Ford’s expertise — the architectural detail and design. He wrote about the house in his book, “Five Houses, Ten Details,” published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2009. The author of four books, Ford also writes extensively about architecture on his website.

Now you can get an inside look into the house and Ford’s motivation for designing a home that reveals at every turn how the building was constructed on House and Garden Television’s “Extreme Homes“ show tonight at 9. In Charlottesville, HGTV airs on Comcast Cable on channel 61, on Dish Network on channel 112 and DirectTV on channel 229.

People, School of Architecture, TV | Thursday, November 8th | By: Dan @1:48 pm | 1 Comment     

UVA Today’s Jane Ford reports:

We have just learned that President Bill Clinton will visit the Building Tomorrow Academy of Gita on Friday. The U.Va. student chapter of  the Indianapolis-based social-profit organization Building Tomorrow, which encourages philanthropy among young people, funded the school; undergraduate students in the Initiative reCOVER project in the School of Architecture, led by associate professor Anselmo Canfora, and the Engineering School‘s Engineering in Context program, led by Dana Elzey, handled the design.

The 10-room school, which opened in 2010, provides access to quality education to elementary school children in the first-ever permanent school within a nine-mile radius.

At the 2011 Clinton Global Initiative Annual Meeting, Building Tomorrow committed to launching BT 2.0, an initiative aimed at enrolling 15,000 primary-level students annually in 60 Building Tomorrow academies by 2016 throughout East Africa.

Canfora said he is leading a design studio this fall to develop a second school design to be built in 2013.

For more information about Clinton’s visit, click here.

engineering, International, School of Architecture, Sustainability | Wednesday, July 18th | By: Dan @4:34 pm | 0 Comments     

UVA Today has written about U.Va.’s “Breathe House” in the past. Now comes word, via U.Va. Innovation’s “What’s Next” blog, that the house has been assembled in Haiti. A big congratulations to Anselmo Canfora and the team that is making this disaster-recovery housing project a major success!

Community, Health and Safety, School of Architecture, Sustainability, technology | Monday, July 16th | By: Dan @2:09 pm | 3 Comments     

UVA Today’s Jane Ford passes along the following item:

Students are immersed in the life of Cape Coast, Ghana with the U.Va. School of Architecture‘s “Community as Classroom” summer course. The goal of the program is for the students to investigate the cultural, social and spatial potentials of the urban landscape of Cape Coast through the engagement of community.

Nine students – six from U.Va., two from Pratt Institute and one from Columbia University in New York – are being led by U.Va. architecture professor and urban planner Maurice Cox and by U.Va. architecture grad Gina Haney, who has worked extensively in Ghana since 1996 on community-based planning initiatives.

Community-based planning engages local stakeholders to develop long-term economic development plan. Through this design studio-based course, students are developing interventions related to conservation and tourism initiatives associated with the area’s multifaceted history and culture by engaging various community members and organizations and their values with a goal of helping to create economic transformations.

They are chronicling their activities in the “Community as Classroom” blog.

International, School of Architecture | Friday, June 22nd | By: Dan @3:21 pm | 0 Comments     

As most of you know, it was a pretty late night for many members of the University community. I was assigned to cover the Faculty Senate’s called vigil outside the Rotunda, and spent more than 12 hours taking notes and standing around as the Board of Visitors deliberated over choosing an interim president. Mostly standing around.

The crowd, which probably peaked at around 3,000 or more in the mid-afternoon, dwindled to several dozen as the board’s closed session dragged on into the late night and early morning. It provided to be an interesting assemblage of mostly faculty and undergraduate and graduate students, and an occasional dog.

Around 1:15 a.m., I noticed a group gathered around a laptop on the portico of the Rotunda, with a faculty member at the center, excitedly doing some teaching. It turned out to be architectural history professor Daniel Bluestone (photo, right); he had called up a PowerPoint presentation of some research he had done.

In reviewing land records and maps in Charlottesville from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, he had been struck by incongruously large buildings amid smaller residences in a few areas of the then-small town. Digging further, he discovered that the larger structures were … brothels!

His engrossing late-night lecture, then, was a history of some of Charlottesville’s houses of ill repute (and their madams, many of whom became major landholders in the town), delivered to a “class” of maybe eight people.

Only in a University community …

And thank you, Mr. Bluestone!

News, On Grounds, People, School of Architecture | Tuesday, June 19th | By: Dan @3:26 pm | 1 Comment     

The summer is a quieter time on Grounds (if you overlook all the construction that’s going on).

But out at Morven Farm, the U.Va. Foundation-owned property about 20 miles away, things are hopping. Two intensive, three-credit courses are meeting out there, part of the second block of the Morven Summer Institute. Both have to do with food systems — “Food and Nutrition in a Changing World” and “Farmer’s Markets and Applied Food Systems Research.”

Read all about them on the institute’s blog.

Arts & Sciences, College of Arts & Sciences, School of Architecture, Student Life, Sustainability | Tuesday, June 5th | By: Dan @2:03 pm | 1 Comment     

Kate McCallum Martin, a master of architecture student, was on the winning "Belmont UnAbridged" team.

From UVA Today’s Jane Ford:

When is a bridge not a bridge? When it doesn’t connect two things by spanning over, but makes creative links at every opportunity.

“Belmont UnAbridged,” by “U.Va. Team 18,” led by faculty advisors W.G. Clark and Daniel Bluestone, took first place in the Project Gait-Way competition  last night at the Charlottesville Community Design Center. They took first place in best bridge design, best urban design and planning and the People’s Choice Awards for best bridge design and best urban design.

The competition sought to design a replacement for Charlottesville’s Belmont Bridge, which carries Ninth Street over the CSX and Buckingham Branch railroad tracks from downtown to the Belmont neighborhood, where it becomes Avon Street.

Continue reading…

Community, News, People, School of Architecture | Monday, February 20th | By: Dan @5:22 pm | 1 Comment     

The October issue of Glamour is out (the one with Jen, Alicia and Demi on the cover), and U.Va. is front and center in a six-page fall fashion spread photographed last spring on Grounds.

The photos, taken around the Academical Village and at Foxfield, are lovely, and our students look fantastic. (Some of the outfits are a little weird, but then we’re not exactly fashion plates ourselves.) Featured students are: Continue reading…

Arts & Sciences, College of Arts & Sciences, Commerce School, engineering, News, On Grounds, People, School of Architecture | Saturday, September 10th | By: Dan @12:00 pm | 1 Comment     

Geothermal power station in Iceland

Kelly Reed, a master’s student in U.Va.’s landscape architecture program, will be spending the next three months in Iceland after having received a Benjamin C. Howland Traveling Fellowship.

She describes what she’ll be doing there this way:

Research aims to address the larger questions: what methods are successful in Iceland’s geothermal infrastructure and how might landscape architects aid in the improvement and renovation of urban infrastructure in socially, ecologically, and economically relevant ways? Through qualitative and quantitative documentation at multiple scales, this investigation will provide insights into geothermal landscapes, and more generally, infrastructure as place-maker, form-giver, ecological supporter, and connective tissue. Research also incorporates participation and exploration of education in an international design school: The Iceland Academy of the Arts.

But the cool thing to me is that she will be keeping a blog during her stay, which should provide some pretty interesting perspectives on a place that few of us have experienced.

International, School of Architecture, Student Life | Thursday, August 11th | By: Dan @6:22 pm | 1 Comment     

Students from Virginia and Virginia Tech are uniting this summer to study sustainability practices in Europe. And they are keeping a blog.

The “Sustainable Europe Summer Course” is under the direction of  Suzanne Moomaw from U.Va. and Ralph Hall and Ralph Buehler of VT. The students arrived in Switzerland on June 27 and return on July 22.

International, School of Architecture, Student Life, Sustainability | Tuesday, July 12th | By: Dan @11:29 am | 1 Comment     

Remember the Learning Barge ? It is a wind- and solar-powered “floating wetlands classroom” conceived, designed and largely built by students and faculty from the School of Architecture and School of Engineering and Applied Science, then turned over to the Elizabeth River Project in September 2009. The goal of the non-profit group is to make the highly polluted Elizabeth River – part of the Chesapeake Bay watershed – swimmable and fishable by 2020, and the barge is a huge part of its educational outreach.

It seems the barge is getting a lot of use, according to its website (make sure you check out the video at that link, too). In the spring of 2010 alone, 50 Hampton schools sent 4,500 students aboard the barge for field trips.

This spring, the Learning Barge and the Elizabeth River Project received a Seaworld/Busch Gardens Environmental Excellence Award , which carried with it a $10,000 prize.

Community, engineering, News, School of Architecture, Sustainability | Wednesday, June 29th | By: Dan @11:14 am | 0 Comments     

UVA Today staffer Jane Ford reports:

A formerly neglected home in the historic Ridge Street neighborhood has been transformed into an innovative energy demonstration house named the Charlottesville Energy House. Changes were made inside and out as a demonstration of energy, water and material efficiency for the local community.

The University’s ecoMOD program teamed with the city of Charlottesville on the project. A team of architecture, architectural history and engineering students designed a renovation that attempts to demonstrate that sustainability and historic preservation are not mutually exclusive. The construction work was completed by the local firm Alloy Workshop.

For three or four years the house will serve as the home for the Local Energy Alliance Program, or LEAP, and then return to its original use as a private home. The project is pursuing LEED for Homes certification at the gold level.

The house, located at 608 Ridge St., opened to the public yesterday.

Community, engineering, News, School of Architecture, Sustainability, technology | Friday, May 13th | By: Dan @3:50 pm | 0 Comments     

Using this week’s anniversary of the beginning of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill as a jumping-off point, U.Va. Architecture School professor Timothy Beatley has written a compelling article for the blog Places: Forum of Design for the Public Realm, discussing the ways the change the relationships between cities and oceans. It’s an accessible read, and certainly worth a few minutes of your time.

People, School of Architecture, Sustainability | Friday, April 22nd | By: Dan @3:54 pm | 1 Comment