Faculty Honored with 2021 ACSA Architectural Education Awards

The Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) recently announced the recipients of its 2021 Architectural Education Awards, which honor “architectural educators for exemplary work in areas such as building design, community collaborations, scholarship, and service.” GSD faculty members Megan Panzano, Maryann Thompson, and Krzysztof Wodiczko, and Senior Loeb Scholar Walter Hood were all honored with Faculty Design Honorable Mentions. The award acknowledges “work that advances the reflective nature of practice and teaching by encouraging outstanding work in architecture and related environmental design fields as a critical endeavor.”

“The award-winning professors inspire and challenge students, contribute to the profession’s knowledge base, and extend their work beyond the borders of academia into practice and the public sector,” says the ACSA. The winners will be celebrated virtually at the ACSA 109th Annual Meeting on March 24-26, 2021.

Expanded Views, With Rooms laser cut acrylic model — “*(Almost) Everything At Once* critiques the fixed isolation of one point of view by simultaneously suspending all spatial viewing angles, except for the familiar front. The possibility of plural perspectives is recovered in this digitally etched ‘extra perspective.’ The representation of this added information in nested laser cut acrylic affords the extraction of new lines as defining limits of entirely new architectural spaces.”

Expanded Views, With Rooms physical model — “*Not-So-Still Life* questions the uniform flatness of one picture plane. It registers shifting viewpoints through objects in the scene. Each drawn object orients itself to a different viewing angle, pulling the architectural planes that suspend it. A new system of negotiation is overlaid as planes are fractured and displaced while they jostle for territory within the original frame, buckling into and folding out from the representation.”

Megan Panzano (MArch ’10), assistant professor of architecture and program director of Harvard’s Undergraduate Architecture Studies, was recognized for her design research project “Expanded Views, With Rooms.” The project critiques the limits of linear perspective asserting that “an architecture around the hegemony of one view misses the point.” Panzano is currently teaching a seminar at the GSD around this research topic.

From “The Ripple Effects: Martin Luther King Jr. & Coretta Scott King Memorial”

Walter Hood, Spring 2021 Senior Loeb Scholar; Maryann Thompson (MArch/MLA ’89), professor in practice of architecture; Krzysztof Wodiczko, professor in residence and area head of the MDes Art, Design and the Public Domain area group; and Julian Bonder were recognized for their project, “The Ripple Effects: Martin Luther King Jr. & Coretta Scott King Memorial.” The proposal—designed as a living memorial in the Boston Commons—embraces the “historic and unique task of creating a monument to the partnership of two extraordinary people.” It aims to “illuminate questions and to welcome the presence of others, by making ‘room’ in Boston Public Space for echoes and ripples coming from the Kings’ voices to be heard in an environment created for reflection and dialogue.” Hood recently presented a lecture at the GSD as part of the Spring 2021 Public Programs.

Read more about this year’s Architectural Education Awards on the ACSA website.