What You Don’t See

Follow the supply chains of architecture and you’ll find not just product manufacturers but also environmental polluters and elusive networks of financial power and political influence

Measuring Up: A Case for Redrawing the System Boundaries of Sustainability at the University of Kentucky

The primary goal of this paper is to examine the role that sustainability assessment and reporting plays in creating a sustainable campus for academic excellence. A prototype sustainability assessment and reporting system is developed for triple bottom line impact analysis of the built environment of the newly expanded and renovated Gatton College of Business and Economics at the University of Kentucky. The prototype system utilizes a toolkit to collect environmental, social, and economic data of the building\u27s built environment for sustainable design performance analyses. The system also employs a comprehensive set of sustainability metrics to measure and report the building\u27s triple bottom line impacts on academic success. In sum, our study succeeds in (1) expanding the definition and evaluation of campus buildings\u27 sustainability to include environmental, social, and economic factors, (2) providing campus stakeholders with a toolkit for assessing the sustainability of campus buildings, and (3) creating a comprehensive sustainability metric for benchmarking and tracking campus buildings\u27 triple bottom line impacts on academic success

Is the World Really Flat? Internationalization, Advanced Technology, and the Question of Convergence (vs. Divergence) in the Age of Globalization

This Honors Thesis explores the question: Is the World Flat (or at least becoming flatter) in the age of globalization? The study explores the theme within two contexts: that the developing countries and regions and that of developed countries and regions, coming to the conclusion that Divergence is as prevalent as convergence and in fact exacerbated by the globalization movement. The center of the study is the small and medium-sized enterprise (SME). This study maintains that the case of developing countries and regions, the critical issue in this debate is degree of internationalization of SMEs in such traditional industries as textiles and apparel: those countries within which such internationalization happen move up the value chain and help kick-start a small economy to growth. We discuss this evolution from low-fee blue-collar to high-profit white-collar economic activity. In the case of already developing countries and regions, the issue is one of the proliferation of high-technology start up SMEs working within cluster environments (e.g., Silicon Valley) centered by venture capital and so-called gatekeepers working within multi-dimensional environments: in such cases new technologies come on the scene and accelerate national and regional productivity and economic growth. When these conditions - internationalization of SMEs and creation of high-tech SME clusters--are not met, divergent occurs ibn the sense that those countries and regions that are marginalized stagnate and fall by the wayside competitively and thus diverge from those more successful countries and regions. This thesis then uncovers common links between our analysis of Developing and Developed Countries and regions in the form of the necessity of becoming part of (for Developing countries) or creating (for Developed countries) Seamless Webs or networks. For Developing countries is the importance of external webs or networks (such as the necessity of SMEs in becoming an integral and active of the EU network); for Developed countries is the importance of forming the major actors of technology creation - SMEs, universities, venture capital, glatekeepers, markets - into coherent and multidimensional cluster groups. These discussions provide a model for predicting the competitive future of Asian companies

Housing the Homeless: Mapping the Design Process of Service-enriched Housing

A thesis, presented to the Department of Architecture and the Clark Honors College of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Architecture, Spring 2008.This file is large and may take several minutes to load.The homeless demographic fluctuates in response to economic, political, social, and environmental upsets. As the climate of uncontrollable conditions changes, so does the population of those with inadequate shelter. Responsiveness to unpredictable, tumultuous patterns is a crucial determinate for the success of a facility that seeks to alleviate homelessness; namely, a programmatic flexibility that ensures longevity. Also imperative in accommodating the homeless population is the combination of housing and service components in a codependent relationship. An inextricable bond between housing and services encourages a successful union in an unbroken chain of related facilities in a continuum of care

Illustrasia

A thesis, presented to the Department of Architecture and the Clark Honors College of the University of Oregon in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Architecture, Spring 2008.This file is large and may take several minutes to open.Within the confines of static, two-dimensional representation, sensory tools are limited to visual cues, thus demanding the maximum output of symbols. Combining words and images taps multiple perception levels in the audience, creating a greater chance for perspicuity of a concept. Illustrasia is an exploration in graphic communication, employing words and images in sequential panoramas that seek to expand the confines of the chosen format. The communication of anonymous specificities serves as the method for transposing experience through printed media. Insinuations of time and place vaguely ground the work, but by avoiding labels to culture, time, and geography, a wider identification may be achieved

Desiging Women in Appalachia: Linking the Past to the Future

A number of Appalachian scholars have considered the central role women played in movements to “uplift” the region, particularly during the Progressive Era. Most, however, have focused on the “fotched-on” women who entered “mountain work” by carving out new areas of expertise that had gone unclaimed by men—education, social work, nursing, recreation, and cultural work, for example (Whisnant 1983, Forderhase 1985 and 1987, England 1990, Tice 1998, Barney 2000, Goan 2000, Stoddart 2002). In this paper I will analyze the “mountain work” of women, both “fotched-on” and native, who dared to challenge the status quo by directly competing in the traditional male profession of architecture, a field that Despina Stratigakos argues still has not successfully integrated women (Stratigakos 2016). Using written records, including diaries and letters, oral history, original architectural drawings, historic photographs, and the buildings themselves, I will present the architectural work of four groups of women, who worked in the Mountain South between the late-nineteenth-century and the 1990s. With one exception, the women were untrained in architecture, and the one who had professionally training was denied official admittance to the profession. Despite having no professional recognition, I will demonstrate how all of the women harnessed the built environment to gain personal power, while at the same time shaping public discourse. While this diverse group of women may seem to have had little in common, I will argue that they all employed a collaborative design, an observation that Stratigakos has associated with other designing women. Finally, I will conclude this paper by suggesting lessons these historical players have to offer social justice activists working in the region today

Raising a Family in the Academy

In “Raising a Family in the Academy,” Architecture Lobby members Joy Knoblauch, Sben Korsh, Brent Sturlaugson, and Olivier Vallerand challenge the longstanding culture of architecture schools that equates dedication to family life and other types of caregiving with a lack of commitment to teaching and scholarship. Rather than exclude families, they suggest, let’s integrate them into academe

Room Temperature Ionic Liquid-Lithium Salt Mixtures: Optical Kerr Effect Dynamical Measurements

The addition of lithium salts to ionic liquids causes an increase in viscosity and a decrease in ionic mobility that hinders their possible application as an alternative solvent in lithium ion batteries. Optically heterodyne-detected optical Kerr effect spectroscopy was used to study the change in dynamics, principally orientational relaxation, caused by the addition of lithium bis(trifluoromethylsulfonyl)imide to the ionic liquid 1-buty1-3-methylimidazolium bis(trifluoromethylsulfonyl)imide. Over the time scales studied (1 ps-16 ns) for the pure ionic liquid, two temperature-independent power laws were observed: the intermediate power law (1 ps to similar to 1 ns), followed by the von Schweidler power law. The von Schweidler power law is followed by the final complete exponential relaxation, which is highly sensitive to temperature. The lithium salt concentration, however, was found to affect both power laws, and a discontinuity could be found in the trend observed for the intermediate power law when the concentration (mole fraction) of lithium salt is close to chi(LiTf(2)N) = 0.2. A mode coupling theory (MCT) schematic model was also used to fit the data for both the pure ionic liquid and the different salt concentration mixtures. It was found that dynamics in both types of liquids are described very well by MCT.U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR)Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) [FA9550-08-1-0306]National Science Foundation (NSF)[DMR 0652232]National Science Foundation (NSF)Department of Energy (DOE)Department of Energy (DOE)[DE-FG03-84ER13251]CNPqConselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq)FAPESPFundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP