Facade Tectonics Institute (FTI) Education Forum will be held on Monday,May 15th 2023, from 12:00 – 2:30 PM ET. FTI members, faculty members, students and professionals are invited to join this virtual event with presentations and discussions on the current state of facades’ education in the United States, organized and hosted by the members of the FTI’s Education Committee.
This forum will begin with a presentation on the state of facades education in the United States. The presentation will introduce the results of a research study that was conducted over a period of two years, where undergraduate and graduate courses across the U.S. were identified. Course syllabi were collected and analyzed to determine how building enclosures are taught at various universities. This introductory presentation will conclude with recommendations on how facades education can be improved to help prepare graduates for successful professional careers.
This research was conducted by the FTI’s Education Committee: Dr. Ajla Aksamija, FTI President and Professor/Chair of the School of Architecture at the University of Utah; Gabrielle Brainard, Associate Principal and Building Enclosure Specialist at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) and Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University; Timothy Brown, Principal at Tim Brown Architecture and Associate Professor of Architecture at Clemson University, and Sunny Milosevic, Ph.D. Student at the Department of City and Metropolitan Planning and Associate Instructor at the School of Architecture, University of Utah. Gabrielle Brainard, Timothy Brown, and Sunny Milosevic will be presenting the results of the study.
The second portion of this virtual event will feature four presentations by faculty members, outlining their pedagogical approaches and teaching methods for building enclosure systems:
Scott Murray, Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (technical drawing)
Dr. Ajla Akšamija, Professor at the University of Utah (high-performance facades and building technology core course integrated with studio)
Dr. Jihun Kim, Associate Professor of Architectural Technology at the City University of New York and a Lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania (environmental performance simulations)
Liz McCormick, Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina in Charlotte (physical experiments and digital fabrication of facade systems).
The final component of the forum will include a panel discussion moderated by Gabrielle Brainard.
