Archives: Faculties

Courses Taught ARC1301 Architectural Design 1 ARC3321 Architectural Design 6 ARC3463 Materials & Methods of Construction 2 ARC6241 Advanced Studio 1

Charlie Hailey is an architect, writer, and professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Florida. Hailey has received numerous awards and grants including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Graham Foundation grant, and two Fulbright Scholarships. He has authored six books that bring multidisciplinary approaches to the built environment, and his newest The Porch: Meditations on the Edge of Nature (Chicago, 2021) explores the porch as method and place—an architecture where we can tune ourselves, sometimes ever so subtly, to the many changes around us. Timeless and timely, it is a book about the joy and gravity of places where inside and outside meet.

Hailey’s work focuses on emergent built environments. As a 2018 Guggenheim Fellow, Hailey continued to delve deeply into vital places like camps and porches to understand how climate, building, and community overlap in meaningful ways and how architecture and the humanities intertwine. Such places are liminal yet pivotal to knowledge, ephemeral yet fundamental to human experience. His interdisciplinary projects seek to tell the stories of marginal places, to understand material cultures and cultural landscapes, and to discover links between human agency, settlement patterns, and ecology. At the University of Florida, where he was named Teacher/Scholar of the Year, Hailey teaches design, history, and theory. Inspired by work with Jersey Devil, his design/build studios mesh experiential learning with learning-by-doing and environmental design with public interest projects (Design/Build with Jersey Devil, Princeton Architectural Press, 2016). Built projects include a music pavilion, community center, outdoor education facility, sustainable bike trailer, recycled mobile theater, builder’s yard, and a series of coastal installations in Cedar Key, Florida. During his most recent Fulbright in Cyprus (December 2023), he led a team of Eastern Mediterranean University students to design and build an outdoor classroom for Yeniboğaziçi Elementary school.

His design and research have also explored camping as a way of making home (Campsite, 2008) and camps across the world as contemporary spaces of freedom as well as emergency (Camps, MIT Press, 2009). In a collaborative project with photographer Donovan Wylie in southern California’s Colorado Desert, Hailey found Slab City to be both harbinger and bellwether—a camp that is indicative of 21st-century displaced settlements and a place made amid struggle and survival (Slab City: Dispatches from the Last Free Place, MIT Press, 2018). He has also investigated human-made islands as newly emergent places that require innovative approaches to design, environment, climate, and conservation (Spoil Island: Reading the Makeshift Archipelago, Rowman & Littlefield, 2013). In Spring 2021, he was a Master Artist in Residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts, where he designed and build a project titled “Porch without a House” as a permanent installation on the campus. He is currently working on a book that explores the meaning and significance of Florida’s fish camps, a resilient network of places where water and land meet.

Professor Gold has over twenty-five years of engagement in architectural design, teaching, and research with a focus on the interrelationships among architecture, ecology, culture, and resource stewardship at urban and residential scales. He currently leads funded research-based design projects and is a founding member of the Florida Resilient Community Initiative (FRCI) at the UF College of Design Construction and Planning. His work and publications explore ecologically responsive design and sustainable living in coastal communities underpinned by the critical need for integrating resiliency, mobility, and aesthetics toward emergent urban forms. His research is both academic and applied through his small award-winning architecture firm – Martin Gold Architects. He is a registered architect in Florida; holds an NCARB certification; and is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects. https://martingoldarchitects.com.

As a member of the Doctoral Research Faculty, he supervises doctoral and master degree seeking students. He leads undergraduate and graduate design studios in addition to teaching lecture and seminar courses in environmental technology and ecological design. Gold served as the Director of the UF, School of Architecture from 2008 to 2014 and currently serves as the Executive Director of the national consortium of academic programs Architecture + Construction Alliance (A+CA).

Professor Gold received his Bachelor of Design in Architecture from the University of Florida in 1991, worked in Florida as an intern architect and then returned to UF to complete is Master of Architecture degree in 1994. He taught under the supervision of Gary Siebein as a graduate teaching assistant in the environmental technologies. His thesis research studied the spatialization of sound in concert halls and the perception of spatial acoustics by listeners. His results and methodology have been published in articles and journals of the Acoustical Society of America in proceedings of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture. He has taught at the University of Texas San Antonio, and conducted workshops on acoustics at Cornell, SCAD, and the American Institute of Architects. He returned to UF as a member of the School of Architecture faculty in 1996.

Stephen Bender is Acting Director of CityLab-Orlando, an off-campus market-rate program of the University of Florida Graduate School of Architecture, offering Master in Architecture and Master of Science in Architecture Studies.

The education of architects should enable artful resolution of competing forces to solve the open, complex, dynamic, and networked problems of our world, including building design. Bender aims to create environments for active learning, structured by project-based courses that enable motivated, self-directed, enriched, and ethical development of students. This includes collaboration with industry professionals and UF peers to develop the concentration in Themed Environments Integration (MSAS-TEI). Create knowledge together.

As a licensed architect, Bender has focused his professional architecture practice, bndr, llc, on projects with the opportunity to explore sustainability and prefabrication in housing and small business. This critical practice is synergistic to his academic developments, course enhancement/creation, and research collaborations at UF. He is Co-PI for the HUD funded Project Re-envision, and the HUD-RD funded Advanced Technologies for Rapid Manufacturing of Post-Disaster Housing, both with interdisciplinary teams. These projects evidence innovation in sustainability practices, prefabrication technology, and partnerships and policy, all focused on housing.

Bender earned a Bachelor of Design from University of Florida, and a Master in Architecture from Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

Courses Taught ARC4330 Analytical Drawing + Sketching ARC1302 Architectural Design 2 ARC2303 Architectural Design 3 ARC2304 Architectural Design 4 ARC3320 Architectural Design 5 ARC3321 Architectural Design 6 ARC4322 Architectural Design 7 ARC4323 Architectural Design 8 ARC4323 ARC6241 Advanced Studio 1 ARC6356 Advanced Studio 3 ARC4330 Analytical Drawing + Sketching ARC6912 Furniture Design + Fabrication

Vandana Baweja is an associate professor the School of Architecture and the Sustainability Program at the University of Florida, Gainesville. She got her PhD in architecture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA. She was trained as an architect in New Delhi, India, and got a master’s in architecture at the Architectural Association (AA) School of Architecture in London, UK. Baweja’s areas of research are – global histories of Tropical Architecture, histories of Sustainable Architecture, and their representation in film and photography. She is the Co-Editor, of Arris: The Journal of The Southeast Chapter of The Society of Architectural Historians, published by UNC press. At the moment she is working on a book manuscript on Sustainable Architecture and editing a book project titled Narratives of Disease, Discomfort, Development, and Disaster: Reconsidering (sub)Tropical Architecture and Urbanism with Dr Deborah van der Plaat (The University of Queensland),) and Professor Tom Avermaete (ETH Zurich). The book project investigates histories of Disease, Discomfort, Development, and Disaster in the field of tropical architecture – a mid-twentieth century global architectural movement that was predicated upon the emerging relationship between architecture and climatology.

Through her publications on Tropical Architecture, she has investigated how ideas about the relationship between architecture and climate were forged in the mid-twentieth century and circulated globally along the networks of the British Empire. She is a recipient of grants from the Florida Humanities Council and the Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative (GAHTC). She has produced peer reviewed teaching materials and curriculum for the Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative (GAHTC), which is a pedagogical professional society out of MIT.  Vandana Baweja is a member of the governing board of the Undergraduate Sustainability Major offered by the College of Design, Construction and Planning at the University of Florida. She is member of the Membership and Diversity Committees of the American Society of Environmental History. She has served on the UF Quest 1 curriculum committee at UF and is a member of the DCP diversity committee.