Architecture

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.

Specialization

I have three related areas of specialization:
1. Topical specialization in housing and urban issues
2. Technical specialization in designing for modular construction and prefabrication.
3. Theoretical specialization in collaboration and innovation practices applied to complex design problems.

My teaching, research, and service spans the design and fabrication of buildings, policy, education, strategic planning, and community design.

Biography

Stephen Bender is 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 and graduate certificate in Themed Environments Integration (MSAS-TEI), and Healthcare Design Integration (HDI). 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.

Vandana Baweja is an associate professor of the School of Architecture in the College of Design, Construction and Planning at the University of Florida, Gainesville. She has served as the co-chair of the UF’s University Curriculum Committee since 2021. 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. From 2023 to 2024, she was the 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.