Martha Kohen

Martha Kohen

School of Architecture
Professor + Director of the UF Center for Hydro-generated Urbanism (UF|CHU)
352-294-1475
AH 262

Areas of Focus:
Sustainability ( Built Environment Resilience, Smart Buildings/Cities, Sustainable Architecture and Design)
Developing visioning proposals with interdisciplinary components and involving stakeholders participation.
I have focused geographically on Florida and Puerto Rico endangered antrhopic and natural environments.

Bio:
Martha Kohen is a Tenured Professor of Architecture in the College of Design, Construction and Planning, University of Florida and Director of the Center for Hydro-generated Urbanism. She received her degrees from the University of the Republic, Uruguay, and Cambridge University.  Before coming to UF in 2003 as Director of the School of Architecture, she directed for 20 years her Architecture and Urban Design practice in Latin America (MKRO) and taught at the University of the Republic. She is a visiting professor at the Universities of Rome, La Sapienza, and Naples, Federico II and is an affiliate of the UF Water Institute, the Florida Climate Institute, and the Center for Latin American Studies.

Her recent research has focused on the impact of Sea Level Rise on human settlements. Since 2015, she has represented the United States as Senior Partner in the UNESCO Chair in Sustainable Urban Quality and Culture, with whom she has jointly organized five international workshops on sea level rise and disaster recovery. Three of these workshops have addressed Puerto Rico Re-Start, an interdisciplinary collaboration between UF, Universities in Puerto Rico and local stakeholders to harness international expertise in designing innovative research and visionary projects to face the challenges posed by hurricanes Irma and Maria (2018-9), earthquakes  and the Coronavirus pandemic (2020) for a sustainable future. Ongoing research is focusing on the impact of the Pandemic in the Built Environment, in Puerto Rico, Florida, New York and Italy in conjunction with the Polytechnic of Milan and the Onehealth Center in IFAS UF.

Teaching and research are conducted jointly, engaging the students in workshops,  graduate Seminars and  upper division design courses, with the ongoing sponsorship of the UF Office of Research, the International Center and UF partners. Work information and publications available in the website.

www.chu.dcp.ufl.edu

www.puertoricorestart.org

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Charlie Hailey

Charlie Hailey

School of Architecture
Professor
352-256-1216
FAC 217

Princeton University (B.A.)
UT-Austin (M.Arch)
UF (PhD)

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.

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Martin Gold

Martin Gold

School of Architecture
Associate Professor
352-294-1474
AH 260

M.Arch., University of Florida, 1994
BDes, University of Florida, 1991

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.

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Donna Cohen

Donna Cohen

School of Architecture
Associate Professor + Director, Global Education
352-392-1418
FAC 215

M.Arch., University of Florida, 1999
B.Arch., Cooper Union, 1990 BA
Art History, Smith College, 1982

Areas of Focus: Sustainability  Teaching Design Studio & Advanced Design Studio Architectural Theory I & II. Research Interests Interaction of built form and culture

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Nancy M. Clark

Nancy M. Clark

School of Architecture
Interim Director, School of Architecture, Associate Professor + Director of the UF Center for Hydro-generated Urbanism (UF|CHU)
352-294-1472
AH 231A

M.Arch., University of Florida, 1994
B.Arch., Auburn University, 1989

Areas of Focus: Sustainability (Building Energy, Built Environment Resilience, Renewable Energy, Sustainable Architecture and Design, Sustainable Construction, Sustainable Technology) My research focuses on sustainability and the built environment with a special focus on water-based cities and communities in Florida, the Caribbean, and beyond. Projects include watershed-based resilience plans that coordinate future land use with built environment risks and social vulnerabilities, green infrastructure, and urban retrofits. Bio: Nancy Clark is Director of the UF Center for Hydro-generated Urbanism (UF|CHU), an international initiative promoting prospective studies of adaptation, resiliency, environmental justice and asset preservation of waterway cities. She also serves as Program Director for UF School of Architecture’s MSAS Master’s Degree Concentrations in Sustainability and Regenerative Practices. Clark teaches courses in architectural design, urban design, and resilience planning.  Her interdisciplinary and collaborative project-based research in urban resilience and development for coastal and fluvial cities has been recognized internationally through exhibitions, awards and lectures presented globally including Mexico, Brazil, Italy, South Africa, France, Colombia, and the US. She is editor of Urban Waterways: Evolving Paradigms for Hydro-Based Urbanisms, a UNESCO series publication investigating the environmental, cultural, and economic future of cities on the water in the 21st century. She leads the Sustainable Settlements, Water Management and Renewable Energy Design Lab and is a member of the Project Leadership Team for Puerto Rico Re_Start International Research Project and Workshops an ongoing initiative that focuses on the preservation of natural resources and reconsideration of existing settlement paradigms toward a more prosperous and sustainable future for Puerto Rico investigated through interdisciplinary inter-institutional collaborations. Clark was a scientific committee member for the National Council for Science and the Environment (NCSE) 18th National Conference and Global Forum on Science Policy and the Environment and served as Chair of the NCSE Global Forum Symposium “Designing Urban Resilience beyond the Science: The Project of the Future”. She was Chief Curator and contributor to Florida 3.0: Reinventing our Future, an exhibition at the Miami Center for Architecture and Design based upon ongoing research projects by members of the CHU who are studying the history and future of Florida’s water -based settlements and hydro-environments within the broader context of new paradigms for the evolution of water based communities.

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Stephen Bender

Stephen Bender

School of Architecture, CityLab-Orlando
Instructional Associate Professor + Program Director of CityLab Orlando
352-294-6876
CLO 516

Education
M.Arch. Architecture, Harvard University, 1996
B.Des. Architecture, University of Florida, 1993

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.

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Stephen Belton

Stephen Belton

School of Architecture
Associate Professor
352-294-1463
AH 238

M.Arch., Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 2001
Architecture B.Arch., University of California, Berkeley, 1994

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

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Vandana Baweja

Vandana Baweja

School of Architecture
Associate Professor
352-294-1465
AH 242

Ph.D. History and Theory of Architecture, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA.
M.Sc. History and Theory of Architecture, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA.
M.A. Histories and Theories of Architecture, Architectural Association School of Architecture, London, UK.
Five Year Undergraduate Diploma in Architecture, Sushant School of Art and Architecture, India.

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.

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