Architecture

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.