Modern architecture
– Green/sustainable architecture, green building materials, green building technologies (for low-tech and state-of-the-art)
– Green/sustainable urban design
– America’s new regionalism
– The impact of buildings on the environment
– The impact of architecture on society/culture
– “The best buildings begin with the land.”
– “The greatest potential for architecture today lies in regional locations.”
– What we can learn from old farmhouses and barns and how their builders respected the land.”
– Responsible revitalization of cities and towns
– LEED: what it is, how to use it to create green buildings
– Art and architecture; art and architecture
– Residential architecture and how to work with an architecture to achieve your dreams
– Commercial architecture
– Institutional architecture
– Historic architecture
SEMINAR AND LECTURE TOPICS
Growing Beyond Green: America’s New Regionalism:
For Regional Architecture to produce high-performance buildings, it must address context, materials, textures, colors and form, using both traditional and non-traditional methods. And it must connect clients’ needs and aspirations to a profound sense of place. This seminar/lecture explores contemporary regionalism’s influence on three Frank Harmon Architect PA major projects and the techniques used to meet social, cultural, economic and environmental needs for sustainability – arguably the most important architectural issue of our time.
Sustainable by Example – A Case Study:
Just as the national American Institute of Architects has committed to “Walk the Walk” to lead the sustainable evolution, so must the AIA’s state components. Using the recent competition-winning design for AIA North Carolina’s Center for Architecture & Design to be built in downtown Raleigh as a case study, this presentation demonstrates how architects can – and must – take an innovative, leadership role in drastically reducing our buildings’ carbon footprints. It will also demonstrate how urban architecture can enhance the urban landscape without harming the environment by educating clients and producing buildings that reduce energy consumption and emissions through both low-tech and high-tech solutions; that reduce the “heat island” effect in center cities; that use environmentally sustainable materials, including recycled materials wherever possible, that encourage density and “walkability,” and that ultimately make the land they inhabit better than they found it.
Sticks and Stones - Sustainable Architecture in the Mid-South:
This seminar examines certain elements and themes that run through regional architecture — landscape; materials and construction (the “sticks and stones” of a place); weather and climate; roof forms that shelter or collect; and clients – and demonstrates how each can and should be used to create innovative, sustainable and appropriate contemporary buildings.
Glass, Grits and Steel:
The evolution of Modern architecture in the South: Using his own work as examples, Frank Harmon examines the elements and themes that inform contemporary Southern architecture — landscape; materials and construction (the “sticks and stones” of a place); weather and climate; roof forms that shelter or collect; and clients — and illustrates the importance of “place” in the process of creating innovative, sustainable, and appropriate contemporary design.
Architecture With A Conscience – Designing Contemporary Regional Architecture:
Buildings with a “conscience” have existed in Southern farmhouses and barns for as long as farmers have erected them. These are simple structures built of wholesome, vernacular materials, perched on stone piers so rainwater flows under them. They nestle lightly into the hillsides without disturbing the land. They are rooted in their region and embody the principles of livability. And they speak of the Southern culture as eloquently as bluegrass music or clay pots.
Regional architecture is enabling, not confining, and embraces what these farmhouses represent, what the late Harwell Hamilton Harris, FAIA, called “the particulars of client, place and materials.”
Building Sustainability Into The Urban Context:
The way we live is making us sick. Healthy buildings and active living are the keys to healthy cities. Therefore, we must improve how we build in order to improve how we live. This session will discuss how urban buildings can be designed to make the most of natural light and ventilation so that they use less energy from coal-fired power plants, thus reducing pollution and improving the quality of the air. It will address the need for interior applications of natural materials without toxic byproducts to improve the quality of air inside our buildings. It will stress the need for greater urban density, rather than suburban sprawl, and increased public transportation to mitigate the unhealthy overuse of individual automobiles and their accompanying expanses of paved parking, which allows storm water runoff to ruin our creeks, streams and ponds. And it will address the need for “green,” or vegetated roofs in the urban context to collect and filter water on top of our buildings (another source of destructive runoff), to reduce the “heat island” effect, and to create more inhabitable surfaces in our cites.
Nature and Architectural Design:
For architecture to complement nature and contribute to a culture of place, it must conserve, protect and celebrate the specific regional landscape in which it exists, whether that landscape is a verdant hillside in Italy, a rocky crag along Canada’s coastline, or the flat plains of Texas. Architecture with a sense of place must engage that particular region’s climate, topography, vegetation and local materials. To be sustainable, it must also rely on that particular region’s resources and learn from its context.
This presentation demonstrates that the most important aspect of a building is the land upon which it will be built — because all good architecture begins with the land. The presentation discusses the influences buildings derive from landscape and region, from design concept to details of materials and construction – through the use of successful case studies. Using examples of the work of Glenn Murcutt, Rick Joy, Ted Flato, Brian MacKay-Lyons and Frank Harmon’s own work, it demonstrates applied, rather than theoretical, methods for using traditional and non-traditional materials to create modern, innovative and sustainable buildings that maximize the pleasures of a particular place’s natural light, air, color, texture and pattern.
Wood – The Ultimate “Green” Material:
The vocabulary of construction in the South has been defined by wood for over 300 years. It was the only building material the settlers in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia had. Yet when we gained access to other materials, wood endured. For the past 20 years, Frank Harmon has been studying 100-year-old vernacular structures — farmhouses, barns, boats, and old textile mills — to learn how they were built and why they have remained intact all these years. This has had a dramatic impact on the way he designs and builds. He has been able to translate the lessons learned from these old, wooden structures into a modern architectural vocabulary.
Architecture and Critical Regionalism Today:
Most architecture published in current periodicals comes from the centers of fashion, for example, Los Angeles, New York or Amsterdam, yet most architecture in North America is practiced in small towns and cities, away from the centers of fashion, by small to medium-sized firms. Today in this hinterland, away from Hollywood and Soho, there thrives an independent spirit of invention, fostered by architects who are nurtured by a sense of place and the everyday concerns of their clients.
What is the importance of regionalism in today’s theory and practice of architecture? “As we move into the unknown territories of the twenty-first century,” writes Liane Lefaivre and Alexander Tzonis in Critical Regionalism: Architecture and Identity in a Globalized World, “the unresolved conflict between globalization and diversity and the unanswered question of choosing between international intervention and identity are increasingly leading to crises as vital as the threat of a nuclear catastrophe in the middle of the last century. [T]he critical regionalist approach to design and the architecture of identity recognizes the value of the singular, circumscribes projects within the physical, social, and cultural constraints of the particular, aiming at sustaining diversity while benefiting from universality.”