ACSA and Buell Center select 2024 winners of Course Development Prize in Architecture, Climate Change, and Society

The Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University and the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) have announced jointly their selection of the 2024 Course Development Prize in Architecture, Climate Change, and Society. 

Courses taught at any ACSA-accredited degree programs were eligible for the program, which this year crowned an overall cash prize winner and three honorable mentions. All courses will be taught at ACSA member schools across the world in the coming years. 

The 2024 Course Development Prize winners are:

Climate | Material | Shelter
Elizabeth Golden & Marc Neveu, University of Washington & Arizona State University 

Description: "The course will advance the University of Washington and Arizona State University’s mission to leverage place, enable student success, and transform society through use-inspired research. Students and faculty from both programs at the University of Washington and Arizona State University will collaborate through in-person visits and virtual meetings and reviews. This proposal is the first of a multi-year, research studio that will explore how earth-based construction (compressed earth block) might be leveraged for sustainable urban development (housing) in the Phoenix metropolitan region. Each year the studio is offered will be organized according to scale — the scale of a wall, the scale of a family, and the scale of a community. Year one will include material testing; Year two will incorporate construction faculty and students; and in Year three students will work with Real Estate faculty and students to develop an economic model in parallel with an architectural proposal. Knowledge and data will be cumulative, with each studio learning and building from the previous year’s investigations."

Honorable Mentions

Demystifying Ecological Thinking in Architecture
Ehsan Sheikholharam, Kennesaw State University

Description: "The syllabus revolves around three sections: the myth of return, the myth of control, and the myth of (liberal) democracy. The course begins by questioning romanticized visions of an idyllic, preindustrial past. Instead, we explore diverse civilizational genealogies and mythologies on the relationship between the human animal and its environment. The next section highlights the connection between the desire for subjugation, hypermasculinity, coloniality, and privatization. The final cluster underlines the tension between the collective needs of the planet and its precarious inhabitants—whether subaltern communities, climate refugees, or endangered species—with identity-based demands for recognition and rights."

Local Repair Ecologies
Cynthia Deng & Lucas Hoops, Tecnológico de Monterrey, Querétaro campus

Description: "Working alongside organizers of various repair networks and community-led initiatives, this interdisciplinary course explores the possibilities of repair as a point of creative departure and builds an open-source atlas of local repair ecologies. Here, ‘repair’ does not seek to restore past conditions, but adapts to future ones — it is a transformative act of care that ranges from mending things and spaces to reparations and ecological repair. In the research seminar students begin with fieldwork, dialogue, drawing, and mapping. We try to make visible the political and social relationships, the spaces, and the material flows that define Querétaro’s distinctive repair ecologies. The studio then asks how architecture can participate in and build on-within-among these intertwined networks of collective care throughout the city, toward reparative futures and new economies."

Collective Comfort II
Liz Gálvez, University of California, Berkeley

Description: "To address equitable-cooling in relationship with an over-reliance on private mechanical, electrically powered air-conditioning technologies, the course sequence aims to develop a public program that re-thinks the cooling center through the combined re-creation of new social dynamics and new environmentalisms that foreground community resilience through collectivity in desert cities. Working collaboratively with design and building science faculty, students will explore the gap between architectural and environmental thinking to develop conceptual, critical, and evocative, yet possible building proposals that address collective comfort."

Course proposals can be viewed in their entirety here.