2020 USCA Research Symposium

ART + TECH + ENVIRONMENT: Integrated Design for a Regenerative and Better Built Environment

Building upon its century-long tradition of innovative research, the USC School of Architecture (USCA) is emerging with new initiatives focused on research and creative work in leading-edge building technologies, landscape and ecology, sustainability, urbanism, and housing.

The first annual USCA Research Symposium, on April 16, 2020, offers an opportunity to think broadly about the fertile interchange between Art, Technology, and the Environment, and seeks to convene a range of alternative approaches as offered by artists, architects, landscape architects, designers, technologists, planners, historians, and critics by framing discussions about design, resilience, and sustainability in the context of interdisciplinary creative and environmental practice.

In a time when pedagogical and disciplinary boundaries are dissolving and merging, we invite participants to consider their discipline in relation to others and to build a meaningful dialogue about how collaborations between art, technology, and the environment can begin to address some of the most pressing climate challenges of our day.

Exploring Methodologies, Pedagogies and Practice, USCA invites proposals for presentations about integrative research, practice, and curricula that explore the intersections, synergies, and interfaces between arts, environments, technology and their influence on design, resilience, and sustainability. Faculty and students from all USCA disciplines are welcome to submit proposals according to one or more of the themes below:

  • METHODOLOGIES: innovative design and scholarly processes that meaningfully integrate art, technology, and the environment, including innovative working methods, collaborative endeavors, transdisciplinary approaches, historical examples, etc.
  • PEDAGOGIES: curricula and methods of teaching that meaningfully integrate art, technology and the environment, including examples from course work, interdisciplinary teaching, new pedagogical directions, etc.
  • PRACTICE: work that meaningfully integrates art, technology, and the environment toward regenerative approaches to design. Topics may include: urban metabolism, renewable energies, new materials, structural and material technologies, VR/AR-integrated built environments, environmental resiliency, circular economies, etc.

Proposals are welcome in the form of:

Posters will be displayed on-line via Zoom (link: TBD). Participants will present their posters during lunch to a panel of jurors who will select “Best in Show” for students. Awards will be announced at the closing session.

Presentation abstracts and panel proposals should be submitted online by March 27, 2020.

For further information or inquiry, email Kay Chang (kaychang@usc.edu).