On June 23, 2005, the Arizona Board of Regents approved a name change for Arizona State University’s College of Architecture and Environmental Design to the College of Design. The name change reflects the college’s mission to emphasize the importance of design as the bond between its six discipline programs—Architecture, Graphic Design, Industrial Design, Interior Design, Landscape Architecture, and Planning, which includes Housing and Urban Development.

College of Design Dean Wellington Reiter stated, “The professional practice of design today, whether as an architect, a product designer, or an urban planner, requires individuals who have an understanding of and training in many facets of design. The focusing of who we are as a college reflects our desire to provide a transdisciplinary design education to our students and to prepare them to be successful future designers.”

The College of Design’s academic units are among the mostly highly ranked at ASU, with the Interior Design program ranking number two in the nation and the Architecture master’s degree ranking 10th nationally among public universities in the 2005 edition of America’s Best Architecture & Design Schools.

The college is at the forefront of research in architecture and urban planning. The College of Design will be launching the Phoenix Urban Research Lab (PURL) in downtown Phoenix in fall 2005. PURL students, faculty, and researchers will find new options to urban issues through design solutions, applied research, public policy discussion, and scholarly investigation to create practical applications and implemented projects. PURL will occupy the eighth and ninth floors of the Security Building in downtown Phoenix, with space for studios, public meetings, offices for affiliated ASU researchers, and a large scale-model of downtown Phoenix.

The College of Design began as the Division of Architecture of ASU’s predecessor, the Arizona State College, in 1957 and became the College of Architecture in 1964. As more programs joined the Architecture school, the college was renamed the College of Architecture and Environmental Design.

The College of Design is comprised of the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture; the School of Design, which includes Graphic Design, Industrial Design, and Interior Design; and the School of Planning, which includes Housing and Urban Development. The College is supported by the Phoenix Urban Research Lab (PURL), which includes the Joint Urban Design Program, and the Herberger Center for Design Research and its initiatives, InnovationSpace, CriticalCorp, and scape.

Terry Surjan, Visiting Assistant Professor of Architecture in the College of Architecture and Environmental Design (CAED), is part of a team that has been chosen as a finalist in the Flight 93 National Memorial competition to design a permanent memorial for the people who died on September 11, 2001 in rural Pennsylvania. Surjan and team member Laurel McSherry are one of only five teams chosen out of 1,011 design entries to enter Stage II of the competition. Their competition entry is Fields, Forests, Fences (click here for the pdf of the competition entry). McSherry was a member of the CAED landscape architecture faculty until 2003 when she was named director of the School of Landscape Architecture at The Ohio State University.

The finalists for Stage II were announced on February 4. Each team of finalists will be awarded $25,000 to further their designs and participated in a Master Planning Workshop in Somerset, Pennsylvania, the site of the disaster, on February 24–25. The final decision on the winning concept will be announced in September 2005, and the winning team will be invited to negotiate a contract with the National Park Service for design of the new memorial.

Surjan has been working toward the Stage II deadline this summer. We wish him and Laurel success! An exhibition of the final five designs will be open to the public from July 1, 2005 through September 25, 2005 in Somerset, Pennsylvania.

A second finalist team with ties to ASU is headed by Frederick Steiner, past director of the School of Planning who is now the dean of the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin, and his team member, E. Lynn Miller, a past adjunct faculty in landscape architecture at ASU.

More information on the competition and Stage II winning designs is available at

www.flight93memorialproject.org.

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This is a fitting capstone to a very special evening of tributes to Paul Rothstein on April 16 that was shared by members of Paul’s family; ASU faculty and staff from the CAED, School of Business, and School of Engineering; students; business colleagues; and friends. It was a tremendous acknowledgement of Paul’s circle of influence to see the 200 plus friends and colleagues at South Mountain Park who shared this experience. It was by far and away a most memorable and moving event. Kate Benjamin, Prasad Boradkar, and the many students who helped to prepare the event and venue are to be congratulated. This was a priceless gift to Paul’s family. The message was inspiring as we were reminded of Paul’s commitment to teaching, his students and his fierce determination to do work that improved the world around us. All while maintaining balance in his personal life and great humor.

For a full article on the President's Professors awards, go to http://www.asu.edu/news/faculty_students/
presidents_professors_042905.htm

Back row, left to right: Camilla Rogers, sophomore; Brian Weiler, sophomore; Rey David Solorio, junior; Jeremy Stapleton, senior; instructor George Hull; show producer Kay Hamilton Estey; Jeffrey Prince, sophomore; and Dustin Braden, who attends Glendale Community College.

Front, left to right: Isaac Deneen, sophomore; Luis Patino, junior; Whitney Warman, sophomore; and Widyawan Pratadaja, junior. Not pictured is Ryan Wassenaar, junior.

Eleven Landscape Architecture students have, for the second year in a row, captured a Gold Medal and the People’s Choice Award at the prestigious San Francisco Flower & Garden Show, the sixth largest garden show in the world. Additionally, they were awarded Pacific Horticulture magazine’s Gold Medal for the Best Regional Landscape Design. The show took place March 16–20, 2005 at the historic Cow Palace in San Francisco.

For the past three months, the students worked on their creation under the guidance of Faculty Associate George Hull. All plants for the exhibit were grown and donated to the students by Mountain States Wholesale Nursery, where Hull works and is responsible for new plant introductions. The team traveled to San Francisco during spring break to install the exhibit (in a record time of 64 hours) and to answer attendees’ questions during the five-day show, which draws 50,000 attendees.

A panel of internationally known judges—Nigel Colborn, Iain Robertson and Alexandra Stoddard—handpicked for their extensive horticultural and design knowledge, judged 23 full-size display gardens. They presented gold, silver, bronze, or crystal awards to each of the display gardens. The People’s Choice Award, announced on Saturday, March 19, was determined by ballots filled out by attendees of the show. The ASU students’ multiple awards for their exhibit is especially rewarding considering their main competitors where California industry professionals. Only two other universities—University of California, Davis, and University of California, Berkeley, fielded teams.

The ASU students who designed and built the winning garden are Camilla Rogers, sophomore; Brian Weiler, sophomore; Rey David Solorio, junior; Jeremy Stapleton, senior; Jeffrey Prince, sophomore; Isaac Deneen, sophomore; Luis Patino, junior; Whitney Warman, sophomore and Widyawan Pratadaja, junior; and Ryan Wassenaar, junior.

The Interior Design program in the College of Architecture + Environmental Design (CAED) has earned a number two in the nation ranking in the 2005 America’s Best Architecture & Design Schools, published by DesignIntelligence. Publication of these standings makes Interior Design one of the highest nationally ranked programs at ASU. This year’s ranking, second only to the University of Cincinnati, improves the ASU program’s standing to number two from number five in the 2004 listing. The Interior Design program has been consistently listed in the top ten rankings of design programs since the inception of the DesignIntelligence survey. Forty public and private interior design programs were included in this year’s list.

CAED’s master of architecture (MArch) program ranked tenth among public programs and in the top twenty of over 100 institutions of all architecture programs in the nation. The graduate architecture program was also ranked fourth among all MArch programs in the western U.S. The MArch program is the professional degree granting program that prepares students for certification in the architecture profession.

“I am extremely pleased by the high regard that the design profession has for our interior design and architecture programs,” said CAED Dean Wellington Reiter. “It is evidence of the excellent quality of education our students receive and professional orientation of our faculty. Our graduates are obviously having a positive impact on the design profession.”

The DesignIntelligence list is the only national college ranking survey that focuses exclusively on design and asks industry practioners to comment on and rank institutions based upon its experiences with the graduates of the university programs. Individuals from over 350 different design, architecture, and engineering firms and public and governmental offices are surveyed for the rankings.