What will education look like tomorrow? In five years? In twenty? What students need to learn and how they are being taught are adapting to a world that is changing faster than ever before. Teachers are faced with the challenge of preparing students for careers that don’t exist yet. We don’t know for certain what …
Celebrating Women in Architecture
I am so excited to host the AIA South Dakota blog for the month of December. What a great way for us to connect as a profession and advance the dialogue about architecture in our state. This month’s blog theme is focused on a topic I am passionate about: celebrating women in architecture. This topic …
Housing the Next Generation
Understanding the Millennial generation is going to prove exceptionally important to South Dakota as we continue to combat our workforce shortage. Millennials will soon make up a majority of the workforce, and we will need to cater to their wants and needs if we hope to attract and retain them. Unfortunately, in addition to this …
Intelligent Architecture
Driver-less cars, precision agriculture, artificial intelligence – although these may evoke images of futuristic cities only seen in sci-fi films, they may be our reality sooner than we think. It was recently announced that Sioux Falls may be a tester-ground for 5G internet technology. Senator John Thune believes this will change and propel our economic landscape …
Designing Healthful Environments
Health and well-being is one of my greatest passions in life. After all, you only have one life, and as you use it, you can never get it back. I fully believe design has the ability, and even the responsibility, to serve the health and well-being of those who experience it. There are many small ways …
South Dakota’s first Passive House multi-family project
Earlier last month, tenants started moving into a first-of-its-kind apartment building in South Dakota. Located in eastern Sioux Falls, Copper Pass Apartments is a 30-unit apartment building design and constructed to achieve Passive House certification.
Are Passive Houses part of the conversation?
Last week the SDSU Department of Architecture (DoArch) hosted a ribbon cutting at PH01:BRK, the first custom designed single-family passive house in South Dakota. The event culminates almost three years of work, and has introduced passive house principles to students, initiated research and training, and most visibly, resulted in the construction of a certified, student …
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High-performance can “pay-off” in the long run
One of the challenges I often face as an architect is trying to help clients and building owners bridge the gap between what is best in the long run and what is the most cost-effective solution up front. I’d like to say I’ve been doing this long enough to see the effects of both approaches, …
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Pumpkin spice architecture
Pumpkin Spice: So “Nice” Today, believe it or not, is the first day of October – which means we are fully entrenched in autumnal culture. As I was putting fall-themed window stickies on the windows with my two-year old, I reflected on all the other wonderful things that come with fall: cooler air, football, changing …
Sioux Falls Design Week begins
Design Week is a week-long opportunity for the city of Sioux Falls to celebrate and explore a wide variety of design disciplines, from architecture to landscape design to graphic design and more. The fifth annual Sioux Falls Design Week will be September 28th to October 5th. See event schedule here: www.siouxfallsdesignweek.com This year like others …