Architecture faculty members recognized with prestigious awards from international association

Two faculty members in Virginia Tech’s College of Architecture, Arts, and Design, Aki Ishida and Miranda Shugars, were recognized with international awards by the Association of College Schools of Architecture (ACSA) this year.

Ishida, associate professor in the School of Architecture, received a 2023 Creative Achievement Award. Ishida’s submission, "Reenvisioning Everyday Architecture: Experiments in Visual Mapping and Hybrid Media," applied inquiry and representation methods from her health care design research.

The ASCA Creative Achievement Award honors creative achievement in teaching, design, scholarship, research, or service that advances architectural education. Ishida’s award-winning project was developed with 13 thesis students in Ishida’s 2021-22 B. Arch Thesis Concentration Area studio as they uncovered opportunities for re-envisioning everyday architecture from the inhabitants’ perspective.

“The architects we educate today will increasingly design for both the physical and digital world,” said Ishida, who also serves as the interim associate director for the School of Architecture and the School of Design. “The methodologies I introduced to our students emerged from my research exploring the intimate relationships people have with the built environment. Creating immersive digital environments through projection mapping that were done in collaboration with the Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology and using ethnography helped our students facilitate their imaginations of what is possible — or new realities — in everyday architecture."

Ishida was previously honored by the ACSA with the organization’s New Faculty Teaching Award for the 2016-17 academic year. In 2016 she was named one of the 25 Most Admired Educators by DesignIntelligence. Ishida is the executive director of Virginia Tech’s Center for the Future of Work Places and Practices, a transdisciplinary collaborative with projects funded by the National Science Foundation.

Shugars, a visiting professor of practice and researcher in the School of Architecture, was recognized for her efforts with a 2023 Course Development Award for Architecture, Climate Change, and Society for “Unequal Cartographies: Mapping Climate Change in Appalachia.” Columbia University’s Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture and the ACSA selected five award recipients in 2023.

The Unequal Cartographies course will introduce students to free, open-source mapping tools to visualize complex urban issues using geographic information systems with discussions on the effects of government practices, health impacts, and climate crises as they stem partly from deeply rooted social ills. Tutorials will cover the basics of finding and evaluating data, representing data sets in GIS, and crafting data-based arguments with maps.

For the final project, students will create interactive maps that present research on a contemporary social-ecological issue in one of the three Appalachian cities: Richmond, Virginia; Roanoke, Virginia; and Charleston, West Virginia. This format will demonstrate the class’s two major learning goals: technical mapping skills and constructing visual arguments through maps.

Representing more than 7,000 faculty members and 40,000 students internationally, the ACSA seeks to empower faculty and schools to educate increasingly diverse students, expand disciplinary impacts, and create knowledge for the advancement of architecture. The association presents awards annually to honor architectural educators for exemplary work in areas such as building design, community collaborations, scholarship, and service. The award-winning professors inspire and challenge students, contribute to the profession’s knowledge base, and extend their work beyond the borders of academia into practice and the public sector.