Chris Ford, PhD, AIA
Chris is a design professional, design educator, and design researcher in the areas of both Architecture and Infrastructure design. He studies and shapes urban futures through design-actionable research utilizing human-centered methodologies.
Chris has worked in the offices of Richard Meier & Partners (New York), Rick Joy Architects (Tucson) and Rob Paulus Architects (Tucson). Projects assisted or managed include residential (single and multi-family), commercial, and infrastructural typologies. He is a registered architect in the State of North Carolina.
After teaching as a lecturer at the University of Arizona, Chris joined the College of Architecture at the University of Nebraska as tenure-track/tenured faculty. He regularly taught undergraduate and graduate design studios including the NAAB Comprehensive Project, elective courses in Design Methodology and Modern Craft, and advised Design Thesis. In Spring 2013, Chris coordinated the "London | 2013" Program where his funded research prompted coursework on Hybridized Urban Infrastructures. In 2015, Chris resigned as a tenured Associate Professor in Architecture to pursue a PhD in Mechanical Engineering.
Chris was the 2016-2019 Hamamoto Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellow at Stanford University, where he completed a PhD in Mechanical Engineering (Design Group) and a PhD Minor in Civil & Environmental Engineering. His PhD investigation is titled "Resilient Infrastructure Futures: An Aetiological Analysis of Lifeline System Failures since 2000 for Enhancing the Resilience of Next-Generation Infrastructure Design" Chris was originally advised by Larry Leifer (Emeritus ME), and was co-advised by Martin Fischer (CEE) and Sean Follmer (ME) at the close of the PhD investigation. As a research coordinator for the Urban Futures initiative, Chris applied Design Thinking to demonstrated problems in the built environment including housing, lifeline infrastructure systems, and urban resilience.
Chris is also a co-founder and charter editorial board member of "Technology | Architecture + Design (TAD Journal)," a peer-review scholarly journal published by the ACSA and printed by Taylor & Francis. He served as its inaugural Associate Editor and has also served as Issue Editor for TAD: "Urbanizing" (v3,i1) and TAD: "Engineering" (v6,i2).
Chris maintains exposure to multiple disciplines through memberships with the AIA, ASME, and ASCE (American Society of Civil Engineers) where he also serves on the Emerging Technology Committee within the organization's Infrastructure Resilience Division.
Chris has worked in the offices of Richard Meier & Partners (New York), Rick Joy Architects (Tucson) and Rob Paulus Architects (Tucson). Projects assisted or managed include residential (single and multi-family), commercial, and infrastructural typologies. He is a registered architect in the State of North Carolina.
After teaching as a lecturer at the University of Arizona, Chris joined the College of Architecture at the University of Nebraska as tenure-track/tenured faculty. He regularly taught undergraduate and graduate design studios including the NAAB Comprehensive Project, elective courses in Design Methodology and Modern Craft, and advised Design Thesis. In Spring 2013, Chris coordinated the "London | 2013" Program where his funded research prompted coursework on Hybridized Urban Infrastructures. In 2015, Chris resigned as a tenured Associate Professor in Architecture to pursue a PhD in Mechanical Engineering.
Chris was the 2016-2019 Hamamoto Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellow at Stanford University, where he completed a PhD in Mechanical Engineering (Design Group) and a PhD Minor in Civil & Environmental Engineering. His PhD investigation is titled "Resilient Infrastructure Futures: An Aetiological Analysis of Lifeline System Failures since 2000 for Enhancing the Resilience of Next-Generation Infrastructure Design" Chris was originally advised by Larry Leifer (Emeritus ME), and was co-advised by Martin Fischer (CEE) and Sean Follmer (ME) at the close of the PhD investigation. As a research coordinator for the Urban Futures initiative, Chris applied Design Thinking to demonstrated problems in the built environment including housing, lifeline infrastructure systems, and urban resilience.
Chris is also a co-founder and charter editorial board member of "Technology | Architecture + Design (TAD Journal)," a peer-review scholarly journal published by the ACSA and printed by Taylor & Francis. He served as its inaugural Associate Editor and has also served as Issue Editor for TAD: "Urbanizing" (v3,i1) and TAD: "Engineering" (v6,i2).
Chris maintains exposure to multiple disciplines through memberships with the AIA, ASME, and ASCE (American Society of Civil Engineers) where he also serves on the Emerging Technology Committee within the organization's Infrastructure Resilience Division.
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Papers by Chris Ford, PhD, AIA
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Infrastructural systems operate in increasingly dynamic environments that present a complexifying array of hazards. As legacy systems are further extended to respond to the demonstrated needs of urban dwellers, it becomes clear a conceptual deficit exists within graduate-level curricula for designing tomorrow’s resilient infrastructure solutions today. Resilient infrastructural solutions require a fundamental reconsideration of design requirements that is informed by original research and best explored first through project-based learning (PBL) design studios in academic departments including architecture, civil engineering, mechanical engineering, and urban design. How then ought interested infrastructural educators pivot their research attention and teaching assignments toward morphologically indeterminate infrastructural problem spaces, while positioning themselves as the conceptual leaders so desperately needed? This paper presents the direction of design studio curricula to infrastructural design problems, offers insight into how funded research in a hybridized infrastructural type can unlock new pedagogical opportunities, and shares pedagogical case histories for three graduate level PBL design studios.
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This paper examines the shared semantics among diverse Design definitions to identify its semantic core and discusses several dilemmas that make a clear boundary for defining Design difficult and multifaceted. The research provides evidence that there is a diverse understanding and usage of the term Design. However, shared word-groups inherent in the definitions provide a family resemblance or bundles of interpredictable attributes for a shared comprehension of Design. Furthermore, a thematic analysis revealed five dilemmas, including Complexity, Zeitgeist, Expertise, Identity, and Disciplinary Perspective, making defining Design multifaceted. While activities and practice differ in diverse disciplines, the fundamental human capacity of productive or design thinking of determining a purposeful and meaningful (end) design (means) is shared among diverse professional disciplinary practices.
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"A motivation for TAD: Engineering has been to illustrate that engineering is ultimately not a proprietary scope of work accessible to only those with the title of Engineer, but rather the actualization of architecture has long required the resolution of technical problems as a means of design. The majority of this dynamic is so inherently embedded within architectural practices that perhaps architecting should be semantically adopted and ratified as a more suitable verb for describing this action."
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Lifeline infrastructure systems are planned and implemented to provide urban dwellers with critical resource units. These resource units include food (kCals), communication (mHz), energy (kWh), and water (MGDs), while also discharging units of waste (tons). Decision-makers historically responsible for shaping these lifeline systems (including members of the Planning, Civil Engineering, and Architecture disciplines) have demonstrated a collective systems-centric mindset for infrastructure implementation. This paper reviews the Systems Approach as the prevailing decision-making method responsible for shaping the majority of infrastructure used in the United States today. However, a legacy effect of past systems-centric infrastructural action is one that entrains the majority of infrastructural planning, design, engineering and construction within a decision-making process now challenged by complexifying urban contexts of the 21st century. Through problem-oriented inquiry, this paper: 1) identifies a bias for the system as a solution type for the design of urban infrastructure; 2) explains the systems approach as a thought model and process for decision-making; 3) advances people-centered mindsets will be essential for designing next-generation infrastructure solutions appropriate for 21st century urban futures.
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An integrated research sketch on the critical relationships between physical space and innovation before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic.
Design, 2:1, 113-113, DOI: 10.1080/24751448.2018.1420969
Design, 1:2, 241-241, DOI: 10.1080/24751448.2017.1354627
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/24751448.2017.1354627
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/24751448.2017.1354627
Ford, Chris. (2017). “Begetting,” [Editorial, Associate Editor]. Technology | Architecture + Design, Viral, 1:1, 108-109. DOI: 10.1080/24751448.2017.1292799
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To sustain life in the built environment, infrastructural resource systems have been designed and constructed to provide a regional population with “lifeline” resource units such as food (KCals), communications (MHz), energy (MWhs), water (MGDs) and to also extract waste (tons). These systems are essential for dwelling in the built environment, yet are structurally and operationally independent of one another, with some nodal exceptions.
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This brief outlines the principles and objectives for a specific type of residential community to be implemented in peri-urban contexts and considers the generation of their own food, water, energy, and managing waste.
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This paper presents the context of, and larger educational pedagogy for, the execution of Composite Drawings as a presentation requirement for academic studios. Although Composite Drawings have a proven history as both effective and engaging graphic artifacts, we are witnessing a decline in their number in recent years. This paper will contextualize the contemporary condition in which Composite Drawings are today conceived, identify the cultural impediments that must be transcended, and share those physical attributes of student solutions that have proven to be most compositionally effective. This paper and associative presentation shall incorporate historical examples by professionals and student work from eight years of architectural design studios to further demonstrate both the benefits and liabilities of the Composite Drawing as a focused representational endeavor.
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If the architectural discipline is to reclaim its influence on the built environment, then it must conceive of research-led and performance-based solutions that address issues beyond aesthetic finish and the market-serving provision of habitable space. Furthermore, as issues and problems relating to the built environment become ever more layered and complex, architect-led interdisciplinary teams will become necessary to address them.
One such opportunity for leadership is infrastructure design, although it is historically shaped by the engineering discipline. However, if we share Buckminster Fuller’s observation that “society operates on the theory that specialization is the key to success, not realizing that specialization precludes comprehensive thinking,” then as the discipline of Engineering requires higher modes of specialized thinking, architects remain in an advantageous position to continue to act comprehensively, and engage both technological and infrastructural innovation in a critical way. The challenge for architects first lies in the recognition of their own comprehensive propensities, and then the deliberate engagement with true issues of infrastructural performance and associative yields.
Architects, qualified by their comprehensive propensities, are well-positioned to conceive multi-functional infrastructural solutions to address the demonstrated needs of society. The design of new infrastructure typologies, especially those with hybridized qualities, drastically changes the position, contribution, and responsibility of the professional disciplines involved in their creation. To this end, architects should no longer wait for an invitation to produce viable infrastructure solutions. The opportunity must be claimed.
Our university-based design / research team has identified and focused on a problem that is defined by renewable energy production, electrical transmission, and urban land use policy. We believe a Renewable Energy Infrastructure (REI) addresses this problem in an effective way and ultimately surpasses the prevailing practices of each of these three identified areas. An REI seeks to generate renewable energy megawatts (MW) at an industrial scale through the simultaneous harnessing of wind, solar, and geothermal resources, but within an integrated, holistic, and free-standing facility positioned in an urban environment. An REI is not a retrofit of a pre-existing architectural installation, but rather is conceived as a new infrastructure typology to be owned and operated by an electrical utility for purposes of servicing users in high-population areas.
Infrastructure cannot be fully realized in ideological form alone. If we are truly interested in affecting either incremental improvements to existing infrastructures, or the prognostication of a fundamentally new infrastructure type, then we must proceed with a heightened seriousness in our design intelligence, a dire sense of urgency in the timeliness that we work, and focused clarity upon the effect that we want to induce, just as the technological innovators Brunelleschi, Wright, and Saarinen have done before us.
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While artists have an established record of scholarship about the role of found objects in their work, there is a disappointing lack of scholarship that considers the role of found objects in design. Perhaps this can first be attributed to the different motivations by which an artist and a designer choose to incorporate a found object. This difference in motivations illuminates that primary reasons for selection are rooted in the source disciplines themselves. The found object in art has no responsibility to perform beyond its aesthetic affect, and the found object in design has no further responsibility beyond its pragmatic (i.e. mechanical, structural) affect. Because the incorporation of found objects is non-essential to all design solutions, then as designers, there is a need to explicitly understand the benefit of incorporating found objects, the criteria for their selection, their impact on design thinking, and their ramifications for use. This paper will articulate four generative strategies for how found objects are / can be used within the design discipline: Resource Availability, Political Heuristics, Creative Heuristics and Aesthetic Heuristics. Design solutions from both architectural design and industrial design are used in support of the formation of these categories, which include work by Michael Rotondi, Phoenix Commotion, Baker + Hesseldenz Design, and LOT-EK. Ultimately, this paper showcases the finished design work of students for an assignment titled “FOCO: The Found-Object Craft-Object,” in which each author must answer the question of how ought a found object be used in design. Student work featured emerged from a three credit hour graduate-level elective titled “Modern Craft” offered by the author while faculty at the University of Nebraska, College of Architecture.
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Design is a form of applied research, and furthermore, architects have historically played a role as technological innovators. Our funded, university-based research / design team has applied design thinking skills to a problem that involves energy production, energy transmission, and urban living. We believe a Renewable Energy Infrastructure (REI) will solve this problem.
An REI generates renewable energy megawatts (MW) at an industrial scale through the simultaneous harnessing of wind, solar, and geothermal resources within an integrated, holistic, and free-standing facility positioned in an urban environment. An REI is not a retrofit of a preexisting architectural condition, but rather is conceived as a new typology to be owned and operated by an electrical utility for purposes of servicing users in high-population areas. While current renewable energy
technologies of industrial scale are typically located in rural areas, their greatest possible service to urban areas is limited due to measurable degradation rates along transmission lines and loss during stepdowns at transformers.
We are in an advantageous position to consider this design problem and are currently assessing the full design requirements involved in such a proposal. Our project required working with the State of Nebraska’s various public power districts and enabled us to connect with expertise in private industry.
While the REI design is not economically feasible within the specific context of Lincoln NE, it remains technologically plausible for other urban sites in alternative or future economic contexts.
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For the architectural educator, are service-learning design problems a reasonable strategy for design studios when students will spend their professional careers engaging and navigating the realities of architectural practice? One alternative to conventional service-learning design problems does not simulate likely design constraints in professional design problems, but rather, suspends such constraints towards exploiting the safety and creative opportunity afforded by the academic arena. After all, one must remember that a complete architectural education is the result of both our discipline’s academy and profession, together. Each serves a different role and as such, teaches the future architect in different, yet equally beneficial ways. Given these plural contexts within which future architects learn, when an educator utilizes a service-based design problem as a vehicle for fulfilling stated curricular goals, then how ought the academic design studio best incorporate this project? This paper examines an array of issues with beneficial and detrimental effect to service-learning projects in the architecture design studio. Specifically, three design problems from annually-successive 4th year undergraduate architecture design studios are presented in terms of their fulfillment of curricular goals and transcended public value beyond the extent of fulfilling these curricular goals. In these cases, service-learning studio problems act as provocateurs as these three studio design problems are framed from a deliberately edu-preneurial sensibility. The projects featured are a Museum of Agricultural Technology (MoAT), a Center for Energy Sciences Research (NCESR), and a US Air Force Cyber Command facility (AFCYBER).