The Boston Society of Architects (BSA) recently awarded nine grants totaling $65,000 from a field of nearly 50 applicants to the BSA’s inaugural research grants program. BSA solicited proposals for projects that focused on “design as research,” encouraging “inquiry not only on specific research topics but also on how design itself (the design process and the results of design) constitutes research as well.” This definition of design encompasses the “full range of issues inherent in architecture: from the materials and technologies that shape physical form to the abstraction of ideas supporting theoretical projects, and draws upon the social, economic, and political dimensions that shape program and process from the historical past, the current moment, or as futuristic projections.”

The nine grants-winning projects and their authors are:

• Adaptive Design: Field Reconnaissance, by Chris Reed; StoSS landscape urbanism. This project proposes to collect storm runoff from a site in Somerville, Mass., and recycle it to invigorate a local ecology.
• Voices from the Past: Letters from 1970s. Women Architects., by
  Doris Cole, FAIA, and Jason Knutson, AIA, Cole & Goyette, Architects & Planners Inc. Using a set of letters from women architects written in the 1970s, the authors will compare women architects and their work then and now.
• State of Sustainability in Higher Education, by Ellen Watts, AIA, LEED™; Architerra Inc., with Boston Consortium. This project proposes an objective assessment of the sustainability practices and experiences of the 13 institutions that form the Boston Consortium.
• Emerging Materials for Change, by John E. Fernandez, AIA, Department of Architecture, Building Technology Group, MIT. This project intends to identify dormant opportunities for better material use for contemporary architecture by proposing design strategies and emergent materials for appropriate construction, adaptive reuse, and disassembly.
• Automason Ver. 1.0 with PDA Cell Phone, by Michael Silver, Office of Research Development, New Haven. This architect-initiated software-development project promises to transform the way designers and contractors build masonry structures.
• Housing Designs for Proposed Smart Growth Overlay, by Peter H. Wiederspahn, AIA, Northeastern University, and Wiederspahn Architecture. This research proposes to design housing and mixed-use development in test-case locations to illustrate the urban and architectural impact of related legislation on the cities and towns of Massachusetts.
• An Exploration of Structural Polymers in Exterior Wall Design, by Rachel Levitt and Greg Biancardi, Cambridge, Mass. This project will use high-tech polymers to develop a multilayered, high-performance structural exterior wall assembly designed to address environmental, aesthetic, and fabrication issues in an innovative, practical way.
• Sonic Space, by Joel Sanders, Yale University. This project will examine how a residential space records domestic sound, external and internal, natural and manufactured.
• Seismic Assessment and Retrofit of Existing Buildings in the Northeastern United States, by Eric Hines, PhD, PE, LeMessurier Consultants/Tufts University/Michigan State University. This project proposes to examine methods that will enable life-safety assessment of older steel-frame buildings as well as tools to evaluate the dynamic, nonlinear behavior of three newer Boston buildings of varying height designed for seismic and non-seismic zones.

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