FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — The University of Arkansas School of Architecture has won national recognition in awards programs co-sponsored by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, the American Institute of Architects and the American Institute of Architecture Students. The school’s Community Design Center has won two awards for design education, bringing the center’s tally for national education honors to eight awards in just four years. CITYbuild, a consortium of design schools that includes the School of Architecture, has won national recognition for design collaboration.

The 2007-2008 Housing Design Education Award for Excellence in a Housing Education Course, co-sponsored by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture and the American Institute of Architects, recognizes Habitat Trails, a sustainable neighborhood for the Rogers chapter of Habitat for Humanity. Community design center staff collaborated with Marty Matlock in the department of biological and agricultural engineering and Mark Boyer in the department of landscape architecture to develop Habitat Trails, which is currently under construction. Twelve architecture and engineering students also shaped design for the project, which has won nine planning and education awards, eight of them national in scope.

The second award, a New Faculty Teaching Award, co-sponsored by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture and the American Institute of Architecture Students, honors Aaron Gabriel, assistant director of the design center and an adjunct assistant professor in the department of architecture, for “demonstrated excellence in teaching performance” during the formative years of his career. Gabriel has been a key component of the design center team since 2003, helping to develop new models for municipal and private development that have won 23 design, planning and education awards.

Aaron Gabriel discusses student work.

“Professor Gabriel combines sophisticated insights on pedagogy with the design and planning skills of a talented practitioner — particularly rare in young faculty,” said Stephen Luoni, director of the design center. “Similar to instruction in the teaching hospital, he models for our students dedication, commitment to excellence, and critical practitioner thinking.”

Gabriel earned a Master of Architecture from Columbia University in May of 2003 and a Bachelor of Design from the University of Florida in 1997. He was awarded a traveling fellowship to the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, Zürich (ETH) in the spring of 2002, and was a Skidmore Owings and Merrill traveling fellow candidate in 2002. With partner Katherine Chang he developed quarters for transitional homeless housing that were selected as one of five winning entries for the Common Ground Community’s First Step Housing Competition in 2003. A prototype was built in New York City and is featured in the 2006 book Design Like You Give a Damn: Architectural Responses to Humanitarian Crises.

The third award, the 2007-08 ACSA Collaborative Practice Award, recognizes the CITYbuild Consortium of Schools. Launched by the December 2005 Arkansas Summit, which was organized and hosted by the School of Architecture, CITYbuild is a collective of national university-based programs working cooperatively to address the challenges of rebuilding New Orleans, post-Katrina. School of Architecture faculty and students redesigned and have begun construction on Miss Gloria’s Kitchen, a restaurant and focal point for the Gert Town neighborhood that has been shuttered since Hurricane Katrina. Other schools and organizations participating in CITYbuild include the University of Kansas, Tulane University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Southern California and Design Corps.

The awards will be presented at the annual meeting of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture in Houston, March 27-30, 2008. All three awards will be included in a book on the 2007-08 education awards to be co-published by the ACSA and the American Institute of Architects.