CCA News

Design Observer's PLACES features CCA's URBANlab

Posted on Monday, January 30, 2012, by Allison Byers

Places, an interdisciplinary journal of contemporary architecture housed on the Design Observer Group website, recently featured the work of CCA’s URBANlab. Nancy Levinson reports, “Bridging multiple programs and formats, URBANlab is dedicated to connecting the intellectual and disciplinary resources of the academy with the practical spheres of public planning and municipal institutions in order to investigate the challenges and potentials of the urban environment in the 21st century.”

Founded in 2008 by Ila Berman, director of architecture, and Mona El Khafif, associate professor and URBANlab project coordinator, URBANlab is one of three research and design labs at CCA focusing on urbanism, ecology, and advanced digital and interactive technologies. Berman says that URBANlab specifically works to “engage urban, infrastructural and environmental issues in partnership with public organizations, professional firms, and government agencies through collaborative, project-based initiatives.”

URBANlab is informed by Berman’s previous project URBANbuild, a design center at Tulane University that she founded as a means for confronting the challenges of a post-Katrina New Orleans. Both URBANlab and URBANbuild share a similar philosophy of a fundamentally proactive, rather than reactive and regulatory, approach to urban design.

For more information about URBANlab, read the interview with Ila Berman and Mona El-Khafif by Nancy Levinson of Places.