SOM Foundation Awards 2023 Research Prize to UTSA Team Studying Housing

The taxonomy of vacancy will focus on seven commercial strips that align with VIA Metropolitan Transit's 2040 Long Range Plan for BRT and LRT. Image: Ian Caine

The research team will create a taxonomy of vacant or underutilized parcels, establishing parameters related to size, cost, zoning, location, and use. Image: Ian Caine, J. William Arch, Melanie Bartholomew, Devon Duffin, Phuoc Luu, Diana Rodriguez, Evey Santillan, Michelyn Smith

A University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA) research team has been honored with the SOM Foundation’s 2023 Research Prize for its proposal titled "A Taxonomy of Vacancy: Are Underutilized Commercial Strips the Answer to San Antonio’s Housing Shortage?"

Led by Ian Caine, the team consists of Wei Zhai and Esteban López Ochoa from the UTSA School of Architecture + Planning, Rudy Niño, Jr. from the City of San Antonio, and Christine Quattro from Appalachian State University. The project explores how vacant or underused commercial parcels can be reimagined as multifamily housing. With a $40,000 grant from the SOM Foundation and additional support from the City of San Antonio, the team will combine data analysis and design thinking to develop innovative policies and typologies to address San Antonio’s housing crisis. This research coincides with broader efforts to accommodate a projected influx of over one million people into Bexar County, underscoring the urgency and relevance of the work.

This year’s jury included Iker Gil, Executive Director, SOM Foundation, Chicago; Carlos Bedoya, Cofounder, PRODUCTORA and Founding partner, LIGA, Space for Architecture, Mexico City; Johanna Hurme, Cofounder, 5468796 Architecture, Winnipeg; Lorcan O’Herlihy, Founding Principal and Creative Director, Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects [LOHA], Los Angeles and Detroit; and Irene Sunwoo, John H. Bryan Chair and Curator of Architecture and Design, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago.

UTSA Center Launches Downtown Planning Process in Freeport, Texas

Image: Downtown Broad Street Freeport, Texas

UTSA’s Center for Urban and Regional Planning Research is excited to begin work in Freeport, Texas, a coastal city with 10,696 residents in Brazoria County. Originally founded in 1912 by the Freeport Sulphur Company, the city is now home to Dow Chemical Company's Texas Operations facility.

Ian Caine will lead the effort, working closely with Freeport's community members and San Antonio's Post Oak Preservation Solutions to develop a Comprehensive Downtown Plan that addresses preservation, economic development, land use, zoning, and infrastructure. The plan will include Historic District Guidelines, designed to connect Freeport's rich architectural heritage with an exciting vision for the future.

Stay tuned for updates!

Center for Urban and Regional Planning Research Hosts "Border Praxis" Panel

Image: UTSA School of Architecture + Planning

Associate Professor Ian Caine moderated a panel titled Border Praxis: Designing Urban and Landscape Futures in the Lower Rio Grande Valley. Panelists included leading urban and landscape designers from the United States and Mexico:

Gabriel Díaz Montemayor, MLA, Assistant Dean for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture, University of Arkansas, Principal, LABOR Studio

Paola Aguirre, MAUD, Principal, Borderless Studio

Dennis Milam, AIA, Principal, Borderless Studio

A lively discussion ensued as the panelists explored the following topics related to urban design practice in the LRGV:

+ Border

+ Scale

+ Agency

+ Space

+ Security

+ Porosity

+ Praxis

Thanks to all that attended!

The event was sponsored by the UTSA School of Architecture + Planning with support from the Center for Urban and Regional Planning Research.

Ian Caine Joins National Research + Scholarship Committee

Image: Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture

Ian Caine is pleased to join colleagues from across the country on the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture’s (ACSA) Research + Scholarship Committee. The Committee’s annual charge is to lead “ACSA’s efforts to support faculty in scholarly endeavors; monitoring and assessing peer-review and recognition programs and recommending actions to advocate for architectural scholarship.”

For the academic year 2023-24, the Committee will “…support architectural scholarship related to the intersection of social equity and climate action focusing beyond academic structures like tenure and promotion to outward facing, external promotion of research and scholarship.”

The Committee held initial meetings in August, hosted by the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. It will publish its work in the Spring of 2024.

Congratulations to Derek Hoeferlin for publishing His Book, Way Beyond Bigness!

Way Beyond Bigness: The Need for a Watershed Architecture (AR+D Publishing, 2023)

Congratulations to friend and colleague Derek Hoeferlin for publishing Way Beyond Bigness: The Need for a Watershed Architecture (AR+D Publishing, 2023)! Derek has been painstakingly assembling this project for years. The result is a 592-page brick of a book, chock full of projects and essays! It features contributions from multiple authors, including Ian Caine’s “Synthetic Utopias for a Post-Katrina Era” which highlights several of the large-scale urban proposals that Derek and I developed at Washington University.

From the publisher:

Way Beyond Bigness is a design-research project that studies the Mekong, Mississippi and Rhine river basins, with particular focus on multi-scaled, water-based infrastructural transformation. The book highlights the author's comprehensive work of over more than a decade, including in depth field research across the Mekong, Mississippi and Rhine, along with a diverse body of academic and professional collaborations, ranging from the speculative to the community-based.

Pick up your copy today. Kudos Derek!

Ian Caine Discusses Urban Context at Wentworth Institute of Technology

Wentworth Institute of Technology

Thank you to Dean Sedef Doganer and the fantastic students and faculty at Wentworth School of Architecture & Design for the invitation to come and speak! I presented a talk titled “On Context in Urban Design” which explored the phenomenon of urban context using the following:

+ four scales

+ four projects

+ four observations

For urban designers, establishing an authentic relationship with context means engaging the city on its own terms. It means understanding the complex interaction between form and policy. It means developing strategic interventions that can create real impact. It means engaging the mechanisms that catalyze, finance, and regulate urban growth. It even means that, sometimes, we have to surrender our preferred role as form-givers.

Great conversations, wonderful space, bustling city, fun evening!

Caine and Díaz Montemayor Publish new Approach to Colonia Landscapes in The Plan Journal

Existing colonia site.

Proposed modular site at fifty years.

Proposed modular site at one hundred years.

Ian Caine and Gabriel Díaz Montemayor are excited to contribute a design proposal to The Plan Journal’s current issue, which focuses on The Right to Housing. Here is an excerpt from “A Modular Approach to Colonia Landscapes in Texas’ Lower Rio Grande Valley,” The Plan Journal, Volume 7/2022 - Issue 2, The Right to Housing:

The Lower Rio Grande Valley (LRGV) is a transborder region that lies in the floodplain of the Rio Grande/Río Bravo River. The region, which covers four Texas counties and the northern portion of the Mexican State of Tamaulipas, is home to more than 900 colonias on the Texas side of the border. These informal, unincorporated settlements–which house more than 400,000 people–are characterized by substandard housing and a lack of civil infrastructure including sewers, paved roads, and potable water. Many of the colonias flood regularly.

This proposal imagines a modular, transitional approach to designing housing and landscape in LRGV colonias. While typical modular housing projects are standardized, prefabricated, packed, shipped, and assembled onsite; the following proposal extends modular efficiencies to the entire site, incorporating landscape, flood control, and canal systems. The holistic, modular approach allows for the flexible growth and decline of the community over the course of one hundred years. Ultimately, the transitional, modular model challenges the adversarial environmental, social, and economic arrangements that exist in colonia developments, imagining a more sympathetic relationship between people, water, and land.

Thank you to fantastic team members Joe Valadez, Trent Tunks, and Tiffany Vargas!

Ian Caine discusses San Antonio's Lack of Walkability with Reporter from the Express-News

Walkscore data suggests San Antonio is the least walkable large city in the U.S.

Image: Matthew Busch | The San Antonio Express-News

A recent Walk Score survey named San Antonio as the least pedestrian-friendly large city in the U.S. Ian Caine reflected on this troubling outcome with reporter Shepard Price from the San Antonio Express-News:

San Antonio's low overall score is of no surprise to Ian Caine, an associate professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio and director of the school's Center for Urban and Regional Planning Research. Caine said "2,000 miles of sidewalks are either missing or broken" in the city.

“San Antonio residents know from experience that large portions of their city are not very walkable, especially outside of the historic core," Caine said in an email to the Express-News.

Caine also noted that the low walkability of San Antonio is reinforced by data and is in part due to the city's growth timeline, which "accelerated dramatically" after World War II, during the period of urban sprawl. Many characteristics associated with sprawl, like scattered development patterns, widespread single-use zoning and low-density neighborhoods can make cities less walkable, Caine said.

To improve its Walk Score, Caine said the city needs to invest in an integrated system of streets with shaded sidewalks and pedestrian-friendly intersections, safe bike lanes and increased transit options. 

“(San Antonio) will have to build more medium-density, mixed-use and compact urban neighborhoods like the ones it developed during the first half of the twentieth century," Caine wrote.

UTSA Architecture Students Tour Innovative Mass Timber Structure

Lake Flato’s Homero Montemayor and UTSA’s David Bogle talk Mass Timber with students.

First-year graduate students from UTSA’s School of Architecture + Planning toured Trinity University’s Dicke Hall, gaining an up-close look at Mass Timber and Cross Laminated Timber (CLT) construction. Lake Flato designer and UTSA alum Homero Montemayor led the tour, tracing the firm’s process all the way from programming through construction. The use of Mass Timber and CLT at Dicke Hall offers a contemporary response to architect O’Neil Ford’s iconic midcentury Modernist campus, which is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Students in Associate Professor Ian Caine’s MArch studio are exploring modular, prefabricated wood construction as a partial solution to San Antonio’s pervasive housing shortage. The studio asks each student to reinterpret a standard housing typology–a Bar, Courtyard, Tower, or Townhouse–while leveraging Mass Timber and CLT construction. Students will present their design proposals to a panel of architects during the SA+P’s final review week, scheduled for early December.

Big thanks to Trinity University, Lake Flato Architects, and UTSA faculty David Bogle for organizing the tour!

UTSA Students Talk Mass Timber with Experts at Timberlyne

UTSA Alum Alex Arrunada shows how Timberlyne manufactures Mass Timber beams.

First-year graduate students from UTSA’s School of Architecture + Planning visited Timberlyne’s facility in Boerne, Texas to learn about Mass Timber and Cross Laminated Timber (CLT) production. UTSA alumni Alejandro Arrunada–Timberlyne’s Director of Innovation–traced the process all the way from material acquisition to site installation. Fellow UTSA alums Yanely Mireles and Tristan Doebler also stopped by to describe their roles as Timberlyne designers.

This semester Associate Professor Ian Caine’s MArch studio is exploring the application of modular, prefabricated construction to multifamily housing in San Antonio. Each of the students will design one of four typologies–a Bar, Court, Tower, or Townhouse–while leveraging Mass Timber and CLT systems. The larger goal of the studio is to explore how emerging modular construction technologies can address pervasive housing shortages in San Antonio. San Antonio is one of the ten fastest growing cities in the United States, with an annual expansion rate that exceeds 2%. Prefabricated and modular housing solutions have enormous potential in a market where demand continues to outstrip supply, and developers deliver only 500 affordable units each year.

Ian Caine receives title of Distinguished Teaching Professor at UTSA

Image: The University of Texas System

Ian Caine is one of nineteen UTSA faculty members to receive the title of Distinguished Teaching Professor, honoring significant contributions to pedagogy at the university. The recipients are all active members of the UTSA Academy of Distinguished Teaching Scholars, which provides institutional leadership and guidance through activities such as mentoring new faculty and developing seminars on teaching excellence. The initial appointment is for a period of five years.

“Congratulations to the outstanding group of faculty members chosen for this honor,” offered Provost Kimberly Andrews Espy. “The UTSA faculty is second to none and this new honorific title is one more way to commend our faculty and recognize their steadfast dedication to teaching excellence and innovative practices that directly contribute to our students’ success.”

Weslaco City Commission Unanimously Approves New Comprehensive Plan

Proposed Streetscape Improvements for the City of Weslaco’s Texas Boulevard.

Proposed Retrofits to the City of Weslaco’s Existing Park Network.

The Weslaco City Commission unanimously approved UTSA’s 2022 update to the City’s Comprehensive Plan. The new document, which establishes a framework for community decision-making through the year 2045, represents sixteen months of collaboration between Weslaco city leaders, UTSA’s Center for Urban and Regional Planning Research (CURPR), and Gabriel Díaz Montemayor, Founding Partner of LABor Studio. Weslaco’s 2022 Comprehensive Plan redefines the City of Weslaco’s growth calculus, expanding the community motto, “City on the Grow,” to include infill, redevelopment, and retrofit strategies.

The City of Weslaco is a rapidly expanding community of 42,000 located in the Rio Grande Valley. Once part of a Spanish land grant known as Llano Grande, Weslaco was incorporated in 1921 and today exists as part of the Reynosa-McAllen metropolitan area, a transnational conurbation along the U.S.-Mexico border. This region, which lies adjacent to the Mexican State of Tamaulipas, is one of the fastest growing urban areas in the United States.

UTSA researchers worked with Weslaco residents and City officials to address the effects of rapid urban growth, specifically as it relates to issues of downtown revitalization, housing, parks, flood control, transportation, economic sustainability, and environmental resilience. The process began in 2021 with three public forums that allowed residents to express their aspirations, concerns, and evaluate how well alternative growth scenarios aligned with community values.

Architecture Jury Shortlists UTSA Design Proposal for International Housing Award

Aerial View of Site.

Axonometric View of Modular Systems.

A jury of architects has shortlisted a UTSA Center for Urban and Regional Planning (CURPR) proposal for an international housing award. The Modular Home Annual International Competition Edition 2, sponsored by Buildner, asked participants to submit innovative modular housing proposals for sites around the world.

CURPR’s proposal, led by Center Director Ian Caine in collaboration with landscape and urban designer Gabriel Díaz Montemayor of LABor Studio, is located in the Rio Grande Valley, a transborder region that lies in the floodplain of the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo River adjacent to the Mexican State of Tamaulipas. The region is home to more than 2,000 colonias–informal, unincorporated settlements that flood regularly and lack civil infrastructure including sewer systems, paved roads, and potable water. In Texas, 400,000 people live in colonias. Many are migrant workers from Northern Mexico who come for seasonal agricultural jobs.

Typical modular housing units are standardized, prefabricated, packed, shipped, and assembled onsite. The CURPR proposal imagines a farming cooperative that extends modular efficiencies beyond housing to the entire site, unitizing the subdivision of land, utilities, flood control, and food production. This vision rejects the adversarial economic, social, and environmental arrangements associated with industrial farming, imagining more sympathetic relations between people, capital, land, and water.

Congratulations to the entire design team, which included Trent Tunks, Joe Valadez, and Tiffany Vargas! The competition jury included Bárbara Bardin, co-Founder of Madrid-based studio Canobardin; Pilar Cano-Lasso, leader of Madrid-based delavegacanolasso; Sarah Broadstock, architect at London-based Studio Bark; Mark Gabbertas of UK-based Gabbertas Studio; Inés Olavarrieta, architect and designer at Madrid-based selgascano.

Talking Political Geography and Urbanism at Texas Tech CoA

Image: Texas Tech CoA

Ian Caine participated in the Texas Tech College of Architecture’s student-run debate series, CoA Dialogues. This impressive student-run series has been up-and-running for over a decade. This year’s theme is Future Societies, featuring discussions on Equity, Environment, Histories, and Political Geography. 

Professor Caine and Texas Tech faculty Danie Vaughn had a wide-ranging conversation on the topic of Political Geography, probing the relationships between urban development, capital, ecology, rhetoric, policy and of course design. Topics included Walmart, Stormwater, Elon Musk, Houston, West Texas, and the Rio Grande Delta. Excellent questions and comments from a small but highly engaged group of students. 

Thank you to Dr. Jeffrey Nesbit, Grace Shanks, and Texas Tech for the invitation! 

UTSA STUDENTS VISIT RIO GRANDE VALLEY TO STUDY MODULAR HOUSING

Studio Visit to Estero Llano Grande State Park.

Graduate students from the School of Architecture + Planning travelled to Weslaco, Texas with Associate Professor Ian Caine to examine modular housing in a regional context. The fall 2021 studio, part of a semester-long transdisciplinary collaboration with University of Arkansas landscape faculty Gabriel Diaz Montemayor, is examining modular housing across regional, metropolitan, neighborhood, and building scales. During the trip, UTSA students met with city officials and visited mobile home parks, wetlands, flood plains, levees, and bird blinds. Students will submit their final studio results to the Annual International Architecture Modular Home Competition in May 2022. 

The studio curriculum builds on an actual community design effort that Caine, Diaz Montemayor, and CURPR researchers are leading in the City of Weslaco, Texas, a city of 41,000. Weslaco is located in Hidalgo County, one of three counties in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, a transborder region is located in the floodplain of the Rio Grande River and adjacent to the Mexican State of Tamaulipas. 

Ian Caine discusses San Antonio's rapid urban growth with the New York Times

Image: The Lyda Hill Texas Collection of Photographs | Picryl

One of fastest growing and oldest cities in the United States, San Antonio faces continuous pressure to embrace economic development while preserving culture. The City expects to add one million residents by 2040, yet faces a severe shortage of affordable housing.

Ian Caine recently discussed these issues with the New York Times:

“San Antonio has a wonderfully preserved historic downtown, an historic building stock and the River Walk, and that’s the image the city projects to the world,” said Ian Caine, the director of the Center for Urban and Regional Planning Research at the University of Texas at San Antonio. “And then on the other hand, it’s one of the fastest-growing cities in the U.S., famously bicultural and minority-majority, and one of the most segregated and poor cities in the U.S.”

“As San Antonio moves forward, it’s trying to make sense of these competing histories,” he added.

Much of San Antonio’s recent growth was catalyzed by the Decade of Downtown, a 2010 initiative championed by former Mayor Julián Castro. As the City heads into a new decade, it must confront multiple challenges that come with development, including issues of affordable housing, gentrification, gridlock, and aquifer protection.

Check out the full article below:

Ian Caine discusses rapid urban growth in unincorporated communities at acsa 109

Image: ACSA

Ian Caine attended the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture’s 109th Annual Meeting to present a recent urban planning effort in Comfort, Texas. Comfort, like 90% of its neighbors in the Texas Hill Country, does not have a municipal government.

Comfort Vision 2050 offers a plan tailored to the realities of life in an unincorporated community, providing a list of 75 Strategic Initiatives that are small-scale, diverse, and possible to achieve without the benefit of municipal government. The research highlights the need to develop regional planning strategies that can address the needs of unincorporated communities, which after all need urban planning for all the same reasons that cities do: to prevent the fragmentation of local ecologies, maintain critical infrastructures, ensure access to housing, preserve physical and cultural history, attract and keep good jobs, expand critical services, facilitate civic discourse, and ensure timely decision-making.

American Planning Association Honors Vision Plan for Comfort, Texas

Image: American Planning Association Texas

Comfort residents discuss the future of their community in one of four public forums. Image: CURPR

The Texas Chapter of the American Planning Association (APA) has awarded Comfort Vision 2050 with a Grassroots Initiative Award at the Gold Level, “[h]onoring an initiative that illustrates how a neighborhood, community group or other local non-governmental entity utilized the planning process to address a specific need or issue within the community.” A jury of leading planners from the APA-Colorado and APA-Texas Chapters made the selections. UTSA’s Center for Urban and Regional Planning Research, led by Ian Caine, facilitated the vision plan in collaboration with the Comfort Area Foundation (CAF) and National Association for Community Asset Builders (NALCAB), with financial support from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Comfort Vision 2050 addresses the political realities of life in an unincorporated community, establishing a novel approach to urban planning that is decentralized, non-governmental, incremental, actionable, coordinated, measurable, and transparent. The plan specifically provides a list of 75 Strategic Initiatives that are small-scale, diverse, and achievable without the benefit of municipal government. 

Thank you to the CAF and NALCAB for initiating the process and to the UTSA team, which included William Dupont, Professor of Architecture; Corey Sparks, Associate Professor of Demography; Bill Barker, FAICP; Matthew Jackson and Thomas Tunstall of UTSA’s Institute for Economic Development; and student researchers Elizabeth Striedel, Ivan Ventura and Diego Sanchez. Most importantly, congratulations to the residents of Comfort for making such an important investment in your community’s future!

What would a sustainable San Antonio look like?

Caine speaking at the Tobin Center for the Performing Arts on December 17, 2019.

Ian Caine delivered the final installment of the UTSA 50th Anniversary Scholars Speakers Series, undertaking a broad thought experiment titled What Would a Sustainable San Antonio Look Like? 

“When it comes to climate change, cities like San Antonio are both the problem and the solution,” said Caine. “Cities cover less than 2% of the Earth’s surface, yet they produce 60% of the world’s carbon and greenhouse gas emissions. As we consider how San Antonio will respond to the climate crisis, we need to imagine what a sustainable city would look like, how it would work, and mostly importantly who it would serve.” 

Click on the image (above left) for a link to the talk, which is posted on Youtube.com.

UTSA students receive AIA Design Award for Galveston Island proposal

Proposal for eco-hotel on Galveston Island. Image: André Simon and Ivan Ventura

Operable hurricane shutter for eco-hotel on Galveston Island. Image: André Simon and Ivan Ventura

André Simon and Ivan Ventura. Image: UTSA

UTSA architecture students André Simon and Ivan Ventura received a Student Design Award at the November 19 American Institute of Architects San Antonio People + Place Celebration. The winning project, titled Transform for Storm, proposed an eco-hotel for Galveston Island’s Gulf Coast. This barrier island is the site of frequent hurricanes and in 1900 experienced the deadliest storm in U.S. history, a tragic event that killed 8,000 people. The awards jury selected Simon and Ventura’s proposal from a highly competitive field of entries, noting that the “….project sensitively explored the challenges of coastal habitation, offering hope for our shared future.”

The students developed the project in a fall 2018 design studio led by Ian Caine with collaboration from Dr. Hazem Rashed-Ali. This studio explored issues of ecological literacy and resilience through the comprehensive integration of advanced performance metrics and design pedagogy. The studio pursued the topics in parallel while re-examining the oft-misunderstood relationship between architectural sustainability and aesthetics. 

The studio also embraced the goals and methods of the Architecture 2030 Challenge, which commits that all new buildings and major renovations will be carbon-neutral by 2030. In 2016-2017, Architecture 2030 selected this design curriculum for its Pilot Curriculum Project, while Metropolis Magazine profiled it in an article titled The 7 Best Sustainable Design Courses in America.