The Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) and the American Institute of Architects (AIA) are pleased to continue the conference partnership dedicated to the intersection of education, research and practice. The 2025 ACSA/AIA Intersections Research Conference explores housing as a process, a product, and a place. This conference will speculate on, advocate for, operate within, and struggle with new housing paradigms. The conference will take place January 9-11, 2025 in Austin, Texas.
At this in-person conference, attendees will gain an increased awareness of research happening in both academia and design practice. The conference will create opportunities for new partnerships, sources of funding, collaborations and critical observations. It will be a chance for both established researchers as well as those looking to enhance their research capabilities, with sessions, breakouts, workshops and networking events.
Conference Overview
Housing is a process, a product, and a place. As such, it involves a multitude of actors and constituents, disciplines, and professions. As a process, it is a political as much as an economic one, it is top-down as much as bottom-up, and it involves flows of data and capital as much as flows of materials and labor. As product it can be classified into architectural typologies and analyzed as urban morphology, it is a physical commodity, and it accounts for a significant percentage of our global carbon emissions. As a place, it determines what our cities look like, how we inhabit them, and how we live together and form communities.
While for some time now, it has become apparent that customary processes of housing production have reached an impasse, proposed remedies are as diverse as the actors involved and tend to echo the biases of specialized expertise and reinforce existing disciplinary paradigms (“faster & cheaper,” “less & better,” “more regulation,” “less regulation,” “more technology,” “more bottom-up,” “more top-down,” “new typologies,” “old typologies,” etc…).
As housing finds itself at the center of overlapping crises of affordability, climate change, policy, and design, there is an urgent need for a shift away from entrenched paradigms towards larger conversations, and new forms of synthetic collaborative practices. More than a decade into the crisis, can we identify outlines of emerging paradigm shifts? How do architects take ownership of these conversations – as leaders or as contributors – and what are their roles in future housing practices?
The 2025 ACSA/AIA Intersections Research Conference invites contributions, papers, projects, case studies, and critical observations that speculate on, advocate for, operate within, and struggle with new housing paradigms. Innovative approaches are welcome at all scales, from single unit to master plan as we recognize even the smallest unit of private space to inherently be an urban problem. Contributions should relate to one of the tracks listed below or address potential overlaps between no more than two.
Housing for Equitable Communities Contributions that engage with, leverage, or invent political or economic processes and outcomes that positively impact affordability, communities, equity, or intervene at a larger scale of urban design or urbanism.
Housing as Radical Solution Solutions that radically rethink housing, its constituent parts (material, space, typology), its effects, representations, or its genesis to generate alternative visions or productive critiques or engage with the long lineage of utopian and/or dystopian visions for ways we live
Housing as Pedagogy Contributions that interrogate the way we teach future generations of architects, educate constituents, and disseminate information to leverage talent and skill towards the goal of better housing.
Housing for Ecology Contributions that recognize the inherent roles of housing in preserving, strengthening, and creating ecosystems, or reducing greenhouse gases.
Housing for Well-being + Health Contributions that focus on health inequalities, cater to specific vulnerabilities and needs, and capabilities of housing to positively impact its (urban) environments, or human interactions therein.
Co-Chairs
John J. Clark, South Florida Community Land Trust & Florida Atlantic University
Martin Hättasch, University of Texas at Austin
Elizabeth Mueller, University of Texas at Austin
Location
Austin, Texas
Austin is the capital of the U.S. state of Texas and It has been one of the fastest growing large cities in the United States since 2010. Austin has an estimated population of 964,177. Located in Central Texas within the greater Texas Hill Country, it is home to numerous lakes, rivers, and waterways. The city’s official slogan promotes Austin as “The Live Music Capital of the World”, a reference to the city’s many musicians and live music venues. Emerging from a strong economic focus on government and education, since the 1990s, Austin has become a center for technology and business. With regard to education, Austin is the home of the University of Texas at Austin, one of the largest universities in the U.S., with over 50,000 students.
