Assistant Professor Aimee Buccellato

Tell us about your background:

I came to the School of Architecture from professional practice in New York where I was an associate with G. P. Schafer Architect, PLLC. While in New York, I was an active member of the Institute of Classical Architecture & Classical America, serving as a Fellow for six years, as well as the Managing Editor of their publication The Forum for three years. I received my initial training here at Notre Dame, followed by a Master in Design Studies degree in History, Theory, and Criticism from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University.

What is your teaching and research focus?

The primary focus of my research, teaching, and to a certain degree, my practice is to advance the study of building technology and sustainable design with particular emphasis on quantifying the inherently durable and sustainable characteristics of traditional principles of design, materials, and ways of making.

In addition to teaching these principles in my Introduction to Building Technology course each fall, I try to design studio projects that allow me and my students to put traditional principles of design and ways of making into practice.

This spring, for example, I took my students to the town of Bernalillo, New Mexico to collaborate on the restoration of one of three remaining adobe flour mills in the state. In addition to field-based research of traditional construction methods (specifically adobe and terrone masonry), the studio worked to stabilize and retrofit the historical structure, and later submitted adaptive re-use proposals to the town for consideration in their master plan efforts.

In preparation for working with locally harvested materials and coursed earthen masonry, our studio built another naturally high-performance thermal envelope: a seven-foot diameter igloo right outside the doors of Bond Hall.

In the fall, I and my student researchers will study the implications of moving an early 19th -century masonry church from Buffalo, New York to Atlanta, Georgia: an actual project to be carried-out by Harrison Design Associates that has recently gained national media attention (here is an interview on the Mother Nature Network).

Last semester I launched my (tentatively named) “Green Scale” research, the intent of which is to quantify and compare purportedly “green”/ hi-tech structures and their traditional/ low-tech predecessors through original case studies, and to develop analysis tools to assess the more qualitative aspects of traditional design and urbanism.

What’s on the horizon?

I’ve got quite a few irons in the fire at present, but most immediately on the horizon: continuing our work (Buccellato Design, LLC with husband Kevin Buccellato) with the Center for the Homeless to realize the Robert L. Miller Sr. Center for Homeless Veterans, the country’s first homeless center dedicated specifically to housing and caring for our local homeless veterans. Construction has begun and will continue through the summer and next year thanks to several local and federal grants and tireless volunteer efforts.

This winter, my colleagues Dr. Paul Brenner and Dr. David Go from Engineering and I will present a paper at the 2011 ASHRAE Winter Conference describing our on-going research collaboration focused on the optimization of computer waste heat in buildings, or Environmentally Opportunistic Computing (EOC).

An interesting fact: energy demand for computing —both to power the machines and to cool them—is already three percent of total U.S. electricity consumption and growing rapidly. Most, if not all, of the heat by-product is wasted. But what if we could harness and actually use the heat from computers— ubiquitous as they are in our modern life—to passively heat our buildings? Much like a ground-source geothermal system, EOC performs as a “system source” thermal system, with the capability to create heat where it is already available, to utilize energy when and where it is least expensive, and to minimize a building’s overall energy consumption (see www.greencloud.crc.nd.edu).

I am expanding the focus of my collective research about “responsible technology” into a book. One of the questions that fuels my research endeavors is the following: What is the responsibility of technology? In other words, what responsibility do we assign to technology to solve our modern problems versus what is the technology of responsibility (the most responsible technology)? What lies at the heart of this question is my core conviction about the virtues of traditional methods and principles, and that beyond the importance of embodied energy, there is still much to be gained from the knowledge that is part of these methods and principles that have been vetted, refined, and mastered over time. More simply: we can and must do better with what we have and what we already know well. If you would like to read more, see my paper “Doing Better with What We Have,” published in the proceedings of the 2009 Building Technology Educators Society Assembling Architecture Conference.