AIA Florida William McMinn Honor Award Nomination from Ron Dulaney, Assistant Professor, University...

AIA Florida William McMinn Honor Award

Nomination from Ron Dulaney, Assistant Professor, University of West Virginia

As a former faculty colleague of Michael Halflants, AIA, I have had many opportunities to observe his exceptional abilities as an architectural educator. During the past eight years, Michael has developed an outstanding architectural practice while excelling as a full-time faculty member at the School of Architecture and Community Design at USF. He has consistently proven himself to be an exceptional architect, a respected colleague, and a gifted educator. In architectural education, the quality of student work is the measure of the quality and quantity of learning. Michael is a devoted and demanding educator, and his students consistently produce excellent work. He approaches teaching with both a broad understanding of disciplinary knowledge accrued as architecture history and theory and a practical understanding developed as an active, innovative design practitioner. From a critical position of synthesis between the idealism of academia and the pragmatism of practice, Michael provides a path and inspires the desire for Florida’s future architects to realize excellent works of Architecture.

The practice of Halflants + Pichette has been recognized for design excellence by their peers on numerous occasions, most recently receiving an unprecedented five design awards in the 2010 Florida Gulf Coast AIA Design Awards program. Michael’s outstanding practice experience benefits his students in several important ways. Students’ exposure to practice issues and conditions helps ease the transition between academic study and professional practice following graduation. Michael’s passion for the practice of architecture is contagious. The presence of his own work in the school demonstrates his commitment to getting works built and evidences that he practices what he preaches which earns a great amount of respect from his students.

The young architecture program at USF and the state of Florida are fortunate to have an architect and educator of Michael’s caliber. His contributions engage and extend the discipline of architecture, edify the value of architecture within the state and region, and undoubtedly elevate the aspirations and works of future architects. I believe that Michael’s outstanding accomplishments and tremendous promise are most deserving of the William G. McMinn, FAIA Award for Outstanding Architectural Education Contributions.

MichaelHalflants, AIA

NOMINATION


Santiago Perez, Assistant Professor, University of Houston

I submit my wholehearted recommendation of Michael, having taught with him at USF from 2003 to 2006.

From an academic perspective, I have enjoyed and benefited from Michael Halflants’ passion and knowledge of architecture as a rigorous discipline, combining his scholarly interests and knowledge of modern architecture with the technical and business knowledge of an emerging practitioner. Michael carries on the best qualities of a modern architect, both regionally within the “Sarasota School” tradition, and as a critically engaged 21st century architect, within a global culture of architecture.

During my time at USF as an assistant professor, I was able to observe the very high quality of academic work that emerged from Michael’s design studio and Thesis students. His high standards, depth of knowledge and passion for teaching, have enabled him to inspire and motivate numerous students with excellent results. Michael was a model for me while at USF, as I attempted to find my own path as a teacher and academic.

Perhaps most inspiring for me, in an age of digital media saturation, is the astute rigor and discipline that Michael achieves both in his own built work, and in the standards that he sets for himself and his students. He is a model teacher and a 21st century emerging practitioner.


RECOMMENDATION


Ap Zylstra, Professor Emeritus, University of South Florida

Michael Halflants was my colleague at the University of South Florida’s School of Architecture and Community Design (SACD) for several years prior to my retirement in 2003. At that time I also followed his architectural practice and have since kept abreast of his designs. I served with him on committees and worked with him in other functions as co-members of the faculty.

His service to SACD has been invaluable, most of all through the excellence of his teaching, the main proof of which lies in the fact that he was able to bring out the best in his students. Time and again I witnessed, both in the less and the more advanced studio courses, how he helped bring a student along from meager beginnings to accomplished end results. It is not difficult to coach supremely gifted students, but to it is the mark of the good teacher to elicit from the average student excellent projects. In this respect, he had hardly his equal and the formal, functional, and structural merits of those students’ designs are the proof of it.


RECOMMENDATION


BIOGRAPHY

Michael Halflants is a registered architect and an associate professor at the University of South Florida where he has been teaching since 2002. His goal is to build and maintain deliberately parallel, mutually reinforcing activities as a practitioner and architecture professor.

After starting his architectural education in Brussels, he earned a masters degree in architecture at the University of Florida. Upon graduation, he was awarded the gold medal, the department’s highest design honor.

Michael was first employed as a project designer with the Polshek Partnership in New York. In that capacity, he drew designs for theaters and offices in Manhattan and for the Kansas University Spencer Museum. Working in a joint venture with Arata Isozaki’s Tokyo office, he was on the design team for the Brooklyn Museum addition.

At the University of South Florida, Michael teaches graduate design studios. He created the Tropical Architecture course and the Modern Housing Prototype elective. He redesigned the Materials & Methods course to include a prescriptive hands-on material investigation. His students have won 8 citations and awards in international design competitions. As a practitioner, Michael was the recipient of the 2005 AIA Eduardo Garcia Award which recognizes an architect under 40 who practices within the seven counties around Tampa Bay. In 2007, the University of Florida honored him with the Young Architect Award. Since starting Halflants + Pichette in 2006, his firm was the recipient of seven AIA awards.


BIOGRAPHY

New Courses Developed

o Critical Reconstruction graduate urban design electiveGraduate urban design elective course to examine the fundamental urban responsibility of buildings as they shape the spaces of the city. The intention is to define and reinforce thegenius loci of a city.

o Tropical DesignThe course examines the technical use of passive cooling strategies through precedent research. Students investigate the design implications of sound passive cooling in a residential assignment. In the designs, every effort is made to engage the senses and limit the need for conditioning.

o Modern Housing PrototypesThe course prompts the student to investigate the interaction between user requirements, urban context, environmental factors, and design intentions in the development of designsolutions for housing projects in warm climates. Particular emphasis is placed on access and degrees of privacy.

Redesigned Course:

o Materials and Methods of Construction | graduate required courseIntroduced a collaborative hands-on full-scale construction project to encourage students’understanding of the weight of the materials, their connection, and the processes of designand fabrication.

AIA Florida William McMinn Honor Award MichaelHalflants, AIA


Study Abroad Program Director, Spain Summer 2010Students will start in Madrid and will visit in turn Cordoba, Seville, Granada, Bilbao, and Barcelona with an emphasis on contemporary and Moorish architecture.

Study Abroad Program Director, Mexico City Spring 2008Led students through Teotihuacan, the Spanish colonial city of Puebla, early 20th century work ofBarragan and O’German, the 1960’s avant-garde of UNAM, and Alberto Kalach’s National Library.

Study Abroad Program Director, Northern Europe Summer 2005The itinerary focused on urban infill projects in Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Breda, Berlin, Lille, andMaastricht.

Study Abroad, Yucatan, Mexico Fall 2004Led two studios on a tour of Haciendas, Mayan Ruins, and through the urban fabric of Merida.

Studio Field Study in the US

o Vancouver / Seattle / Portland, Spring 2010

o San Francisco , Spring 2009

o Los Angeles, Spring 2007

o Phoenix, Spring 2006

o Chicago, Fall 2005

o New York, Fall 2003

o Houston, Spring 2003

FIELD STUDIES

Select Service Responsibilities and initiatives that have significantly contributed to the life, visibility, and growth of the School of Architecture:

2010 > Created the USF’s first publication of students’ work to showcase 5 years of work across the curriculum.

2010 > Initiated the USF Alumni Awards (Emerging Architect & Distinguished Alumni Award)

2009 > Set up an international lecture series: Will Bruder (Phoenix) - Brian MacKay-Lyons (Halifax) - Wendell Burnett (Phoenix) - Wong Mun Summ (Singapore) - Anne Fougeron (San Francisco) - Greg Pasquarelli (New York)

2009 > Organized USF’s first wide lecture series reception following Will Bruder’s lecture

2007 > Initiated and organized USF’s first school wide exhibit at the Tampa Bay AIA’s downtown gallery starting

2007 > Set up the first exhibit of outside work at USFMies van Des Rohe Tugendhat House exhibit

2004 > Organized the first international lecture series featuring Kristin Jarmund of Oslo and Christian Kandzia from Stuttgart

2004 > Initiated the Student Portfolio Award

2002 > Initiated and organized the first lecture series with prominent Florida practitionersIncluding Mark Hampton, Gene Leedy, Carl Abbott, William Morgan, and Dwight Holmes



UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH FLORIDAGRADUATE DESIGN STUDIO

Students are expected to be as rigorous in the formulation of their concepts as in the resolution of the projects though precise models and orthographic drawings, to be motivate by their parti but also by the desire to resolve the construction.

Designs are constrained or liberated by the medium we use. Over the duration of an assignment, both the medium and the scale of the investigations are constantly changed.

While modeling software is an invaluable tool in developing a design in any phase of the process, the students must rely heavily on physical model making with an emphasis on craft.


DESIGN STUDIO


DESIGN STUDIO

Students are encouraged to take advantage of digital fabrication available in and out of the school to span the gap between the physical and the digital realm.

The studios strive to bridge the School’s insular situation with the larger community and other research fields. Participation and reviews of experts outside the field of architecture allows the students to ground their project in the current research of a specific assigned program.

G. Giusti

P. Nguyen

R. Haas


DESIGN STUDIO

Large Scale Section ModelsM. Hernandez

Jenny Collins


DESIGN STUDIO

Instead of relegating planning exercises to the urban studio in the design curriculum, it is integrated in short focused master planning and urban design projects in each studio, while bringing students and their work to the neighborhoods for presentations and feedback.

Daniel Bernal


Steve Dremov

A. Puentes

Beverly Frank

Students participated in a conference on children’s environments co-chaired by Michael Halflants and Dr. Stan Graven.

They interacted around large conference tables with world-class architects, educational experts, architecture professors from across the country to generate plans for an experimental preschool for an impoverished Tampa Bay community.

The intent of the conference was to bring together and incorporate concepts of early child development including social, emotional and cognitive development, the concepts of proximal environment of the child, the understanding of the concepts of neighborhood, community and social learning as a basis for the architecture and design of preschools.


UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH FLORIDAMATERIALS & METHODS


MATERIALS & METHODS OF CONSTRUCTION

Illustrated in the following slides are the materials investigations completed in 2004, 2006, and 2008.

The 16x16x30 series of assignments marked the first time that a material study was introduced in the M&M course at the University of South Florida.



Students worked in pairs to complete 3"=1'-0" scaled model and orthographic drawings to describe their design proposals.

Half of the proposals were selected to be built by teams of four students who did not work on the initial design. The four builders could coordinate with the initial designers throughout the process, but retained full responsibility of the final product. The success of the project lies in part in the demarcation between the builders and the designers. This division sharpened the students’ understanding of the relationship between what is drawn and what is built, and in the design opportunities discovered at the full scale of the material.

Concrete Studies Fall 2004


In the end, the most successful projects were not be the careful renditions of the initial designers' drawings, but rather constructions that evolved in a collaborative effort through the lessons learned at full scale.

The projects were evaluated for their craft and precision, and for the inventiveness in the selection of materials and connections. Spatial considerations, though secondary to the connections, were also examined.


Wood Laminations Fall 2006



Investigations in Glass Fall 2008


UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH FLORIDATROPICAL DESIGN


TROPICAL DESIGN

The course examines the technical use of passive cooling strategies through precedent research.

Students investigate the design implications of sound passive cooling in a residential assignment. In the designs, every effort is made to engage the senses and limit the need for conditioning.


TROPICAL DESIGN


UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH FLORIDARESEARCH & PRACTICE

USF, like most architectural programs, will recognize practice as research, so long as the work is recognized by the profession.

Halflants + Pichette, a firm in which Michael is the acting design principal was awarded 8 AIA awards in the last 4 years.

In addition, Michael presents his research at conferences, most recently in November, at the International Tropical Architecture (InTA) conference in Bangkok.


PRACTICE / RESEARCH

2010 AWARDS

2010 Florida Gulf Coast American Institute of ArchitectsSoltice Residence, Honor Award

2010 Florida Gulf Coast American Institute of ArchitectsWilson Residence, Honor Award

2010 Florida Gulf Coast American Institute of Architects Popper Addition, Merit Award

2010 Florida Gulf Coast American Institute of Architects Howe Residence, Merit Award

2010 Florida Gulf Coast American Institute of ArchitectsSchickler Addition, Citation Award

In April 2010, the firm Halflants + Pichette was awarded an unprecedented 5 AIA awards from the Gulf Coast Chapter of the AIA.


The projects are extremely well conceived both formally and environmentally. Their contribution to the profession is to be found in the application of well-understood formal ordering system and spatial

development that is married to an understanding of (green) design. David Cronrath, Dean, College of Art & Design Louisiana State University

Halflants+Pichette’s design work is both strongly influenced by international modernism and profoundly rooted in the subtropical vernacular of South Florida with its courtyards and covered terraces, producing

high quality design work that is responsive to context, function, and programmatic constraints. Rene Davids, Professor, University of California, Berkeley

The Solstice House presents their exceptional ability to interpret the conditions of the site in such a way that the house mediates between the land and the sea, and the land and the sky, while satisfying the

programmatic needs as a residence. Jin Baek, Ph. D. Department of Architecture, Pennsylvania State University

Michael Halflants draws upon precedents of significant modern icons of the Sarasota School and bring to the work a broader international sensibility. The projects deftly build on the Sarasota traditions

without mimicking the modern masters that came before, engaging the broader architectural discourse that transcends this region. I have no doubt that the work that comes out of this partnership will be of

the highest quality. Craig Borum, Associate Professor, University of Michigan

What impresses me the most about Halflants & Pichette’s work in general is that it clearly builds upon the modern tradition without reducing it to a collection of tricks and signs. The Schrock House seems to pick up where Rudolph left off in 1960. It also synthesizes the architectural promenade of Le Corbusier,

the inhabitable stepped roof of Libera’s Casa Malaparte. Ron Dulaney, Division of Design, University of West Virginia

The work produced by the firm exhibits insight and elegance, as well as a keen understanding of regional context and sustainable practices.

Marilys Nepomechie, Associate Professor, Florida International University


PRACTICE / RESEARCH

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CURRENT PRACTICE / RESEARCH

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Please include a minimum of 5 images of the nominee. The images can be “action” shots and/or portrait-style shots and should have a high resolution.


Please include a minimum of 5 images of the nominee. The images can be “action” shots and/or portrait-style shots and should have a high resolution.


Yucatan 2004

AIA Florida William McMinn Honor Award Nomination from Ron Dulaney, Assistant Professor, University...

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