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Furniture For Keeps: A New Approach to Sustainable Furniture Fabrication

Rather than the traditional approach of having students purchase virgin lumber, our department chose to source lumber from the UW Salvage Wood Program for this year’s Furniture Studio cohort. To learn more about our furniture studio course and this unprecedented practice of utilizing salvaged wood, check out our StoryMap created by MLA student Joanna Chen!

Just Circular Communities

Just Circular Communities (JCC) is an interdisciplinary collaborative that seeks to envision and implement localized, regenerative, and community-driven circular systems for a Just Transition – by, with, and for Frontline communities. At the University of Washington, College of Built Environments, students have engaged with JCC topics through Participatory Action Research and Service-Learning design studios. Led by Associate Professor Catherine De Almeida, landscape architecture, architecture, and urban planning students have participated in community-engaged design activities to explore the development of the…

Visiting Georgetown’s Innovative Wet Weather Treatment Facilities

On Wednesday, January 24th, the Seattle 2030 District, which is part of the larger 2030 Districts Network, hosted a tour of the Georgetown Wet Weather Treatment Station (WWTS). The Seattle network of districts is a private-public partnership composed of property owners and managers, services stakeholders, and community stakeholders. The 2030 Challenge was established by the non-profit organization Architecture 2030 and aims to achieve a 50% reduction in energy use, water consumption, and transportation emissions by the year 2030.  Four graduate…

UWLA Students Awarded Top Pacific Horticulture Design Futurist Prize

by Chris Copeland (MLA 2025) In the summer of 2023, Pacific Horticulture held a design competition to support new planting ideas for Pioneer Park in San Francisco, CA. Working with an historic site like Coit Tower, which can attract up to one hundred and fifty thousand visitors per year, our team wanted to use this opportunity to draw attention to the historic ecosystems of California. These communities of plants and animals are iconic and beloved. However, in a changing and increasingly…

Kove Janeseki featured in UW Farm Weekly Newsletter (10.11.23)

Kove Janeski (UW Farm Operations Lead) writes: The UW Farm has been experimenting with cereal cultivation this growing season: we have grown and are processing multiple wheat varieties at the Center for Urban Horiculture Farm site and are also testing out a small planting of quinoa within Mercer Court’s Chenopodiaceae plot. Alongside the Farm’s other chenopods, such as beet and chard, the Farm’s quinoa has grown over 6 feet tall!

Future Food Forest: Radical Landscapes for Uncertain Times

Students in the summer studio led by Elizabeth Umbanhowar present their installation for the Seattle Design Festival titled “Future Food Forest: Radical Landscapes for Uncertain Times”. The festival took place August 20th and 21st at Lake Union Park from 10-7. Their installation at the Seattle Design Festival represent what a loss of biodiversity would look like from present into the future. Visitors could dye pieces of fabric at the altar presented in the middle of the archway that displayed different…

Summer Design Build 2022 in Traena, Norway

We welcome back some of our students who went to Traena, Norway to complete their Design/Build with Daniel Winterbottom and co-instructors Luka Jelusic and Mate Rupic!  A group of 16 students, some matriculated at UW, left the US in the middle of June 2022 to work on a design/build project on a small island off the coast of Norway for five weeks. Students were asked to create a unique space that could be offered year-round to the local community as…