The AIA Women’s Leadership Symposium this year brought to light an aspect of my sister Sho-Ping Chin’s accomplishments that had heretofore remained hidden from her family. And it was her modesty that had kept us in the dark. In the years that she worked as an architect, she shared with us the joy and frustrations of chasing after a job or taking a project to its final phase and the excitement of spending a week at St. Boniface Hospital in southern Haiti right after the 2008 earthquake, sketching out a plan for the creation of a maternity ward. But she never mentioned her work in the AIA and her attempt to give female architects a voice within the association. Perhaps this was because she felt what she did was not an accomplishment but merely an extension of who she was – a woman architect. Thus to be in the presence of those who, together with her, masterminded the Women leadership Symposium and to hear from them what it was like to work with Sho-Ping enlarged my idea and my knowledge of my own sister. For this I am deeply grateful.
I, as well as everyone in my family, am also grateful for the exhibition dedicated to my sister at the Symposium. The design and fabrication was a labor of love. It had the imprint of Ching-Hua Ho, who worked with Sho-Ping as partners-in-crime and each other’s provocateur for eighteen years. The exhibition also reflected the skills of a group of young architects Ching assembled at Payette, who labored tirelessly for months to get everything right and befitting Sho-Ping’s legacy.
Opening later this year, the Ragon Institute of MGH, MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, MA is an essay in the tuning of building façades for performance. The aluminum sunshades that veil the building began as a concept tested by scoring Bristol paper. The team utilized tools from all modalities: paper models, CNC-mills, parametric studies, solar analysis, wind and water simulations and full-scale mock-ups to inform the design and drive energy use down. The ultra-high performance building is tracking a 61% reduction in energy use compared to the 2030 baseline.
#earthweek #designalways #buildingscience #performalism #cambridge #bostonarchitecture
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