Tyler Blog

September 3, 2024

JADE Fellow Beamlak Sahle (BSArch '25) Wants to Build Naturally

Author: Wanda Motley Odom

When international student and Architecture major Beamlak Sahle (BSArch ’25) returns to her home country of Ethiopia after graduation next May, she hopes to revolutionize the way buildings are constructed in the African nation, especially in rural areas.“I would like to solve a lot of design problems when it comes to infrastructure,” said Sahle, adding that she is particularly interested in schools and hospitals. “I would like to introduce a community-oriented design approach and bring back natural building technologies to help improve the living conditions of the people.” Read More

September 3, 2024

Associate Professor Philip Glahn Publishes New Book on Visionary Art Collective

Author: Alina Ladyzhensky

Philip Glahn, Associate Professor of Aesthetics and Critical Studies at Tyler, has coauthored a new book about Mobile Image, a pioneering new media art collective founded in 1977 by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz. The Future is Present: Art, Technology, and the Work of Mobile Image (The MIT Press, 2024), coauthored with Cary Levine, Associate Professor of Contemporary Art History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, highlights the collective's prescient vision, as well as its continued importance and resonance. Read More

Tyler Architecture students and faculty
August 9, 2024

Architecture Students Design for Southeast Asian Market in FDR Park

Author: Alina Ladyzhensky

Tyler architecture students designed structures to inspire stalls that will be built at the Southeast Asian Market's permanent site in Philadelphia's FDR Park as part of a two-part elective studio over spring and summer 2024.⁠ These courses featured a mix of students in Tyler’s architecture 4+1 program—an accelerated degree track leading to a bachelor of science in architecture and then a master of architecture—and graduate students enrolled in the two- and three-year track master of architecture programs. Read More

Joni Baumgarten, Sasha Eisenman, Laura Toran, Josh Caplan and Abdullah Al-Amin
July 25, 2024

Temple faculty hope to save PennDOT’s plants from deadly road salt

Author: Jordan Cameron

An interdisciplinary team of researchers from Temple and Villanova was commissioned by PennDOT in 2017 to research and monitor bioretention basins—small green spaces filled with a variety of flowering plants, grasses and trees—along I-95 to help improve their design. These basins become filled with deicing salt used to treat roads in the winter, which is detrimental to the health of the plant life. The Temple group includes Josh Caplan, an associate professor of horticulture at Tyler, and Sasha Eisenman, chair of Tyler’s Architecture and Environmental Design Department.  Read More

July 22, 2024

Envisioning a Therapeutic Career Path Through Fieldwork

Author: Wanda Motley Odom

Art therapy major Paloma Collins (BA ’24) had never worked with elderly adults before, so she didn’t know what to expect when she started fieldwork as part of her capstone studies with residents of the older adult community at Wesley Enhanced Living at Stapeley in Philadelphia.“I learned to ask a lot of questions,” reflected Collins, who was instrumental in helping residents design and craft a four-foot by eight-foot sensory mural on the memory care floor in a hallway where residents pass by to get to their apartments or seek out activities. She described the project as “born of conversations,” spending time getting to know about the residents, their lives and capabilities, and what gave them feelings of calm, comfort and security. Read More

Cover of Ground Control: A Design History of Technical Lands and NASA’s Space Complex by Jeffrey Nesbit
July 18, 2024

Architecture Professor Publishes Book on NASA's Infrastructure History

Author: Alina Ladyzhensky

Tyler Professor of Architecture Jeffrey S. Nesbit has published a new book that examines the 20th-century American rocket launch complex at the intersection of architecture, infrastructure, and aerospace history. Ground Control: A Design History of Technical Lands and NASA’s Space Complex (Routledge, 2024) surveys the architectural histories and aesthetic considerations that helped to develop America’s public image of early space exploration. Read More

Derek Resse, PBJ
July 16, 2024

MFA Student Curates Show about ‘Myth’ of American Dream

Author: Jordan Cameron

Natalia Purchiaroni, a second-year MFA candidate in Photography, had never curated an art exhibition before having the idea for what would become The Myth of the American Dream, now on view in the Stella Elkins Tyler Gallery this July.Over the last 10 years, Purchiaroni has observed more and more people—across all political affiliations—begin to ask questions about how much the American government protects and serves its citizens. She has noticed that an increasingly large number of conversations with peers, family members, and even in professional and academic settings, center around the state of the nation and the anxieties about it.  Read More

June 17, 2024

Altered Books: A Practice in Art Therapy

Author: Wanda Motley Odom

Art Therapy major Valerie Ramos’s book In Bloom is an explosion of mixed media, tissue paper, newsprint, patterned craft paper, felted snippets, tinsel scalloped doilies, and stiffened netting. The book’s assemblages of multicolored pages are so full that they sit up like wings when fully open, which seems apropos as the center of the book coyly resembles a swallowtail butterfly, with puffy wings of mauve and pink and purple and blue and silver.  Read More

June 6, 2024

Tyler Ceramics Alum Named Resident Artist at The Clay Studio

Author: Alina Ladyzhensky

Bradford Davis (MFA '24), an alum of Tyler's Ceramics program, will join The Clay Studio in Philadelphia, one of the nation's oldest and most respected centers for ceramics, as a Resident Artist this fall. The residency program offers the top emerging ceramic talent in the U.S. and abroad the space, time, and resources to develop their artwork and their professional lives.Davis is an award-winning multimedia artist who uses ceramics to express his emotions and responses to his traumas and life experiences. As a retired Army Artillery Officer, his journey of healing feeds his creative research.  Read More

Judith Schaechter and her biophilic dome project in progress.
June 4, 2024

Adjunct Professor Judith Schaechter Featured in WHYY News

Author: Alina Ladyzhensky

Tyler Glass Adjunct Professor Judith Schaechter was recently profiled by WHYY News about her role as the current artist-in-residence at the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics, which explores the biological basis of aesthetic experiences. Schaechter's residency project is a stained-glass dome that speaks to the concept of biophilia— the human tendency to seek deep connections with nature. Read more. Image: Judith Schaechter and her biophilic dome project in progress. Photo credit: Kimberly Paynter/WHYY Read More