Pollution and Revitalization: What’s the Future of the Elizabeth River and the Chesapeake Bay?

Professor Phoebe Crisman will discuss the polluted state of the Elizabeth River and present her innovative community project, the Learning Barge, a floating model of sustainability and a way to connect people to the environment.

This innovative service-learning project comprised of University of Virginia students and faculty from the Schools of Architecture, Engineering and Education has collaborated with several Norfolk area partners to design and build the Learning Barge—self-sustaining field station that will provide interactive education about how the Elizabeth River, the most polluted tributary of the Chesapeake Bay, and human activities are inextricably linked. The educational curriculum is being developed with the Elizabeth River Project and teachers from the public school districts of Portsmouth, Norfolk, and Chesapeake.

March 14, 2007 6:00 - 7:30 p.m. Nauticus The National Maritime Center One Waterside Drive Norfolk, VA 23510 Directions

UVA School of Architecture news article:

Faculty Members Collaborate on Public Art Project High Above the Elizabeth River
By Paul Lipkowitz, September 29, 2006

Photo by Tom Cogill

About the Speaker

Phoebe Crisman
Assistant Professor of Architecture

Phoebe Crisman is a practicing architect, urbanist and Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Virginia, where she teaches architectural design studios and lectures on architectural theory and urbanism. Ms. Crisman was educated at Harvard University and Carnegie Mellon, and conducted post-graduate research as a Netherlands-America Fulbright Fellow in Amsterdam. She practiced with firms in Chicago, Cambridge and Hong Kong prior to establishing Crisman+Petrus Architects in Charlottesville, Virginia. Her professional work been widely published and has received several design awards, including the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, the Discovery Museum and Urban Bridges, her winning entry in the AIA Designing for Density Competition in 2003.

In her teaching, research, and practice, Ms. Crisman investigates fragmentary and overlooked places, processes and materials. She has published numerous essays, most recently “Outside the Frame: A Critical Analysis of Urban Image Surveys” in the journal Places: A Forum of Design for the Public Realm. Her forthcoming book, Site Out of Mind, examines design strategies founded on an ethical mode of attentiveness to unacknowledged places. In her design practice, Ms. Crisman explores eco-effective design strategies that incorporate complex infrastructure systems, greater land use density, site specificity and community planning. She explored these issues in the Urban Bridges project by designing a series of sustainable, high-density bridge buildings over the Massachusetts Turnpike in Boston. She began this agenda while transforming a 27-building abandoned industrial complex into the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) with Bruner/Cott & Associates.

Currently Ms. Crisman is designing strategies for the co-existence of waterfront industry and ecological regeneration in several projects along the Elizabeth River in Virginia’s Hampton Roads region. Funded by a Virginia Environmental Endowment Grant, she has just completed work on a Sustainable Revitalization Plan for 330 acres of industrial land at Money Point, in collaboration with The Elizabeth River Project and the UVA Institute for Environmental Negotiation. Since January 2006 Ms. Crisman has led an interdisciplinary team of University of Virginia students and diverse community partners to design and fabricate The Learning Barge - a floating, self-sustaining environmental education field station on the Elizabeth River. The project was awarded the 2006 National Student Collaborative Design Award from the American Institute of Landscape Architects.