brwarchitects hosts the Erwin Ramsey Summer Fellowship program for graduate and fourth year undergraduate students in the School of Architecture. The Fellowship is a partnership between the resources at brwarchitects, the energy and creativity of the selected Fellow, and the needs and circumstances in our community. One Fellowship is awarded per year.
Our 2022 Erwin-Ramsey Fellow was interested in creating spaces where young people feel a sense of belonging and pride. Brandon Eley (UVA ’22) came to the Fellowship with a plethora of experience working with young people for The Gates Scholarship, Young Leaders Summit, Collegiate 100, and Project Pipeline. These experiences and others developed a passion in him for using what he learned in his design education to serve young people.
brwarchitects is now welcoming applications for the 2022 Erwin-Ramsey Fellowship. This Fellowship is open to graduate students and fourth year undergraduate students in the School of Architecture. For the first time, we are offering the opportunity to schedule a four-week Fellowship to focus on more a more robust project.
Our 2021 Erwin-Ramsey Fellow was interested in space, people, and power. Gabriel Andrade came to the Fellowship already with experience in helping everyday people become more engaged and empowered in the shared spaces we occupy everyday.
Naturally, the Fellowship needed to culminate in an experience rather than a presentation. Guests, students, and BRW staff participated in a walking tour throughout the Mall to practice intervening and shaping the space around us.
brwarchitects hosts a Summer Fellowship for graduate students, fourth-year and rising fourth-year undergraduate students in the School of Architecture. Named after the brwarchitects Principals’ hometowns, this fellowship aims to deepen architectural contributions to the town where the firm has worked for over 35 years.
Due to changing conditions regarding COVID-19, the 2021 Fellowship is expected to take place in late Summer 2021 and will be predominently in-person with safe social distancing and all necessary precautions.
Our 2020 Erwin-Ramsey Fellow, Taha Suhrawardy, concludes his program with a capstone presentation. Building on the work that brwarchitects does with public housing residents in Charlottesville, Taha explored the critical role that food security plays in resident-led redevelopment.
This three-week program will focus on a specific integrative project that contributes to Charlottesville’s affordable housing goals and will be based on the program’s curriculum as well as the ingenuity and interests of the fellow. During the program, the fellow will build relationships with residents, clients, and decision-makers in the Charlottesville housing market, while gaining a higher level of professional experience than entry-level and internship positions.
brwarchitects’ clients at 701 Water Street hosted a special event in October to celebrate the grand opening of the newly remodeled lobby space and showcase its new resident artist. The party was also an occasion to recognize Habitat for Humanity’s Southwood Redevelopment and its Capital Campaign. The building owners, together with Manchester Capital, graciously opened the doors to a lively mix of Charlottesvillians and the night was a wonderful example of the crossover between art, architecture, and the important work of community building.
Host and emcee Jeff Hall of Manchester Capital introduced Dan Rosensweig, local President of Habitat, and illuminated the importance of the Southwood project as a model for community engagement, resident-driven planning and the goal of redevelopment without displacement. Mr. Rosensweig delved into these issues and in particular focused attention on our community’s vital need for affordable housing. The central theme of Habitat’s Core Building Operations is the Vision of “a Greater Charlottesville Community where everyone can find a decent place to live.”
Brwarchitects’ renovation of one of the oldest buildings on Charlottesville’s Historic Downtown Mall has become an attractive feature for locals and tourists alike. At the very beginning of this project, the exterior paint was stripped which revealed an attractive patina on the brick wall. In fact, this exterior paint was the main cause of the building’s extensive water damage throughout the years, and removing it created an immediate improvement in water infiltration.
In addition to rehabilitating the historic brick exterior, brwarchitects opened new windows in the existing 3rd Street masonry wall and removed the outdated wood façade and replaced it with a new glass and steel assembly. This contemporary intervention complements the building’s historic presence, while the addition of new oversize windows opens the interiors to the public mall.
As an undergraduate student in architecture coming into the office for the summer, my experience with real projects was very limited. In school, we are given only theoretical projects with no client, no budget, and very few other constraints. Students are encouraged to focus on creating beautiful, efficient, environmentally-friendly spaces; there is much less consideration for the people that would inhabit them.
This summer I got to experience a community redevelopment project in which the focus is not only on improving the living conditions for the residents but also including them in the planning process and giving them a voice for the future of their neighborhood.
PSMJ Resources, Inc., the world’s leading authority on the effective management of architecture, engineering, and construction firms, announces the members of the 2019 Circle of Excellence. Seventy-two exceptional architecture and engineering firms made it onto the exclusive list this year.
PSMJ designed the Circle of Excellence to highlight successfully managed firms that demonstrate outstanding achievements in areas such as profitability, overhead management, cash flow, productivity, business development, staff growth, and turnover. The Circle of Excellence represents the top 20 percent of participants in PSMJ’s annual A/E Financial Performance Benchmark Survey, based on 13 key performance metrics.
With a long history of having worked in historical contexts in Charlottesville and Central Virginia, brwarchitects was initially consulted to provide some architectural sensitivity support for MEP (mechanical, electrical, and plumbing) engineers for a local institutional client. This evolved into a series of supportive maintenance, upgrade, and planning activities over the following years while our client executed more prominent restoration projects.
In any complex institution, the wide variety of organizational functions make facilities changes an involved procedure. We think of these as “domino projects” in which one change or upgrade to a facility leads to new and re-emerging organizational needs in other areas. In addition, our client’s many personnel were distributed among disparate buildings – a predicament that they had previously identified as a priority.