The College of Arts and Architecture's Stuckeman School at Penn State is hosting Luisa Caldas, a professor of architecture at the University of California, Berkeley who specializes in virtual immersive environments in architecture, for a lecture at 4 p.m. March 5 in the Stuckeman Family Jury Space. The lecture, which is free and open to the public, will also be livestreamed via Zoom.
Caldas' talk is part of her appointment as a 2024-25 recipient of the Stuckeman School's Interdisciplinary Design Professorship.
With more than 20 years of experience in the field of sustainable design and green building - both in academia and as an energy consultant for large commercial buildings - Caldas' work focuses on the use of advanced computational tools to support sustainability input in early design decision making.
She is the founder and director of the UC Berkeley XR Lab (Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality Laboratory), which is a research lab for virtual, augmented and mixed reality. She is also a faculty scientist in the Energy Technologies Area of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, a member of the FHL VIVE Center for Enhanced Reality and a member of the executive committee of the Berkeley Center for New Media.
In her lecture, titled "Designing Immersion: Four works from the Berkeley XR Lab," Caldas will touch on different projects her team have done "where response to context and social impact are the drivers allowing technology to find its resonance."
"Emerging technologies in the arts bring with them the imperative for a new language and the crafting of new discourses," said Caldas. "The design of immersive environments is unique in its relationship with the embodied nature of the interface, with human movement in dialogue with spatial information.
Caldas has taught or been a visiting scholar at MIT, Tokyo Institute of Technology, School of Engineering of the Technical University of Lisbon, Universidade do Minho, ISCTE/Instituto Universitario de Lisboa, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile and Universidad Frederico Santa Maria. Prior to her appointment at UC Berkeley in 2012, she was professor at the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Lisbon, where she was vice-president of the Scientific Council and inaugural director of Sustenta Lab.
As licensed architect, Caldas' professional practice focuses on single-family housing projects and commercial projects. She worked as an architect with Frederico George in Lisbon, and with Richard MacCormak in London, among other offices.
"Visionary Visuals Re:Vamped," an exhibition Caldas co-organized with Orsolya Gáspár, assistant professor of architecture, is open in the Stuckeman Family Building Rouse Gallery through March 6. The mixed reality exhibition looks at the future through the lens of a changing, modern architecture landscape,
