People
George Thrush has extensive theoretical and practical experience on all sides of the public approval process associated with large urban projects. He is a leader in regional urban design projects for the Boston region. His significant articles about the regional urban design proposal known as the New Urban Ring are: Ring City: Civic Liberalism and Urban Design, 1995, ACSA Proceedings; Boston’s New Urban Ring: an Antidote to Fragmentation, Writing Urbanism, (Douglas Kelbaugh, FAIA, Editor), article first published in AppendX, 1996, and included in this collection, 2008. Thrush has also convened major urban design charrettes in the city, and curated and hosted public exhibitions on the subject.
In addition to his academic work, he has served on Community Advisory Committees, appointed by the Mayor of Boston to represent the public interest in large-scale real estate development proposals. He is currently serving on the CAC reviewing the Air Rights development project at the Kenmore/ Fenway parcels. Previously, he has served a professional advisor and consultant to a private real estate developer (on the other side of the table) for a major development on parcels 25, 26 and 27 in the area known as South Bay, in Boston. He has published six major op-ed pieces in The Boston Globe on the subject of balancing the public interest with private development. He has a book on the subject forthcoming, entitled Thinking Public in a Private Age.
Jie-Eun Hwang has devoted her career in balance between design practice and computation research. As a practiced architect and a researcher, her major expertise reflects various speculations related space and its spatial representation based on the coherent understanding on the cutting edge of both ends. She earned her degree of Doctor of Design at Harvard University in 2007. Her doctoral dissertation, “Heuristic Nolli Map: A machine learning approach for interpreting urban morphology”, examined an intelligent system that contributed to architects and urban designers, by providing a domain specific knowledge representation mechanism. In prior years, she has participated in a vast range of interdisciplinary research projects, including virtual reality (in Virtual Reality Research Center, KIAST, Korea), cyber museum (in Imaging Media Research Center, KIST, Korea), locative media (in The Media Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and geographic information system (in Center for Design Informatics, Harvard University). Her recent collaboration with Jean Oh and Dr. Smith at Carnegie Mellon University [Oh et. al 2005] leveraged such vast potentials of interdisciplinary approach. Hwang is currently working on a research project at Northeastern University for mapping various indicators of a complex urban project, Boston Urban Ring, which engages relevant information technologies to empirical demands of public review process.