Hartell Graduate Award: Anthony Graves, M.F.A. '09, has been selected by the Department of Art faculty for the 2008 John Hartell Graduate Award for Art and Architecture. Graves is an artist and curator based in Ithaca whose work stages various effects by layering competing visual systems. He has exhibited works in New York City, Boston and Copenhagen. He is the founder of the Ithaca gallery Brick Balloon (www.brickandballoon.net) and is one of the founders and editors of c-m-l.org, an online archive and journal. Graves was a fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2004-05.

The Hartell Award includes a monetary prize. This year, five graduate students submitted entries. John Hartell joined the architecture faculty in 1930 and the art faculty in 1940, and served as art department chair from 1940 until 1959.

Sustainable architecture: The Cornell Center for a Sustainable Future (CCSF) recently awarded a grant for a collaborative research project involving Department of Architecture faculty. The grant of nearly $140,000 from CCSF's Academic Venture Fund will go to "Integrated Digital Design Environment for Sustainable Architecture" over the next 18 months. The architecture faculty research team -- professor Don Greenberg, assistant professor Kevin Pratt and visiting assistant professor Dana Cupkova, along with professor Ken Torrance of the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering -- will develop interactive visual and analytic digital tools to help architects model and test sustainable and energy-efficient designs at the early stage of the design process.

"The CCSF funding will serve to develop and extend the computational tools necessary to further design work that is focused on a better understanding of architecture as an environmental practice, which Kevin [Pratt] and I have been investigating in our architectural research design studios," Cupkova said.