Robert D. Hotten: Curriculum Vitae

Robert D. Hotten, MLA, Architect

B.Arch, M.Arch(Hons), MLA(Berkeley), AIA(Former), ANZIA,

ANZILA (Chair Auckland Branch 1999-2000), ASBPA

Biography

Robert is one of the early graduates (B.Arch, 1969) of the newly reorganised College of Environmental Design, University of California, Berkeley. Interestingly, he and his colleague Heikki Saarela, both independently built rural cabins, their versions of environmental design, as senior professionals in the 1990's. What was the influence from Berkeley, that led them to these vernacular expressions 30 years later? Garrett Eckbo, J.B. Jackson, Frank Lloyd Wright.

With a Joint Program in Urban Design Masters from the University of California, Berkeley, Robert has practiced and taught architecture, landscape, urban design, film, and CAD/CAE/CAM/GIS as a Registered Architect in California, Hawaii, and New Zealand.

Robert has, since 1994, hosted the web site Sustainable Architecture: Eco Design and Landscaping, Urbanism. The site, www.aloha.net/~laumana, is still the #2 rated web site in "sustainable architecture". From Sustainable Architecture:

"Sustainable design requires, as Derrida and others suggest, the end of history. That is the end of a certain concept of history. In the future of an unfinished universe, higher levels of organization (consciousness for example) may irrigate the field with unimagined possibilities. This then is the post-structuralist challenge for the art of eco design....

The third concept of sustainability is ethical, weighing the paradox of our illusion of affluence against the injustice of environmental degradation."

these are some of the concepts that feed Vernacular and environmental design methods and studio design synthesis.

Most recently Robert was a guest "Professeur Associe" in Paris, and formerly a Teaching Fellow at the University of Auckland. He presented a paper "From Dreamtime to Quicktime: Panoramas" at the ACADIA conference in Washington, October 2000. See http://www.aloha.net/~laumana/post.html and etc., for recent work "Posturbanism: Eco Design From Norm to Form" (Presented at the SFIA Eco-Wave Conference, July 2002, Berkeley, and published as an ebook). He continues to develop sustainable alternatives at his eco living community project in Hawaii. His personal interests include toying with a "virtual professor" status.

Contact

Robert D. Hotten, MLA, Architect (laumana@aloha.net)

B. Arch, M. Arch, MLA, AIA (Former), NZILA (Former Chair, Auckland), NZIA,

Registered Architect: California - #C-12081, Hawaii - #A-6540, New Zealand - #6240.

Copyright 1995-2003 Robert D. Hotten, All Rights Reserved

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