Margaret Hickey, AIA
Professor in Architecture
Chair, Department of Environmental Design

Meg Hickey graduated with a mechanical engineering degree from M.I.T. in 1963, having done co-op training designing testing machines at Goodyear Tire & Rubber Research; she then worked for several years as an engineer at the GE Small Aircraft Engineering Department in Lynn, redesigning oil and vent system parts for jet engines then being used in the Vietnam war. Discouraged with the politics of warfare, in 1969, she returned to M.I.T. to complete a degree in architecture. During this second time at MIT she, and the wives of some of her classmates and professors, formed the women's group which subsequently wrote and published the first edition of the women's health manual, Our Bodies Our Selves.

While working in her own practice, she has also worked as a renovation architect for the City of Cambridge Community Development Department, the Cambridge Redevelopment Authority and the Just-A-Start program for twenty years, and she is now on the architect selection board for the Cambridge Housing Authority. In her practice as a registered architect she has done low to moderate income new housing, commercial and office space planning work, and many private dwelling renovations.

Since 1973 Meg has taught architecture at MassArt, developing the entire building technology and structures sequence, and establishing a pre-professional architecture major. As department chair of the combined Design areas and then of Environmental Design for 15 years, she also developed and hired for all day and night design curriculum in the emerging and everchanging disciplines of computer graphics. During the late 80's she began to use computers herself and has exhibited her algorithmic images in various galleries and universities.

In 1991 Megbegan collaborating with professors at U.Mass Bostonwho had an NSF grant to develop a math course for college age adults who find math both difficult and believe itirrelevant. The work of this team has grown into the textbook Explorations in College Algebra, now coming out in its 4th edition. Meg writes practical problem sets for this book, with special emphasis on applications, which make sense to adults who are visual thinkers. Sheteaches Structures, Mechanical Systems, Building Methods, Space Planning with AutoCAD, Algebra and the Computer, Pre-calculus and Calculus.

Patricia Seitz AIA LEED
Professor in Architecture
Coordinator of the Architecture Program

Patricia Seitz is a graduate of MIT, and Washington University and holds professional, baccalaureate and masters degrees in Architecture, and a masters degree in Asian Studies with a focus on Japan and China respectively. As a registered Architect with 25 years of professional experience, Patricia Seitz is the founding principal of Seitz Architects, Inc., formed in 1989, and partner with Seitz-Reisen Architects. Works include a variety of project types focusing on aspects of sustainable buildings: day care centers and schools, religious centers, multi-family housing complexes, and single-family residences, as well as projects including retail and storefront renovations, showrooms and offices. All projects are either new buildings or adaptive reuse including extensive design of furniture, lighting, graphics and exhibits. Many of these projects have been for highly visible organizations that have received national press coverage with projects published in Harvard Business Journal, Boston Globe, and Wired, among others. Current projects include a new administrative building for Rosie’s Place, a non-profit organization in the City of Boston which provides food and shelter to women, an adult day care center in Lynn and a sustainable house in Cambridge each which will incorporate native planted green roofs, recycled materials, alternative energy production and energy use reduction.

While running a full-time practice, she also coordinates the graduate and undergraduate architecture program as a Professor of Architecture at Massachusetts College of Art. Several of these professional projects - both with the firm and through MassArt - have included partnerships with renowned artists. Firm projects include working with a photographic muralist Annette Lemieux, and in 1998-1999 her senior class in Architectural Design worked on architectural buildings supporting a Master Plan for the City of Brockton designed by international public artist Patricia Johanson. This project received grants from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and the Rivers and Trails division of the National Park Service.

She developed MassArt’s Sustainable Architecture class in 1996, and during 2006 and 2007 the class designed and installed a native planting green roof garden on the 11th floor of the Tower building on campus, supported by two grants from the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Affairs. This is also an ongoing pilot project with New England Wild Flower Society for testing native plants. In 2007 Ms. Seitz received a grant from the New England Fund for the Arts to develop a collaborative project with her students and a sustainable artist through an RFP process to design an energy producing art/landscape project on campus. This will serve as an educational component for students in the department as well as the local neighborhood community. It will include landscape, art, and alternative energy components in a design/build construction project.

Grants also include a Foundation grant to study thatch roofing techniques in England – applied to a zero-emissions tea house in Rhode Island, and an Aga Khan grant to study and document the dimensional relationships of streets and residences in Cordoba, Spain, exhibited at MIT and Columbia University.

Paul Hajian
Professor in Architecture

Paul Hajian is a graduate of MIT and holds professional and baccalaureate degrees in architecture. He is a Registered Architect with 25 years of professional experience and is a founding principal and President of Hajian Architects, Inc., a full service architectural, engineering and planning firm. He has had a career-long focus on single and multi-family housing for public and private clients, and includes the organization of innovative design strategies for a wide variety of projects.

Projects include Congregation Beth El Master Plan, Addition and Renovations; Maimonides School and new Synagogue/Science Labs; St. Mary’s Parish Center and New Chapel; Softbank Corporate Offices; Ski Market Stores in MA and CT; Filenes Basement Stores in MA and NY; Intergarden Internet Café; Sazarac Grove Bar and Grill; New houses in Scarborough, ME, Carlisle, MA, and on Cape Cod in East Sandwich, Woods Hole Centerville, Falmouth and Tuckernuck Island.

The firm has received the 2003 Metal Architecture Design Award Honorable Mention, and has had projects published in Kitchen and Bath magazine, Metal Architecture, Newton Magazine, Banker & Tradesman, the Boston Globe, Providence Journal, and the Boston Sunday Herald. Mr. Hajian has also published research in Places - Quarterly of Environmental Design, Boston Magazine on restoration and renovation, and he was recently interviewed in the Boston Sunday Globe column "Ask the Expert" on interior design, lighting, and color trends.

His practice, teaching, and research focus on the transformation of places, and he has extensive experience in the adaptive re-use of existing structures. His particular interests include residential, educational, and institutional building types, many of which have resulted in a number of award-winning projects. Among these are the completed design for the new synagogue, administrative, and classroom spaces at the Maimonides School in Brookline, MA and a state-of-the-art seven-level home on Cape Cod, MA, recently featured in Cape Cod Magazine. The firm recently completed its first green roof project, using a pre-cast concrete structural decking system with natural stone facing and local plantings.

Mr. Hajian has taught Architecture in the Department of Environmental Design at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design since 1985, where he also served as chairman of the department for six years and currently chairs the College's Curriculum Committee. In addition he is a Board Member and President Elect of the Community Design Resource Center of Boston, providing resources for communities to access quality design solutions in the building of sustainable environments. He is a tenured professor and has received several grants for work with his students including a 2004 Art and Community Partnership Faculty Grant. Other grants include a Foundation Grant and an Aga Khan Grant for Documentation the Silk Route in China. His research in indigenous housing and collective forms in the Xinjiang Provence of China was published in Mimar.

Michael Joyce, AIA LEED
Lecturer in Architecture

Michael Joyce is a graduate of MIT, and Massachusetts College of Art and Design and holds a professional masters degree in architecture and a bachelor of fine art respectively. At MIT he was awarded the Alpha Rho Chi medal for professional merit. As an architect and designer with over 15 years of professional experience, he is an associate and LEED accredited professional with the nationally known architecture and planning firm Goody Clancy in Boston. Mr. Joyce has designed, coordinated and completed a variety of building types, including student housing, academic dining facilities, courthouses, research laboratories, research and conference centers, schools, restaurants, transportation facilities and mixed-use development projects as well as commissioned work for private residential projects. His experience also includes time spent abroad on urban design and city center development with a variety of design firms in Germany, Japan and the United Kingdom.

Current projects include the New Essex County Trial Courts in Salem MA, the Drug Discovery Research facility at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, SC and the renovation of the John W. McCormack Federal Courthouse in Boston, MA. Recently completed projects such as the Burton Morgan Center for Entrepreneurship at Purdue University and North Kingston High School have won honors including a BSA/AIA Design Excellence Award in 2005 and a 2003 Citation for Outstanding High School-American School & University respectively. Mr. Joyce has taught and lectured on a variety of courses and subjects in architecture, urban design and drawing at the Massachusetts College of Art, the Boston Architectural Center, UMass Dartmouth and at MIT. He has been an invited critic to many schools including Tulane University, Louisiana State University and the Kunst Acadamie in Munich. As a continuing lecturer in architecture at the Department of Environmental Design, he has co-developed a design lecture series of invited artists, architects and practitioners. In 2006 in the wake of the devastating storms that demolished New Orleans and much of the Gulf coast, he was the moderator of the critical symposium Urban Visions New Orleans/ Design Ideas for Re-building that brought key architects, planners, educators and students from Louisiana and Boston together to discuss and present work on the importance of sound planning and design principles toward a long-term recovery effort to rebuilding in New Orleans.

Mr.Joyce continues to pursue and participate in a variety of architectural design competitions many of which have won awards. In 2004 a distinguished design jury selected the Michael Joyce/ Michael Kim scheme as the preferred winning scheme for the 9/11 Memorial for Logan International Airport. In 1993 he was awarded First Honorable Mention for the 80th Paris Prize sponsored by the National Institute of Architectural Education /Van Allen Institute NY. Honors for other projects with various teams have included awards for the Daimler-Benz Urban Design Realization for Potsdamer Platz, Berlin; the Vegasack Harbor Waterfront Renewal, Bremen and the Pension Fund Building Wacker Chemie Gmbh, Munich.

Carlos Fernandez, AIA MSCE
Lecturer in Architecture

Carlos Fernandez is a graduate of MIT, Brown University and Columbia University and holds professional, baccalaureate and graduatedegrees in architecture, civil and structural engineering respectively. He is a registeredArchitect with 15 years of professional experience in a wide range of building types including design, project management and client consultation. Building types for which services were provided include college and university buildings, office buildings and office interiors, research laboratories, retail stores and shopping centers, performing art centers, apartments and housing, single residences, rehabilitation and restoration of historic buildings.Mr. Fernandez's design philosophy is to arrive methodically at recommendations and solutions derived from project needs, constraints, experience, technology and the consideration of the natural environment.

Mr. Fernandez has taught at the University of California, Berkeley, College of Environmental Design, Department of Architecture and Massachusetts College of Art, Environmental Design, Department of Architectureand holds 15 years of teaching experience at the undergraduate, graduate and professionallevels. Ongoing architectural researchconsiders threelines of inquiries. Building Systems and Recasting the Rules of Building Assemblies examines how thinking related to the general knowledge of building systems can extend beyond simple problem solving to view materials of constructions, form vocabulary, structural response and compositional syntax within a continuum of possible revisions and alternatives. The Architectural Problem of Structures and the Shaping of Structural Phenomena via Solid Mechanics and Stress/Strain, Statics and Force Vectors and Kinematics and Deflection examines how a language of physical attributes, shapes and the practice of design can disseminate fundamental knowledge about structural mechanics when it is directed toward exploring the environment of the creative structure. it investigates technology necessity and efficiency to imbue contemporary technical advances with architectural meaning. Lastly, Toward an Understanding of Outdoor Social Spaces in Galicia, Spain and the Local Place Character of El Paseo Cotidiano examines the level of congruence between the cultural and social structure of the urban society in Galicia and the form and character of the outdoor social spaces Galicia has over time generated. It examines the contemporary spatial qualities and collective nature of the pedestrian experience and the physical setting of El Paseo Cotidiano in Galicia, Spain.

Pamela Sartorelli
Lecturer in Architecture

Pamela Sartorelli is a graduate of Massachusetts College of Art with a BFA in Architectural Design, and MIT with a Master of Architecture degree. With 15 years of experience, Ms. Sartorelli runs her own firm focusing on residential, commercial and institutional projects, with a particular emphasis on community centered design projects. She received first place in the Design Competition for the Boston World Trade Center and received traveling grants from the World Bank as a participant at the WBA Conference. Research projects have centered on community housing prototypes for Chernobyl and Minsk, Belarus.

As a long time faculty member, she designed the studio curriculum for the second semester juniors with a focus on building places that serve multiple types of users as a means to encourage her students to model community-making while building scale models of their projects as analogs of their building construction systems. She has initiated design charrettes with students in the Fenway area adjacent to the College campus, to encourage students to understand their immediate urban environment and the place of the MassArt campus and community in ts urban neighborhood.

Rick Brown
Professor in 3D Fine Arts/Artisanry

Rick Brown received a Master of Architecture degree from Harvard and an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. Exhibitions include installations at the Decordova Musuem and Sculpture Park in 2004, a scale model of the Zabludou Synagogue at the University of Wisconsin. Human Powered cranes fabricated by students in architecture and 3D departments were exhibited at Wentworth Institute of Technology and on the MassArt campus. Films on his work were aired on the Discovery Channel for “Machines in Lost Time – Submarine” 2004, National Geographic Magazine April 2003, October 2003, Timberframe Magazine June 2002, and December 1999.

Collections and Client work exist at the Carelicum Museum, Hoensun Finland 2000, and the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum.

Rick has received numerous grants for his projects including Colleges of the Fenway grants in 2002 and 2003, National Endowment for the Arts Funding for Sculpture/Decordova Museum; Ford Foundation Grant; and a Massachusetts Artist Foundation Finalist Grant for Sculpture. He is currently on a Fulbright in Poland researching and teaching students abroad in a reconstruction of Zabludoe Synagogue.

Jennifer Mecca
Lecturer in Architecture

Jennifer Mecca is a registered architect with over 16 years experience managing architectural design and construction, as well as in urban design and development planning. Ms. Mecca is currently a Principal with To Be Designed (TBD), a Boston-based architecture, planning and urban design firm. As the design partner of TBD, Ms. Mecca focuses on design and consultant management for TBD projects. Current TBD projects include co-management of a project team for a 1.3 million square foot mixed-use transit oriented development in Revere, MA; residential renovations and new construction; and commercial space planning and interior architecture.

While working in the Boston area, Ms. Mecca has served as a Project Architect managing commercial, institutional and residential design projects. She has worked with both national retail chains and local small businesses. Institutional project experience included tenant fit-out, renovations and historic rehabilitations at Wesleyan University, Harvard University, and the Clay Mathematics Institute in Cambridge, MA.

As an urban designer, Ms. Mecca has both public and private sector experience with projects ranging from design of urban parks and the public realm, to urban revitalization, to land-use and predevelopment planning. Ms. Mecca’s current urban design research interests have focused on sustainable urban design practices and development of “zero-carbon” communities. She has worked on public realm improvements for West Palm Beach, Florida, Brooklyn, NY, and Mestre, Italy. New development planning projects have included sites in California, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Texas, Virginia, and Vietnam. While working for the City of Boston, Ms. Mecca played an integral part in strengthening the city’s neighborhood retail and commercial base with the Boston’s Main Streets Program, an effort to bring sustainable economic development to communities across the city.

Ms. Mecca holds a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Cornell University, and a Master of Science in Architecture Studies from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where her thesis work examined the form of the suburban residential home. Ms. Mecca worked as part of a four-person project team on the Grand Egyptian Museum Competition, for which their submission received a Distinctive Project Commendation in 2003. She received the SMArchS Degree Thesis Award MIT in1993, and was winner of a travel grant from the Van Allen Institute’s Lloyd Warren Fellowship design competition in 1991. Ms. Mecca has served as a thesis advisor at the Boston Architectural Center and has been a guest critic at the BAC, Mass Art, Wentworth Institute of Technology and MIT.

Additionally, Ms. Mecca maintains an art studio in Boston’s Fort Point arts district where she focuses on clothing design and textile arts. She has exhibited locally and nationally; local venues have included the Fuller Craft Museum, Providence Art Club and Mt. Ida College Gallery. She has been recognized most recently as a Mass Cultural Council 2007 Artist Grant Program Finalist.

Kent Christman
Lecturer in Architectural Fabrication

Kent Christman has a BA in Design and Building Technology from Evergreen State College in Washington, and studied engineering and architecture at Case Institute of Technology and the Boston Architectural Center. He spent a decade as a construction manager for various commercial projects in Manama, Abu Dhabi, Dubai and in Riyadh, where he was the quality control manager for the FF&E at the Royal Terminal of King Khaled International Airport. In between flights to the Middle East, he did custom carpentry in the Boston area, and for the past fifteen years has been a licensed independent contractor specializing in the restoration of wood-frame houses in New England. He has long had a commitment to energy-efficient building techniques and has worked to incorporate them into his work.

He has a sideline in alternative energy vehicles as well. For the past ten years he has taught a middle school course on designing and building model solar-powered cars, and this past summer he joined a New York to New Orleans car rally in a twenty-four year old Mercedes Benz converted to run on waste vegetable-oil.

David Hajian, AIA
Lecturer in Architecture

David Hajian is a registered architect with 25 years of experience in the architectural profession. He has licenses to practice in MA, RI, CT, NH, and NM and is NCARB certified and a member of the CSI (Construction Specifications Institute). Currently a partner and principal of Hajian Architects Inc, a multidisciplinary firm located in Watertown, MA, he had worked for Centerbrook Architects (formerly Moore, Grover, Harper) of Essex, CT and other firms in Providence, RI, Cambridge, MA and Boston, MA. As project architect or architect of record, he has completed numerous residential, commercial, institutional, and religious projects throughout New England. The firm’s work was recently profiled and published in Cape Cod Magazine, featuring a new oceanfront home constructed with many “green design” features. A recently completed synagogue in Brookline, MA was also featured in Metal Architecture magazine, in part due to the zinc roofing and siding materials specified for the project exterior.

Mr. Hajian was an appointee to the Cambridge Library Design Advisory Committee to help coordinate the renovations to the main branch of the historic Cambridge Public library and is currently assisting the Bishop Playground Improvement Committee (BPIC) in Arlington, MA as design architect of their proposed expansion (currently in process). He has been guest critic in architecture at MassArt, MIT, RISD, and the BAC and has participated as an invited panel member of the RISD Entrepreneurship Forum in Boston, MA.

Mr. Hajian holds professional and baccalaureate degrees from the Rhode Island School of Design, and participated in the highly acclaimed European Honors Program in Rome, Italy. He is an accomplished photographer and architectural renderer with a specialty in architectural watercolor wash paintings in the Beaux Arts style. His work has been exhibited throughout the New England states, with numerous shows in RI, MA, and CT; as well as at shows in Rome, Italy profiling his architectural watercolor renderings.

John Russell
Professor of Art History

Professor John Malcolm Russell teaches the art and archaeology of the ancient Middle East and Egypt. The author of four books and numerous articles on ancient Assyria, his most recent book, The Final Sack of Nineveh (Yale), investigates the destruction of Sennacherib's palace in Iraq by looters in the 1990’s. Prior to the 1991 Gulf War, Professor Russell was Associate Director of the archaeological excavations at Nineveh, Iraq, and is currently Associate Director of the excavations at the Assyrian site of Tell Ahmar in Syria. From September 2003 to June 2004 he served in Baghdad, Iraq, as a Senior Advisor for Culture for the Coalition Provisional Authority, where he focused on renovating the Iraq Museum and protecting archaeological sites.

Ellen Shortell
Professor of Art History
Chair, Department of Critical Studies

Ellen M. Shortell, Professor of Art History and Chair of the Critical Studies Department, is an internationally recognized expert on medieval architecture and stained glass. She has lectured widely and published articles on French Gothic architecture, and is co-editor of the forthcoming interdisciplinary collection, The Four Modes of Seeing: Essays on Medieval Imagery in Honor of Madeline H. Caviness (Ashgate Press, 2008). As series editor of the AVISTA volumes on the technology, science, and art of the middle ages, she has overseen the publication of books on the uses of metal (including architectural metal) in the middle ages, on the drawings of Villard de Honnecourt, and on the medieval hospital. She is currently completing a book on the 12th- and 13th-century architecture of the collegiate church of Saint-Quentin in northern France. Professor Shortell teaches a class on Medieval Architecture as well as seminars on Romanesque architecture and Gothic architecture.

Ellen Shapiro
Professor of Art History

Ellen Shapiro is Professor of Art History at Massachusetts College of Art and Design. She holds a B.A. from Brandeis University and an M.A., M.Phil. and Ph.D. from Yale University. She is the recipient of the Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, a Fulbright Fellowship, and grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Graham and Kress Foundations. Her scholarship on Italian modern architecture during Fascism has been published in Architectural Design, Oppositions, Journal of Architectural Education, Design Book Review, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, and the catalogue of the Milan Triennale. Professor Shapiro co-curated and is co-author of the catalogue of the award-winning exhibition, Inlands: Images of Boston, Photographs by Mimmo Jodice (Milan, 2001), and author of five chapters in The Seventy Wonders of the Modern World: 1500 Years of Extraordinary Feats of Engineering and Construction (London, 2002).