Dr. Carmela Cucuzzella, is an Associate Professor in the Design and Computation Arts Department and is holder of the Concordia University Research Chair in Integrated Design, Ecology and Sustainability for the Built Environment (www.ideas-be.ca). She is a research member of the inter-disciplinary and inter-university laboratory Laboratoire d’étude de l’architecture potentielle (L.E.A.P).
Her research work is framed within the broad domain of design studies where she investigates questions of sustainable design for urban living. Her varied background and expertise in environmental and social life cycle analysis, in green building rating systems, and in design and architecture, allows her to adopt a framework revolving around design’s interrelated dimensions of the cognitive-instrumental, the moral-practical and the aesthetic-expressive forms of conception and discourse.
She has two main areas of research. In her CoLLaboratoire research platform, she seeks to understand how the collaborative design and implementation of interactive art-architecture in public urban spaces can contribute to a critique, deeper understanding and/or embodiment of sustainable urban, professional, community, and even human practices in the long term. In her second area of research, her interests lie predominantly in the history and theory of environmental architecture and design. She focuses on the challenges of accommodating sustainability diagnostic or rating tools such as Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) alongside the creative conceptual exploration that takes place during the design process. She addresses the limits of current sustainability assessment tools as a means to gain a complex understanding of social, cultural and environmental repercussions of design practice.
She is preparing two new books. The first manuscript is entitled Analysing Eco-Architecture beyond Performance which will be published by JDL Publishers. The second is a co-edited volume with Sherif Goubran called, Sustainable Architecture from Measurement to Meaning.
