Centers + Institutes

Community Design Assistance Center

Director: Elizabeth Gilboy

The Community Design Assistance Center was established in 1988 through a grant from the U.S. Department of Education’s Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education program. The two main goals of establishing the center were to provide underserved communities in southwest Virginia with low-cost planning and design assistance and to provide landscape architecture, architecture, planning, and building construction students with an opportunity for paid experience related to their future careers that also taught students about participatory design and planning processes.

Center for Design Research

Directors: Joseph Wheeler, Nathan King, Robert Dunay

The Center for Design Research (CDR) links the academy, industry, and design practice by creating opportunities for teaching through applied research. The work of CDR teams expands the scope of design and embraces collaboration across many scales and disciplines with the goals of technological innovation and systemic impact.

Projects involve multiple venues - local, regional, national and international – however, the intellectual threads tying the diverse work together have largely remained behind the scenes. The CDR exhibition, Modeling A Vision, held at the Branch Museum for Architecture and Design In Richmond, Virgnia presents a kaleidoscope of past research and a prospectus for future projects as a cyclic process of searching, teaching, and researching with impactful results. The link to a video documenting two decades of work can be found here.

Center for High Performance Environments

Director: Jim Jones

The Center for High Performance Environments (CHPE) serves as a first-of-its-kind resource for designers, engineers, system consultants, teachers, school administrators, facility managers, building owners and others interested in improving the design and operation of built environments. The CHPE takes a holistic approach to the design of buildings and focuses on a range of multidisciplinary activities, including energy efficiency, sustainability, systems integration, evaluating the building envelope, and integrating appropriate technology into indoor environments of the 21st century.

International Archive of Women in Architecture

Director: Paola Zellner Bassett

The International Archive of Women in Architecture (IAWA) was established in 1985 as a joint program of the College of Architecture and Urban Studies and the University Libraries at Virginia Tech. The purpose of the Archive is to document the history of women's contributions to the built environment by collecting, preserving, and providing access to the records of women's architectural organizations and the professional papers of women architects, landscape architects, designers, architectural historians and critics, and urban planners.

Vibrations Testing Laboratory

Director: Mehdi Setareh

The Vibrations Testing Laboratory (VTL) was established in 2011 at 165 Inventive Lane, Blacksburg, Virginia,  through a major support from the National Science Foundation. VTL's main mission is to conduct research and support educational activities as related to vibration serviceability issues in architectural structures. It is the only such facility in the country dedicated to research on vibration serviceability issues. The laboratory houses a two-story full-scale steel structure and an assortment of testing and measurement equipment such as dynamic signal analyzers, force platforms, impulse hammers, and computers.

Four Design

Director: Jeff Joiner

FourDesign is a faculty-led, student-run design studio in the School of Visual Arts at Virginia Tech. We work with local, regional and national clients to develop well-designed, strategy-based branding and marketing materials that help them build stronger relationships with their customers.