MSL Teaching and Research

ARH5600 : 3D Cultural Heritage Informatics is a collaboration between the UVA Library and the Historic Preservation Program in Architectural History at UVA. Students are taught various methods of utilizing 3D scanning technologies to document historic and significant artifacts, buildings and sites of cultural heritage. At Morven, they are using terrestrial LIDAR instruments to scan the historic core of the former Morven plantation with a focus on outbuildings at the Kitchen Building and Claims House as well as the immediate grounds and landscape. This is a class collaboration with Architectural History Field Methods, who are also working on site during the Spring semester. In addition to the fieldwork, ARH5600 students are taught how to process the 3D data and prepare it for further use. The 3D data collected can be used for complete architectural documentation of the sites in focus including visualizing the site as plans, sections, elevations, isometrics, axonometric and perspective views.

“The University of Virginia School of Architecture was recently awarded a $3.25 million grant by the US Army Corps of Engineers to support the monitoring and adaptive lifespan management of nature-based infrastructure in the Chesapeake Bay region. Urban Planning with Integrated Natural Systems (UPWINS) project at Morven is an early-stage research and development project that will bring together efforts between multiple universities, local organizations, and federal partners to verify the impact of its research on sites that call for innovative and adaptive approaches to flood control and ecosystem management.“

Learn more: The Natural Infrastructure Lab at the UVA School of Architecture

Morven Programs received $25K from the UVA Committee on Sustainability to award faculty grants for sustainability-related teacher and research projects at Morven. Phoebe Crisman’s proposal to design a sustainability plan for Morven with a groups of students was awarded one of the grants. Phoebe and her students developed a professional-level study in one semester, designed around 19 actions Morven could take to become UVA’s Sustainability Lab.

The University of Virginia Arctic Research Center (UVAARC) continues to monitor and analyze microclimate environmental data collected at Morven as part of its pilot study, which started in 2020. With the knowledge that has been gained from Morven, the UVAARC Team installed similar arrays of sensors on the coast of Alaska in the city of Utqiagvik in early June of 2022. Located 320 miles north of the Arctic Circle on the Chukchi Sea, Utqiagvik is underlain be permafrost which is being destabilized by climate change and anthropogenic impacts.