July 17, 2018
Associate professor Neal Hubbell receives TreanorHL Architects Faculty Award
Neal Hubbell, associate professor in the interior architecture & product design department in the College of Architecture, Planning & Design, or APDesign, received the 2018 TreanorHL Architects Faculty Award. This award is to recognize a faculty member from APDesign who best exemplifies the tie between practice and the academy.
"The series of courses which Neal has been teaching at APDesign have been finely crafted," said Nathan Howe, head of the interior architecture & product design department, who nominated Hubbell for the award. "It is a beautiful mix of developing research skills in young designers and teaching them the art of crafting a design that will set it apart from the competition. It also instills in students that it is not enough to create a striking object but that the design must have a story to tell for it to stand apart from its competition."
In 2017, Hubbell's class yielded three projects that OFS Brands selected to manufacture. Currently, two of those projects are under contract and the other will be soon. The outcome for the department and the students is not only the accomplishment of having students' designs go to market, where they were on display at the international furniture and design show Neocon in Chicago last June, but also the royalties to be given to the department and the student designers from these projects. This endeavor has created the equivalent to a license agreement that is picked up by industry for a patent. The unique research and design offering that Hubbell has created with OFS Brands will form a template for future collaborations.
Hubbell received his Bachelor of Environmental Design from the University of Colorado in 1981 and a Master of Architecture from the University of Texas at Austin in 1991. Before entering academia, Hubbell had extensive professional experience with interior architecture and architecture firms that specialized primarily in the areas of workplace design, retail design and hospitality design. In 1984, Hubbell became National Council of Interior Design Qualification, or NCIDQ, certified, and then passed the Architectural Registration Examination, Colorado, in 1986. Hubbell has more than 20 years of experience in academia at a number of higher education institutions teaching all levels from freshman to graduate students. Some of Hubbell's scholarly interests include design methodologies with the express interest in enhancing creativity, design history and lighting design.