January 22, 2013
Mahesh Daas to deliver architecture lecture Friday
Mahesh Daas, 2012 ACSA distinguished professor of architecture and chair of the architecture department at Ball State University, will deliver the lecture "Memos from an Inconvenient Studio" at 4 p.m. Friday, Jan. 25, in the K and S Ballroom at the K-State Student Union. The lecture is free and the public is encouraged to attend.
Daas was also the inaugural 2008-11 emerging media fellow of Ball State’s Center for Media Design. Previously, Daas served as the associate dean for academic affairs and research of the College of Architecture at the University of Texas at San Antonio. He is licensed to practice architecture in India, and worked with architectural firms in Chicago and Kansas City.
The Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture, or ACADIA, has elected Daas twice to the organization’s presidency. He serves on the advisory board of the International Digital Media and Arts Association, or iDMAa; on the editorial board member of the International Journal of Architectural Computing, or IJAC; and on the board of the Indiana Architectural Foundation. He has been a peer-reviewer for the National Science Foundation, and served on the NSF delegation to Israel in 2010 to explore bilateral research opportunities in sustainable materials and technologies.
Daas is interested in the interdisciplinary intersections between design, technology, innovation, leadership, social justice and higher education. His work is evenly distributed between design practice, design-build, history and theory and applied research. He has been a keynote speaker at conferences in the U.S. and South America. He has published over sixty refereed papers, book chapters, journal articles and juried design projects, some of which have won best paper awards. At UT San Antonio, he won the President’s Distinguished Achievement Award for Creative Production. He is a co-recipient of a 2001 Kansas City AIA Merit Award for the Baron BMW Dealership building, and a 2007 recipient of
International Fabrics Foundation Outstanding Achievement Award for the design and construction of Advanced Fabrics Exhibition.
An academic polyglot, Daas has been educated in architecture, urban design, business and higher education management at, respectively, Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University; Kansas State University; the University of Texas at Austin; and the University of Pennsylvania, where he is completing an innovative Executive Doctorate in Higher Education Management. Daas is also an award-winning fiction writer and poet.