November Professional Member of the Month

Ulrike Passe

Iowa State University

Associate Professor of Architecture and Director of the Center for Building Energy Research

1. What is the most exciting and energizing aspect of your current position?

In my current position at Iowa State University I am energized by the work with my students, I teach a graduate sustainable design studio and I select a new site every year. I always learn a lot myself by discovering the site and its challenges together with the students. This year we are working on a location in Memphis TN. Well, I had not been to Memphis, a great discovery. Of course also my research excites me. Currently, my work with the ISU Sustainable Cities Group is very exciting. We are currently working on developing energy models for urban trees, a collaboration between an urban ecologist, a computational fluid dynamics expert and myself. We all know, that trees reduce building cooling loads, but there is no real good design tool to connect trees with building performance. We hope to change that soon.

2. What was the last interesting book you read?

The last really good book I read was Salman Rushdie’s Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights. I had picked it up at a bookstore at the airport in Mumbai India and started immediately on the flight back via Europe last winter, it is a crazy story, a fairy tale explaining our current world turmoil with the lifted veil between humans and jinns (spirits). The number of months in the title can be translated to ‘one thousand and one night’ and there are many parallels to Scheherazade. Rushdie is a great story teller, fascinating.

3. What professional accomplishment are you most proud of?

I think I am most proud of my book “Designing Spaces for Natural Ventilation”, that it was published and is read and used all across the world. That does make me proud. The book was published 4 years ago and I am receiving great feedback when I attend international conferences. Researchers, students actually use it. I also started the Iowa State University Sustainable Cities Research Group four years ago with funding from the ISU presidential interdisciplinary research initiative (PIRI) and that team is now starting to win large federal grants. But I am also proud when I see my former students get licensed as architects.

4. How do you define success? And measure it?

That is a hard question. Yes, how do I define success? That is a very good question, as an academic my work is always evaluated by peers (for journal publication, conference papers etc) and I get evaluated by the students every semester, thus I am constantly measured. But success starts, when I am satisfied and happy with my work. When a paper gets accepted in a highly competitive journal, that is success, when a grant gets funded, that is success, but my best work, the grants I put the most work in, sometimes get rejected multiple times at first. Thus, the measuring of success is even more complicated. Being persistent is also success, not giving up is success. I cannot just measure success in ‘number of articles published’ or ‘amount of dollars won in external grants’, but when I hear from a PhD student at an international conference, that she is using my book in her research, that is success.

5. We are Iowa Women in Architecture; who were the female role models that inspired you? 

There were some great women in my family, some of my aunts were pretty independent women, which was still not the norm in their generation. But I am not sure, I took them as ‘role models’ in that sense, that I wanted to become like them. But watching them probably told me that I could pretty much do what I wanted, if I were persistent and good at something. The first architect I worked for after graduating in Berlin was a woman, I think she showed me, that it was not a problem to run my own firm, if I wanted and I did for about 10 years.