J. Irwin Miller Architecture Program

Email

cmreinha@iu.edu

Location

The Republic Building 116

Reinhart is a licensed architect, researcher, and educator who ­generates design and research projects that weave together the vernacular with the contemporary, the analog with the digital, and the evidence-based with the speculative, to nurture and inspire more harmonious ways of living on a damaged planet and in a fractured society.

He recently presented at Greenbuild on a panel with directors from the US Green Building Council (USGBC) and the US Department of Energy (DOE) on “Engaging Building Professionals in the Decarbonization Revolution.” He has implemented architectural sustainability on many projects achieving LEED and other certifications, including serving as a sustainability consultant on the $4B+ healthcare campus currently under construction in Indianapolis. At the other end of the spectrum of size and cost, he has taught hands-on workshops in which people learn to build their own homes of earth and straw. As the Director of Sustainability and Research for a mid-size architecture/engineering firm, he implemented virtual reality and performance simulation into office workflows and worked cross-departmentally to reduce the embodied carbon impacts of concrete mixes used in the firm’s engineering projects.

He received his B.A. and M. Arch degrees summa cum laude from the College of Architecture and Planning (CAP) at Ball State University, where he was honored with the AIA Henry Adams Certificate, the Alpha Rho Chi Medal, the ARCC King Medal for architectural research, and was a commencement speaker for CAP. As an undergraduate, his work on sustainability was recognized by being chosen as a Byron Fellow and being selected as a national Udall Scholar. As a graduate student, he led a team to victory in the US Department of Energy’s Race to Zero Competition (now called the Solar Decathlon Design Challenge).

His hands-on research into natural and low-carbon/carbon-sequestering materials like earth, straw, timber, exemplified in the experimental “bale-cob” home that he and his wife live in, has been featured in the journals The Last Straw and The CobWeb. His research into open source methods of equitable, architectural knowledge transfer was featured in his TEDxBloomington talk and a presentation at the Living Future conference. 

Reinhart’s research explores connections between architecture and human bodies/living organisms. This mutli-disciplinary inquiry weaves together evolutionary biology, physiology, archeology, definitions of life, building technology, and architecture history and theory. The current project in this vein, “Architecture and life: Data-mining and computational analysis of an inclusive architectural discourse for comparisons between buildings and human bodies, body systems, and living organisms” was recently awarded a HathiTrust Research Center Advanced Collaborative Support Award. 

He has been selected as a participant in The Bloomington Symposium: Intelligence.