Charlie Hailey, M.Arch., Ph.D.

Professor of Architecture

College of Design, Construction and Planning

2014 Awardee

Charlie Hailey’s research focuses on how built environments are made. His work investigates material culture and cultural landscapes to discover links between human agency, settlement patterns, and ecology.

Hailey continues his line of research with a focus on how emergent environments are actually constructed-how they are designed and built. His work fills research gaps with the study of marginal landscapes and seeks to provide contemporary frameworks for rethinking methods, as well as subjects, of research. These explorations have elicited praise in popular, professional, and academic journals, and his monographs have been reviewed nationally and internationally. His first book Campsite (LSU Press, 2008) explored camping as place-making, and the following year Camps (MIT Press, 2009) continued this investigation with a focus on camps as contemporary global spaces. His most recent book Spoil Island (Rowman & Littlefield) studied the manufactured landscapes of artificial islands as unexpected public and naturalized spaces.

Hailey served as a Fulbright Scholar in 2011. With the Fulbright and its urban design studio, he combined current research with his dedicated interest in teaching in order to collaborate with colleagues from the Balkan region, including the University of Prishtina in Kosovo. In January 2012, he was asked to write a series of articles about his experience for Inside Higher Education. The Fulbright also helped frame subsequent investigations in Tirana, Albania, where he delivered an invited lecture at POLIS University and studied urban landscapes with a grant from the Center for European Studies. Hailey plans to continue collaborations with colleagues in Macedonia and Albania through the Fulbright Senior Specialist program.

Hailey is currently completing the manuscript for a book about teaching and practicing design/build (an integrated means of delivering architectural projects). Forthcoming from Princeton Architectural Press, The Design/Build Handbook includes extensive field research and interviews with the internationally known experts of Jersey Devil, whose work spans five decades of combining public interest design with actual construction. The book fills a gap in the understanding of how the process of design/build education works and how the practice of architecture and construction might be more closely integrated in the future. Related to this research, Hailey has completed five design/build service learning projects in the surrounding community with School of Architecture students.