Kevin Nute

Kevin Nute teaches architectural design and courses on spatial ordering, building types and time in built space. He began his career at the University of Nottingham in England, where he won the Shimeld and RIBA President’s design prizes before going on to work in architectural practices in London, Hong Kong and Singapore. He earned his doctorate at the Martin Centre for Architectural and Urban Studies at Cambridge University, where he was awarded Fulbright and Japanese Ministry of Education scholarships to pursue his doctoral work as a research associate at the University of California, Berkeley and Tokyo University. The resulting book, Frank Lloyd Wright and Japan (1993), examines the integration of disparate sources in the building design process and received the 1994 International Architectural Monograph Award from the American Institute of Architects.

Professor Nute taught part-time at Cambridge from 1990 to 1995, when he received a Japan Foundation Research Fellowship to examine relationships between space and time in Japanese buildings based at Tokyo University. This work resulted in the book Place, Time and Being in Japanese Architecture (2004), which explores how buildings can be designed to express universal parameters of existence. In 1996 he accepted a position as an associate professor of architecture at another Japanese national university, Muroran Institute of Technology, where he taught architectural design and directed a research laboratory for four years before joining the University of Oregon in October 2000.

Professor Nute’s research focuses on qualities of built environments that resonate directly with building users. His most recent work, Vital: Using the Weather to Bring Buildings and Sustainability to Life (2014), a video animated ebook, explains how the natural movements of the sun, wind and rain can be used to improve the well-being of building occupants and raise awareness of sustainable living practices.