Judith Sheine, MArch

Judith Sheine is an academic expert in mass timber design, Southern California 20th century architectural history, design and construction technologies, and housing. At the University of Oregon, she is a professor in the Department of Architecture and the Director of Design for the TallWood Design Institute (TDI), a collaboration between the UO’s College of Design and Oregon State University’s Colleges of Forestry and Engineering focused on the advancement of timber products and their application in building systems.

Since 2008, Sheine has worked in interdisciplinary teams of architecture and engineering faculty and students focused on advanced timber products and their applications. This work led to her involvement in the formation of the TallWood Design Institute in 2015. Sheine is engaged in TDI research, outreach, and education; current research projects include the development of single-family mass timber workforce housing and façade retrofits for energy and seismic resilience, both projects employing prefabricated mass timber panel assemblies, and the re-use potential of mass timber building components. Sheine has expertise in affordable housing, having won several prizes in the 1990s for competition entries and one built project, expertise that she is now applying to the new timber technologies. Her background in the examination of Southern California architects and the connection of their design theories to construction technologies serves as an underpinning of her more recent work in the field of design and construction technologies in timber.

Sheine is also an award-winning architect whose projects have been published internationally and she has been recognized as the leading authority on the work of R.M. Schindler; her publications on the architect include R.M. Schindler (Phaidon Press, 2001) and her most recent book, Schindler, Kings Road and Southern California Modernism (University of California Press, 2012), co-authored with Robert Sweeney.