About Mahesh
Mahesh Daas is the ACSA Distinguished Professor, Irving Distinguished Professor, and the Chairman of the department of architecture at Ball State University and the inaugural Emerging Media Fellow at the Center for Media Design at Ball State University. As the chairman, he is responsible for 40 faculty members, 350 students, and 4 degree programs. Under his leadership, the department has been ranked by Architect magazine among top three schools of architecture in the area of digital design, and among top six schools of architecture in the area of social justice. The department has been recently recognized as a “World-Class School of Architecture” by Design Intelligence Cramer Report, and the four-year old Ball State Master of Architecture program has been ranked 9th in the Midwest in 2011. At Ball State, Professor Daas describes himself as an “Intellectual Venture Capitalist,” and teaches “An Inconvenient Studio” and seminar on “Innovation Methods” where he employs entrepreneurial and self-organizing learning environments that he calls “rhizomatic and wall-less.”
Professor Daas is interested in the intersections between technology, social justice, education and design. He has been a keynote speaker at conferences in the US and South America. He has published over fifty refereed papers, book chapters, journal articles, and juried design projects, some of which have won best paper awards. At UT San Antonio, he won the President’s Distinguished Achievement Award for Creative Production. He is a co-recipient of a 2001 Kansas City AIA Merit Award for the Baron BMW Dealership building, and a 2007 recipient of International Fabrics Foundation Outstanding Achievement Award for the design and construction of Advanced Fabrics Exhibition. Before joining Ball State in 2008, Professor Daas was the Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Research at the University of Texas at San Antonio College of Architecture. He led advising, assessment, enrollment management, faculty and student affairs, research administration, and strategic planning. He worked with architectural firms in Chicago and Kansas City, and also taught at Kansas State University.
He is a two-term past president and an elected board member of ACADIA (Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture); an advisory board member of iDMAa (International Digital Media and Arts Association); an elected editorial board member of IJAC (International Journal of Architectural Computing); and a board member of the Indiana Architectural Foundation. He has been a peer-reviewer at the National Science Foundation, and served on an NSF delegation to Israel in 2010 to explore bilateral research opportunities. He has chaired a recent NSF symposium and workshop on Extreme Affordability, and has also served on research review panels for the Canadian Government.
In addition to academic achievements, Professor Daas is an award-winning writer. He penned poems, lyrics and short stories in two languages. He derives inspiration from Latin American literature, particularly the works of Octavio Paz, Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
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