Sergio Palleroni
Professor
Master of Science in Architectural Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2006
Bachelor of Architecture, University of Oregon, 1983
Contact: sergiop@pdx.edu
Curriculum Vitae
Current Classes
Arch 101 Introduction to Environmental Design
Arch 581 Architectural Design Studio 8
Research
Sergio Palleroni is a Senior Fellow of the new Center for Sustainable Solutions at Portland State University, and a founding member and faculty of the federally funded Green Building Research Lab. Professor Palleroni's research and fieldwork for the last two decades has been in the methods of integrating sustainable practices to improve the lives of communities worldwide typically underserved. In 1988, to serve the needs of these communities he founded an academic outreach program that would later become the BASIC Initiative (www.basicinitiative.org), a service-learning fieldwork program. Each year, the BASIC Initiative challenges students from the United States and abroad to apply their education in service of underserved communities around the globe. Today, the BASIC Initiative continues to serve the poor in Asia, Latin America, Africa and the U.S. In addition, Professor Palleroni has worked and been a consultant on sustainable architecture and development in the developing world since the 1980s, both for not-for-profit agencies and governmental and international agencies such as UNESCO, World Bank, and the governments of China, Colombia, Costa Rica, India, Kenya, Mexico, Nicaragua and Taiwan.
The work of the BASIC Initiative has most recently been documented in Studio At Large: Architecture in Service of Global Communities (2004), Building a Strawbale House (2005) and Architecture Like You Give a Damn (2006), Teaching Sustainability in Asia (2007), Expanding Architecture: Design as Acitivism (2009), as well as several documentaries including the PBS series Design e2 (2006), all which explore the BASIC Initiative's efforts to improve and make sustainable the lives of the planet's poorest citizens.
