Madame President Goes ALL-In

Explicit content warning

09/26/19 • 77 min

For Archinect Sessions episode #145 we are joined by Kimberly Dowdell, a principal at HOK in Chicago and the current President of the National Organization of Minority Architects. Our conversation covers Kimberly’s impressive path to success in architecture, and the leadership role she’s taking in NOMA. We’ll also discuss the upcoming NOMA conference taking place in Brooklyn in a few weeks from October 14th-20th.

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The War on Cliché

On this episode, we're joined by Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena. A long-familiar name to most of our listeners, Aravena’s work gained significant media attention upon winning the Pritzker Prize in 2016, elevating his reputation for working to address some of today’s most difficult issues through participatory design, engaging users, groups, experts, and the public-at-large. His most notable projects are his “incremental housing” developments, a partially subsidized low-income solution for displaced families providing half-built homes for families to complete on their own, within their own budgets and tastes. Elemental has since released the plans for these projects for free, via download from their website.

This week Aravena was awarded another significant prize, the ULI J.C. Nichols Prize for Visionaries in Urban Development. The award recognizes visionaries that are making significant contributions to international community building, with an emphasis on land use and development bettering society. Our conversation starts with him describing how this ULI prize is so important to him...

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The Current State of LA's Architecture Student Publications

On this episode of Archinect Sessions we’re sharing the recording of a panel discussion I moderated last weekend at the A+D Museum, as part of the current exhibition The Los Angeles Schools. The panel brought together five students and three faculty members representing student-led publications from LA’s architecture programs. Rayne Laborde and Phoebe Webster represented UCLA's POOL; Marcelyn Gow represented SCI-Arc’s Offramp; Richard Mapes, Corie Yaguchi and Irvin Shaifa represented SCI-Arc's Underscore; Alvin Huang represented USC’s Supertall; and Stephen Phillips, Cal Poly LA Metro’s Director, represented their program’s hardcover publication LA Ten.

Our talk covers a lot of ground, exposing the inner-workings of editing and producing publications in today’s unique and highly transformative media landscape. Our conversations cover issues of editorial decision-making, design, freedom of expression and thoughts on the future of student publishing in architecture school.