ARCHI text AIA Leadership Summit

by Caitlin Daly, AIA, 2022 AIAENY President-Elect

This February, I had the privilege of attending the AIA Leadership Summit in Washington DC from February 14th to 17th with President-Elect, Mary-Kate Young, AIA. The conference served the dual purpose as our Lobby Day at Capital Hill and a conference with sessions focused on Generations at Work. Throughout the conference, we were challenged to ask how we would design the future. Before we go on, I want you to think about when you were 18 and name three things that happened that year. For me, the first YouTube video was uploaded, Hurricane Katrina devastated the Gulf of Mexico, and Angela Merkel became the first female Chancellor of Germany.

But first, we headed to Capital Hill to meet with representatives from New York—our mission was to advocate for two bills, the Democracy in Design Act and Resilient AMERICA Act. The Democracy in Design Act would codify the U.S. General Services Administration’s (GSA) “1962 Guiding Principles for Federal Architecture,” prohibiting the federal government from mandating any national design style. As the cost of weather/climate disasters continues to rise, the Resilient AMERICA Act seeks to reduce this cost by increasing allocations to FEMA’s pre-disaster mitigation programs (the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities (BRIC) Program) and support additional BRIC Programs for resilient building code adoption and implementation. Both bills have bipartisan and bicameral support, and previous versions had been brought before Congress, which made talking with the staff easier. We will continue to work closely with AIA staff to follow up on these bills as they work through Congress.