Platform 2023-2024: Civics and Placemaking

PLATFORM THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE

Civics and Placemaking

2023–2024

PHOTO/GRAPHIC

CONTENTS

Civics and Placemaking

Planning and design practices play a significant role in shaping the ways individuals to come together, share ideas, and take collective actions.

Moreover, the ways in which public spaces are planned, designed, constructed, and maintained provide a kind of social infrastructure that supports a community’s pursuit of health, safety, and welfare, and its expression of civic aspirations. This issue of Platform highlights how the programs, faculty, and students across the School of Architecture contribute to the creation of places that foster civic life.

2

Dean’s Introduction

4

Contributors

8

Water in Cities

MICHAEL HOLLERAN

14 Mapping the Jaguar Corridor: A Radiography of Urbanization JUANA SALCEDO

22 In Support of Transgressive Practices: Cultivating New Landscape Imaginaries MAGGIE HANSEN

28 The Civics of a Just Transition MICHAEL ODEN AND MIRIAM SOLIS

310 Inner Campus Drive, B7500 Austin, Texas 78712-1009 512.471.1922 | soa.utexas.edu

34 Multispecies Lounge

NEREA FELIZ AND JOYCE HWANG

40 Plume

KORY BIEG AND CLAY ODOM

46 Placemaking: The Role of Historic Preservation and Building Documentation in Creating Inspiring Public Spaces BENJAMIN IBARRA-SEVILLA

52 Architecture is a Team Sport LARRY SPECK

58 Ripples of Hope COLEMAN COKER

62 Alum Profiles 70 Philanthropy 78 Exhibitions

Managing Editor Bridget Gayle Ground Assistant Editor Emilio Sanchez Design Whitebox To Our Readers We welcome ideas, questions, and comments. Please share your thoughts with us.

Left: Plume by Kory Bieg and Clay Odom.

Right: Multispecies Lounge by Nerea Feliz and Joyce Hwang. Photo by Jack Landau.

Cover: Photo © Albert Vecerka/Esto Back cover: Students and faculty fill Goldsmith Hall’s Eden and Hal Box Courtyard. Photo: School of Architecture Visual Resources Collection.

1

DEAN’S INTRODUCTION

Students and community members gather at Austin’s Circle Acres Nature Preserve as part of the Gulf Coast DesignLab’s RESTORE project in partnership with Ecology Action of Texas. Photo: © Coleman Coker.

2

PLATFORM 2023–2024

Heather Woofter

CIVICS AND PLACEMAKING

Our fields rely on collaboration and exchange. Buildings cannot stand on their own; instead, they are part of a more extensive system and landscape, framed by conditions of history and culture, impacting community well-being and our environment. As designers, we are taught to solve problems and innovate solutions through additions and cuts to existing infrastructure. But as Dennis Crompton of Archigram might say: What can we first achieve without building? How might we frame very real and complicated concerns to ask questions of the future?

I am honored to join The University of Texas at Austin and the faculty, staff, students, and alumni of the School of Architecture.

I aspire to actively participate in Austin and its dynamic communities, just as many UT faculty engage with and contribute to the city. This summer, I moved here from Washington University and St. Louis, a place I’ve called home for twenty years.

St. Louis is a beautiful and complicated place—but until recently, a shrinking city.

Yet, at one point, it was the fourth largest city in the US with rapid growth as a manufacturing center.

No place is static; environmental and economic forces contribute as firmly to the health and physicality of a place as the everyday buildings in our communities.

Change is incremental, almost invisible, as we are more likely to see the pieces directly impacting us instead of the complicated tapestry that connects us all.

Landscape architects in particular accept that no design is static by the nature of the profession. As Maggie Hansen relates in her essay “In Support of Transgressive Practices” (page 22), time is as material to proposals as seemingly stable ground, where social and ecological relationships shift and evolve.

While I am still new to Austin, I hope to use my ‘antenna’ to see the city through the momentarily heightened lens of a traveler, to observe firsthand the things that work well and those that do not, and to gradually learn—through conversations such as the ones presented in the following pages—how Austin’s civic life and collective actions

endure and bring us closer to a shared and actionable vision for the broader community. This issue of Platform is dedicated to “Civics and Placemaking” and examines the myriad ways that our spaces and places shape the public life of citizens of our community, which, in turn, contribute to regional and national affairs and a sense of global interconnectedness.

The School of Architecture is unique for many reasons, but key among these is the breadth of allied disciplines housed here, spanning all scales of the built environment—from the room to the region. As an educational institution, our school can bring design professionals, planners, and research scholars together around thematic and collaborative topics. As Michael Holleran observes in his essay “Water in Cities” (page 8), “My work encompasses not just the great systems that make and shape cities but the expressions of water in landscape and culture. These subjects, I realized, could form a course that crosses every discipline in the School of Architecture—something I am surprised is not more common.”

I consider collective intelligence among the irreplaceable resources that academic institutions bring to cities. Because design is connected to complexity—systems, contexts, cultures, and histories—the integrity of many disciplines come together, with placemaking solutions arising from their collaboration and from the specificity of the surroundings. Larry Speck demonstrates this in his essay, “Architecture is a Team Sport” (page 52), noting: “We need to be honest about how incredibly complex and demanding the design of a significant project is, and how many different capabilities and perspectives are required in the creation of a sophisticated work of architecture or urban design.” Civic life requires a relational perspective, where ‘building’ includes tending to existing spaces, performances (like pop-up events) that anticipate and test future community-based projects, and forums that encourage difficult conversations to bring together citizens, local government, developers, planners, and designers to imagine an accessible and vibrant public sphere.

The essays within provide numerous examples of how this work takes place.

Michael Holleran and Juana Salcedo consider public space through the lens of water and the territory of the jaguar— essays that uncover the ways we make space for and through nature. Michael Oden, Miriam Solis, and Maggie Hansen discuss approaches to policy and practice that are more just, equitable, and environmentally sensitive. Benjamin Ibarra-Sevilla and Larry Speck describe a partnership with the National Park Service, and the multi-faceted teams behind the creation of the State of Texas’s new Capitol Mall, demonstrating the importance of collaboration in placemaking. (These two projects additionally demonstrate the compatibility of historic preservation with placemaking projects, and how the school’s alumni go on to contribute to placemaking through a range of different professions.)

The essays conclude with an excerpt from Coleman Coker’s recent book on his Gulf Coast DesignLab, reflecting on how designers and educators can make meaningful change toward more just and sustainable places and communities.

Whereas Speck’s piece highlights the importance of teamwork to placemaking, Coker considers the motivations that lead individuals to communal action. The issue also features two public art installations by our faculty that enrich our experience and understanding of the public spaces and networks in which we live. (Like Holleran’s and Salcedo’s essays, Nerea Feliz’s installation reminds us of how we hold space for nature amid urbanization.) Finally, the issue spotlights alumni who are shaping civic life through their careers, the donor (and School of Architecture alum) behind a transformative new scholarship, and the faculty exhibitions hosted at the school during the past year.

The School of Architecture has a considerable track record of projects and activities engaging civic space. This issue of Platform captures a trace of their intention to link a range of academic pursuits to the public good. ◆

3

4

KORY BIEG

COLEMAN COKER

NEREA FELIZ

MAGGIE HANSEN

MICHAEL HOLLERAN

JOYCE HWANG

BENJAMIN IBARRA-SEVILLA

MICHAEL ODEN

CLAY ODOM

JUANA SALCEDO

MIRIAM SOLIS

LARRY SPECK

PLATFORM 2023–2024

CIVICS AND PLACEMAKING

CONTRIBUTORS

KORY BIEG is an associate professor and the

director for the Architecture Program at the School of Architecture. He received his master of architecture degree from Columbia University, is NCARB-certified, and is a registered architect in Texas. Bieg is the principal of OTA+, an architecture, design, and research office that specializes in the development and use of current, new, and emerging digital technologies for the design and fabrication of buildings, building components, and experimental installations.

Since 2013, Bieg has chaired the TxA Emerging Design + Technology conference and co-directed the TEX-FAB Digital Fabrication Alliance. He has also served on the board of directors of SXSW Eco Place

by Design and the Association for Computer Aided Design in Architecture (ACADIA), cochairing the 2019 ACADIA conference titled “Ubiquity and Autonomy.” His research focuses on computational design practice, the use of creative AI in architecture, and architectural theory. In 2018, Bieg co-edited CENTER 21: The Secret Life of Buildings, a book exploring the significance of ObjectOriented Ontology (OOO) in architecture, featuring original essays by prominent philosophers and architects.

COLEMAN COKER is a professor of practice and

the director of the Gulf Coast DesignLab at the School of Architecture. He is a Loeb Fellow in Advanced Environmental Studies at Harvard University Graduate School of Design and a Rome Prize recipient from the American Academy in Rome. A registered architect, Coker has practiced architecture for more than thirty-five years. He founded buildingstudio in 1999 after a thirteenyear partnership with Samuel Mockbee as Mockbee/Coker architects.

NEREA FELIZ is an associate professor at

the School of Architecture and founder of Nerea Feliz Studio. Situated at the

intersection of architecture, interior design, and interior urbanism, her work encompasses scholarly and creative activities with a sustained focus on public interiority. Feliz’s projects and writings have been featured in publications including Ground Up; Architectural Histories; Interiors: Design, Architecture and Culture; The Architect’s Newspaper; and urbanNext.

Her design work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at a range of venues including Space p11, Fusebox, SXSW Eco, Matadero Madrid, and several academic institutions.

MAGGIE HANSEN is an assistant professor at the School of Architecture, where she teaches landscape architecture studio, visualization, and theory courses. She brings multidisciplinary training to the design and study of public space. She earned a BA from the University of Chicago and worked in contemporary art and theater before turning to design. She holds a master of architecture degree and a master of landscape architecture degree from the University of Virginia. Her design experience includes professional practice and community-based design. Maggie’s research explores landscape architecture as the choreography of care practices that maintain cultural and ecological relationships. Her work draws influence from social impact design, gardening, theater and performance, participatory art, and activist methods. Her scholarship on participatory methods of design and design teaching has been presented at the Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA), the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture (CELA), the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA), and the Architecture Media Politics Society (Amps). She was the 2021–2023 Meadows Foundation Centennial Fellow of the Center for American Architecture and Design. ▸

5

CONTRIBUTORS

MICHAEL HOLLERAN earned his PhD at MIT and came to the School of Architecture in 2006, after teaching architecture and landscape architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design, and then at the University of Colorado where he served as Associate Dean of the College of Architecture and Planning. He directed the School of Architecture’s Graduate Program in Historic Preservation from 2006 to 2019.

His first book was a history of the origins of preservation and planning in Boston. His current book project, “The Urban Ditch: Landscape, Life and Afterlives,” is about water in cities.

JOYCE HWANG is an associate professor at the University at Buffalo SUNY and founder of Ants of the Prairie. For nearly two decades she has been developing projects that incorporate wildlife habitats into constructed environments. She is a recipient of the Exhibit Columbus University Research Design Fellowship, the Architectural League Emerging Voices Award, the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) Fellowship, and the MacDowell Fellowship.

Her work has been featured by MoMA, and exhibited at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Matadero Madrid, the Venice Architecture Biennale, and the Rotterdam International Architecture Biennale.

geometry, and architectural geometry informed by form-resistant structures.

His research focuses on the transmission of building technology from Europe to the Americas, exploring the constructive and geometric analysis of sixteenth-century ribbed vaults in Mexico. His work has received numerous awards including Best Publication in the Latin American Biennale and the Phillip Johnson Award from the Society of Architectural Historians. As an educator and designer, Professor Ibarra-Sevilla’s design studios focus on the current challenges of historic preservation, including adaptive reuse and insertions of contemporary architecture into historic urban landscapes. His seminar explores the relationships between geometry, space, and structure, and the challenges Gothic and Renaissance designers faced. He is profoundly interested in building technology; he teaches Construction II, focusing on building structural and envelope systems. In his Graphic Documentation course, students learn through a hands-on approach to document historic buildings following HABS guidelines, and explore digital technologies like laser scanners and digital photogrammetry as vehicles for assessing and visualizing landmark properties.

BENJAMIN IBARRA-SEVILLA is an associate professor of Architecture and Historic Preservation, program director for Advanced Studies, and program coordinator for the Master of Science in Historic Preservation program. His expertise involves case studies of ancient masonry techniques, stereotomy, descriptive

MICHAEL ODEN is an associate professor in the Community and Regional Planning Program at The University of Texas at Austin. His teaching and research areas include local and regional economic development, planning in the time of climate change, and definitions and concepts of equity and social justice in contemporary planning.

Dr. Oden has published widely in academic and professional venues on a range of economic development and planning

6

CIVICS AND PLACEMAKING

PLATFORM 2023–2024

topics. Some recent works include: “The Salience of Megaregional Geographies for Inter-Metropolitan Transportation Planning and Policy-Making” (Transportation Research Part D: Transportation and the Environment, 2020) with Gian Claudia Sciara; “The Launch and Evolution of a Technology-Based Economy: The Case of Austin Texas,“ (Growth and Change, 2019) with David Gibson; “Better is Better than More: Investigations into Qualitative Growth (International Journal of Sustainable Development, 2016), with Michael Benedikt.

He is also a collaborator to the Texas Metro Observatory project, with a focus on “Socioeconomic and Spatial Change in 25 Texas MSAs.”

CLAY ODOM is an associate professor in

the School of Architecture’s Interior Design Program. He received a master of architecture degree from the Texas Tech University Huckabee College of Architecture and a master of science in advanced architectural design from Columbia University GSAPP. He is principal of studioMODO, based in Austin, Texas.

Odom’s design, research, and pedagogical approaches leverage complex systems as conceptual and methodological frameworks for interrogating and designing the built environment. He has exhibited and presented his work in France, Italy, Holland, Hong Kong, Australia, Estonia, Canada, and the United States.

JUANA SALCEDO is an architectural designer

and scholar working at the intersection of architecture and urbanism. She is an assistant professor of practice at the School of Architecture and editor at Failed

Architecture. She studied architecture and history at Universidad de Los Andes and earned her master of environmental design degree from Yale University. As a designer, Salcedo has led and worked on projects at a range of scales, from residential projects to schools and community centers, to urbanscale projects including urban waterfronts and green corridors. Her research draws concepts and methods from environmental history, urban political ecology, decolonial studies, and science and technology studies to reconnect architecture and cities with the larger environmental and socio-economic processes that shape them, focusing on Latin America. She also explores visualization and mapping as tools for illustrating spatial and territorial issues for broad audiences. Her current project, “Infrastructures of Care: Jaguars, Humans and the Design of Urbanscapes in the Americas,” was awarded a Research and Development Grant from the Graham Foundation. She is the 2023–2026 Meadows Foundation Centennial Fellow of the Center for American Architecture and Design.

MIRIAM SOLIS is an urban planner and assistant professor of community and regional planning at the School of Architecture. She received her doctorate in city and regional planning from the University of California, Berkeley, and holds a master of city planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Specializing in environmental justice, her research, teaching, and practice identify organizational, procedural, and policy strategies to equitably distribute environmental benefits and burdens and meaningfully engage historically

marginalized communities. Dr. Solis leads research projects that involve partnerships with nonprofit organizations and local governments, and she teaches courses on racism and the built environment, practicums, and research design. She is on the leadership team of Planet Texas 2050, The University of Texas at Austin’s campuswide grand challenge research initiative, and is a 2022–2024 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine Gulf Research Program Early Career Fellow.

LARRY SPECK is a professor at the School of Architecture, where he has been on the faculty since 1975. He served as the school’s dean for nine years, associate dean for three years, and founding director of the Center for American Architecture and Design for eight years. He received his three degrees from M.I.T., where he also served as a faculty member for three years.

Speck has been a Fulbright Senior Scholar and has written more than forty articles in professional journals and other publications on art, architecture, engineering and design. He has received numerous awards for his teaching, including the AIA/ACSA Topaz Medallion, the Amoco Award, and the Blunk Professorship. Speck also has a distinguished career as a practicing architect. Among other projects he has helped lead six major master planning projects in Austin, and was the lead designer for the Barbara Jordan Terminal at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport (three phases) and the Austin Convention Center (two phases). In the last twenty-five years, Speck’s design work has won more than 120 design awards. He is a Fellow in the American Institute of Architects. ◆

7

8

PLATFORM 2023–2024

CIVICS AND PLACEMAKING

Fig. 1 (left) “Muslindraped bathing houses float at the foot of gardens, and the limpid little stream is in high favor as a refuge during the heated term.” Frank H. Taylor, “A Journey through Texas,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, October 1879.

Every city’s story is written in water as well as in land and people (fig. 1).

Fig. 2 (below) New Orleans’ habitability relies on levees and pumps. In Hurricane Katrina they failed.

Photo August 30, 2005

by Jocelyn Augustino / FEMA / Wikimedia Commons.

Water in Cities MICHAEL HOLLERAN

New York was planted on one of the world’s great natural harbors, where the Hudson provided deepwater access far into the interior. The fertile estuary offered a seafood bounty to the Lenape, then Dutch and then British settlers. New Orleans, the “impossible but inevitable city” in the words of Peirce Lewis,1 commanded the mouth of the Mississippi, the continent’s great river, but no part of its site stood above the highest floods of that river. Chicago, too, began as a continentally strategic node, where a brief portage and later a short canal connected the two great interior water pathways of French North America, the Mississippi, and the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence. And Los Angeles, strangely to our ears today, was located for its abundant water supply, where a subterranean rock formation forced an underground river to the surface even in the driest years.

The origin stories are different; without water they are untellable. As the stories continue, water remains central.

New York ascended to continental primacy first through the innovation of “packet ships” sailing to European ports on set schedules, and then by building the Erie Canal to bring the Great Lakes into its hinterland. When its water supply became a source of disease (and horses from Philadelphia refused to drink it), New York incorporated as a city to finance and build the Croton Aqueduct, beginning a public water system of such purity that to this day it requires no treatment.

New Orleans built levees that protected the city, often by flooding its neighbors.

In the early twentieth century, the largest pumps in the world enabled development of the land at the bottom of the “bowl” within the levees. That was good for the city until it was bad, in 1965 with Hurricane Betsy and again fifty years later with Hurricane Katrina (fig. 2).

9

The origin stories are different; without water they are untellable. As the stories continue, water remains central.

My own current research examines the cultural landscapes that resulted from surface water conveyance through irrigation cities (see “Digging Ditches,” Platform 2019–2020). Earlier in my career I worked on the history of ports and urban landmaking, and of navigation and power canals in the Northeast. My work encompasses not just the great systems that make and shape cities, but the expressions of water in landscape and culture.

Fig. 3 (above) On November 5, 1913, as water first flowed through Los Angeles Aqueduct, William Mulholland’s five-word dedication speech expressed the essence of water imperialism: “There it is. Take it!”

Photo 2001 by Jet Lowe/ Historic American Engineering Record/ Library of Congress.

Los Angeles grew far beyond the capacity of its reliable river, through the water imperialism of taking first from the Owens Valley (fig. 3), and eventually through the Colorado River from as far as Wyoming.

The seemingly de-watered Los Angeles River occasionally came back to life with a vengeance through catastrophic flooding, answered in the 1940s with a 51-milelong concrete channel that has become a canonical dystopian image of the city.

Fig. 4 (right) Frederick Law Olmsted designed Boston’s Back Bay Fens in 1879 for ecological function. Public reception eventually caught up with him, says Claire Kelly (MLA ’24).

Photo ca. 1914–1940, courtesy Boston Public Library CC BY-NC-ND.

Chicago’s phenomenal growth was fueled by railroads. This does not sound like a water story, but the railroad network was shaped

by New York financiers already invested in Chicago through Erie Canal commerce, and Chicago could arbitrage shipping rates by land or by water in a way unavailable to its competitors. Chicago engaged in its own imperialism of water flows, reversing the direction of the Chicago River to send wastes away from its own water supply, toward St. Louis.

10

CIVICS AND PLACEMAKING

PLATFORM 2023–2024

These subjects, I realized, could form a course that crosses every discipline in the School of Architecture—something I am surprised is not more common.

Constructing the syllabus was an exercise in too many choices. Chronology? Geography?

I arrived at something like functions or systems—drainage, consumption, waste, transportation, amenity. These transcend all times and places, unfolding in different ways at different times. And most importantly for the course’s theme, these systems collide and intersect in complex ways that constitute the water biography of each city. I launched this course in fall 2022 as “History of Water in Cities.”

Students responded with tremendous enthusiasm, and some took the course in directions I hadn’t anticipated. Students explored their hometowns or other cities they found interesting. Jonathan Shuster (MSCRP ’23) wrote about the culture of rain in Seattle—a subject that includes the elusive view of Mount Rainier, imprinted on urban form and on the collective psyche of Seattleites. Julia Manion (MSSD ’23) recounted the long history of bluegreen infrastructure, from Frederick Law Olmsted’s Back Bay Fens in Boston (fig. 4) through Ian McHarg’s Design with Nature to the present. Christopher Griffith (BArch ’23) described the experience of tsunamis

(that’s right, plural) in Hilo, Hawaii, and its productive outcome in an international warning system based on sensors across the Pacific. Claire Kelly (MLA ’24) analyzed the transition, in urban public recreational water, from pools to splashpads. And Connor Phillips (PhD CRP student) wrote about water control systems, from ancient hydraulic automatons, to nineteenth-century telegraphic connections to reservoirs that supplied Lowell’s mill turbines, to the AI systems that are the subject of his own research. Many students sttarted from present-day issues and found that these had long histories, with failures and successes at solutions and adaptations.

than on water, water’s place in urban form tended to move from path to edge.

Cities almost invariably built water supply first, and sewers later. Only after water mains delivered, and toilets flushed, did cities consider the possible need for sewage systems as a category of public infrastructure. This does not speak highly of our ability to foresee and shape the future.

Large and small themes begin to emerge.

Water bodies served everywhere as sinks for wastes of all kinds. Sewage entered rivers that carried it away—“away” sometimes referring to the water supply of downstream communities. People used refuse, ash, and debris to fill wetlands and extend shorelines.

Over the long sweep of history, as transportation improved faster on land

Water bodies got smaller and cities got bigger; soon they swam in their own filth.

Urban shorelines and streambanks came to be seen as repellent places, their inhabitants determined through lack of choice.

Water quality became an environmental issue long before air quality did, with local successes in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and then dramatic national successes beginning later in the twentieth century. As waterways got cleaner, they became amenities in the hearts of cities, as they had long been at out-of-town beaches and shores.

Water has served as an amenity for millennia through fountains and gardens, but in North American cities any design of water at an urban scale at first served practical rather than aesthetic ends. This changed in the nineteenth century, with ornamental water features and eventually

11

12

PLATFORM 2023–2024

CIVICS AND PLACEMAKING

whole shorelines and stream corridors designed as parts of park systems. More recently the scale has grown still larger, but “design” at a metropolitan scale is a more diffuse and distributed process.

For two centuries, the places where we communally immerse our bodies—baths, beaches, and pools—have become sites for the most fervid expression of social distinctions. Over time these have varied: first class, then sex, then race (fig. 5). Water also provides venues for less conflict-ridden social interactions. In the nineteenth century both Los Angeles and San Antonio had a canal-side path known as “Lovers’ Lane”; in twentieth-century New York, loci of gay life included bathhouses, abandoned piers on the Hudson, and beaches at Fire Island.

When we talk about climate change we are often talking about water, about disruptions that make less of it where it is needed and more where it is not. Water stresses ripple through other networks: power generation disrupted by lack of water to turn turbines or to cool generators, transportation halted by low water in rivers, food supplies stunted by drought or by flood, sometimes both in a single place and year. We make urban heat islands with asphalt and rooftops, yes, but also with water stresses that reduce the availability or capacity of trees to amend microclimates.

Fig. 5 Where bodies met water, Jim Crow drew a sharp color line. Halifax County Courthouse, North Carolina, photo 1938

by Charles Christopher Crittenden/Farm Security Administration/ Wikimedia Commons.

We have constructed both these needs and these disruptions, and we have done so over centuries. Water flows are the most elemental, most essential, most ancient of urban systems. They have shaped many other networks, sometimes invisibly through cadastral or administrative patterns. We think of land as a separate category, yet how much is urban land shaped by its proximity to, or isolation by, bodies of water? By access to good water or hazards borne by bad water?

By its susceptibility to flooding, or by its longago origins as fill?

This year’s class will soon present its work. ◆ 1 Peirce Lewis, New Orleans: The Making of an Urban Landscape (2d ed., 2003), 19.

13

Jaguar Corridor Current Range Historic Range

Cities (radius 60km from the JCI)

Cities within the Jaguar Corridor

Three Global Conditions Cities and Farms Shared Lands Panamazonia (RAISG)

14

PLATFORM 2023–2024

CIVICS AND PLACEMAKING

Cities and Farms of the Historic Range

Large wild areas

Mapping the Jaguar Corridor

A Radiography of Urbanization JUANA SALCEDO

To put a place “on the map” raises many questions. Maps have often been instrumental in conquest and colonization processes, but they can also be powerful artifacts that ignite dissenting ways of seeing and reimagining our world. The map of the Jaguar Corridor might be an example of the latter. This landscape project envisages the creation of a continuous territory covering 4.5 million square kilometers (half the size of the continental US) stretching from northern Mexico to northern Argentina to ensure the survival of the jaguar (Panthera onca). Borrowing landscape architect and theorist James Corner’s terms, I consider this map as both a finding—an acknowledgment of the need to cultivate and care for a series of landscapes to prevent the extinction of the Americas’ largest feline and top terrestrial predator—and a founding—because it compels us to radically question the colonial capitalist modes of inhabitation that have led to environmental breakdown and the sixth mass extinction.1

Fig. 1 (left) A stronghold against urbanization.

Correlation of the Jaguar Corridor with the dataset of the “Three Global Conditions for Biodiversity Conservation and Sustainable Use” (2020).

Credit: Juana Salcedo.

The Jaguar Corridor Initiative was launched in 2000 and is led by the New York-based conservation organization Panthera.

The initiative goes well beyond the conservation of the jaguar.

Researchers regard the feline’s presence in a territory a measurement of the health of an ecosystem; an indicator of animal and vegetation diversity, as well as water and air quality.2 So far, the corridor has remained largely under the radar of urban and landscape architecture researchers, even though urbanization processes are deeply entangled with this aspiration of hemispheric integration. The most viable habitats for the jaguar are proportionally inverse to those linked to extended processes of urbanization. Aside from elevation (jaguars mostly live under two thousand meters above sea level), conditions such as cover type, percentage of tree and shrub cover, distance to roads, as well as distance to human settlements and areas of high population density are all determining factors in the presence or absence of this feline.3

15

Figs. 2 and 3 Tourism in the Jaguar Corridor student exhibition. The double-sided panels presented the students’ projects, using string to physically and visually connect areas of overlap in their research and findings. Credit: Alejandra Quintana, Naomi Nelson, Natalie Raper, Alyson Vargas, and Chaochen Fan.

16

PLATFORM 2023–2024

In a years-long research project supported by the Graham Foundation (2020), I have developed a cartography of interconnection that makes visible the entanglements and frictions between the processes of urbanization and the Jaguar Corridor.4 This has involved correlating the corridor with public data about the transformations and socio-environmental struggles that are symptomatic of urbanization processes.

The research has prompted a series of seminars I have taught both at The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture and at Universidad de Los Andes, in Bogota, Colombia, in which students choose a theme through which to research, analyze, and visualize the complex processes of urban transformation intersecting with the corridor. In this essay, I introduce the Jaguar Corridor mapping initiative and reflect on the collaborative project of the School of Architecture students who participated in my spring 2023 seminar focused on tourism.

The Jaguar Corridor provides us with a radiography of urbanization—one that challenges a city-centric view of the urban experience. Urban political ecologists

CIVICS AND PLACEMAKING

Maria Kaika and Eric Swyngedouw describe urbanization as the “history of urbanizing nature”—a socio-spatial process of capitalism that unevenly incorporates, transforms, and commodifies all types of nature to support urban life over increasingly larger and geographically dispersed territories.5 Through the lens of the cartography of interconnection, the Jaguar Corridor emerges both as a stronghold against these extended processes of urbanization—while nevertheless connected to urban life—and a contested territory in friction with the socio-ecological flows of these processes.

Conservation efforts to protect the jaguar emerged during the mid-1960s when the fashion craze for spotted cat skins from wealthy industrialized countries reduced the feline to a highly valuable commodity.6 After the massive killing of over 180,000 jaguars in less than two decades within the Brazilian Amazon alone, Latin American governments forbade trade and signed the 1975 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora. Protection has meant stricter regulation, but not a complete end to

trading. However, the main driver of jaguar population decline has been extensive habitat degradation, fragmentation, and loss driven by the expansion of agriculture, cattle ranching, and human infrastructures.7 The region has been mostly urbanized from its southern and northern extremes—where most landscape connectivity areas are at risk of fragmentation. This is precisely what needs to be reversed, as the initiative seeks to foster the ecologically distinct jaguar populations across its entire range to ensure genetic diversity and the survival of the species. The Amazon is the largest remaining habitat for the jaguar. By 1900, the Amazon encompassed less than half of the jaguar’s historic range. At present, it accounts for almost 80% of Panthera’s Jaguar Corridor. Still, many towns and cities overlap with the corridor and need to acknowledge that in their public policy and municipal plans. Around 87 million people live within 60 kilometers of the corridor in

at least 213 cities and towns. Half of those cities and towns are located within the Amazon region, comprising a population of more than 10 million. Additionally, close to 4 million people live within the corridor in around 27 settlements, each with populations of up to 1 million inhabitants.

The Jaguar Corridor is a frontier of extraction and waste disposal for the industrial economy—one where Indigenous communities, farmers, and other marginalized populations across the region have struggled and even died for environmental justice and their right to live in these territories.8 The inventory of the Environmental Justice Atlas, which collects data on ecological distribution conflicts from activists and researchers, shows that over 30% of the cases in the hemisphere are in immediate proximity of the Jaguar Corridor even though the corridor only accounts for 8.5% of the Americas—an indication of the strong mobilizations occurring in these territories. The Amazon,

17

where jaguar life still thrives, has become increasingly critical. Almost half of the Atlas cases occur in this area and are mainly related to land grabbing, deforestation for natural products, itinerant agriculture, and the construction of hydroelectric dams.

A heatmap integrating the most urbanized areas and tree cover loss, as well as the EJA inventory, characterizes the corridor in terms of its frictions for the survival of both the jaguar and the communities living in these areas. Because critical zones are the most detectable fragmented landscapes, these areas of friction can also emerge as potential opportunities to reformulate the terms of cohabitation.

Political ecologists Bram Buscher and Robert Fletcher propose the concept of convivial landscape planning as a lens to rethink areas of habitat fragmentation.

Rather than setting nature apart, this concept calls to re-embed the uses of non-human natures into social, cultural, and ecological contexts and systems. Doing so, he underscores, entails “learn[ing] to accept both nature that looks a little more lived-in than we are used to and working spaces that look a little more wild than we are used to.”9 The cartography of interconnection is a way to move from a general view of the Jaguar Corridor toward a situated understanding.

More than a series of untouched natures, or a series of landscapes to be managed by scientists and experts, the corridor is a deeply political and collective project— one embedded in relations of power that define how (or if) the corridor is shaped and cared for, and whose lives are enhanced or diminished by this process. Instead of a fixed landscape, the corridor requires acknowledging and repairing the unequal distribution of environmental consequences caused by processes of urbanization— and the violences these have prompted—as well as embracing alternative practices of cultivation and caring already present and enacted by the peoples living in these areas.

18

PLATFORM 2023–2024

In my spring 2023 seminar, graduate students from the School of Architecture proposed to explore the Jaguar Corridor through the lens of tourism. Tourism is a crucial matter of concern as it is both an economic activity that reshapes territories through the spatial production of logistical and traveler infrastructures, and a commodified experience that is revealing of urbanite desires. The theme chosen allowed each student to navigate significantly different terrains of contestation, following their own curiosity while fostering a rich dialogue between their respective explorations. The result of this work came together in a collective exhibition that carefully sought to communicate their research to wider audiences.

The Jaguar Corridor provides us with a radiography of urbanization—one that challenges a city-centric view of the urban experience.

Alejandra Quintana (MSCRP + MSUD ’25) traced the impacts that the Maya Train and its tourist infrastructures—which link cities with Maya temples and other ancient constructions—will have on the Maya Forest—the largest tropical rainforest and main remaining habitat of the Jaguar in Central America—and its Indigenous communities. Naomi Nelson (MSCRP ’23) delved into the growth of Ayahuasca rituals and other types of self-discovery tourism, inquiring if there is a connection between this tourist trend that is increasing in popularity and the illegal trade of jaguar parts. Natalie Raper (MSCRP ’23) explored how the Jaguar Corridor Initiative relies on the cooperation of private landowners in Colombia, where jaguar sightseeing travel

CIVICS AND PLACEMAKING

Categories

29% Mineral Ores and Building Materials Extraction

19,4% Biomass and Land Conflicts

16,7% 5,5% 4,7% Fossil Fuels and Climate Justice/Energy 15,7% Water Management

4% 2,1%

Total cases: 382

Infrastructure and the Built Environment

Waste Management

2,9% Tourism Recreation Industrial and Utilities conflicts Biodiversity conservation

72% within 50Km from the Corridor (275) 28% overlap with the Corridor (107)

44% Panamazonia (RAISG)

Unknown Latent Low Medium High

Intensity

Fig. 4 A contested territory. Correlation of the Jaguar Corridor with the dataset of the “Environmental Justice Atlas” (2020). Credit: Juana Salcedo.

19

Fig. 5 and 6 Adventure tourism and migration flows in the Usumacinta River. Credit: Alyson Vargas.

20

PLATFORM 2023–2024

CIVICS AND PLACEMAKING

is starting to be encouraged in the eastern plains with the aim of replicating successes in the Brazilian Pantanal. Alyson Vargas (MSCRP ’23) examined the adventure tourism and migration flows shaping the Usumacinta River, a contested border between Guatemala and Mexico where jaguar conservation efforts intersect with border politics and surveillance and deterrence infrastructures. Finally, Chaochen Fan (MSCRP + MSUD ’25) followed carbon credits projects in the Acre and Rondônia states in Brazil and the concurrent expansion of illegal logging, questioning whether the promises of many airlines to offset greenhouse gas emissions with an extra fee will actually result in positive change.

Taking the cartography of interconnection as a departure point, each of these projects provides an in-depth narrative of the Jaguar Corridor and its socioenvironmental landscapes. This involved recognizing the celebratory stances as well as the dissents and frictions that counter polished narratives of progress—as in the case of the large-scale infrastructures of the Maya Train project—and the seemingly straightforward solutions to environmental breakdown—as in the case of the uncritical spread of new carbon credit projects across the region.

Perhaps what is more challenging—and at the same time, what can be more stimulating—about navigating and narrating these explorations is that they present an opportunity to release the complex set of socio-environmental, political, and economic entanglements at stake. The students expressed that one of the most difficult aspects of their assignment was finding reliable sources, and recognizing the biases that these might reflect. For instance, Naomi Nelson relied on the information provided by Operation Jaguar, which is a non-governmental organization

based in the Netherlands that collects data on illegal trade of jaguar parts.

Naomi underscored the need to recognize that conservation can easily carry “a smidge of colonization” because the people involved might impart “their own priorities and have the resources to do so effectively without understanding local infrastructure or indigenous knowledge.”10 One additional challenge, and potential area of further experimentation, pertains to representation. In her research on the Jaguar Corridor on the Usumacinta River, Alyson Vargas focused on the violent intersection of migrants’ experience trying to reach Mexico from Guatemala (and ultimately the United States) and the promotion of adventure tourism in the area.

Hers was a first effort to “represent the physical terrain more to show the dangers of it and express to the public how difficult it is to navigate, not only as an animal who’s used to it, but as humans who are forced to use these corridors as a means of survival too.”11 Facing these challenges in the process of research can provide learning opportunities to rehearse skills of critical inquiry and analysis.

In sum, the premise of this exercise, and of this research at large, is that the Jaguar Corridor might offer us—spatial researchers and practitioners—a rich framework through which to consider urbanization processes and their connection with environmental breakdown and biodiversity loss in a time of deep ecological change.

Doing so can push us to decenter cities as the main area of urban inquiry, and enrich our understanding of the multiplicity of living beings that cohabit the world in their own ways.12 It is also an opportunity to expand the analytical expertise and representation techniques of the spatial arts, to engage in a broader discussion of this initiative, and, further, to imagine and push forward attentive responses based on a multispecies view of nature. ◆

1 James Corner, “The agency of mapping: Speculation, critique and invention,” in Mappings, ed. Dennis Cosgrove (London: Reaktion Books, 1999), 214. For a discussion on the concept of colonial inhabitation see Malcom Ferdinand, Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022).

2 Daniel Thornton, et. al., “Assessing the umbrella value of a range-wide conservation network for jaguars (Panthera Onca),” in Ecological Applications, 26 no. 4 (2016): 1112.

3 Alan Rabinowitz and Kathy A. Zeller, “A rangewide model of landscape connectivity and conservation for the jaguar, Panthera onca,” Biological Conservation, 143, no. 4 (2010), 944.

4 This research has also benefited from the 2019 Global Studies and Critical Theory on Planetary Urbanization summer workshop organized by the Academy of Global Humanities and Critical Theory, and the wonderful and insightful feminist group Las Lámparas.

Geographer Jineth Rodriguez worked with me in developing the GIS data.

5 Erik Swyngedouw and Maria Kaika, “ReNaturing Cities: Great promises, deadlock… and new beginnings?” in Handbook of Cities and the Environment, ed. Kevin Archer and Kris Bezdecny (Northampton: Elgar Publishing, 2016), 44.

6 Alan Rabinowitz, An Indomitable Beast: The remarkable journey of the jaguar (Washington: Island Press, 2014), 151.

7 Melissa Arias, “The Illegal Trade in Jaguars (Panthera Onca),” (CITES, 2021).

8 Latin America is the world’s riskiest place to be an environmental activist. In 2020 more than two thirds of worldwide murders of activists occurred in this region, with Colombia, Mexico, and Brazil at the top of the list. See “Last Line of Defense: The industries causing the climate crisis and attacks against land and environmental defenders,” Global Witness, September 2021.

9 Büscher, Bram, and Robert Fletcher, The Conservation Revolution: Radical Ideas for Saving Nature Beyond the Anthropocene (London: Verso, 2020), 142.

10 Naomi Nelson, in conversation with the seminar, May 8, 2023.

11 Alyson Vargas, in conversation with the seminar, May 8, 2023.

12 This call to decenter cities is emphasized in Hillary Angelo, “From the city lens toward urbanization as a way of seeing: Country/city binaries on an urbanizing planet,” Urban Studies 54, no. 1 (2017) 158–175.

21

In Support of Transgressive Practices

22

PLATFORM 2023–2024

CIVICS AND PLACEMAKING

Cultivating New Landscape Imaginaries MAGGIE HANSEN

Social movements are projects of reimagination and the organization of ongoing action. A landscape architect’s tools are well-suited for these tasks of shaping public imaginations and defining the first steps to build it. Ideas for change, like gardens, require tending by many hands to take root and flourish. Creating actionable visions of more environmentally sustainable ways of living requires the slow work of learning the nuances of a site and its constituents. Realizing these visions of change requires a capability to act beyond the limited moments of direct action within a project scope—for designers this is typically demolition, construction, occupancy.

While the timeline for imagining, promoting, building, and growing a landscape should be slow and meandering, a landscape architect’s work is often constrained by limited time and access to the places we design and the communities we serve.

Our work may be further constrained by a site boundary, while the issues we aim to address—the impacts of climate change, biodiversity loss, and income inequality— register in our environment in patterns that do not obey land use boundaries or a specific agency’s jurisdiction.

Fig. 1 Credit: Thomas Meredith.

Conventional landscape architecture projects are framed by these boundaries.

The potential of our discipline to shape new imaginaries about how to engage these concerns lies in its complex contextual dependencies and its engagement with dynamic and constant change. Emerging conversations in design question the usefulness of obeying the conventions

of landscape practice, recognizing that the way we have been building on and caring for land must change. And from these questions, alternative approaches to making landscapes are being modeled.

These transgressive practices challenge disciplinary boundaries in order to catalyze policy change, informed by an understanding of the long-term environmental impacts on the ground.

As the 2021–2023 Meadows Foundation Centennial Fellow, I convened the symposium, Transgressive Practices to Transformative Policy: Landscape Change, Fast & Slow (fig. 1). The event brought together four designer-scholars whose work explores how landscape architects can shape social and ecological relationships.

Responding to a call for landscape architects to embrace “transgressive practices,” the panelists proposed models of imagining, caring for, and making landscapes through practices with deep commitments to place. Documentation of the event’s presentations and discussion will be shared through a forthcoming volume of the Centerline series published by the school’s Center for American Architecture and Design.

Reflecting on the event, I have identified four ways that individual design projects can contribute to new public imaginations for how we build on and care for the land, while challenging the policies that often limit our work to replicating the status quo. These emerged from my own work in community-based practice. I volunteered with the Gowanus Canal Conservancy from 2011 to 2014, and have continued to 23

study their work through interviews and site visits. And as a former director of the Small Center for Collaborative Design at Tulane School of Architecture, the outreach arm for the school, I had the honor of celebrating the official opening of Parisite Skatepark, after the Center helped with advocacy for the park and installed the park’s entry plaza and raingardens through a design-build course. These are just two projects that leverage ongoing design efforts to promote local engagement in shaping public space and caring for land.

There are projects across the country that engage these processes. While some are led by designers and others by grassroots efforts, landscape architects can learn a lot from how incremental and ongoing practices to make and care for a place can serve as tools for organizing an engaged environmental public.

Figs. 2-4 Credit: Gowanus Canal Conservancy.

24

PLATFORM 2023–2024

CIVICS AND PLACEMAKING

Sustained Commitment to a Counter-Reality: Fast Prototypes and Ongoing Care

Holding up an ideal of a more just and ecologically sustainable world requires a commitment and hope for ideas that may not seem realistic in the immediate future.

Working toward this counter-reality, as philosopher Judith Butler describes it in her writing on ethics in social movements, requires a willingness to be called naïve or dismissed as hopeful, and it requires the tenacity to continue to work toward an ideal.1 The Gowanus Canal Conservancy (GCC) began in 2006 as a nonprofit environmental advocacy group, initially engaged in conversations about the cleanup and remediation of the Gowanus Canal.

Locally the organization’s identity as a “conservancy” references the city’s Central Park Conservancy, which led efforts to improve and enhance the park after a period of decline.2 This framing signals a deep commitment to an idea of the canal and its watershed as a diverse, living ecosystem worthy of the care given to the best public parks. For many New Yorkers, this image of the Gowanus is a counterreality for a waterbody that is plagued by historic industrial pollution and ongoing combined sewer overflows. The GCC has

helped to change these perceptions through a long-term commitment to improving the sustainability and biodiversity of the area through physical design interventions, ongoing stewardship, and other visible actions of care.

The GCC’s early work took the form of building small but visible prototypes of stormwater management infrastructure.

Through community workdays, GCC staff would lead volunteers and interns through the process of installing and tending streetside bioswales and raingardens.

Alongside these efforts, the Conservancy led trainings on street tree pruning, citizen science surveys of street trees and plant species, and walking tours of the neighborhood ecology and history (figs.

2, 3). In collaboration with the Gowanus Dredgers, they toured the canal on canoes.

Their canoe rides actualized the idea of the Gowanus Canal as a recreational waterbody, thereby strengthening the argument to the EPA for a higher standard of remediation (fig. 4).

The performance of maintenance, tours, and landscape interventions supported the GCC’s message that this was a place worthy of care, and created opportunities

to talk with community members about current political discussions relating to the neighborhood’s future. Each new bioswale was yet another prototype in the public realm of a more ecologically diverse and sustainable neighborhood. While caring for the bioswales, the GCC gathered information on the health of the plants, the perception of the public, and the height of the local groundwater. As their partnerships with the City of New York grew, they were able to use this information to improve the reception and environmental function of future installations. The Conservancy’s presence demonstrated a commitment to their image of the watershed, and built trusting relationships with the local community and government agencies.

These conversations and partnerships informed the priorities for the GCC as the neighborhood has undergone gentrification and change. The organization formed alliances with other social and environmental groups to advocate for the needs of the local public housing community and for the health of the local environment as a public space. The GCC leadership envisions a future for the organization that is even more deeply embedded: a conservancy that is paid to 25

steward its public spaces led by residents who have grown up in the neighborhood.3 To do so requires that they continue to pursue paid contracts to care for the public spaces, in order to employ and mentor local youth to do this work, while also building a stabilized nonprofit organization for the next generation of local leaders to take over. Their work continues to both build and promote an idea of a neighborhood worthy of investment and stewarded by the community: a working prototype of an urban conservancy.

between the city and the university. Just as critical to making the case was the trust and goodwill associated with the Small Center’s Design Build Manager, Emilie Taylor Welty, who had worked in collaboration with multiple city agencies throughout her career in community-based design. Through Emilie’s network, the skaters connected to leaders of the New Orleans Recreation Development Foundation, who were looking for a place to install skate ramps donated by Red Bull and Spohn Ranch.

Political Friendship: Building Trust in Place

Social practice requires an artful use of social skills. Realizing design projects is always deeply relational work. Few designs can be constructed without collaboration.

Working toward change and working to realize ideas outside of the ease of the status quo requires productive and trusting relationships. Political theorist Danielle Allen describes this as a political use of the habits of friendship: reciprocity, turntaking, mutual exchange, and recognition of a shared life.4 The trust and good will of political friendship opens opportunities to reconsider long-held beliefs or to offer a compromise.

When the City of New Orleans threatened to demolish Parisite Skatepark,5 an unpermitted DIY recreation space, the skating community succeeded in defending the park by activating these kinds of political friendships (fig. 5). The skaters had been creating skateable surfaces in the area for two years, actively promoting an atmosphere that welcomed a mix of ages, races, and backgrounds. Their advocacy for the park as a benefit to the city included testimonials from skaters on the importance of the all-girls-skate-night, and the mentorship young skaters found in a sport that kept them out of trouble.

These important relationships within the Parisite community made a compelling case, and were complemented by the skaters’ decision to work with The Small Center for Collaborative Design, the Tulane School of Architecture’s community design program.

Through the Small Center, the skaters’ cause gained credibility and they were able to leverage the institutional relationships

26

PLATFORM 2023–2024

CIVICS AND PLACEMAKING

These connections to corporate donors and municipal agencies further strengthened the case for approving the site’s use as a DIY skatepark. The support of multiple constituents in a variety of positions of power helped to change the city officials’ perception and embrace the idea that a park built by and for youth was an asset to the city. The skatepark’s approval created the first designated skatepark in New Orleans, and a shift in the City’s approach to community-led improvement

Fig. 5 Credit: Michael Wong / The Albert and Tina Small Center at Tulane School of Architecture.

These transgressive practices challenge disciplinary boundaries in order to catalyze policy change, informed by an understanding of the long-term environmental impacts on the ground.

of public space. None of this would have occurred without political friendships. These relationships take time and consistency to build; the trust required to try new ideas is earned by demonstrating that we’ll be there to fix what we break.

Alternative Models of Practice Require Alternative Models of Business

Conventional fee-for-service work rarely supports the amount of time and flexibility required to design in sustained dialogue with the dynamics and communities of a site. A different business model is needed.

Alternative modes of practice are often explored through funding models that allow for longer timelines and little expectation for profit—such as partnerships with academic research institutions, government agencies, and mission-driven nonprofits, or donor- or self-funded initiatives. A project cannot challenge the idea of land as a commodity if that project’s funding values only the bottom line.

What are a landscape architect’s obligations to the layered and interdependent relationships across and within a site; its stakeholders, its histories, its ecologies? As our society grapples with the global climate crisis and its disproportionate impact on already-vulnerable populations, we are uniquely positioned to help build a new socio-ecological ethos. To heal and prevent the destructive potential of our discipline, we need to break and rebuild some of the policies and practices that bound our work. It will require the courage to be transgressive, as we reimagine the way that we work and build the foundation for futures of radical hope. ◆ 1 Judith Butler, The Force of Nonviolence: An EthicoPolitical Bind (London: Verso, 2020).

2 This link was first pointed out to me by Michael Geffel; he writes about it in Michael Geffel, “Terrestrial Practices: Pulling Landscape Back to Earth,” Kerb 28 (2020): 84–87. For more on the Gowanus Canal Conservancy: gowanuscanalconservancy.org.

3 Interview with Andrea Parker, Executive Director of the Gowanus Canal Conservancy, June 5, 2022.

4 Danielle S. Allen, Talking to Strangers Anxieties of Citizenship Since Brown V. Board of Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.)

5 For more on Parisite Skatepark: Rudy Bruner 2019 Silver Medal Report, rudybruneraward.org/winners/ parisite-skatepark; Albert and Tina Small Center at Tulane School of Architecture profile, small.tulane. edu/project/parisite-skate-park.

27

All photographs

by Austin Civilian Conservation Corps (ACCC) members who participated in this research project.

Additional photos and ACCC members’ insights are available in Oden et al. (2022) and Solis et al.

(2023).

28

PLATFORM 2023–2024

CIVICS AND PLACEMAKING

The Civics of a Just Transition MICHAEL ODEN AND MIRIAM SOLIS

The Broader Civics of Placemaking in the Current Era

In discourses about the civics of placemaking, work—the concrete processes of labor involved in making places and the goods and services that support urban life—seems to often get short shrift.

The design dimensions of places and the ways in which the built environment promotes social interaction and qualities of life for residents are commonly foregrounded. Yet, work and the environment in its broader sense must be integrated in a more robust and meaningful concept of placemaking in the current era.

A key dimension of civic placemaking in the twenty-first century is the profound need to dramatically reduce the environmental harms associated with urban life in all of its dimensions. At the same time, the way that we produce and live in spaces must now confront the stark history and current realities of growing inequality, segregation, and racial and ethnic discrimination that shape the experiences of urban life in the United States.

Pulling together these particular elements of placemaking was the goal of a research program led by Miriam Solis, Michael Oden, and Katherine Lieberknecht of the Community and Regional Planning Program. In partnership with the City of Austin, this team has produced a number of publications under the rubric of Expanding Pathways to Quality Jobs in Austin’s Growing Green Economy.1 The broad normative framework animating our investigation integrated sustainable placemaking with the drive to expand climate justice in the context of social and environmental crises.

Sustainable placemaking demands that all new economic and physical development generate net improvement in environmental performance while producing more equitable outcomes for workers and residents. Such a “just transition” to a greener, low-carbon city is consonant with sustainable development, but emphasizes specifics. The just transition framework focuses on ways that

29

green policies can benefit lower-income households through reduced exposure to environmental harms, lower household costs, and improved access to quality jobs.2 Our research on the green economy at the national level, and at the local level in Austin, is grounded in these propositions.

Economy and Work in the Era of Climate Change and Growing Inequality Given inconsistent and incomplete policy at the national and state level, US cities have been leading efforts to mitigate climate change. The City of Austin is often viewed as a leader on a range of environmental issues. With active citizen support, policies implemented by City of Austin enterprises and departments have yielded significant progress in reducing per-capita greenhouse gas emissions and water consumption.

However, the actions of individual cities have a minimal impact on global climate dynamics in the absence of aggressive national and international interventions.

miners, workers in the oil and gas industries, and conventional energy generation plant personnel are typical examples. But when citizens and even experts are asked what green jobs are, responses are more varied.

Many would highlight obvious examples such as jobs in a solar panel manufacturing facility, while others might reference less common activities like working on an organic farm, repairing bicycles, or designing green buildings. And then there are more complex examples where part of a production process or work activity improves environmental performance or outcomes while other parts do not. A plumber is likely to install low-flow toilets and other water conserving appliances but also other standard, less efficient varieties.

In our research we first had to tackle this definitional challenge. A significant methodological advance in estimating green employment was offered by Vona et

In the US, there has been a damaging pattern of wavering commitment to aggressive climate action and investment in green technologies and industries.

Between 2009 and 2012 there were major federal research and development (R&D) and green investment initiatives, but by the second Obama administration, climate action policies were largely frozen and federal commitment and investment in green development fizzled.3 In 2021–2022, national policy shifted back via the passage of the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act. A key explanation for the waxing and waning of climate policy is the habitual invocation of negative economic narratives: aggressive environmental actions eliminate jobs, increase costs of goods and services, and stymie economic growth. Despite counter-narratives offering compelling evidence for the overall net-positive effects of climate and environmental actions, the job killer claim retains resonance.

One reason for this is definitional. The industries and occupations that might suffer from strong environmental policies are generally legible and well known—coal

30

PLATFORM 2023–2024

CIVICS AND PLACEMAKING

al. (2019), who employed an occupational approach using public secondary data.4 We extended their basic methods to estimate green jobs and green job growth at both the national and local levels. This process also yielded detailed occupational data that allowed us to understand the wage structure and educational attainment characteristics of green jobs—key information in evaluating just transition prospects for workers traditionally excluded from family supporting, career building jobs.

Green Job Growth and Equitable Access

Our analysis demonstrated that jobs directed toward improving environmental outcomes have grown significantly faster than overall employment both nationally and in the Austin region. In the Austin Metropolitan Statistical Area, our estimates show that green job growth added more than 19,500 net jobs in the 2010–2019

Our analysis demonstrated that jobs directed toward improving environmental outcomes have grown significantly faster than overall employment both nationally and in the Austin region. period as the green job share of total regional employment grew from 3.3% in 2010 to 4.18% in 2019. We also estimated that future green job growth in Travis County will be robust through 2028 and will generate more than 14,000 annual job openings over the 2018–2028 period.

Unfortunately, the pattern of green employment growth suggests that that lower-income communities, people of color, and women will face significant barriers accessing emerging green job opportunities.

Our estimates showed that green job growth is tilted toward occupations that typically require a bachelor’s degree or equivalent at the entry level.5 In the Austin MSA, roughly 76% of green employment in 2019 was in occupations requiring higher average educational levels to enter. We also found that women and people of color are underrepresented in the current green job mix, which has a disproportionate share of male workers and lower levels of racial and gender diversity when compared with all occupations nationally.

However, within our estimates of green occupational growth, there is evidence of promising career pathways to quality, well-paying jobs in the green economy for

residents that have historically had poor access. A segment of these jobs are in professional occupations requiring higher educational attainment (but less than a four-year degree). Here, the pathway for lower income students is through accumulation of skills and certified post-secondary degrees. For example, individuals can access certain professional service occupations such as environmental engineering technicians via two-year community college tracks, and continue, if desired, toward environmental engineering careers through a four-year college program.

A second important channel into green employment is through the skilled trades.

According to our Travis County estimates, there will also be an estimated 4,748 annual job openings in occupations not requiring high average formal education levels. Many of these are low-wage occupations, but over half of job openings in this category have average wages of over twenty dollars per hour (in 2019 real wages). These occupational categories were the focus of our analysis, and many occupations in this category—such as plumbers and pipefitters, electricians, building inspectors, and HVAC technicians—offered wages

31

of over twenty-five dollars per hour and prospects for upward mobility.

The next question in our inquiry was if local workforce and economic development institutions were positioned to facilitate access to these growing green occupations.

To better understand the role of local public and nonprofit institutions, twentyfive regional workforce and economic development organizations were interviewed. Background research and interview information revealed that the local political atmosphere has acted as a strong tide pushing against access to quality green jobs. Austin workforce development operates in a right-to-work context with low unionization and deregulated labor markets.

In light of weak labor institutions, private sector hostility to labor and workplace regulation is backed by state government policies and a long history of racial and ethnic discrimination. Against these forces, a select number of community and labor organizations and local government agencies have worked to address job access gaps by promoting workforce development as a key path linking green jobs programs with broader equity planning efforts. One fruit of these efforts was the Austin Climate Equity Plan published by the City in late 2021. The plan argues that the creation of green jobs will not only drive improved environmental and economic outcomes, but also address specific equity goals. The plan encourages increasing green job training opportunities for people of color and providing financial support to local green businesses owned by people of color.

Austin Workforce Development Institutions in the Just Transition Framework

As in all metro regions, the federal government funds Austin’s local workforce development board, the Workforce Solutions-Capital Area. The Austin board advances local workforce development goals by funding job placement providers and local training institutions; it also operates as an intermediary that brings together labor, private employers, education, government, and nonprofits.

Workforce Solutions-Capital Area spearheaded the adoption of the regional

32

PLATFORM 2023–2024

2017 Community Workforce Plan and its stated objective of ensuring ten thousand residents at or below 200% of the poverty level secure middle-skill jobs by 2021.

The Austin Community College system is another linchpin institution in advancing this goal by offering education and training that leads to associates degrees or industry certifications.

The Community Workforce Plan and, consequently, local workforce development efforts do not have a strong green jobs orientation. Four of the eight workforce development organizations interviewed did not offer any training for the occupations with green activities identified above.

Local workforce development efforts are largely focused on healthcare, information technology, and skilled trades industry partnerships.

Austin Community College was the most significant institution providing training for the green jobs that are projected to experience high growth in the Austin area and not associated with high levels of

CIVICS AND PLACEMAKING

educational attainment—plumbers and pipefitters; automotive service technicians and mechanics; inspectors; and heavy truck drivers.

The majority of workforce training organizations interviewed offered training that was typically intermediate in length and did not have clear post-program pathways into the skilled trades. The “high-road” programs focusing on quality jobs with green occupational tasks were the exception. Austin Community College and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers offer certificate, pre-apprenticeship, and apprenticeship opportunities in the skilled trades, including electricians and HVAC technicians—middlewage green occupations in high-growth sectors. This example suggests some possibility to conceptualize and implement approaches that enable participants starting with a GED-level of education to advance into quality career-building jobs.

Beyond their meager focus on career pathway strategies of workforce

commitment to fostering equitable green job growth. Workforce development organizations emphasized the need for structured partnerships between government, nonprofit organizations, businesses, and specific communities in order to act on green job development. Our research in this area indicates that more decisive, innovative action is needed to cultivate the systemic changes required to advance just transition goals in Austin’s deregulated, low-union environment.

Building a Just Transition to Green Cities

Focusing on the role of work in placemaking in the context of the environmental crisis and growing inequality, our research attempts to unpack the character of green job growth and opportunities to connect residents with historically poor access to career-building employment.

development, most Austin training organizations did not explicitly focus on the diversity of participants. The majority of organizations indicated that they recruit strictly based on income and acknowledged racial equity as a challenge. Explicitly attending to racial and ethnic inequalities in programming is needed given disparities in post-program hiring and wages. A year after their participation in training, Black and Latinx men and women were more likely to earn less than their white counterparts.

The biggest disparities in earnings existed in the skilled trades, where white men earned an average of $9,320 more than Black participants per year.6 It is crucial to address the gap between local green economic and workforce development initiatives and the training of a diverse workforce in order to make meaningful progress toward building equitable green career pathways. Most private and NGO sector respondents conveyed that they were unaware of the City’s recent climate action goals, let alone its Climate Equity Plan’s expressed

Despite Austin’s image as a progressive city at the forefront of innovative and effective actions across a spectrum of environmental areas, City and economic development leaders have not meaningfully focused on labor workforce development in the context of advancing sustainability and climate justice. There is no doubt local authorities and leaders are constrained by the political environment—particularly the weak labor market regulation and protections. However, our research profiled a few clear and feasible actions that could be considered to make progress toward just transition goals.

First, the City could further build stronger links between specific communities and green activities and jobs by expanding the city’s new Climate Ambassadors initiative.

These initiatives could create a permanent network of residents who, as paid workers, would increase awareness of and participation in a variety of environmental actions at the community level. As a second possible initiative, the City of Austin could collaborate more directly with the local workforce development board, area employers, and labor unions to expand paid apprenticeship programs in occupations with significant green job tasks. ◆

1 Michael Oden, Miriam Solis, Katherine Lieberknecht, Haijing Liu, Tony Bassiri, and Kaileen McHugh, “Expanding Pathways to Quality Jobs in Austin’s Growing Green Economy,” The University of Texas at Austin Community and Regional Planning Program, 2022; Miriam Solis, Michael Oden, Katherine Lieberknecht and Haijing Liu. “Labor Lacuna: Disjuncture’s Between Local Climate Action and Workforce Development in Advancing Just Transitions” (submitted for publication, 2023).

2 J. M. Cha, M. Pastor, C. Moreno, and M. Phillips, “Just Transition/Transition to Justice: Power, Policy and Possibilities,” USC Equity Research Institute, June 2021; J. M. Cha, V. Price, D. Stevis, T. E. Vachon, and M. Brescia-Weiler, “Workers and Communities in Transition: Report of the Just Transition Listening Project,” Labor for Sustainability Network, March 2021; X. Wang and K. Lo, “Just Transition: A Conceptual Review,” Energy Research & Social Science 82 (2021), DOI: 102291.

3 J. Jenkins, M. Muro, T. Nordhaus, M. Shellenberger, L. Tawney, and A. Trembath, “Beyond Boom and Bust: Putting Clean Tech on a Path to Subsidy Independence,” Breakthrough Institute, Brookings Institution, Massachusetts, 2012.

4 F. Vona, G. Marin, and D. Consoli, “Measures, Drivers and Effects of Green Employment: Evidence from US Local Labor Markets, 2006–2014,” Journal of Economic Geography 19, no. 5 (2019): 1021–1048. In this method, Vona et al. first identified green tasks according to the Department of Labor’s Occupational Information Network (O*NET). The green tasks are either associated with “green enhanced skills” or “green new and emerging” occupations. Many occupations have no green tasks associated with their work activities. For occupations with some green tasks, O*NET uses the distinction between green tasks and non-green tasks to quantify the portion of work time that each occupation dedicates to green activities at the 8-digit Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) level.

For example, for occupation SOC-47-2181Roofers, O*NET identifies twenty-nine discrete job tasks associated with this occupation. O*NET identifies nine tasks associated with roofing that improve the environmental performance of roofs. This yields a green score or greenness ratio of .31 (9 divided by 29) for this occupation.

5 Michael Oden, Miriam Solis, Katherine Lieberknecht, Haijing Liu, Tony Bassiri, and Kaileen McHugh, “Expanding Pathways to Quality Jobs in Austin’s Growing Green Economy,” The University of Texas at Austin Community and Regional Planning Program, 2022.

6 G. Cumpton, C. Juniper, and A. Patnaik, “Austin Metro Area Community Workforce Plan Year Two Evaluation Report,” The University of Texas at Austin Ray Marshall Center for the Study of Human Resources, 2020.

33

Multispecies Lounge

Left: Photo by Double Happiness.

Above: Axonometric drawing by Double Happiness with Michelle A. Franks (MID ‘23).

NEREA FELIZ AND JOYCE HWANG

Multispecies Lounge was created by Associate Professor Nerea Feliz and Joyce Hwang, of the University at Buffalo, through their artistic practice Double Happiness. It was on view May 26–September 25, 2023, at The Bentway Studio facing Canoe Landing Park in downtown Toronto. This temporary piece was part of Beyond Concrete, an exhibition by the The Bentway offering a series of installations, performances, conversations, and events that considered how urban nature and the built environment can co-exist in new ways to improve public spaces in the city.

Photos by Jack Landau.

When we think of civics and placemaking, we tend to think of cities as human-territory and citizens as people. But the reality is that, despite the hostility of our urban spaces toward non-human species, cities are home to a multiplicity of life forms. Multispecies Lounge, a project commissioned by Toronto’s The Bentway, aims to make visible under-acknowledged non-human populations, which are active participants of urban life in Toronto, by attracting them and bringing attention to their presence. The project presents a constructed environment for cohabitation, with a collection of multispecies urban furnishings integrating bird houses, insect habitats, hibernacula for smaller terrestrial animals, and seating for humans.

The installation helps to raise awareness about the urban wildlife that traverse and reside within the built environment in and around Canoe Landing Park in Toronto. Habitat conditions in the project cater to familiar species of popular appeal, such as American robins, barn swallows, and other charismatic songbirds, while equally providing refuge for less-recognized urban fauna such as solitary bees and Dekay’s brownsnake. The project also facilitates information about a selection of local urban wildlife. Visitors can access an acoustic component of the project, the “Lounge Voices,” on any device using QR codes (also available at thebentway.ca/event/multispecies-lounge). “Lounge Voices” consists of a series of first-person narratives about these species’ epic stories of survival and adaptation to the city.

36

PLATFORM 2023–2024

CIVICS AND PLACEMAKING

The reality is that, despite the hostility of our urban spaces toward non-human species, cities are home to a multiplicity of life forms.

Using renewable resources such as red cedar, as well as recycled materials like discarded construction waste, the project’s material ecology advocates for circular economies in design and construction. A series of gabions filled with concrete debris from an adjacent demolition site provides both an above-ground foundation and habitats for local insects and reptiles.

Ten eight-foot-tall towers hold a range of bird house types (box, shelve, and cup form) to accommodate different nesting necessities. Lower cedar towers incorporate seven insect hotels. We anticipate that the bird houses and insect habitats, which are installed independently from the outdoor lounge’s thirty-two seats for people, will be donated for educational purposes to schools in the surrounding neighborhood.

Multispecies Lounge offers both daytime and nighttime viewing experiences, offering glimpses into the urban experience of nonhuman citizens. The installation features UV reflective graphics as a nod toward insects’ and birds’ ability to see beyond the light spectrum visible to humans. The surfaces of the habitats are decorated with a series of patterns that change appearance under UV light, much like natural patterns present in nature that are invisible to the human eye. At night visitors have the opportunity to experience the installation visually through black light, further amplifying visual perception through a more-than-human lens.

By creating a leisure space for interspecies encounters, Multispecies Lounge seeks to cultivate environmental awareness and a sense of intimacy between us and other life forms that inhabit the city, fostering respect, curiosity, and even admiration toward their formidable resilience. ◆

37

38

PLATFORM 2023–2024

CIVICS AND PLACEMAKING

Above and left: Elevation drawings showing UV graphics, by Double Happiness with Michelle A. Franks (MID ‘23).

Below: Plan drawing by Double Happiness with Michelle A. Franks (MID ‘23).

39

Plume KORY BIEG AND CLAY ODOM

Above and left: Plume is an original work owned and commissioned by the City of Austin and designed by Kory Bieg and Clay Odom. Photos

by Philip Rogers.

Plume is part of an ongoing design and research collaboration between associate professors Kory Bieg and Clay Odom. Their focus lies in translating digitally conceived prototypes into permanent, site-specific architectural works that dynamically interact with and impact urban contexts.

41

Plume is a permanent public art project at the Austin-Bergstrom International Airport that was commissioned by the City of Austin as part of its Cultural Arts Division’s Art in Public Places program. The work challenges perceptions and preconceptions, activates its surrounding context, and serves as a defining element for pedestrians traveling from the long-term parking lot to the airport. The artwork embodies the essence of Austin while symbolizing the complex and intricate systems that support modern air travel. As both a way-finding device and reference for the broader context of Austin, the project acts—much like the airport—as a connector of both near and far.

The project takes its form as a contemporary reinterpretation of the ancient obelisk. Using advanced design processes and a range of fabrication tools, Plume was designed as a modern monument coded with narrative and

42

PLATFORM 2023–2024

CIVICS AND PLACEMAKING

performance. Its dynamic appearance— like the changing iridescence and fillagree of a grackle’s feathers or the elusive, dissipating cloud of a jet contrail—offers a unique view from every angle—sometimes appearing solid and textured, other times intricately layered and porous.

As visitors approach, the solidity of the obelisk dissolves into lines of movement traversing the surface, punctuated by clusters of perpendicular brackets like planes on a flight path. Glimmers of the purple interior reflect against the exterior aluminum rods. At night, interior LED lighting causes the 3D-printed interior to glow while the complex pattern of the exterior fades. Through its form, material, and pattern, Plume captures the essence of Austin’s slogan, “Keep Austin Weird,” by engaging the need for a lasting monument to its contemporary moment while embracing the impermanence and complexity of the systems of travel it represents.

base object: resul ng form

beginning object example of areas removed

interior object

outside surface pipes hosted on base object

interior object removed from base object. area between outside form and interior space is created

cloud or nest of lines inserted between outside and interior space. hosts ligh ng

convergence of interior and exterior exterior pipe assembly as variable surface interior volumetric meshwork. holds ligh ng

=

base form

+

form of interior space

interior removed from base crea ng space inside of object

=

43

44

PLATFORM 2023–2024

CIVICS AND PLACEMAKING

Fabrication and assembly of the project involved a combination of digital and analog methods, defining the work’s formal and experiential agenda, while contributing to the project’s aesthetic qualities across different scales. Plume is constructed from a combination of materials and techniques.

Its interior features a robotically 3D-printed structural matrix painted with an iridescent purple. This matrix is wrapped with an exterior surface made from more than five thousand linear feet of 3/8-inch-diameter cold-bent aluminum rods composed into a series of panels supported by custom lasercut aluminum brackets. The brackets also determine the rods’ spacing, allowing them to seamlessly merge from one panel to the next. The panels are finished with varying levels of matte and reflective anodized coatings. The finish and the circular section of each rod, working together with the larger panel bends, combine to form an outer surface that mirrors and distorts its environmental and programmatic context.

The effect varies dynamically as one moves around the structure; the reflection of the exterior blends with the interior around the circular cross-section of each rod, creating an oscillating effect that blurs interior and exterior, form and context. Although impossible to simulate the effect precisely, the design of the complex inner and outer assemblies was intentionally executed based on a detailed and accurate 3D model and a series of at-scale physical prototypes.

The design of Plume relied on a parametric 3D model that accounted for every part to ensure seamless integration and adherence to precise tolerances. Given the complexity of the assembly, it was crucial to have a detailed digital model with complete fabrication and assembly information so that the entire project could be updated and coordinated with even the smallest change to an individual part. While certain elements were standardized, hundreds of unique 3D-printed parts were utilized to connect larger panel assemblies to the core.

Coordinating multiple technologies and fabrication methods was essential to the project’s success. ◆

As both a wayfinding device and reference for the broader context of Austin, the project acts—much like the airport—as a connector of both near and far.

Opposite page: Photos

by Philip Rogers.

45

Fig. 1 (above) Students documenting a 1936 building at Carlsbad Caverns National Park.

Benjamin Ibarra-Sevilla Fig. 2 (left) Students at Carlsbad Caverns National Park. Benjamin Ibarra-Sevilla

46

PLATFORM 2023–2024

CIVICS AND PLACEMAKING

Placemaking

The Role of Historic Preservation and Building Documentation in Creating Inspiring Public Spaces BENJAMIN IBARRA-SEVILLA

On the one hand, placemaking involves intentionally shaping vibrant spaces that allow for new experiences and expanded ways for people to interact. On the other hand, placemaking also involves protecting significant historic buildings, sites, and landscapes to safeguard our cultural heritage and ensure the continuity of history and memory for future generations.

Challenges of balancing these seemingly divergent aims become more complicated—and more contested—when working in the public realm. In times of rapid social and technological change, successful syntheses of creation and conservation become increasingly important. Work done by the School of Architecture’s Historic Preservation Program in some of our country’s national parks shows how to achieve successful results.

Placemaking and Historic Preservation

Historic buildings and landscapes possess unique characters and tangible connections to the past. They evoke a particular time and a specific place, serving as visual anchors that ground a community in its history and identity. Incorporating historic buildings and sites into placemaking efforts allows for the preservation and celebration of the community’s cultural heritage, fostering collective memory.

The connection between placemaking and historic preservation goes beyond aesthetics and cultural significance. Historic buildings have a social and economic value that can be harnessed to drive sustainable development. Preserving and repurposing these structures can revitalize neighborhoods, attract tourism, and stimulate economic growth. By activating historic buildings as community hubs, cultural institutions, or small businesses, placemaking efforts can contribute to the vitality and economic viability of a place.

A good argument for historic preservation as a placemaking strategy is that it aligns with the principles of environmental sustainability. Rehabilitating and reusing existing buildings minimizes resource consumption and reduces carbon emissions associated with new construction. By incorporating sustainable design practices into preservation projects, placemaking can promote environmentally responsible development, creating public spaces that are not only inspiring but also environmentally friendly.

47

Figs. 3 and 4 (right) Students documenting a 1936 building at Carlsbad Caverns National Park. Benjamin Ibarra-Sevilla.

Fig. 5 (below right) Students presenting work to National Park Service officials.

Benjamin Ibarra-Sevilla.

Historic preservation has evolved beyond its traditional role of protecting culturally significant buildings and landscapes. It has emerged as an avenue for achieving economic growth and social equity, particularly in the realm of affordable housing. Preservation-based affordable housing projects leverage the existing infrastructure and character of historic buildings through adaptive reuse, repurposing them into affordable housing units. By utilizing existing structures, these projects reduce construction costs and time while preserving the architectural heritage of communities. This approach not only addresses the pressing issue of housing affordability but also contributes to the revitalization of neighborhoods, attracting residents and businesses, and stimulating economic growth.

socio-economic backgrounds can live together, fostering social cohesion and supporting long-term community resilience.

It aligns with principles of environmental sustainability by reducing the demand for new construction and incorporating energyefficient technologies.

Preservation-based affordable housing promotes social equity by preserving the existing fabric of communities, mitigating the displacement often associated with gentrification. By maintaining the character and affordability of neighborhoods, these projects create inclusive, mixed-income communities where people from diverse

Our Historic Preservation Program offers a rigorous academic curriculum that equips students with the knowledge and skills necessary to address interrelated questions related to the preservation, conservation, and restoration of built environments.

However, academic instruction alone cannot fully prepare students for the complexities

48

PLATFORM 2023–2024

The intertwined values and strategies of placemaking and historic preservation make it possible to highlight the value of our built heritage while also creating inspiring public spaces. By integrating historic buildings into placemaking efforts, we can leverage their authenticity, cultural significance, and aesthetic qualities to foster a stronger sense of place, community engagement, and economic vitality.

Partnership: The Historic Preservation Program and the National Park Service

CIVICS AND PLACEMAKING

and challenges of real-world preservation projects. This is where the ongoing partnership with the National Park Service becomes instrumental: it enables students to engage in hands-on learning experiences, allowing them to apply their theoretical knowledge to practical preservation efforts while gaining invaluable insights into the professional field.

Over the last eight years, the partnership between the Historic Preservation Program and the National Park Service has proven to be a fruitful collaboration that mutually benefits both institutions in accomplishing their respective missions. This educational relationship has provided valuable learning opportunities for students while supporting the preservation efforts of the National Park Service.

The National Park Service benefits from this partnership by harnessing the enthusiasm, fresh perspectives, and expertise of the students. The documentation and condition assessments of historic buildings carried out by the students provide the National Park Service with critical information for making informed decisions regarding

the preservation, maintenance, and interpretation of these structures. The students’ contributions thus play a vital role in the long-term stewardship and conservation of historic resources within the National Park System.

Additionally, the partnership serves as a platform for knowledge exchange and innovation. Faculty members from the School of Architecture collaborate with National Park Service professionals to develop best practices, methodologies, and strategies for preserving historic buildings— fostering a spirit of continuous learning and improvement.

These outcomes support the missions of both institutions. The Historic Preservation Program is dedicated to advancing the field through education, research, and community engagement. The partnership fulfills this mission by providing students with practical experiences and by actively participating in professional conversations that contribute to the preservation of our cultural heritage.

Students come to understand how these historic buildings can serve as anchors of identity and memory within a community.

Similarly, the National Park Service is committed to preserving the nation’s natural and cultural resources for future generations. The partnership enables the National Park Service to tap into the expertise and passion of the students, expanding its capacity for preserving historic buildings and sites while engaging the field’s future leaders.

This partnership serves to educate students about the importance of cultural heritage and the need for its preservation.

By engaging in preservation projects with the National Park Service, students develop a deeper sense of responsibility and stewardship, becoming experienced advocates for the preservation and interpretation of our shared heritage. In addition, these experiences have provided an identity to our program—one that helps future students recognize the value of the curriculum and philosophy behind it.

Student Participation: Documenting Historic Buildings and Placemaking Education

One of the key aspects of the partnership between the Historic Preservation Program

49

50

PLATFORM 2023–2024

CIVICS AND PLACEMAKING

and the National Park Service is the documentation of historic buildings within the parks. This hands-on engagement provides students with unique educational opportunities that enrich their academic experience and contribute to the creation of inspiring public spaces through a placemaking framework.

When students are tasked with documenting historic buildings, they are immersed in a process that requires a deep understanding of architectural elements, historical context, and preservation principles. Through meticulous fieldwork, students learn to observe, measure, and record the physical attributes and conditions of the buildings. This process involves conducting research, analyzing primary and secondary sources, and interviewing experts or local community members who may have knowledge about the structures.

Fig. 6 Measured drawings (elevations of Superintendent’s Building at Carlsbad Caverns National Park), completed 2018–2020 by students under the guidance of Associate Professor Benjamin Ibarra-Sevilla: Beatriz Alba (MSE ‘18), Anthony Vannette (BArch ‘19), Junyeoung Jeon (MArch ‘19), Lauren Kelly, Tolu Oliyide (MSHP ‘20), Vangie Ulila (MSHP ‘20), Sofia Gonzalez (MA ‘21), Estefania Barreto (MSHP ‘20), Eliza Blackman (MSHP ‘21), Laura Christman, Diana Hernandez (MSHP ‘21), Sydney Landers (MSHP ‘21), and Ali Wysopal (MSHP ‘21).

Through these activities, students develop research capabilities, critical thinking skills, and an appreciation for the complexity of historic preservation. They learn to navigate the challenges posed by historical gaps, incomplete documentation, and evolving conservation practices.

The students’ work contributes to the body of knowledge about these historic buildings, providing valuable information that is documented for future research, interpretation, and preservation efforts.

But educational opportunities arising from this partnership extend beyond technical skills and historical research. The National Park Service serves as a kind of client for the students, exposing them to the dynamics of professional relationships and the need to balance multiple stakeholders’ interests. Through interactions with National Park Service professionals, students learn to navigate the complexities of project management, communication, and collaboration.

This firsthand experience on real preservation projects instills a greater sense of responsibility and stewardship among the students. They become more acutely aware of the significance and complexity of cultural heritage and the urgent need to protect and preserve it for

future generations. This understanding often goes beyond that of a mere academic exercise; we have seen how it translates into a student’s personal commitment to the buildings they document and to the broader cultural landscape.

Over a semester, students come to understand how these historic buildings can serve as anchors of identity and memory within a community, and how the structures can contribute to the creation of inspiring public spaces that reflect the community’s cultural heritage and enhance a sense of place. In part, this knowledge positions them to develop and employ the tools of preservation advocacy. But students are also challenged to think critically and imaginatively about how one might adapt and repurpose these constructions to meet contemporary needs. Students also envision appropriate reuses of these buildings. This creative problem-solving aligns with the principles of placemaking, which emphasize the active engagement of stakeholders and the incorporation of diverse perspectives to create meaningful and vibrant public spaces.

Conclusion

Placemaking draws upon historic preservation principles to create public spaces that embody a sense of place and cultural continuity. By recognizing the value of our built heritage and integrating it into the design and activation of public spaces, placemaking leverages the authenticity and historical narratives of historic buildings to enrich the overall experience of a place.

The partnership between the Historic Preservation Program and the National Park Service builds a bridge between theory and practice through education. The opportunities to engage these culturally and naturally important places have helped us to build on our students’ passions for placemaking by giving them opportunities to not only learn new technical and critical thinking skills, but to understand and—even more importantly—take on the responsibilities to use them. Their work exemplifies the transformative power of placemaking, strengthened by integrating cultural heritage into the design and activation of public spaces. It also contributes to the creation of spaces that will serve as a source of inspiration for the American people. ◆

51

In the master plan, historic buildings with a distinctly different scale and character than much of the rest of the district are honored by the creation of a “Garden District” dominated by mature trees and an intimate scale. Photo © Albert Vecerka/Esto.

Architecture is a Team Sport LARRY SPECK

Several years ago, I wrote an article for the Japanese journal a+u as the introduction to a full issue they devoted to the design of the Kimbell Art Museum, credited to Louis Kahn. Kahn’s seminal and influential role in this iconic project is indisputable, but the article I wrote emphasized the many other people whose design contributions were surprisingly powerful in making this building into one of the most admired architectural works of the twentieth century. The point of the article was that the design of architectural projects—except for the most tiny and simple ones—are a team sport involving many minds, many talents, and close collaboration.

It seems somehow deceptive and diminishing to credit our works to a single architect or even a single firm. We need to be honest about how incredibly complex and demanding the design of a significant project is, and how many different capabilities and perspectives are required in the creation of a sophisticated work of architecture or urban design. This essay further demonstrates this point through a brief account of the design process of a very large and complicated project where I

was involved over much of the last decade: the Capitol Complex project in downtown Austin. Our firm, Page, was fortunate to be a part of the project from its earliest days. I personally played the role of senior principal and had the opportunity to witness the whole, rich design effort from conception to completion. I welcome this opportunity to describe the kind of highly collaborative design methodology that is essential in consequential urban projects like this one—a methodology that involves dozens of designers and hundreds of voices inspiring and shaping the final product.

Design work on the Capitol Complex project for the State of Texas began with a solicitation for professional services to create a master plan for the roughly forty blocks of mostly contiguous downtown real estate owned by the State in the center of Austin (most of the land between Eleventh Street on the south, Lavaca Street on the west, Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard on the north, and Trinity Street on the east). That effort became the 2016 Texas Capitol Complex Master Plan—the seminal document for the redevelopment of a large portion of that valuable asset.

53

Focused on the monumental State Capitol Building completed in 1888, the State’s land had been acquired piecemeal over more than a century. There had been previous master plans, including the truly scary 1956 Capitol Area Master Plan that proposed fourteen virtually identical office slabs marching like soldiers along Congress Avenue from the Capitol Building to what is now Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, and the much more benign 1989 Texas Capitol Preservation and Extension Master Plan proposed as part of the underground expansion of the Capitol Building completed around that time. No real master planning had been done in the nearly thirty years that followed.

The project manager for the Page team during this master planning phase was Jonathan Sylvie, who was ideally suited to manage this kind of hydra-headed project.

He is an engineer by training with a PhD and a long career of building challenging projects for complicated clients. Jon was an essential design force on the project since effective process management has a massive impact on what kind of input is gathered and what kind of decisions get made. Dan Kenney, who has an even longer history of involvement in large, complex projects, was the lead planner. His many years in a similar role at Sasaki, one of the most prominent specialized master planning firms in the country, gave Dan a deep understanding of planning design principles that few professionals can command. He has an extraordinary ability to envision the “big picture” and incredibly consequential details, all at the same time. Ryan Losch, who was trained as an architect but had recently completed a graduate degree in urban design at Harvard, worked closely with Dan and eventually took over the role of lead planner in the 2018 and 2020 updates to the plan.

Sasaki, based in the greater Boston area, was also a partner in the master planning process, contributing their broad and longstanding expertise in landscape architecture through the involvement of

54

PLATFORM 2023–2024

CIVICS AND PLACEMAKING

team members like Caroline Braga and Philip Dugdale, as well as Mary Anne Ocampo and others in broader planning issues. Page and Sasaki had both worked on the Dell Medical School Master Plan, which is just to the east of the Capitol Complex site, a few years earlier, which meant that most of the team had working relationships with each other and knew this part of Austin very well.

There were, of course, many other design consultants who had a powerful influence.

HR&A Advisors, led by Joseph Cahoon (MSCRP ‘00), contributed real estate and economic development expertise.

DeShazo Group did the traffic analysis, including modeling projected alternatives, and HWA Parking led by Troy Jamail did the assessment of both current and future parking supply and demand. Traffic and parking data shaped some of the most consequential design moves on the project, including decisions to significantly modify street movement patterns on Sixteenth Street and Eighteenth Street, and the commitment to completely eliminate cars from both North Congress Avenue and a portion of Seventeenth Street. A team of engineers from several different firms helped lead decisions about utility infrastructure.

Peter Maass was Deputy Executive Director of Property and Real Estate Management at the Texas Facilities Commission (TFC), serving as the primary client contact for the State. Peter’s more than ten years of service at TFC gave him incredible knowledge of the complicated political structure of the Texas state government.

Because this was a landmark project with a very large appropriation price tag, it needed to get input and buy-in from virtually every corner of governance. A primary impetus for the effort was a plan to consolidate state workers, historically spread out in leased space all over Austin, into the Capitol Complex in order to create operational efficiencies, provide better visitor access to agency offices, and eliminate the high and sometimes unpredictable cost of leases.

This meant dozens of agencies in the government had a stake.

The TFC arranged very large stakeholder meetings with representatives from the Governor’s Office, Lieutenant Governor’s Office, Office of the Speaker of the House, Texas State Preservation Board, Texas State History Museum, Texas Historical Commission, General Land Office, Texas Department of Public Safety, City of Austin, and various other interested agencies.

There were also two formal groups of legislators involved—the Partnership Advisory Commission and the Joint Oversight Committee on Government Facilities. Two very notable senators and their staffs—Republican Senator Kevin Eltife and Democratic Senator Kirk Watson—were major sources of input and feedback. This was a truly bipartisan effort.

Private meetings for input were also held with Governor Greg Abbot, Austin Mayor Steve Adler, and their aides.

Each of these stakeholders gave valuable input and really did help shape the design.

The Historical Commission, for example, helped us understand the opportunities in highlighting a small group of nineteenthcentury buildings that sat, rather anachronistically at the time, in the heart of the study area. The Bullock Museum had very strong ideas about both bus and car movement and drop-off possibilities around their building, both during construction and after completion, to help their operations perform smoothly and efficiently.

From all of these players and all of this collaboration, the 2016 Texas Capitol Complex Master Plan drew three “big ideas.” The first involved the conversion of North Congress Avenue into the Capitol Mall with five levels of parking below—a move that would support the densification of office workers in the heart of the complex while creating a lively new public open space for both events and everyday use by state workers and visitors. The second involved creating a garden district around the aforementioned historic

We need to be honest about how incredibly complex and demanding the design of a significant project is, and how many different capabilities and perspectives are required in the creation of a sophisticated work of architecture or urban design.

Opposite: The Capitol Mall comingles a wide range of users from office workers to tourists to local Austinites From everywhere on the mall the historic Capitol Building is the focus. Its importance as a landmark for the city is emphasized from the north side as it never has been before in its 142-year history. Photos © Albert Vecerka/Esto.

55

buildings that would have a distinctly different scale and character than the surrounding urban complex, and that would preserve not only the nineteenth-century buildings but also the heritage trees nestled around them. The third involved the creation of eight significant urban connections to other parts of the city as well as a major new gateway at the corner of Trinity and Fifteenth Streets.

The Master Plan proposed three initial phases for implementing the new vision and a strategy for how those first projects could achieve the greatest design integrity and fidelity to the goal of creating a strong sense of place in the district, and not just a series of new buildings. Part of that strategy involved the creation of an “expert panel” to help play the client role as design progressed. Each of the group’s three members would be a distinguished design professional— one appointed by the Governor, one by the Lieutenant Governor, and one by the Speaker of the House.

A new RFQ was issued for design of the first phase of the project, soliciting a Master Architect/Engineer (Master A/E) to design the initial buildings and public spaces through a design development level of completion. Page, and the larger team we assembled, was again fortunate to be selected in that process. The first phase included the design of the mall itself from Sixteenth Street to Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard, the underground parking below it with street changes for access, and two state office buildings. The larger of the two, later named after former President George H. W. Bush, was designed to anchor the northeast corner of the mall and respond amiably to the Texas State History Museum anchoring the northwest corner. The smaller building, later named after former Congresswoman Barbara Jordan, occupied an infill site that would complete the eastern edge of the mall between Sixteenth and Seventeenth Streets.

diverse in their capabilities. The lead project manager was Paul Bielamowicz (BArch ‘00), who has degrees from The University of Texas at Austin in both architecture and engineering and has been assigned to complex urban problems both at SOM in Chicago, in his early career, and at Page for almost twenty years. Ginny Chilton, who graduated from Texas A&M and has been at Page for more than a decade, worked closely with Paul. Both of them critically impacted the design through not only their perceptions and ideas, but also through the perspective they gathered in coordinating input from TFC, stakeholders, engineers, landscape architects, and a myriad of other consultants.

Josh Coleman, who came to Page after doing graduate work at Yale and working for two top architectural firms in New York, worked closely with me and a very talented group of younger designers—among them Diana Su (MArch ‘11), Jonathan Schwartz (MArch ‘11), and Diane Rincon—on the overall design of the mall, garage, and office buildings. In particular, he was key in the design of the Bush Office Building, influencing everything from massing to skin design to lobby finishes. Diane HofferSchurecht, an Illinois Tech grad who, like Paul, had worked for SOM in Chicago before coming to Page eight years ago, was similarly very influential on the design of the Barbara Jordan Office Building.

As with the master plan, the teams for completing this design work were large and

There was a myriad of consultants on the Phase 1 Master A/E team, including some who had been key in the master planning phase. Landscape architects, traffic and parking consultants, civil engineers, utilities engineers, structural engineers, and many others—too many to call by name here—were involved. It is important to acknowledge what a fundamental and important influence on design comes from these consultants! Just as an example: a unique cascading circulation route both for cars and pedestrians was developed to improve wayfinding in the mammoth underground parking garage with very essential design assistance from parking

56

CIVICS AND PLACEMAKING

PLATFORM 2023–2024

consultant Troy Jamail. Without Troy’s deep knowledge, we never could have modeled, refined, and proven this unique design concept.

The expert panel was duly appointed, bringing three significant designers—David Lake (BSArchStds ‘77), Brad Nelsen, and Jaime Palomo (MSArchStds ‘93)—to collaborate in the effort. I cannot say enough good things about these three very talented architects. The many meetings with them were constructive, collaborative, productive, and even inspiring. Working with them made me very proud to be an architect—part of a profession dedicated to making the best physical environment possible, and not just advancing personal agendas.

When the drawings were nearing completion for the Master A/E phase of work, TFC put out RFQs to solicit applicants for the next phase’s architect and engineer of record roles. In the latter stages of the Master A/E work, it had become apparent that the decision to expand the Central

(both for exterior and interior public spaces), landscape design, and much of the detailing, there was still a great deal of design work to do for the completion of the contract documents package.

All of these firms did a consummate job of maintaining fidelity to the original design while also inserting new ideas and solving design problems at the smallest scale.

Budgets had to be rectified repeatedly as both construction markets and state financial pressures changed over time. The Master A/E team maintained involvement in an advisory capacity throughout this phase, working closely with the architects/ engineers of record and the TFC Facilities Design and Construction team, led very capably by John Raff. When the design and drawings were complete, the construction phase commenced. Therein is another fascinating story of teamwork and coordination to complete the final product.

Glass pavilions in the mall space connect downward via elevators and cascading stairs to five levels of underground parking. Photo © Albert Vecerka/Esto.

Utility Plant (CUP) to provide power for the new buildings was going to be too expansive and disruptive to make sense. A site was selected for a new CUP and the scope to design it was added to this solicitation. With this new project, four different architects/ engineers of record were selected to execute the final design phase.

CobbFendley was selected as engineer of record to complete drawings for excavation and utilities infrastructure for the entire complex. Jacobs was selected as architect/engineer of record for the CUP (with Carter Design Associates playing a significant architectural role). HKS was selected to be architect of record for the George H. W. Bush Building, and Kirksey Architecture was selected to be architect of record for both the Barbara Jordan Building and the mall and underground parking garage. Although drawings had been completed in the Master A/E phase for all of these scopes except the CUP to describe massing, plans, programmatic accommodation, skin, materials/finishes

The Phase I project for the Capitol Complex is now complete and occupied. It contributes to an extraordinary series of green open spaces that run south-to-north through the center of Austin, stretching from Eleventh Street and the Capitol Grounds to the new Capitol Mall, before connecting with the University at the newly renovated Blanton Museum of Art plaza and extending up Speedway Mall to Dean Keeton Street. For this entire fifteen-block sequence there is a broad, continuous bike- and pedestrianfriendly path with minimal car presence.

There is also shade and lush landscaping that together provide a gracious, pleasant public space for not only everyday movement, but also for events, festivals, informal gatherings, dining, play areas, outdoor workspaces, and much more.

Projects like this demonstrate how important collaboration from a broad range of capabilities and talents is to urban design, architecture, and placemaking. As in filmmaking, an orchestra performance, and many other creative enterprises, multiple individuals working together is a key to success. Architecture is a team sport. ◆

57

58

PLATFORM 2023–2024

CIVICS AND PLACEMAKING

Ripples of Hope COLEMAN COKER The following is excerpted from Coleman Coker and Sarah Gamble, Environmental Activism by Design (Applied Research and Design Publishing, 2022), 175–85. Reprinted with permission from Applied Research and Design Publishing.

We are living in a truly unique moment, one that gives us reason for hope. There is a sense that change is afoot, that we have awakened to the fact that things cannot go on as they were. We have begun to realize the damage we’ve done—and are doing—to our only home, taking responsibility for the ecological catastrophe we’ve wrought. This crisis is finally getting the attention it needs; it is high on the agenda in political debate and is making front-page news on a regular basis. The same is true of the entrenched social inequity that has so stained our nation… Responding in earnest, people who have never done so before are taking to the streets and demanding change, their impatience and frustration transformed into an unstoppable force. There is a sincere feeling that maybe this time it will mean something, that change can occur.

…

With the pandemic having completely overturned the world as we knew it, with our unsustainable lifestyles and societal injustices exposed, this time of upheaval has offered a pause in which we have the opportunity to reflect on how we want to live and where we want to go from here. Many have realized we must do something to change the direction in which we were headed. Many have already begun to bring about much-needed environmental and social change; the groundswell is being felt around the world, particularly by some political and corporate leaders who sense their entrenched ways of doing things is over. The adversity many have been facing—and are still grappling with—is motivating many to work more closely together to try to overcome the challenges and explore the possibilities for a better future. A blossoming sense of hope is being felt, but fundamental change is far from assured.

Yet, we’re beginning to see attitudes and approaches to issues that seemed insurmountable just a few years ago turn a corner. They’re not yet collectively large but momentum is there. Change is in the air. We have collective decisions to make, critical ones that will impact all life on this planet for some time. And we have very little time to decide whether we’ll confront the challenges ahead and fundamentally change how we live. We have a lot at stake and each of us has a role to play.

…

59

Making such a commitment doesn’t have to feel selfless. To be an effective means for change, motivation should begin out of self-interest, since self-preservation no doubt is a primary human driver. You might simply desire a better future for yourself.

That hope might then extend to those with whom you are closest. Your love for them might come in the form of your willingness to give a bit of your time and energy for them, for your children and grandchildren, whether you have them now or plan to in the future. The needs of everyone else may not seem as vital as your own; most of us aren’t as altruistic as Gandhi or Mother Theresa. But that’s all right, for when working to better our lives, and those we cherish, others inevitably benefit, whether they’re on the other side of the planet or some of the untold future generations.

This is because the problems we face are not local, regional, or even hemispheric; they are global in scope, and for centuries they will affect everyone. We all breathe the same air, drink the same water, eat food from the earth in which it grows, and, regardless of what side of the tracks you and your neighbors live on, we all share in the desire to make a better community in which to live. So, working to improve your local environment, even if the effort you put into it is meant for you, benefits everyone.

It’s okay to be a bit selfish. In the end, all of us gain from your activism. Contrary to that overused axiom, the whole is not greater than the sum of its parts. Each bit of it is a world of its own, inexorably intertwined with dominions upon dominions, each affecting the other in impactful ways that are sometimes knowable but more often hidden and mysterious, ever-changing and ever-growing. Each of us is one tiny part of that which impacts many others, all parts of equal value. When even the smallest measure is improved, all segments benefit likewise. What you do matters; the actions you take ripple out into the world in untold ways. As Robert F. Kennedy expressed: “Each of us can work to change a small portion of the events [of our world]. Each time…a man acts to improve the lot of others…he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy…those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls…”.1 What do you want your future to be? What kind of world do you intend to live in forty, fifty, and sixty years

60

PLATFORM 2023–2024

CIVICS AND PLACEMAKING

from now? You have the power to shape the future for all the world. Gather your courage and summon the will to become one of those waves of energy.

…

This book has spotlighted the work of dedicated design students and the community outreach work they have achieved. Shifting the focus from them as individuals to the broader community of design educators and practitioners and how they might get involved, it must first be underscored that we also have the responsibility—the capacity—to help blaze a new ethical path. Our discipline engenders the unique skillsets that help us effectively tackle many issues on many scales, even something so overwhelming as the climate crisis. We employ what’s come to be called design-thinking, nimble skillfulness to successfully respond to outsized problems.

As designers, we are pretty good at defining and then finding balanced responses to countless messy issues. Designing a building and getting it built is a monumental undertaking; it requires the combination of technical, social, ecological, and aesthetic capabilities. That effort is seldom a linear process but instead an ever-moving target, full of multiple shifting conditions with unpredictable manifold parts. Designers must have the ability to concurrently address the wishes of our clients; the demands of municipal governments, trade unions, and craftspeople; and the ethical and social needs of the community in which the building is built. We must attend to the comfort and safety of our building’s users, not to mention the lasting beauty that we are expected to achieve. We’re practiced in grouping multiple issues into manageable assemblages, breaking them down and finding appropriate responses. We’re accustomed to planning for unpredictability and then acting accordingly. We have learned how to imagine inventively and put that creativity into play. Designers have unique capabilities that can collectively think and act beyond the building norms that have brought us to the edge of calamity. By no means comparing what we are capable of to the scale of the problems the world is facing socially and ecologically, we are nonetheless adept at solving problems, often for years, sometimes decades, and even longer. Each effort we make, no matter its scale, goes toward repairing the damage. We are at a unique

moment in time. We can gather the courage needed to effectively employ our manyfaceted skills and respond to the complex social and ecological issues at hand, or we can continue narrowly focusing on issues that are increasingly irrelevant. Dare we use our wealth of imagination and help the human race craft a new ethical foundation that is grounded in compassion, empathy, and inclusion? We have the capability; when will we begin?

Design thinkers can certainly recognize social inequity and environmental injustice; sometimes we even contribute to the systems that create them. It takes courage to recognize that no matter how progressive we think we are, we contribute to the inequality and we need to own up to it. We can’t change longpracticed prejudicial acts alone, but we have leadership skills and can use them to motivate others, so that they recognize the implicit biases facing minorities and take action to prevent practices such as redlining or placing petrochemical plants or garbage dumps in Black and Brown neighborhoods. Through our professional work and community activism we must insist on respecting each and every person, no matter how unlike us they are. Likewise, the work we do as architects depends on millions of investment dollars, often over the many years it takes to realize our designs. What we propose can make others’ lives better but can also bring inequity and environmental harm; we’re no small participants in the neo-liberal economic system that operates on the assumption that greed is good. Our participation in that—maybe unknowingly—supports the notion that increased productivity and capital growth greases the wheels of success. Those who suffer most from our tacit inaction to challenge this idea are people of color, the disenfranchised, and the poorest among us. We need to find substantive ways to unhitch ourselves from a financial system designed for those who already have the most. We have the imagination to influence attitudes about how capital wealth can be reshaped.

As educators who teach design thinking, we can do a much better job when it comes to teaching young designers how to focus on inclusion, just what ethical design can really do, and how to put social equity and

environmental justice above all else. We can teach them that getting your building on the cover of Architectural Record is not nearly as important as helping a neighborhood get the clean water it deserves. There may not be courses in architecture school that teach students how to be socially compassionate, but we can insist that these ideas become part of a school’s foundational curricula.

We don’t typically offer seminars on basic empathy and social responsibility, but we can teach such courses if we choose.

Inclusive design thinking helps the future practitioner recognize social inequity and

by climate catastrophe. In doing so, we can broaden how we define ourselves as architects and designers. We can expand our communal responsibilities, so that in twenty-five years we hardly recognize what architecture schools have become. They might be reshaped to seamlessly integrate building community relationship, biology, forestry, social science, anthropology, law, and engineering, so that we become much more generalists instead of the specialists we try to convince ourselves we are not. Architecture schools might begin by asking students to reimagine our societal role. Instead of just designing buildings, we can expand our design horizons to support food growers in urban spaces to eliminate long-haul food distribution. We can help forests rebuild themselves so that they are diverse once again. We can develop programs geared toward community empowerment, self-sustenance, and health. We can design buildings to support kelp and algae farms that will supply their communities. We can design better living systems—what we used to call cities—so they integrate with their local ecologies. We can reshape our teaching methodologies so that they embed students into the communities in which they contribute their design skills, so that their field work focuses on learning to effectively communicate, empathize, and advocate. Designers can, and should, play a role in long term responses to the ecological catastrophe unfolding before our eyes.

For each of us, environmental activism by (through) design can mean designing our lives in ways so that we become more fulfilled, so that satisfaction is achieved through helping fulfill the lives of others and making a better world for them. That is the pond in which we might cast a stone that would activate the overlapping ripples of hope, the “million different centers of energy” in which we define who we are.

And, in that, there is real reason for hope. ◆

We don’t typically offer seminars on basic empathy and social responsibility, but we can teach such courses if we choose. equips them with the power to bring about change. As designers and educators, we can help negotiate the shifting sands of dynamic global change by discovering new ways to teach communities how to help themselves; how they might live sustainably and become more resilient.

And by sincerely acknowledging the storm cloud of climate disaster and massive habitat destruction that looms over us all, we can see that effectively responding to it is not an insurmountable task. Through building relationships in the communities where we work, we can teach others to respect themselves and their communities, and to become better stewards of the environment.

These things will not be easy; it will take courage. It will take courage to accept the fact that nothing is more important than teaching our students new ways to think and design that help offset the harshest impacts of climate change, while finding ways to protect those most vulnerable to the effects of that dynamic change. It will take the courage to commit to the seachange that is required, if we really want to prepare students for a future shaped

1 Robert F. Kennedy, “Day of Affirmation Address, University of Capetown, South Africa,” June 6, 1966, https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/thekennedy-family/robert-f-kennedy/robert-f-kennedyspeeches/day-of-affirmation-address-university-ofcapetown-capetown-south-africa-june-6-1966.

61

ALUM PROFILE

Kevin Jeffery

Landscape Planner, Development Services Department, City of Chula Vista, California MLA ’19

Above: Photo by Grexsys Photography.

Left: Photo by Veriditas Rising: Sealaska Heritage Institute Campus of Art Juneau, Alaska. MRV Architects and Anderson Land Planning.

62

PLATFORM 2023–2024

CIVICS AND PLACEMAKING

Why do public spaces and civic life matter? Why should we care?

Public spaces and civic life are extremely important because they provide people with places to de-stress, learn, and improve themselves. Public amenities show that a municipality is not just a place to live, but a place that is desired and livable. People are doing more than just going to work and going home to eat and sleep; they need other spaces to enjoy and where they can recharge their physical and mental capacities. Public spaces are often envisioned as built structures, but a beneficial civic life for a community can be created by simply leaving a natural space alone to flourish or slightly maintaining it. When you feel good, you take better care of yourself and the people and community around you; thus, making naturalistic spaces abundant as well as open to all is majorly beneficial to every municipality. People should care for and advocate for public spaces, especially nature-based ones, because if left unchecked, developers looking to maximize profits would build out properties with “units” of glass, concrete, and steel, leaving no outdoor spaces to recreate in or look upon.

How did your education at the School of Architecture influence your professional life?

The School of Architecture gave me the technical tools for evaluating spaces in which humans, other fauna, and flora engage with both the indoors and outdoors. It exposed me to the core principles of a design process. Through the exposure of a plethora of design tools (digital, handmade, evaluation methods, etc.), I gained the confidence to tackle any design/planning problem big and small at work. At the jobs I’ve had since leaving the school, I would often push the visual and planning boundaries of what had previously been established for the benefit of both the client and my employer. The most important experience the School of Architecture instilled in me is the perspective of a “designer,” and that that term can mean many different things. I walked away knowing that I was more than a designer; I was a creator with a responsibility for making things better for all. I carry this with me every day in my job when I am looking at design proposals. I can tell if they are fulfilling the minimum procedures or truly providing a quality space for their users.

Can you describe a pivotal moment in your career or educational experience that transformed the way you view your work?

As I was starting my career—before grad school at the School of Architecture—I was fortunate enough to gain experience as a grassroot organizer for a local environmental water nonprofit where I learned many things humans did and still do to natural waterscapes as well as the overall environment. Working with the communities of the Anacostia River Watershed allowed me to gain a perspective on the effects good, bad, and ugly designs have on a community—especially bad design that was old or outdated and had a harmful psychological and physical effect on living things. This

experience cemented for me how critical water is in every living thing’s way of life—which is why I chose water as my focus as an environmental steward. Since then, I have steered my personal and professional goals toward waterscape quality, design, and planning, through a lens of elevating the universal right to water.

What are the most pressing issues that your field must focus on in the future?

Chula Vista, California, where I work as a landscape planner, is a town seven miles south of San Diego and seven miles north of the US-Mexico Border. Working in the water-conscious state of California, especially in southern California, near the border, has made water conservation and water quality major issues. My job calls for me to review a variety of construction/development plans from a landscape perspective. This can include plans for a single unit to entire neighborhoods, and for both residential and commercial projects. In addition, I work with developers on creating community-scale guidelines that shape what the “vibe” of the community will be. Making sure these planned communities have enough park land, open space, and landscaped areas is another large issue in my job. Ensuring that future generations have enough green space to look at and engage with is the number one focus of my work.

How can students prepare for this future?

One thing you can do to prepare during school is try all the tech toys you can while you are in the program. Knowing how they interact with other disciplines and devices will really help you excel when you are in the office. The School of Architecture and The University of Texas at Austin in general is filled with all kinds of software and hardware for students to use and learn on. Try them all. Another way to prepare for the future is to be realistic about your career goals. Have an option B, C, and D, other than your top goal when you graduate. Know that your top choice might not be available to you immediately after graduation, but that it is never too early to start planning and working toward your goals and job requirements (i.e. licensure). Lastly, do not be afraid to walk into an office without an appointment or to cold-call and introduce yourself. Have your portfolio with you and just be honest and willing to listen. People— especially people in the architectural/construction fields—love to share what they know and discuss their work. If your interest is genuine, you might find yourself getting employed on the spot.

What impact do you hope to make in your future career trajectory?

I hope to be fortunate enough to have my career be looked at by my peers and community as one that improved the lives of people and brought them happiness. I also hope my work protects and propagates healthy outdoor spaces where animals and plants can live wild and free. At the end of it all, making outdoor spaces that facilitate positive celebrations, growth, and discovery are what I would hope my efforts achieve. ◆

63

ALUM PROFILE

Tatum Lau, AICP, ENV SP

Senior Associate/Social Value Lead US West, AECOM MSCRP/MUD ’17 Why do public spaces and civic life matter? Why should we care?

Over the last decade, we’ve experienced increased polarization and social division, and while the world would not be an interesting place without diverse perspectives, the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated the weaknesses in our collective ability to address a large-scale crisis.

While it would be naïve to think that public space alone will address these challenges, safe streets, parks, and open spaces that are accessible and welcoming to people across all segments of society are the antithesis to online echo chambers which can fuel division. These spaces have the potential to provide people with opportunities for connection to nature and each other. This is particularly beneficial for people living in apartments and a key strategy for our discipline, if we’re aiming to move toward smaller, less resource- and energy-intensive living spaces. It’s also important to distinguish public spaces—intentionally designed to be coupled with affordable and sustainable housing—from those in an affluent neighborhood or a corporate campus that may not be inclusive to everyone.

How did your education at the School of Architecture influence your professional life?

I came into the dual degree in community and regional planning (MSCRP) and urban design (MSUD) with a background in architecture and several years of practice behind me. The dual degree gave me access to a broad yet complimentary range of perspectives and professors dealing with issues I cared about. The Urban Design Program expanded on my experience, incorporating landscape architecture and also giving me the flexibility (the program allowed many electives) to deepen my knowledge on specialized topics within the School of Architecture and in other departments and schools. The Community and Regional Planning Program gave me robust methodologies and evidence-based approaches to address both policy and design. The dual degree also gave me the necessary time to ruminate on how it all fits together and, combined with the generosity of professors willing to discuss these curiosities, created a foundation from which I draw upon in practice daily.

Above: Photo by Jason Kindig Photography.

Opposite page: Affordable housing workshop with The University of Washington; photo by Bara Safarova.

64

PLATFORM 2023–2024

CIVICS AND PLACEMAKING

Can you describe a pivotal moment in your career or educational experience that transformed the way you view your work?

Growing up in South Africa, I chose to study architecture because I was curious about the possibilities for housing and infrastructure to improve life outcomes for people living in extreme poverty.

With hindsight, it’s clear to me that social justice was the thread that tied my professional and educational pursuits in affordable housing, regional planning, climate resilience, and urban design together. However, throughout my career, I’ve felt like I’ve had so many interests and uncertainty about what my specialization is. In 2021, AECOM began heavily investing in its global Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) strategy, which is a commitment to embedding these values in everything the company does. A principal asked if I would consider taking on a regional role in Social Outcomes/Social Value (the S in ESG) and the light bulb came on.

Although this is an evolving role and space, I relish the time I can spend strategizing ways for interdisciplinary teams to embed equity in processes that inform our projects.

What are the most pressing issues that your field must focus on in the future?

One barely has to keep up with the news to know that as a society, we face a myriad of social, environmental, and economic challenges that climate change only exacerbates. Many of us in this field (and others) acknowledge that the disparities and inequities we are working so hard to address are a direct result of systemic and institutional racism and discrimination. As planners, designers, and academics, we operate within the very institutions that helped create those inequities. And in many cases, we’re still using historical procedures and frameworks to make decisions about funding, designing, and building tomorrow’s infrastructure. Audre Lorde rightly asks whether the master’s tools can be used to dismantle the master’s house. The challenge for us, then, is to simultaneously and critically question the validity of our “best practices,” precedents, and tried-and-trusted approaches—while urgently transitioning to a low carbon economy that leaves no one behind.

How can students prepare for this future?

Start today! Question your (and your professors’ or employers’) assumptions; ask community members what they think. Seek conversations outside of your discipline and network.

Our educational institutions, our curriculums, the “seminal works” we rely on—all could have blind spots and its everyone’s responsibility to contextualize historical information in order to leverage what’s useful today. By contextualizing, I mean asking questions such as, “What biases, power, privilege, or agenda could the author or sponsoring institution have had when the text/report/ guidance was written?” Followed by, “How are we using these findings to inform our decisions?” and “How will our organization/ company adapt to incorporate these lessons in the future?” I acknowledge that this process takes time and doesn’t always lead to complete answers, but can we as practitioners and future practitioners invite contradiction, conflict, and imperfect answers into the research and design process?

While I think our discipline is well positioned to facilitate city- and community-building efforts in preparation for climate change, community-based organizations, nonprofits, public health professionals, and engineers are working toward similar goals. If these folks don’t see things the same way that we do, what can we learn from each other?

What impact do you hope to make in your future career trajectory?

I hope to bring people together to co-create and adapt places, infrastructure, and regions that are healthy, resilient, and welcoming. This requires systemic change starting from the micro (e.g., the way we treat each other in our places of work and play) all the way to the macro (e.g., how governments make decisions about who benefits from new infrastructure investments). Using this perspective, I remind myself that every interaction or conversation with a coworker, client, neighbor, or impressionable student is an opportunity to model the values to move the needle toward this vision. ◆

65

ALUM PROFILE

John Rigdon

Vice President of Projects and Planning, Waterloo Greenway MSCRP ‘13

Why do public spaces and civic life matter? Why should we care?

Public spaces matter because they are free and accessible spaces where the community can come together. People can relax, gather, have fun, and be themselves in public spaces. The act of enjoying these spaces together creates a sense of community pride and a collective identity. This is vital to healthy civic life.

Public spaces and civic life are increasingly under threat as municipal budgets are cut and people have less need to interact with each other in their daily lives. Privatization of services and the increase in online social interactions can reinforce or worsen divisions and social isolation. We should care because these public spaces foster in-person human interaction. People generally behave better when viewed publicly by their peers. This allows people to better understand and value each other as members of a collective community.

Public spaces are also where the fun, unpredictable, and weird aspects of living in a city can be freely experienced. I believe that these experiences truly define the identity of a place by creating shared stories and myths. The identity of a place (e.g., “what makes Austin, Austin”) usually plays out in the public realm.

Opposite page: Photo by John Sutfin and WGC.

66

PLATFORM 2023–2024

CIVICS AND PLACEMAKING

How did your education at the School of Architecture influence your professional life?

My education at the School of Architecture provided me with the vocabulary and skills to understand complex urban issues. I never read an article titled “How to Develop an Urban Infrastructure Reuse Park Project through a Public-Private Partnership and an International Design Competition.” However, I did build a foundation of knowledge about how cities work and how to create and manage effective planning processes. This baseline has proven invaluable as I navigate new territory with the Waterloo Greenway project.

My education also helped me learn the importance of understanding and representing the needs of the people who will be served by a project. Context is critical and that is best understood through the local community. The School of Architecture introduced me to the models and tools that guide my work with community engagement and participatory planning.

Lastly, my time at the school allowed me to expand my knowledge beyond urban planning. I was able to take classes that introduced me to the history and theory of landscape architecture, real estate development, and law. This cross-training in different fields has been important as I navigate connecting the public-private partnership, the community, and the project design.

Can you describe a pivotal moment in your career or educational experience that transformed the way you view your work?

The first thing that comes to mind was the opening of Waterloo Park. Our project team spent years working on the planning, community engagement, and design of the park. We understood all of the details and knew all of the challenges that arose during the more-than-seven years of design and planning. It felt like we knew everything there was to know about the park. However, once it opened, my perspective changed. People started using the park in new, surprising, and sometimes unconventional ways. Some products and ideas that made so much sense on paper ended up being less useful in reality. It was genuinely surprising and eyeopening to watch this happen in real time.

I also didn’t anticipate the impact that it would have on me to be a part of creating a real, physical space for others to enjoy. In urban planning, we spend a lot of time thinking about things in the abstract or as frameworks at a large scale. Planning documents can often be a bridge to what’s next rather than the creation of something tangible. It has been immensely rewarding to watch people enjoying and experiencing something that I put so much time into. This has also been very instructive as I look toward future projects.

67

What are the most pressing issues that your field must focus on in the future?

As our population continues to grow—particularly in cities—our current parks and public spaces are becoming insufficient to meet the needs of the community. They are suffering from overuse and underinvestment. At the same time, growth has impacted the availability of land to create new public spaces and amenities. We have to fight for public space wherever we can. This can take many forms, including infrastructure reuse, acquisition of underutilized land, or redevelopment of existing public spaces. Additionally, we have to think critically about the role that public spaces should play in the future. My belief is that public spaces need to do much more than simply provide access to nature. Public spaces are opportunities to serve the community in a range of ways that are relevant to modern life. They can provide fitness and health services, education, cultural events, and more, while still providing access to nature. Our parks and open spaces need to be designed, built, and operated with that intention. This means creating hardworking public spaces with the infrastructure and accessibility required to meet these new demands. If we do this, we can continue to evolve our public spaces to meet the needs of the community while not losing critical access to green space.

Real estate development will continue to put pressure on parks and open spaces in rapidly growing urban areas. Growth can have the positive effect of creating more park users and a larger tax base for a community. This can lead to increased support for public spaces at an individual level. However, we don’t appropriately value the impacts of growth on our parks in our land development code and policies. Our professions need to continue to develop tools that appropriately assess the financial impacts of growth on public spaces. Doing so will provide us with the resources to take care of and grow our parks and public spaces to meet the needs of our communities in the future. Nonprofit partners are a part of the solution, but they can’t be the only solution.

How can students prepare for this future?

Students who are interested in public space should take advantage of opportunities to broaden their knowledge outside of their degree area while in school. Understanding public policy, architecture and design, and public finance are still critical. However, public-private partnerships and fundraising have become vital to modern public space development. An understanding of how these partnerships work will prepare students for the future. I would additionally encourage students interested in parks and public spaces to take courses about private real estate development and finance.

Understanding what is important in the development process can help identify policies and partnership opportunities that can support the growth of public spaces.

Finally, I would encourage students to get to know how their local government works. Reading about this can only teach you so much.

Understanding how decisions really get made can help guide you to the areas in planning, policy, architecture, and design where you can have the greatest impact. Go to council and commission meetings, volunteer at events, attend public meetings. These are the best ways to see how things really get done.

What impact do you hope to make in your future career trajectory?

It is truly rewarding to play a part in creating the types of public spaces that I think our community deserves. I would like to continue to find ways to bring ambitious public projects to life. I hope that my work will help prove that the public-private model works for open space projects, and that we deserve as much attention to detail and investment in our public spaces as we get in our new restaurants, bars, and living spaces. I also hope that my work in Austin stays true to our city’s identity while creating space for new stories and memories. I think we can have it both ways here, and I hope to play a part in that with the work I do. ◆

Broadening our definition of public spaces is also important. Parks and traditional civic gathering spaces remain important, but we should also consider the role that streets, sidewalks, and smaller public spaces can play in creating a better public realm. It will be increasingly important to think about all of these spaces not just as engineering challenges, but as opportunities to serve the needs of the community. An active and beloved public realm provides eyes on the street, making our communities safer and better connected.

Opposite page: Photos

by Elizabeth Felicella and MVVA.

68

PLATFORM 2023–2024

CIVICS AND PLACEMAKING

69

DONOR PROFILE

Lauren Rottet, FAIA, FIIDA BArch ’79

When Lauren Rottet first enrolled at UT Austin, she originally planned to become a doctor. Because she also loved art, she pursued a dual degree combining pre-med and art coursework. However, fate intervened and she graduated with a bachelor of architecture in 1979 and parlayed that degree into an illustrious design career. The first woman in history to be elevated to Fellow status by both the American Institute of Architects and the International Interior Design Association, Rottet is the founding principal and president of Rottet Studio, creator of an award-winning furniture line, and known as one of the most influential interior architects working today.

Lauren decided to give back to the place where it all began by creating an endowed Texas Challenge scholarship to help future designers realize their passion for design and contribute to our built environment.

Reflecting on her time at the School of Architecture, Rottet fondly remembers late nights in the studio making models and drawing with a T-square and parallel bar, trying to play catch up after switching majors. “The time went so fast as once you finally came up with your “big idea,” you had to develop it, model and draw it, then articulate it to the studio and professor and hope they appreciated it. It was fun and challenging and I realized that architecture was the perfect combination of art, science and physiology.” The drawing part came easy; calculus and structures were another story. But in general the program was an exceptional education in problem-solving which has served me well.” Recently,

“Many of our architects and designers have come into the field struggling to pay back college loans. The students work— and trying to hold a job while studying architecture is close to impossible—and when they get out, many still have debt.

I wanted to help and when I heard about the Challenge program, I was motivated to participate as the match allowed a scholarship pool of $500,000. In particular, I wanted our funds to go to UT as I have been impressed with the Interior Design Program that is rigorous and produces graduates who can hit the ground running. I am an architect who embraces architecture, master planning, interior design, and really anything that has to do with design, so I wanted to encourage the UT School of Architecture and the students to continue to embrace this well-rounded study of design.”

“I wanted to encourage the UT School of Architecture and the students to continue to embrace this well-rounded study of design.”

70

PLATFORM 2023–2024

CIVICS AND PLACEMAKING

Through the Texas Challenge program, gifts of $125,000 or more are matched dollar-for-dollar, doubling the impact a scholarship can make for high-potential School of Architecture students from low- to medium-income families in Texas.

Through endowed scholarships like Rottet’s, the School of Architecture can empower and equip a new generation of designers with the skills they need to find their voice and change the world.

Rottet’s self-launched firm, Rottet Studio has become recognized as one of the finest design practices in the world. Rottet

Studio has more than 70 million square feet of built design; an extensive portfolio of corporate, hospitality, residential, multi-family, and maritime projects for the world’s leading companies, brands, and Fortune 100 clients; and a suite of awardwinning product designs through the furniture line, Rottet Collection.

Rottet holds nearly every title and honor a designer can hold: Interior Design Hall of Fame, Designer of the Year, Boutique Designer of the Year, Platinum Circle Honoree. Throughout her career, Rottet has sought to innovate and continually grow her design practice. Today, her firm has offices in Houston, Los Angeles, and New York, and they have worked on projects in nearly every part of the world, including Antarctica. As an architect and designer, Rottet’s vision includes every dimension of a project, as she seeks to infuse spaces with light, energy, and detail elements that surprise and delight.

In all that she does, Rottet believes that education is ongoing and that the gift of design talent must be nurtured, trained, and inspired: “A solid, well-rounded education is critical for practical thinking as you navigate the business world trying to make sure your ideas are heard and your creations are realized. The need for education and the energy it brings to your practice is never-ending. I am continually learning from other amazing architects and designers, contractors, trades, developers, hoteliers, restaurateurs, manufacturers, and owners. Mentoring my team and watching those who love to learn grow beyond their expectations while creating amazing projects is one of the most satisfying aspects of my career.”

CONTRIBUTE To learn more and to contribute to the Texas Challenge scholarship program, visit giving.utexas.edu or contact Luke Dunlap, Executive Director for Development, at luked@austin.utexas.edu or 512.471.6114.

Lauren Rottet.

Compliments of Rottet Studio.

71

ENDOWMENTS

These 175 permanent endowments have an approximate market value of $55 million and account for over $2.2 million in annual, renewable funding that directly supports students, faculty, programs, travel, lectures, exhibitions, prizes, research, and other initiatives in perpetuity. Endowments grow in value over time and provide a reliable funding stream to support students and faculty and advance the mission of the School of Architecture.

72

PLATFORM 2023–2024

CIVICS AND PLACEMAKING

School of Architecture Endowments As of August 2023 AIA Austin Charles Moore Endowed Scholarship Brooke and Frank Aldridge Endowed Faculty Excellence Fund Blake Alexander Traveling Student Fellowship in Architecture Anbalagan Family Endowed Fund in Architecture Architexas Endowed Graduate Fellowship in Historic Preservation Francisco “Paco” Arumi-Noe Memorial Fellowship in Sustainable Design Yvette Atkinson Memorial Scholarship in Architecture Beattie Family Endowed Architecture Fund Marvin E. and Anne Price Beck Endowed Scholarship Wayne Bell Excellence Fund for Historic Preservation Edwin E. Beran Centennial Lectureship in Architecture Carl O. Bergquist Endowed Scholarship Sinclair Black Endowed Chair in the Architecture of Urban Design Sinclair Black Endowed Excellence Fund for Urban Design Myron Geer Blalock Endowed Presidential Scholarship BOKA Powell Endowed Scholarship Jean and Bill Booziotis Endowed Annual Lecture in Architecture Jean and Bill Booziotis Excellence Endowment in Honor of the Texas Rangers Jean and Bill Booziotis Endowed Excellence Fund Jean and Bill Booziotis Endowed Graduate Fellowship in Architectural History Hal Box Endowed Chair in Urbanism Hal Box Endowed Scholarship in Architecture George W. Brackenridge Scholarship Fund Brightman/York Endowed Lecture Series in Interior Design Brochstein Excellence Fund Blake Allison Brooks Scholarship Carolyn Brooks Graduate Fellowship in Interior Design C. William Brubaker/Perkins+Will Endowed Presidential Scholarship David Bruton, Jr. Centennial Professorship in Urban Design Conner Bryan Memorial Fund for Sustainability Research John Buck Company and First Chicago Investment Advisors for Fund F Endowed Scholarship in Architecture

Joseph Robert Buffler and Esther Rogers Buffler Endowed Traveling Scholarship Build Well Construction Excellence Fund Evelyn S. and H.D. Butler Endowed Excellence Fund in Architecture Kent S. Butler Memorial Excellence Fund in Community & Regional Planning Edwin W. and Alyce O. Carroll Centennial Lectureship in Architecture Matt Casey Memorial Scholarship in Architecture Center for American Architecture and Design Endowed Excellence Fund Center for the Study of American Architecture Endowment John S. Chase Endowed Presidential Scholarship John S. Chase Family Endowed Graduate Fellowship John S. Chase Family Endowed Professorship in Architecture Children of John and Christine Boylan Endowed Scholarship in Architecture Dick Clark, III Endowed Chair in Architecture Dick Clark Student Travel Fund Fred W. and Laura Weir Clarke Endowed Presidential Scholarship in Architecture honoring Carl Bergquist Fred W. Clarke Endowed Presidential Scholarship in Architecture honoring Alan Y. Taniguchi Bartlett Cocke Regents Professorship in Architecture Bartlett Cocke Scholarships Cogburn Family Foundation Architecture and Urbanism Prize Reenie & Kent Collins Endowed Excellence Fund for Historic Preservation Peter O. Coltman Book Prize in Architecture and Planning Content Architecture Endowed Excellence Fund Robert James Coote Architecture Scholarship Bluford Walter Crain Centennial Endowed Lectureship Roberta P. Crenshaw Centennial Professorship in Urban Design and Environmental Planning The Paul Philippe Cret Centennial Teaching Fellowship in Architecture Fred Winfield Day, Jr. Endowed Scholarship in Architecture Isabelle Thomason Decherd Endowment for Preservation Technology Jorge Luis Divino Centennial Scholarship in Architecture Larry Alan Doll Endowment for Architecture Student Travel Amy Dryden Endowed Scholarship

Professor Buford and Ruth Duke Endowed Excellence Fund in Architecture Raquel Elizondo Staff Excellence Fund William H. Emis, III Traveling Scholarship in Architecture Janet Farren Perseverance Fund for Interior Design Excellence Fund for Topics in Sustainable Development O’Neil Ford Centennial Chair in Architecture Ford, Powell & Carson Endowed Scholarship Terry Norman Forrester & Nancy Hoppess Forrester Dean’s Excellence Fund Ted Freedman Endowed Scholarship Suzie Friedkin Endowed Scholarship in Interior Design Furman + Keil Architects Endowed Excellence Fund Gensler Exhibitions Endowment The Cass Gilbert Centennial Teaching Fellowship in Architecture Golemon & Rolfe Centennial Lectureship in Architecture Herbert M. Greene Centennial Lectureship in Architecture Adam Conrad Grote Memorial Scholarship in Architecture J. David Harrison Endowed Scholarship Harwell Hamilton Harris Regents Professorship in Architecture HDR Architecture Endowed Scholarship Courtney Hill Interiors Endowed Scholarship in Interior Design Hoffman Family Endowed Fund for Architecture Mike Hogg Professorship in Community and Regional Planning Lily Rush Walker and Coulter Hoppess Endowed Presidential Scholarship in Architecture Humphreys & Partners Endowed Scholarship in Architecture Interior Design Endowed Excellence Fund Janet C. and Wolf E. Jessen Endowed Presidential Scholarship The Wolf and Janet Jessen Centennial Lectureship in Architecture Wolf E. Jessen Endowment Fund Journeyman Construction Faculty Excellence Fund in Architecture Professor Terry Kahn Endowed Graduate Fellowship in Community and Regional Planning Karl Kamrath Lectureship in Architecture Martin S. and Evelyn S. Kermacy Collection Endowment Martin S. Kermacy Centennial Professorship in Architecture Killebrew Family Endowed Travel Fund in Architecture

Henrietta M. King Endowed Excellence Fund for Historic Preservation Henrietta Chamberlain King Endowed Scholarship Katherine Kligerman Fund for Architecture Student Support Matthew F. Kreisle, III/Page Southerland Page Graduate Fellowship in Architecture Dr. Nancy Panak Kwallek Endowed Chair in Design & Planning William E. Lake, Jr. Excellence Fund for Architecture Lake/Flato Endowed Scholarship Karen and Jerry Lea Family Endowed Excellence Fund Leipziger Travel Fellowship Fund Hugo Leipziger-Pearce Endowed Graduate Fellowship in Planning Kevin J. Lorenz Graduate Fellowship in Architecture LPA Endowed Scholarship for Sustainable Design Lynne Brundrett Maddox Scholarship in Interior Design Harvey V. Marmon, Jr. FAIA/Marmon Mok Scholarship in Architecture Sue and Frank McBee Fellowship in Historic Preservation McCall Endowed Excellence Fund Eugene and Margaret McDermott Excellence Fund for the Study of American Architecture Eugene McDermott Centennial Visiting Professorship Margaret McDermott Centennial Teaching Fellowship in Architecture Meadows Foundation Centennial Fellowship in Architecture Meadows Foundation Centennial Professorship in Architecture Mike and Maxine K. Mebane Endowed Traveling Scholarship in Architecture Alice Kleberg Reynolds Meyer Foundation Centennial Lectureship in Architecture Gene Edward Mikeska Endowed Chair for Interior Design The W. L. Moody, Jr. Centennial Professorship in Architecture Jack Morgan Endowed Scholarship Charles M. Nettles Endowed Presidential Scholarship Oglesby Prize Endowment Overland Partners Endowed Presidential Scholarship George M. Page Endowed Graduate Fellowship Page Southerland Page Fellowship in Architecture Jane Marie Tacquard Patillo Centennial Lectureship Barbara & Donald Pender Endowed Scholarship

Claude M. Pendley, Jr. Memorial Scholarship Fund (for Graduate Fellowships) Edward J. Perrault Endowed Presidential Scholarship in Interior Design Alma Piner Scholarship in Architecture John William Potter Endowed Fund for the Encouragement of Risk Taking Boone Powell Family Prize in Urban Design Paul C. Ragsdale Excellence Fund for Historic Preservation The Sid W. Richardson Centennial Professorship in Architecture Debbie Ann Rock Scholarship in Interior Design Henry M. Rockwell Chair in Architecture Roland Gommel Roessner Centennial Professorship in Architecture Potter Rose Graduate Fellowship Potter Rose Professorship in Urban Planning Lauren Rottet Endowed Scholarship Edwin A. Schneider Centennial Lectureship in Architecture School of Architecture Advisory Council Endowed Excellence Fund School of Architecture Faculty Fund for Student Domestic Travel School of Architecture Scholarship and Fellowship Awards Endowment Joy & Morin Scott/Sally & John Byram Graduate Fellowship Brandon Shaw Memorial Endowed Scholarship Overton Shelmire Scholarship in Architecture Sixth River Architects Endowed Fellowship Snøhetta Endowed Scholarship in Architecture Established by Craig Dykers and Elaine Molinar Louis F. Southerland Endowed Scholarship Lawrence W. Speck Excellence Fund Lawrence W. Speck Endowed Graduate Fellowship in Architecture Lawrence W. Speck/Page Southerland Page Graduate Fellowship in Architecture Frederick Steiner Endowed Excellence Fund in Landscape Architecture Ruth Carter Stevenson Regents Chair in the Art of Architecture Emily Summers Excellence Fund for the History of Interior Design Sweatt Family Endowed Scholarship Lance Tatum Endowed Scholarship John Greene Taylor Endowment for Collections Enhancement John Greene Taylor Family Graduate Fellowship in Architectural History

Texas Chapter American Society of Landscape Architects Endowed Graduate Fellowship Jack Rice Turner Endowed Scholarship in Architecture Urban Edge Developers Dean’s Excellence Fund The University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture’s Advisory Council Women’s Endowed Scholarship Wilmont “Vic” Vickrey, FAIA, Endowed Excellence Fund for Architecture of the Americas Wilmont “Vic” Vickrey Endowed Scholarship Arthur Pope Watson, Jr. and Robert Wayne Garrett Excellence Fund Kelly Wearstler Endowed Fund for Design Students J. M. West Texas Corporation Fellowship in Architecture Gordon White, MD, Graduate Fellowship in Landscape Architecture Robert Leon White Memorial Fund Wilkinson Family Travel Fund for the School of Architecture Roxanne Williamson Endowed Scholarship Trisha Wilson Endowed Professorship Fund Wilsonart Endowed Lecture Series in Interior Design

ENDOWMENTS ARE FOREVER To create a new endowment or make a gift to support an existing endowment, please contact Luke Dunlap, Executive Director for Development, at luked@austin.utexas.edu or 512.471.6114. giving.utexas.edu/p23

73

FRIENDS OF ARCHITECTURE

School of Architecture Donors As of August 2023

John S. Chase Endowed Presidential Scholarship Karen E. Pittman [MA ’87, MArch ‘10]

Killebrew Family Endowed Travel Fund in Architecture Charles N. Killebrew [BArch ‘95]

ENDOWMENTS AND SPECIAL FUNDS

Dick Clark, III Endowed Chair in Architecture Dick Clark III Foundation F. Walter Penn [BA ‘79] Raymond James Charitable Endowment Fund

Kevin J. Lorenz Graduate Fellowship in Architecture Kevin J. Lorenz [MArch ‘84]

Blake Alexander Traveling Student Fellowship in Architecture Richard W. Meyer [BArch ’70, JD ‘74] Anbalagan Family Endowed Fund in Architecture Anand M. Anbalagan Beattie Family Endowed Architecture Fund Evan Beattie [BArch ‘04] BOKA Powell Endowed Scholarship R. Andrew Bennett [BArch ‘90] BOKA Powell Children of John and Christine Boylan Endowed Scholarship in Architecture Rebecca L. Birdwell [BA ‘96] Christopher H. Lytle Blake Allison Brooks Scholarship B. Allison Brooks [BArch ‘00] Carolyn Brooks Graduate Fellowship in Interior Design Estate of Carolyn Brooks BRR Architecture Scholarship BRR Architecture, Inc. Joseph Robert Buffler and Esther Rogers Buffler Endowed Traveling Scholarship Howard Parker Trust Build Well Construction Excellence Fund Austin Enve, LLC Laura Burton [BSArchStds ‘89] and David Burton [BBA ’91, MBA ‘00] Morton Feldman Foundation Stanley Freeman Memorial

Reenie & Kent Collins Endowed Excellence Fund for Historic Preservation Irene Harwood Collins [BJ ‘83] and G. Kent Collins [BArch ‘81] Peter O. Coltman Book Prize in Architecture and Planning Felicity A. Coltman Robert James Coote Architecture Scholarship Robert James Coote Trust Bluford Walter Crain Centennial Endowed Lectureship B. Walter Crain, III [MBA ‘75] Larry Doll Memorial Fund for Student Travel Coleman Coker Elizabeth A. Danze [BArch ‘81] and John P. Blood [BArch ‘81] Deepanita Das and Santhosh George Luke W. Dunlap [BA ‘01] Wendy Fok [BArch ‘00] Janet Farren Perseverance Fund for Interior Design Janet M. Farren [BSID ‘90] Ted Freedman Endowed Scholarship Elise Freedman Daniel Najjar Renee F. Stern [BA ’71, MA ‘80] Furman + Keil Architects Endowed Excellence Fund Furman and Keil Architects PLLC Philip T. Keil [MArch ‘94]

Evelyn S. and H.D. Butler Endowed Excellence Fund in Architecture Estate of H.D. Butler

Adam Conrad Grote Memorial Scholarship in Architecture Daniel E. Grote

Kent S. Butler Memorial Excellence Fund in Community & Regional Planning Cheryl L. Cioffari [MArch ‘06] Lisa M. Weston [PhD ‘05]

J. David Harrison Endowed Scholarship David Harrison [BArch ‘79]

Matt Casey Memorial Scholarship in Architecture Joe E. Casey [BS ‘76] Kent L. McNeil [BBA ‘98]

74

PLATFORM 2023–2024

Hoffman Family Endowed Fund for Architecture William K. Hoffman [BArch ‘78] Professor Terry Kahn Endowed Graduate Fellowship in Community and Regional Planning David C. Bodenman [BA ’72, MSCRP ‘76]

CIVICS AND PLACEMAKING

Eugene McDermott Centennial Visiting Professorship The Eugene McDermott Foundation Boone Powell Family Prize in Urban Design Laura Powell [MSCRP ‘95] & John A. Hartman [MSCRP ‘95] Leilah Powell [MSCRP ‘96] Joanne and James Pratt Japan Travel Scholarship Fund Joanne H. Pratt Paul C. Ragsdale Excellence Fund for Historic Preservation The Ragsdale Foundation Rachael Rawlins Memorial Fund Michael W. Simmons [BA ’16, MS ‘18] Mary M. Standifer School of Architecture Advisory Council Endowed Excellence Fund Lexa Acker [BArch ‘63] Charles H. Armstrong [BArch ‘81] Myron G. Blalock [BArch ‘78] David C. Bodenman [BA ’72, MSCRP ‘76] Laura V. Britt [MArch ‘00] Gabriel Durand-Hollis [BArch ‘81] David Harrison [BArch ‘79] Michael H. Hsu [BArch ‘93] Anne E. Kniffen [BArch ‘79] Elaine Molinar [BArch ‘88] Judith R. Pesek [BSID ‘78] James W. Shepherd [MArch ‘94] Helen L. Thompson [BA ’71, MA ‘73] Michael I. Wheeler [BBA ‘74] Gordon L. White Canan Yetmen [BA ‘91] Brandon Shaw Memorial Endowed Scholarship Jeffrey S. Abel [BSArchStds ‘93] Kathleen and Brewster H. Shaw, Jr. Edythe Tonnesen Overton Shelmire Scholarship in Architecture James A. and Mayme H. Rowland Foundation Snøhetta Endowed Scholarship in Architecture Established by Craig Dykers and Elaine Molinar Elaine Molinar [BArch ‘88] and Craig E. Dykers [BArch ‘85] Snøhetta Architecture Design Planning, PC

Lawrence W. Speck Excellence Fund Lawrence W. Speck Frederick Steiner Endowed Excellence Fund in Landscape Architecture Frederick R. Steiner Emily Summers Fund for Craft & Artisanship in Interior Design Emily R. Summers Sweatt Family Endowed Scholarship Glenn A. Sweatt [ MBA ’91] Texas Chapter American Society of Landscape Architects Endowed Graduate Fellowship American Society of Landscape Architects, Texas Chapter Betsey and Gary Unger Scholarship in Architecture Betsey and Gary A. Unger [MArch ‘66] Kelly Wearstler Endowed Fund for Design Students Kelly A. Wearstler Kelly Wearstler Lifestyle LLLP Julia and Michael Webber Excellence Fund for Student Leadership and Development Julia C. Webber [BArch ‘94] and Michael E. Webber [BA ’95, BS ‘95]

PROGRAMS AND CENTERS

Architecture Program Kory Bieg Brown Foundation Norma A. Castellanos Patricia L. Cornelison [MArch ‘84] John M. Davis [BArch ‘64] Caleb Duncan [BSArchE ’97, BArch ‘98] Bonnie A. Peters Fergie and Jaime E. Fergie Robert T. Jackson [BArch ‘70] Virginia W. Kelsey [BArch ‘83] Paul Lansdowne Hudson C. Lockett, III [BArch ‘78] Stephanie F. Motal [BArch ‘04] Johanna H. Reed [MArch ‘12] Marta Salinas-Hovar [BArch ‘87] Andrew M. Torres [MArch ‘07] Xin Wang John P. White [BArch ‘57] Architectural History Program Ernesto X. Bilbao [PhD ‘21] David K. Coonrod [BArch ‘70] R. Kelly Mathews [MPA ’91, BBA ‘91] Richard W. Meyer [BArch ’70, JD ‘74] Center for Sustainable Development Laven T. Busse & Audrey Busse Foundation Brent D. Redus [BArch ‘85]

Community and Regional Planning Program Paula B. Burns [MSCRP ‘95] Cheryl L. Cioffari [MArch ‘06] Clarence E. Feagin, Jr. [BA ’82, MSCRP ‘84] Andy L. Helms [BA ’64, MSCRP ‘70] Joelle D. Kanter [MArch ‘04] Julie King Elizabeth H. Klingler Armando Ornelas [BA ’85, MSCRP ‘95] Judy L. Ramsey [BA ’71, MSCRP ‘76] David W. Sullivan [MS ’84, PhD ‘97] Floyd T. Watson, Jr. [MSCRP ‘79] Kay D. Whitney [BA ‘61] & Leon A. Whitney [BArch ‘58] Chengyan Wu [MSCRP ‘95] and Xichang Zhang [PhD ‘94] Galapagos Sustainable Architecture Initiative David Harrison [BArch ‘79] Rose Quan Li [BArch ‘22] Nancy Parker Deedie Potter Rose Gulf Coast DesignLab Tamara K. Chambless [BArch ‘79] Historic Preservation Program Melissa M. Bogusch [MArch ‘95] Marianne McCann Jones [BSID ‘81] Frank D. Schubert Interior Design Program Jennifer E. Foster [BSID ‘95] Taylor E. Moore [BSID ‘18] Billie Jo Thorne [BSArchStds ‘89] Laurie A. Tyler [BSID ‘82] Landscape Architecture Program Catherine Gowan [MLA ‘08] Michael D. Pecen [MLA ‘07] Allan W. Shearer Robert S. Simpson [BArch ‘75]

Laura R. Doll [MPAFF ‘78] Terry N. Forrester [BArch ‘59] Larry W. Gooch [BArch ‘72] Nonya S. Grenader [BArch ‘76] Kathryn Tate Hamilton [March ‘99] Stephen P. Harris [BArch ’87, MPA ‘16] Stephanie L. Harris David Harrison [BArch ‘79] Kate Almond Harrison Maria Hartt Leland C. Horstmann [BArch ‘80] Molly E. Hubbs [MArch ‘12] Richard W. Jennings Katelyn J. Kautz [BArch ‘23] Raymond A. Landy [BArch ‘70] Paul Lansdowne Emma F. Leonard [MArch ‘12] Mario Lowe Andrew R. McFarland [MArch ‘97] Kimberly McKittrick [MArch ‘89] Arlene Mirza Kevin Hadsell Moore [MArch ‘09] Courtney N. Morshed Jennifer Cline Murrill [BArch ‘98] Winifred E. Newman [BArch ’89, BSArchStds ‘90] Frederick R. Peterson Pong Options Trading Mara L. Pressman Rene D. Quinlan [BArch ‘88] Sasan Rezaie [BA ‘87] Davis W. Richardson [MArch ‘19] Robert W. Rossi [BArch ‘77] Myounggwi Ryou Ya-Ting Shieh and Chien-Yu Chen Joseph E. Sircely [BA ‘93] William B. Tamminga [BArch ‘71] Rebecca Tarango Monica Tenorio Billie Jo Thorne [BSArchStds ‘89] Linda M. Tsai [MArch ‘93] Michael I. Wheeler [BBA ‘74] Gordon L. White Sarah C. Wu [MSCRP ‘06] Brent J. Yost [BArch ‘03] Kristina H. Yu

Student Support Mehrdad Yazdani Allahabadi [BArch ‘84] Carmie L. Chatters David M. Cooperstein [MArch ‘98]

Sustainable Design Program Nathan G. Goodman

Student Technology Fund Michelle Addington Shawn C. Alshut [MArch ‘84] and Edward J. Alshut [MArch ‘84] Susan R. Benz [BArch ‘84] Ilona E. Blanchard [MS ’00, MA ‘00] David C. Bodenman [BA ’72, MSCRP ‘76] Melissa M. Bogusch [MArch ‘95] Bonnie L. Bridges [MArch ‘90] R. Brian Burnett [BArch ’08] Anna B. Burns Pamela Carlson Tamara K. Chambless [BArch ‘79] Pearlene Cinnie Cheah [BArch ‘16] Deepanita Das and Santhosh George

OTHER GIFTS

Urban Design Program Urban Land Institute School of Architecture Dean’s Fund Tahirah A. Aatiq [BArch ‘21] Cynthia Agustin Shawn C. Alshut [MArch ‘84] and Edward J. Alshut [MArch ‘84] Donald Bayliss Alexander K. Berghausen [MArch ‘01] Hilary K. Bertsch [MArch ‘95] Tracy L. Blackmon [BA ‘10] and Clint Pugh Melissa M. Bogusch [MArch ‘95] Oza Bouchard [BArch ‘75] Laura V. Britt [MArch ‘00] John R. Brown [BSCoLA ’71, BArch ‘72]

Robin A. Camp [BS ’80, MArch ‘90] Cameron Campbell Julie A. Choate Erlene M. Clark [MSArchStds ‘18] and Stephen L. Huffaker [JD ‘00] Sarah E. and Richard L. Cleary G. Kent Collins [BArch ‘81] Sean S. Coney [MArch ‘86] John M. Davis [BArch ‘64] Clarice A. Droughton [BJ ‘71] Sarah D. Dunckel [BFA ‘74] & Frank E. Dunckel [BArch ‘78] Winston L. Evans [BArch ‘68] Linmor B. Feiner [BSArchStds ’64] Bonnie A. Peters Fergie and Jaime E. Fergie Terry N. Forrester [BArch ‘59] Ali Gidfar [MArch ‘85] Joseph C. Gorney [MSCRP ‘00] Roger Gossett Nonya S. Grenader [BArch ‘76] Ranjit Balakrishna Gupta [BArch ‘96] Joannes A. Haakman [BS ’83, BArch ‘84] Guy L. Hagstette [BArch ‘79] Clifton J. Harness [BArch ‘15] Ingeborg C. Hendley [MSHP ‘08] Larce M. Holder, III [BArch ‘68] Julie M. Hooper Morris W. Hoover [BSCoLA ’74, BArch ‘77] Leland C. Horstmann [BArch ‘80] Angelita Huizar Robert T. Jackson [BArch ‘70] Liza Kappukattil and Gireesh Sadasivan Susanna Y. Kartye [BA ’96, MArch ‘02] Michael D. LaPoint [BArch ‘76] Viola Lopez [BArch ‘79] Scott H. Martin [MArch ‘90] Roy J. McCarroll [BArch ‘62] Jeffrey T. Mechlem [BArch ‘02] Jennifer B. Morgenstern [MArch ‘94] Charles L. Nelson [BArch ‘78] Charles W. Nixon [BArch ’67] Olubukunola Oyedeji Jim T. Phillips [BArch ‘73] Porras Nance Engineering Adam A. Pyrek [BArch ‘91] Stephen B. Ratchye [MArch ‘96] Susan W. Raymond [BArch ‘90] & James F. Raymond Robert E. Reeder [BArch ‘75] E. William Reichert [BArch ‘71] Richard M. Reilly, Jr. [MArch ‘95] Ronald C. Roeder [BArch ‘76] Marta Salinas-Hovar [BArch ‘87] Mark C. Santa Maria [MArch ‘86] Molly H. Sherman [BA ‘86] Thomas P. Simister [BA ’01, MA ‘03] Jason E. Smith [BArch ‘95] & Signe J. Dinsdale-Smith [BArch ‘99] smitharc architecture + interiors David R. Stanford [BArch ’79, BS ‘79] Joel T. Sterling [MArch ‘18] Thomas H. Stovall [BArch ‘62] Guadalupe Suarez [BArch ‘19] Kalpana R. Sutaria [MArch ‘78]

Rebecca Tarango John W. Taylor [BArch ‘74] Howard L. Templin [BArch ‘72] Monica Tenorio Lisabeth C. Townsend [MSCRP ‘88] Dat Thanh Tran [BAS ‘21] Bruce E. Turner [MSCRP ‘75] Drexel W. Turner [MSCRP ‘73] Joel A. Villalon [BArch ‘84] Cynthia Y. Walston [BArch ‘82] Susan M. Weaver [BArch ‘72] Norman G. Weiner [MArch ‘96] James E. White [BArch ‘57] Yilmaz Yetmen Architecture Annual Fund Peter J. Boes [MArch ‘93] Gerard J. Bolsega [MArch ‘95] Elizabeth K. Chen [MArch ‘02] D. Sherman Clarke Mitchell G. Gilbert, Jr. [BArch ‘73] Tom E. Hinson [BSArchStds ’70, BA ‘70] Gloria Jaster-Hickey Robert L. Marx [MArch ‘82] Roy J. McCarroll [BArch ‘62] Scott W. McCrary [BArch ‘71] Phillip G. Mead [MArch ‘91] Richard Meyer Mikiten Architecture, Inc. Michael Perna Mara L. Pressman Tyler Reeves Ronald C. Roeder [BArch ‘76] Alesa Iola Rubendall [MArch ‘03] Shelley A. St. Clair [BSID ‘87] James H. Shackelford [BArch ‘80] David V. Shrum [BArch ‘75] Bruce E. Turner [MSCRP ‘75] Brenda B. Wilson Victor A. Fuentes Yela [BArch ‘89] George F. Zapalac [BA ’70, MSCRP ‘74] Degrees from The University of Texas at Austin are indicated.

Every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of this list. If your name was omitted, misspelled, or incorrectly listed, please accept our apologies, and notify Leah Hollingshead at lhollingshead@austin.utexas.edu so that we may update our system and correct our error.

75

GOLDSMITH SOCIETY

The Goldsmith Society is a special group of principal benefactors who provide flexible, annual support to promote scholarly excellence and advance the school’s high standards of design.

Gifts from Goldsmith Society donors have an immediate and direct impact on the School of Architecture, allowing the dean to seize opportunities and invest strategically in important projects that shape the school’s evolving teaching and research agenda.

The Goldsmith Society comprises individuals, families, firms, corporations, and foundations that pledge $25,000 in unrestricted funds over five years ($5,000/year).

FOUNDERS AND CURRENT MEMBERS Lexa M. Acker W. Randall Ackerman Diana Keller Aldridge and Frank Aldridge Phillip Arnold Lisa and Tim Blonkvist Suzanne Deal Booth Jean* and Bill* Booziotis Diane and Hal Brierley Lynne and Lyle Burgin Diane and Chuck Cheatham Dick Clark, III* Reenie and Kent Collins Curtis and Windham Architects Willard Hanzlik J. David Harrison Nancy and Richard Jennings Journeyman Construction, Inc. Jeanne and Michael Klein Ray Landy Lucas/Eilers Design Associates, LLP

Lucifer Lighting Company Ileana Mendez and Kevin J. Lorenz The Eugene McDermott Foundation Dana Edwards Nearburg Cindy and Howard Rachofsky Gay* and Shannon Ratliff J. Brett Rhode Deedie and Rusty* Rose Lloyd Scott Shelton-Keller Group Lawrence W. Speck Lenore Sullivan and Barry Henry James Susman John Greene Taylor* Helen Thompson Melba and Ted Whatley Kathryn and Mike Wheeler Coke Anne and Jarvis Wilcox *in memoriam

JOIN THE GOLDSMITH SOCIETY Interested in joining the Goldsmith Society? Contact Luke Dunlap, Executive Director for Development, at luked@austin.utexas.edu or 512.471.6114. giving.utexas.edu/p23

76

PLATFORM 2023–2024

CIVICS AND PLACEMAKING

ADVISORY COUNCIL 2023–2024

Michael Wheeler, Chair Melissa Bogusch, AIA, NCARB, Vice Chair Jeffrey Abel, Assoc. AIA, LEED AP W. Randall Ackerman Frank Aldridge, III Diana Keller Aldridge Richard Archer, FAIA Charles Armstrong, FAIA Phillip Arnold, Hon. ASLA, LEED AP Tary Arterburn, FASLA John Avila, Jr. David B. Barrow, Jr., AIA, ASID Rebecca Birdwell Professor Emeritus Sinclair Black, FAIA Myron Blalock, III Timothy Blonkvist, FAIA, LEED AP David Bodenman Bob Borson, FAIA, LEED AP Nestor Bottino, FAIA Laura V. Britt, ASID, RID B. Allison Brooks, AIA Lyle Burgin, AIA Tamara Chambless, AIA, LEED AP, NCARB Anthony Chase G. Kent Collins Tommy Cowan, FAIA H. Hobson Crow, III, FAIA Gary Cunningham, FAIA William Curtis, Jr. Gabriel Durand-Hollis, Jr., FAIA Bibiana Dykema, AIA Darrell Fitzgerald, FAIA, LEED AP Charles Fulton, AIA John Grable, FAIA Charles Gromatzky, AIA Jesse Cameron Hager, AIA David Harrison, AIA Christopher Hill James Tipton Housewright, FAIA, LEED AP Michael Hsu, AIA, IIDA Ford Hubbard, III Terry Kafka Philip T. Keil, AIA

Anne Kniffen, RID, IIDA Sam Kumar, MS David Lake, FAIA Matthew Leach, AIA Sandra Lucas, ASID, NCIDQ, RID, LEED Green Assc.

Harry Mark, FAIA Gilbert Lang Mathews, Hon. AIA Michael McCall, AIA Elaine Molinar, AIA, NCARB, LEED AP Kate Anne Mraw, LEED AP BD+C Dana Nearburg Benjamin Parker, AIA, WELL AP Judith Pesek, FIIDA, LEED AP Charles Phillips, AIA Leilah Powell Howard Rachofsky Elizabeth Chu Richter, FAIA Roland G. Roessner, Jr. Candid Rogers, FAIA Deedie Potter Rose Lloyd Scott James Shepherd, AIA, LEED AP Dan Shipley, FAIA Emily Summers, RID James Susman, FAIA Jerry Sutton, AIA Evan Taniguchi, AIA Christine Ten Eyck, FASLA Helen Thompson David Watkins, FAIA Julia Cook Webber Melba Whatley, Hon. TxA Gordon White, M.D. Samuel McElvy White, AIA NCARB Samantha Whitney, AIA Allison Wicks Canan Yetmen, Hon. TxA

EMERITUS MEMBERS

Lexa Acker, AIA Emeritus Ken Bentley, AIA Susan Benz, AIA Reed Kroloff Kevin Lorenz, AIA Emeritus Graham Luhn, FAIA Boone Powell, FAIA

School of Architecture graduates celebrate commencement on the plaza outside the LBJ Auditorium. Photo by Thomas Meredith.

77

EXHIBITIONS The School of Architecture regularly hosts exhibitions to showcase faculty research.

The following were on display during the 2022-2023 academic year. Use the QR codes to learn more and view images as well as 3D virtual tours.

TWILIGHT REQUIEM

October 14–November 18, 2022 Organized by 2020–2022 Emerging Scholar Stephanie Choi With support from the Gensler Exhibitions Endowment and the Bluford Walter Crain Centennial Endowed Lectureship This exhibition explored ritual and ceremonial objects used in quotidian life, drawing upon Korean folk art forms, aesthetics, and histories to imagine new rituals and objects.

Photo by Thanh Le.

78

PLATFORM 2023–2024

CIVICS AND PLACEMAKING

January 30–February 24, 2023 Organized by Associate Professor Kory Bieg, Assistant Professor Daniel Koehler, and Associate Professor Clay Odom With support from the Henry M. Rockwell Chair in Architecture and Gensler Exhibitions Endowment

ARCHITECTURE AFTER AI

This exhibition and symposium explored the potential of artificial intelligence platforms to revolutionize the field of architecture, from the way buildings are designed to the conception of new forms and structures that were previously unimaginable. They offered a glimpse into the future of the field and the exciting potential of architecture after AI. Photo by Kory Bieg.

79

2022–2023 EXHIBITIONS February 24, 2023

TRANSGRESSIVE PRACTICES TO TRANSFORMATIVE POLICIES: LANDSCAPE CHANGE, FAST & SLOW

80

PLATFORM 2023–2024

CIVICS AND PLACEMAKING

Organized by Assistant Professor and 2021–2023 Meadows Foundation Centennial Fellow Maggie Hansen Presented by the Center for American Architecture and Design with support from the Meadows Foundation Centennial Fellowship and Meyer Foundation Centennial Lectureship This symposium and display considered a framework of transgressive landscape practices to reposition design professionals from being instruments of existing policy to catalysts for policy change, informed by an understanding of evolving impacts on the ground.

Photo by Thomas Meredith.

March 9–April 14, 2023

“FOR WHITES”: CONTEXTUALIZING RACE AND ARCHITECTURE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT AUSTIN

Organized by Assistant Professor Tara A. Dudley With support from the Gensler Exhibitions Endowment, the Blake Alexander Architectural Library Endowment, and the University of Texas Libraries This exhibition illuminated and investigated the racist signage that was discovered in Battle Hall during the course of 2021 renovations. It placed the signage within the complex—yet previously unexplored—history of Black craftsmen and laborers’ contributions to the construction of Battle Hall between 1910 and 1911 and, more broadly, to the development of the campus’s built environment from the University’s founding through the 1930s building campaign.

Photo by Thanh Le.

81

310 INNER CAMPUS DRIVE, B7500 AUSTIN, TEXAS 78712-1009

Non-Profit Org U.S. Postage Paid Austin, Texas Permit No. 391