AIASF Equity by Design is pleased to host Despina Stratigakos in the launch of her newest book WHERE ARE THE WOMEN ARCHITECTS? Join us for a special evening at AIA San Francisco to meet the author, discover highlights from the book and participate in a discussion with panelists on featured topics. 

 Program Agenda:

• 6pm - Registration, Refreshments and Book Purchase Opportunity
• 6:15 - Where are the Women Architects? Book presentation by Despina Stratigakos
• 6:45 - Audience Q&A w/ the Author
• 6:50pm - Panel Session  - See Below for information on the Panelists.
• 7:25pm - Audience Q & A w/ Panel and Closing words
• 7:35pm - Networking Reception and Book Purchase/Signing Opportunity.
• 8pm - End of Event - Thank you for joining us.

Panelists: Despina Stratigakos, Nancy Levinson, Deanna Van Buren and Rosa Sheng, AIA

Moderator: Susan Kolber

About the Author and Panelist:

Despina Stratigakos is associate professor and interim Chair of Architecture at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. She is the author of Where are the Women Architects, Hitler at Home and A Woman's Berlin: Building the Modern City. Stratigakos has published extensively on the history of women in architecture, including her award-winning book, A Women’s Berlin: Building the Modern City, the story of a forgotten metropolis designed by and for women. Her latest book, Hitler at Home, investigates the architectural and ideological construction of the Führer’s domesticity. She has served as a trustee of the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation, a board member of the Society of Architectural Historians, advisor of the International Archive of Women in Architecture at Virginia Tech, and Deputy Director of the Gender Institute at the University at Buffalo. She also served on Buffalo’s municipal taskforce for Diversity in Architecture and was a founding member of the Architecture and Design Academy, an initiative of the Buffalo Public Schools to encourage design literacy and academic excellence.  She received her Ph.D. from Bryn Mawr College and taught at Harvard University and the University of Michigan before joining the faculty at UB.

About the other Panelists: 

Nancy Levinson is Editor and Executive Director of Places Journal, the journal of public scholarship on architecture, landscape, and urbanism. Nancy brings to editorial work experience in academia and practice, most recently as the founding director of the Phoenix Urban Research Laboratory at Arizona State University, and as co-founding editor of Harvard Design Magazine at the Graduate School of Design, where she directed the journal’s rise to international prominence. Previously she worked as acquiring editor at Princeton Architectural Press, and before moving into publishing, she practiced architecture in Philadelphia. Nancy has written for academic and trade periodicals, including Architectural Record, Landscape Architecture Magazine, the Journal of Planning Literature, the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Perspecta. She received a B.A. from Yale University and Master of Architecture degree from the University of Pennsylvania.

Deanna Van Buren is a national thought leader researching, formulating and advocating for restorative justice centers, a radical transformation of justice architecture. She currently sits on the national board of Architects, Designers and Planning for Social Responsibility and is the founding partner of FOURM, design studio, a firm creating spaces for peacemaking and restorative justice. Deanna spent 13 years as a design lead on domestic, institutional and design education projects in the bay area, Europe, Asia and the Middle East prior to starting her practice in 2010. She has been awarded a Byrne Justice Innovation Grant with the Center for Court Innovation to develop a peacemaking center in Syracuse NY, the first of its kind in the United States. Funded by the Fetzer institute, her practice is also currently developing and implementing design studios with incarcerated men and women and is a recent awardee of the Rauschenberg Artist as Activist grant to develop the first mobile resource village. Deanna received her BS in Architecture from the University of Virginia, an MARCH from Columbia University and has recently completed The Loeb Fellowship at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design.

Rosa T. Sheng, AIA, LEED AP BD+C is a Senior Associate at Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, Founder and Chairperson for Equity by Design an AIA San Francisco committee. As a licensed architect with 21 years experience in Architecture and design, Rosa has led a variety of award-winning and internationally acclaimed projects, from the aesthetically minimal, highly technical development of the glass structures for Apple’s original high-profile retail stores, to the innovative and sustainable LEED NC Gold–certified Lorry I. Lokey Graduate School of Business at Mills College in Oakland, California. Most notably, as the Founding Chair of the AIASF Committee: Equity by Design, Rosa lead “The Missing 32% Project,” a 2014 Equity in Architecture Survey and research study, which launched a national conversation for achieving equitable practice in Architecture. Since the group launched its key findings, Rosa has been presenting in Boston, New York, Lisbon, Atlanta, Philadelphia, Seattle with other cities planned for 2016. The group’s outreach for equity in architecture has received national press in Architect Magazine, Architectural Record, Wall Street Journal, TEDxPhiladelphia and KQED/NPR.

About the Book:

In the United States, architecture students are more than 40 percent female. But more than 75 percent of working architects and more than 80 percent of architecture school deans are male. If women are undergoing the rigorous training to enter the field, why aren’t they staying there? Why aren’t they being elevated to positions of power? 

In WHERE ARE THE WOMEN ARCHITECTS? (May, $19.95), Despina Stratigakos, an architectural historian who spearheaded the campaign for Mattel to produce an Architect Barbie, explores the many facets of this drastic gender imbalance from the 19th century to the present day. Stratigakos shows that although women have long been active in architecture, their work was often focused on residential and interior design, leaving the large-scale institutional commissions that win public accolades and award financial gain to men. 

The situation is changing, slowly, though as the numbers make clear, the upper echelons of the field remain heavily male-dominated. In 2013 only 17 percent of architecture firm principals and less than 20 percent of architecture school deans were female. But Stratigakos profiles the emergence of new challenges to this boys’ club, from outspoken efforts to retroactively award Denise Scott Brown the Pritzker—her professional partner and husband Robert Venturi was given the prize in 1991, and the two were jointly awarded the 2016 AIA Gold Medal, a move widely seen as a corrective—to Wikipedia hackathons organized to write women into the historical record.

The first title in the Places Books series, a collaboration between Princeton University Press and Places Journal, WHERE ARE THE WOMEN ARCHITECTS? is an all-too-relevant account of gender imbalance in the workplace that will resonate within architecture and well beyond.

Places Books, published by Princeton University Press in association with Places Journal, presents smart, lively titles on architecture, landscape, and urbanism. Featuring the work of emerging and established scholars alike, Places Books offers readers a range of the best contemporary writing on the built environment.

Visit the Places Journal website here: https://placesjournal.org/

Rosa Sheng, AIA will be presenting the Keynote at Day 1 of AIAS Forum in San Francisco - Save the date!

Rosa Sheng, AIA will kick off the 2015 AIAS Forum in San Francisco with a keynote presentation on Why Equity Matters in the Future of Architecture. 

Full Schedule Available Here

Register Online

2015 NOMA NATIONAL CONFERENCE KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

The National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA) is pleased to announce the 43rd Annual International Conference & Exposition, taking place October 15-17, 2015 at the Sheraton New Orleans in downtown New Orleans, Louisiana. The Conference theme this year is RISE: Social Justice by Design. While the design profession has seen a shift towards a more socially-conscious practice in recent years, NOMA has always been an organization centered around community engagement and social justice through the design process. With that in mind, this year, we are challenging our members and partners to rise in support of diversity in the profession and design justice in our communities.

Keynote Speakers : Maurice Cox and Rosa Sheng

Rosa will be speaking at 8:30am on Friday October 16th about the call to action for both women and men to help realize the goal of equitable practice to advance architecture and communicate the value of design to society. At NOMA RISE this year in New Orleans, she will be talking about how Bias & Privilege needs to be discussed more before we can begin to move the needle towards equitable practice. In the EQxD Get Real Blog series, the challenges of NOT talking about Bias & Privilege are explored by individuals from different vantage points of architectural practice.

REGISTER HERE BY SEPTEMBER 15TH!