Ekdahl Lecture History

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Lecture Title: Why design is the best career in the world and the only way to do it!

Description: Phillips is responsible for the company's design and product platform strategies, development of all new products, product enhancements and life cycle management.

Phillips has an expansive design background in differing industries and design disciplines. He has spent more than 16 years in the automotive industry designing vehicle exteriors, interiors and components for the top brands in the world.

Phillips has designed consumer products and most recently oversaw seating product development for the past five years for a southern California manufacturer. An awarded designer who is extremely passionate about design and enjoys the challenge of creating world-class products, Phillips resides in southern California with his family. OFS is a family-owned, community-driven company providing socially responsible furniture and logistics solutions in office, health care, education and government, headquartered in Huntingburg, Indiana.

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Lecture Title: Ordinary and Extraordinary

Description: Scarpa has garnered international acclaim for the creative use of conventional materials in unique and unexpected ways. He also is considered a pioneer and leader in the field of sustainable design. He is the recipient of the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum Award in Architecture and also was awarded the state of California and National American Institute of Architects Architecture Firm Award. Over the last 10 years, Scarpa's firm has received more than 50 major design awards, including 19 National AIA Awards, Record Houses, Record Interiors, the Rudy Bruner Prize, five AIA Committee on the Environment "Top Ten Green Building" Awards and the World Habitat Award, one of 10 firms selected worldwide. He also has received the lifetime achievement awards from Interior Design Magazine and the AIA California Council.

Scarpa's work has been featured in numerous publications and has been exhibited in venues such as the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, the National Building Museum and the Gwangju Biennale. Scarpa also has appeared on "The Oprah Winfrey Show."

Currently, he is on the faculty at the University of Southern California and has taught and lectured at the university level for more than two decades. Some of those institutions include the University of North Carolina at Charlotte; Harvard University; University of California, Los Angeles; Southern California Institute of Architecture; Washington University in St. Louis; University of Florida; University of Michigan; University of Southern California; and the University of California, Berkeley. He is a co-founder of the Affordable Housing Design Leadership Institute Livable Places Inc., a nonprofit development and public policy organization dedicated to building mixed-use housing and to help develop more sustainable and livable communities.

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Lecture Title: The Largest Art: A new manifesto for urban design

Description: Ryan's work demonstrates that urban design is the largest of the building arts, one that is distinct from other arts like architecture, landscape and land art. In "The Largest Art," Ryan distinguishes urban design by its pluralism, which has five dimensions: plural scale, ranging from an alleyway to a region; plural time, because it is deeply enmeshed in both history and the present; plural property, with many owners; plural agents, with many makers; and plural form, with a distributed quality that allows it to coexist with diverse elements of the city, looks at well-known urban design projects through the lens of pluralism, and revisits the thought of three plural urbanists working between 1960 and 1980.

Ryan will tell three design stories for the future, imaginary scenarios of plural urbanism in locations around the world, and conclude with three signal considerations that all urban designers must acknowledge: eternal change, inevitable incompletion, and flexible fidelity. These stories illustrate Ryan's belief that "the city is a ceaselessly active, perpetually changing entity: the urban design of the future must be an art whose aesthetic qualities welcome the city's pluralism instead of resisting it."

"Brent Ryan's work demonstrates the breadth of work that our students are preparing to address in their future practice," said Stephanie Rolley, department head in landscape architecture and regional & community planning.

Ryan's research focuses on the aesthetics and policies of contemporary urban design, particularly with respect to current and pressing issues like deindustrialization and climate change. Ryan's first book "Design After Decline: How America Rebuilds Shrinking Cities (The City in the Twenty-First Century)," was selected by Planetizen as one of its 10 best urban planning books of 2012, and his second book, "The Largest Art: A Measured Manifesto for a Plural Urbanism," was published by MIT Press in 2017.

Ryan's research has been published in the Journal of Urban Design, Journal of Planning History, Urban Design International, Urban Morphology, and the Journal of the American Planning Association, which awarded his article "Reading Through A Plan" its best article of 2011. Ryan also has written numerous chapters for books, including "The City After Abandonment"; "Urban Landscape"; "The Oxford Handbook of Urban Planning"; "Rethinking Global Urbanism"; and "Urban Megaprojects: A Worldwide View." He has three current research projects in China, all, funded by the Sam Tak Lee Laboratory, examining coastal landmaking, the threat to urban villages, and a case study in transfer of development rights. Ryan has also consulted for the World Bank on planning projects for emerging economies in Eastern Europe, and he will initiate a five-year study of sustainability in Siberian cities in 2017, funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation.

Before joining MIT, Ryan taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he was also co-director of the City Design Center. Ryan holds a bachelor's degree in biology from Yale University, a Master of Architecture from Columbia University and a doctorate in urban design and planning from MIT.

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Lecture Title: Generosity: Infrastructure and the Public Realm

Description: Fascinated by the urban environment, Delk is a passionate champion of the public realm. Based in New York City, Delk is a partner and landscape architect with Snøhetta. She works to cultivate transdisciplinary collaboration for the creative advancement of our public environment. Clear thinking and collaborative principles characterize Delk's leadership of a myriad of dynamic projects, while her unencumbered vision allows for concerted explorations that embrace experimentation and improvisation within complicated social environments.

Delk's enthusiasm is reflected in her commitment to design and leadership within her firm and community. Currently, she's an active board member for the Urban Design Forum in New York City and is often invited as a speaker at influential conferences, universities and communities throughout the world.

With a natural ability for engaging diverse community and client intricacies, Delk guides complex projects ranging from master plans and brownfield redevelopments to realizations of urban plazas, parks, streetscapes and riverfronts. Currently, she leads several efforts with Snøhetta, including the design of the Willamette Falls Riverwalk in Oregon, the Blaisdell Center Master Plan in Honolulu, and the reimagined design of a significant public plaza in midtown Manhattan.

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Lecture Title: Provisional Architecture: Designing Just Food Systems

Description: Taylor will discuss the history of MASS Design Group's work, and the conceptual framework for her focus on food system design as a form of radical hope. Through that lens, she will present some of the ongoing food and farming projects on the boards at MASS, including the Good Shepherd Poultry Ranch in Kansas, a new national network for school kitchen design, a community-run food hall as catalyst for urban redevelopment in Poughkeepsie, New York, an installation to cultivate food literacy with students in Indiana, and an industrial scale grain mill in Senegal.

MASS Design Group is a nonprofit architecture firm based in Boston, and Poughkeepsie, as well as Kigali, Rwanda. MASS believes that architecture is never neutral, and its mission is to research, build and advocate for architecture that promotes justice and human dignity.

"Food is primal and political and cultural," Taylor said. "Food is inextricably linked to housing, to education, to health, to environmental change, to local economies, to global industry, and to racial and social injustice; food production and access are spatial and temporal. Agricultural production occupies vast swaths of our landscape, and is a powerful environmental force."

Taylor is an architect with a background in organic agriculture. She has an interdisciplinary focus on food justice, agriculture and food systems. She is currently working on projects based in Boston, Hartford and the Hudson Valley Design Lab that target in on issues of rural infrastructures of food production, equitable food access, and cultivation of food culture in disinvested cities. Before joining MASS, Taylor directed an independent practice focused on water infrastructure. In this capacity, she was the recipient of the Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction, Gold Prize, for her work on urban flood control in Las Vegas.

Taylor lives with her family in East Haddam, Connecticut, where they own and operate an organic vegetable and cut flower farm. She has taught advanced architecture studios at the Yale School of Architecture and Columbia University Graduate School for Architecture, Planning and Preservation.

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Lecture Title: Design at IBM 1967 - 1978

Description: John Stram has 46 years of professional award winning design experience. He served as industrial design/graphics manager at IBM, was director of design division at Seal Furniture and Systems and was manager of design—p fixtures & temporary displays for American Greetings Corporation. He is an instructor/visiting lecturer for eight universities and colleges. He is a member of the Fashion Merchandising Advisory Board at University of Central Missouri. Stram has been a member of IDSA for 28 years. He holds 11 US design patents and two US utility patents. His 27 exhibited/design awards include being part of the permanent collection at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MOMA), a two year traveling exhibit with the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C., and a three-month exhibit at Plastics as Plastics, at the Museum of Contemporary Crafts in New York. Stram has 27 works cited in design books, magazines and newspapers including: Form—Journal of Design, Product Design 2 and Industrial Design Magazine.

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Lecture Title: Soft Architecture; is being finished finished?

Description: When a cyclone cleared the trees around a house he designed in a forest, accomplished New Zealand architect Smith embarked on an alteration, research and teaching adventure; finding time, he suggests, at airports and while his kids were at parties. What happens next includes winning World Villa of the Year at the 2017 World Architecture Festival in Berlin, exhibitions in Prague, multiple New Zealand Architecture awards, and an iterative-design teaching program and doctorate at the University of Auckland.

Smith has more than 15 years of experience working as a design architect in design-led practices in New Zealand and Australia. His residential and public work has been widely published in New Zealand and internationally, and rewarded with a string of awards, including winning World Villa of the Year at the World Architecture Festival in Berlin 2017, being a finalist for the NZIA New Zealand Architecture medal in 2013, winning multiple NZIA New Zealand Architecture awards in public and residential categories, New Zealand's top timber design award in both residential and commercial categories, and in 2018 received nomination for the German International Architecture Award and was awarded at the International Architecture Awards and Architecture Masterprize Awards out of America. He was also highly commended at the 2015 World Architecture Festival in Singapore and presented as a finalist in Barcelona 2011, Singapore in 2013 and 2014, exhibited and represented New Zealand at the 2015 and 2018 International Architecture festivals in Prague, and has received commendation from the New Zealand Concrete Society, New Zealand Property Council Excellence Awards, and more than 30 NZIA local architecture and magazine awards. Recent publications include Architecture Record, Elle, Vogue and GQ magazine.

Smith has widely lectured about the practice's work, teaches an iterative design studio to master's students and has been both an internal and external master's examiner at Auckland University. He has served as a New Zealand Institute of Architects national councilor, been appointed to architecture award juries at a national level, and was invited onto a super jury at the World Architecture Festival in Singapore 2014 and judged again in Berlin 2017 and Amsterdam 2018.

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Lecture Title: The City is a Landscape: Kindness and the Space Between Buildings

Description: Rubin, founding principal of David Rubin Land Collective, practices landscape architecture with a simple mission and big ambitions: to positively inform the world and improve the human condition through the landscape. In this talk, Rubin will explore how socially purposeful landscapes can create positive change through cross-disciplinary collaborations and the synthesis of art, technology and the social sciences. This kind of empathy-driven design process derives from the understanding that landscape requires a spectrum of thoughtful ideas and voices in order to be successfully rendered. This collective consciousness lifts landscape to its highest ideals, affecting the human condition in positive, equitable ways.

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Lecture Title: Resilience: How to Turn Plans into Action for America's Climate Changed Future

Description: Founder and President of Climate Resilience Consulting, a Certified B Corp. She is an accomplished organizational strategist and visionary leader with over 25 years of domestic and international experience in the corporate, government and non-profit sectors implementing resilience and sustainability strategies, management systems, performance measurement, partnerships, benchmarking and reporting.

Her career started working on private sector projects in Southeast Asia forUSAID’s US-Asia Environmental Partnership and the World Bank and proceeded with implementing water security projects for MWH, a global engineering company; creating community sustainability projects for a niche architecture and urban design firm, Farr Associates; and pioneering public private partnerships, adaptation planning, interdepartmental coordination and climate performance measurement as lead of the Chicago Climate Action Plan at the City of Chicago. More recently, she created corporate social responsibility plans and reports for Fortune 500 companies as a Vice President at Edelman and ran a preeminent global adaptation nonprofit grounded in university-based research and analytics, the Notre Dame Global Adaptation Initiative, ND-GAIN.

Joyce is a Senior Sustainability Fellow at the Global Institute of Sustainability and advises various high level resilience groups, including the Resilience Brokers Programme, City Finance Lab, The Climate Bond Initiative's Adaptation and Resilience Expert Group, Global Adaptation and Resilience Investment work group, the MIT Climate CoLab, Partnership for Resilience and Preparedness, The Climate Service, and the US Green Building Council's Illinois chapter.

She was a Chicago Council on Global Affairs Emerging Leader, founding board member of the Alliance for Water Efficiency, a Great Lakes delegate to Brookings International Young Leaders Climate Change Summit, an American Society of Adaptation Professionals board director, an advisor to the National Center for Atmospheric Research Engineering for Climate Extremes Partnership, a member of Illinois FARM’s advisory group and an Aspen Institute Socrates Fellow.

Joyce regularly speaks as an expert in climate adaptation and resilience and has presented at Climate Week, WEF and COP side-events, and Greenbiz, among others.

She received a B.S. in biology, environmental studies and Asian studies from Tufts University and a Masters in city planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is the author of the Climate Adaptation Exchange Blog. @joycecoffee