Ekdahl Lecture History

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Lecture Title: An Unconventional Career Path in Design

Description: Cacciatore's lecture will talk about his career path that started in the field of car design at a very early age and brought him, over more than two decades, to explore and combine different design disciplines. A selection of personal and commissioned design projects will be shared to illustrate the importance of following intuition and passions in shaping a career path that is meaningful to each of us. He will also discuss how to anticipate and leverage the evolution of technology to express excellence in every design project.

In the last 20 years, Cacciatore has created concept cars, aircraft interiors, watches, TV advertisements, video games, mobile apps, interactive installations, 3D printers and more.

He believes that creativity needs a multidisciplinary approach. That's why his work has always been focused on mixing creative disciplines and continuously exploring that magic field that lies between art and science.

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Lecture Title: Mining

Description: The lecture "Mining" is presented in three acts: (a) a deep dive into a case study to unearth the multidisciplinary design discourse from concept through construction to representation, (b) an interactive workshop exercise for enhanced creativity and lifelong pondering, and (c) design contamination between typologies, pivoting between project scales.

Chu is an architect, interior designer and educator. In her four decades in practice, Chu has worked extensively with world-renowned museums, cultural and arts-related facilities, and educational institutions. Leveraging her design reputation, Chu champions interior architecture as a distinct and emerging discipline, advancing design excellence through teaching, public speaking and her leadership in the civic and professional realms, including her role on the city of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Commission, the Mayor's Design Advisory Panel, the National AIA Interior Architecture Advisory Group, Contract Magazine’s editorial advisory board, and Architecture California. Chu has served on numerous design juries and as a vice president of the IIDA International board of directors from 2017-18. A dedicated educator since 1990 in architecture and design schools across the country and abroad, Chu was recognized with the distinguished Presidential Honoree Educator Award by the Los Angeles Chapter of the AIA in 2016.

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Lecture Title: Democratic Ground — Discovering Equity in the Landscape

Description: Gray's lecture is broken down into three parts: reality, reconciliation and reconnection.

"The public realm is democratic ground that connects humans with the environment, yet the environment is not always for everyone," Gray said. "The world is rapidly changing, and the time is now to reinvent the practice of design for public space in response to social and environmental challenges. We need to reconnect people of color to the environment. Many people are commonly absent from the conversation regarding open space. The current minority population of the U.S. will become the majority in 20 years and the disciple of design needs to proactively prepare for this reality. Traditional Eurocentric models of planning and development have not accounted for the needs of all residents. Unfortunately, there are still many people who are left out of our collective design conversation. We must reverse the cultural perception that has systematically manifested oppression and encourage all people to embrace nature towards developing a positive environmental empathy."

This lecture is crafted to discuss the importance of fostering cultural diversity in design toward curating the public realm to take care of the needs of all the people. The planet is stressed due to human impacts and landscape architects, architects, planners, engineers, biologists and scientists to name a few have the insight to restore the earth. He will also discuss how design will bring people together to heal the planet from climate change, racism, consumption, species extinction and inequity.

As an EDSA studio leader with a 27-year career and experience in more than 30 countries, Gray's global management sense has positively shaped the outcomes of many environments. His heritage originates from Liberia, West Africa, which has influenced his sense of community-based design and placemaking. His portfolio ranges from large-scale planning to detailed site design, with emphasis on communities, parks, hospitality, urban public realms, health care and campus spaces. Blending sensitivity, context and creative design solutions, Gray unites a client's vision with his vanguard viewpoint producing designs with purpose and presence.

Domestically, his work includes parks and public realm experiences in rural and urban communities. His international experience encompasses the design for mixed-use destinations, resort communities, and large-scale parks in the Caribbean, North Africa, and the Middle East including a 5,000-acre Central Park in Cairo, Egypt. Currently, Gray is leading a team of designers and landscape architects on projects in Florida, Georgia, California, Virginia, Arkansas, Puerto Rico, Bahamas, China, Dubai, Egypt, India, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Antigua and St. Lucia.

A registered landscape architect in Florida, Georgia, Arkansas, and Virginia, Gray is CLARB certified. After completing studies in architecture at the Boston Architectural College and Savannah College of Art and Design, he earned his Bachelor of Landscape Architecture from the University of Georgia. Regarding professional affiliations, he has been a member of the American Society of Landscape Architects, or ASLA, since 1999 and was inducted into the Council of Fellows in 2017. In 2018, Gray was elected to serve as ASLA vice president for professional practice on the Board of Trustees' Executive Committee. He has served the ASLA Florida Chapter on the Scholarship Committee and ASLA National on the Student and Professional Awards Jury, as well as the Annual Meeting Education Advisory Committee. He is a past president of the Landscape Architecture Foundation and an active member of the Urban Land Institute.

At EDSA, Gray's award-winning projects are inspired by a passion for creative design solutions that solve meaningful global issues. Gray has the keen ability to translate a community's vision to create places that intentionally relate to diverse generations. With an uncompromising dedication to quality, he consistently takes into consideration important factors like community, heritage, environment, and the constant pursuit of improving humanity through landscape architecture.

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Lecture Title: The Future of Parks and Public Space: What's Next?

Description: In this lecture, Silver explains that "Parks and public spaces are vital to the livability of cities. As the country urbanizes and demographics of the American population shifts, parks and public spaces are gaining greater importance as places for physical health, mental health and social interaction." Silver continues, "The global pandemic and the social unrest have exposed inequities in our communities that have existed for generations. As we plan and design for the future, how can we create more equitable, inclusive and accessible places?"

Silver joined the leadership team of McAdams as vice president of urban planning in June 2021. He is responsible for providing advisory services in urban planning, land use, parks and public space planning with an emphasis on diversity, equity and inclusion. Silver serves as an ambassador and leader for the company in regional and national organizations and events. He is the current president of the American Institute of Certified Planners and former president of the American Planning Association. Before joining McAdams, Silver served as the New York City parks commissioner, overseeing more than 30,000 acres of parkland.

When Mayor Bill de Blasio named Silver as New York City's parks commissioner, he called him a visionary. The mayor went on to say: "He has a passion for fairness and equality. He understands that we have to ensure that parks and open spaces are available in every community and are well-maintained in every neighborhood in this city." At NYC Parks, Silver streamlined the capital process by six months allowing the public to enjoy renovated parks sooner. He introduced a new public realm strategy called "Parks without Borders," launched a capital project tracking system and initiated a Framework for an Equitable Future to improve the parks system that included a $318 million campaign to transform 67 of the city’s most neglected parks. The $50 million "Parks Without Borders" program earned national and international recognition for its innovative approach to urban design and helped make parks safer and more accessible. Both the Community Parks Initiative and Parks Without Borders is being replicated in the United States and abroad.

Silver is one of the nation’s most celebrated urban thinkers. He was selected to Planetizen’s list of the 100 Most Influential Urbanists in the world. In addition, he has been honored as one of the top 100 City Innovators in the world by UBM Future Cities and the Urban Times named him one of the top international thought leaders of the built environment. In 2017, Silver was selected to be an honorary member of the American Society of Landscape Architects.

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Lecture Title: Place IT! An Art & Sensory-Based Approach to Inclusive Community Engagement

Description: James Rojas will talk about how changing the tools of engagement can transform public meetings and change outcomes. He developed this method to empower community members to make changes in their community by using their memory, hands, and objects. This sensory- based approach to community design invites participants to understand and articulate their relationship to place and others as first and foremost in the planning and design process. He will present examples of recent community workshops and will introduce the new book he produced with John Kamp, just published in February 2022.

James Rojas is an urban planner, community activist, and artist. He has developed an innovative public-engagement and community-visioning tool that uses art-making, imagination, storytelling, and play as its media. He is an international expert in public engagement and has traveled around the US, Mexico, Canada, Europe, and South America, facilitating over four hundred workshops, and building fifty interactive models. He has collaborated with municipalities, non-profits, community groups, educational institutions, and museums, to engage, educate, and empower the public on transportation, housing, open space and health issues. His award-winning method has been implemented all across the globe.

He is also one of the few nationally recognized urban planners to examine Latino cultural influences on urban design and sustainability in the US. He has written and lectured extensively on how culture and immigration are transforming the American front yard and landscape, and he is the founder of the Latino Urban Forum, an advocacy group dedicated to increasing awareness on planning and design issues facing low-income Latinos.

He has lectured and facilitated workshops at MIT, Berkeley, Harvard, Cornell, and numerous universities, schools and public forums. His work has been installed at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, the Venice Biennale, the Exploratorium, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Bronx Museum of Art, the Getty and on streets and sidewalks of major cities. His research has appeared in the NY Times, LA Times, Dwell, Places, and in numerous books.

Lecture Title: A Path and Mindset for Independence

Description: A specialist in furniture design, Coletti will draw from her career and experiences to discuss the working life of a designer and her path to opening her own studio. Coletti began her career as an in-house designer for various manufacturers and now works with manufacturers as an independent designer. She will discuss the steps needed before and after concept development to bring a new product to life. She will also discuss the revision, review and rework processes that occur during development to refine and optimize a product for its release. Finally, she will discuss groundwork that persuades manufacturers to choose and embrace a designer’s work and to continue the relationship.

The daughter of an art-loving teacher and a tool-and-die maker, Coletti spent her childhood in love with building blocks and music. She studied industrial design at Purdue University and spent a summer immersed in Scandinavian Design in Denmark.

After an early career with Bernhardt Design, Lenovo and Williams-Sonoma Home, Coletti established Nonfiction Creative in 2010 as a multidisciplinary studio specializing in contract furniture design. Her designs have received multiple awards, including Best of NeoCon, Editor's Choice and Gold awards.

Coletti's process identifies the user’s needs to empathetically design elements that elevate their experience.

"I put myself in the shoes of the individual," Coletti said. "How would I want to feel in this situation or environment? Do I want comfort? Do I want to feel confident? From that role-play, I look for a way to design an empathetic answer to create that experience."

In addition to her design work, Coletti has served as an adjunct faculty member in the industrial design program at Appalachian State University.

Lecture Title: Co-creating the City

Description: City building at its best is a collective enterprise, combining the experience and aspirations of residents with the professional knowledge of planners, designers and civil servants. For too long, the development of our cities has been a top-down process, often exacerbating racial and economic inequities, and ignoring the needs of the communities it impacts. On the other hand, many processes to enable community input can be derailed by NIMBYism and the loudest voices in the room at the expense of the common good. This lecture explores a number of projects in Detroit that seek a middle ground between grassroots and top-down approaches to create more equitable and beautiful outcomes in the city's post-bankruptcy development, focusing on the role of public space in strengthening and revitalizing the city.

At The Kresge Foundation’s Detroit Program Bush supports investments in transformative public spaces in the city of Detroit that promote greater understanding and inclusion, as well as strategies that advance the interconnections between sustainable urban development and economic equity.

Before joining the Kresge Foundation in 2021, she served as urban design director-east region at the city of Detroit Planning and Development Department, where she was involved with planning and developing inclusive economic recovery efforts in partnership with residents. She implemented work through the Strategic Neighborhood Fund and led Detroit’s Reimagining the Civic Commons initiative in the Fitzgerald neighborhood in northwest Detroit.

Alexa has also held positions with SmithGroup and San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association.

Bush earned a bachelor’s degree in visual and environmental studies from Harvard University and a master’s degree in landscape architecture from the University of Virginia.

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Lecture Title: Convergent Resemblance

Description: As social beings, we instinctively continue to rethink the relationship of the individual to the collective,” Snyder said. “Within the contemporary contexts of antipodal belief systems and reductivism, which predictably result in larger factions, we in the creative professions are simultaneously encouraged to be unique individuals. We struggle to understand our place within the design disciplines which have rightfully dismantled the myth of the individual creator, but which stand in contrast to a larger social context that antithetically promulgates and exploits the attainment of celebrity. In response, this lecture will posit examples of potential contributions from incorporating idiosyncratic intuitions into any design process while adamantly continuing to prioritize the historically fiduciary responsibilities of our design professions.”

Snyder's academic research and teaching activities are primarily concerned with how specific cultural, contextual and constructional demands influence architectural design. Much of his current work reflects adaptive responses that investigate the role and appropriateness of various techniques of precision as either generative or refining modes of application. In 1995, he established his firm, Vincent Snyder Architects, in Austin. His professional work ranges in scale from residential to institutional and is internationally published, exhibited and recognized. Selected awards include those from Progressive Architecture, Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture National Design Award, Cradle2Cradle, Boston Society of Architects, Texas Society of Architects and the Austin chapter of The American Institute of Architects. He is a registered architect in Texas and has additional licensures through the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards. Snyder is also a Rome Prize in Architecture recipient and a Fellow at the American Academy in Rome.

Lecture Title: (re)Defining Context

Description: Hacin’s lecture will discuss circumstances, surroundings, milieu, backdrop, ambience and frame of reference. The word "context" has many meanings and has grown exponentially in use over the past 50 years. So then, what is "contextual design" and how can we think about how its evolution informs the practice of architecture today? Mostly within the context of New England, Hacin will describe how H+A has explored this strategy over many years through a wide array of project types, defining and redefining design problems with the goal of supporting the region and the community in impactful ways that are both authentic and particular.

Hacin founded Hacin + Associates, an interdisciplinary architecture and design firm, in 1993. Along with a team of more than 30 people dedicated to design excellence and client service, Hacin has received extensive media coverage and over 80 regional, national and international awards in recognition of the studio’s broad portfolio of architecture, interior design, graphics and branding.

The son of an architect and born in Geneva, Switzerland, Hacin received his Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from Princeton University, graduating summa cum laude, and his Master of Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, graduating with distinction. He has served on the Northeastern University School of Architecture Advisory Board and as a guest critic and lecturer at design schools across the country, including Northeastern, the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Virginia, the Boston Architectural College and others. He has participated on numerous design juries and panels, given a TEDx talk, recorded multiple podcasts, guest-edited the journal Architecture Boston, and most recently lectured and taught a graduate architectural design studio at Roger Williams University’s School of Architecture.

Hacin has served for nearly 20 years as a Mayoral appointee to the Boston Civic Design Commission, the city of Boston’s design review panel for significant projects that impact the public realm. He has been an active volunteer on behalf of a number of civic, professional and nonprofit organizations, including the Boston Society of Architects, Design Industry Groups of Massachusetts, Historic Boston Inc. and the Boston Center for the Arts, where he served as the board chair during a pivotal time of the organization’s celebrated rejuvenation.

In 2010, Hacin was named a fellow of the American Institute of Architects. With more than 35 years of professional experience, he has been personally recognized for his public service to the city of Boston and received numerous awards for his contributions to design.