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The AIArchitect team would like your input as we prepare to freshen up the newsletter for the rest of the year. Based on your requests to date, we are writing shorter articles in four areas: News, Business, Practice, and Design, We cover four major strategic areas of concern for the AIA—sustainability, diversity, integrated practice, and emerging professionals—on a rotating basis. We have the weekly Doer’s Profile, poll, and we’ve beefed up our blogs.
As the country slips through the current downturn, thoughts turn to the worst. "What if I get laid off?"
Jane Jacobs died two years ago last week, but if she’d lived, and visited me in my neighborhood in Washington, D.C., I’d like to think she might have written a book about it.
I moved to Columbia Heights, smack dab in the geographic center of the District of Columbia, last fall as I was reading Jacob’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities. For me, these two events are indelibly twinned, impossible to stop from informing each other. As I got further and further into the book, it seemed that the Jacobian dramas spelled out so plainly in Death and Life were being reenacted outside my front stoop just for my benefit.
In his keynote presentation May 15 at the AIA 2008 National Convention in Boston, Millard Fuller, the founder of Habitat for Humanity, spoke of the nexus of that idea. (Many think that Jimmy Carter founded Habitat, he said. In actuality, it was Fuller who recruited the former president in 1984 to join the effort.)
He also shared a challenge particularly for AIA members.
Continue reading "We the People Give Every Child a Chance" »
The convention this year, as is abundantly clear from the AIArchitect coverage, spoke elequantly and at length to the many facets of diversity. Although many people think of ethnicity and gender when they hear the words inclusiveness or diversity, there is another element that too many of us tend to overlook: the importance of good design for every one of us as defined by the convention theme: We the People. As Habitat for Humanity founder Millard Fuller said pointedly: “I have discovered that architects find it difficult to build for the poor.”
This page contains all entries posted to AIArchitect in May 2008. They are listed from oldest to newest.
April 2008 is the previous archive.
June 2008 is the next archive.
Many more can be found on the main index page or by looking through the archives.