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Solution or Sacrilege | Biographies

Jean Gardner is Senior Faculty, Department of Architecture, Interior Design and Lighting, at Parsons the New School for Design. Gardner’s course “Issues and Practices in Architecture and Urbanism” received special recognition in the 2005 National AIA Ecological Literacy Initiative. Co-chair of the ACSA Task Force on Sustainable Design, she helped organize Sustainable Pedagogies and Practices, the 2003 ACSA/AIA Teachers’ Seminar. With The Rockwell Group, she exhibited The Hall of Risk, 2002 Venice Biennale. Gardner received a Special Citation Award for her work as an urban ecologist, author, and educator in both the architectural field and the public realm from the New York City Chapter of The American Institute of Architects. She has also been honored with a Special Achievement Award from the City Club of New York City for founding Environment ‘90s, a coalition of over 250 groups. Her recent book is Cinemetrics: Architectural Drawing Today co-authored with Brian McGrath.

Susan Szenasy is Editor-in-Chief of Metropolis. Under her editorial leadership, the magazine has gained international recognition and has won numerous awards. She is also a professor at Parsons the New School for Design. Szenasy frequently lectures on design ethics, organizing Metropolis’ conferences: Wonderbrands, Wonderbrands West, Net@work, Business UnUsual, and Teaching Green. Szenasy also co-founded R.Dot, a coalition of New York City businesses, professionals, and residents who provide expertise on how to rebuild the former World Trade Center site in Lower Manhattan. She has previously held other senior editor positions at Interiors Magazine and Residential Interiors. Szenasy is the author and co-author of several books, notably The Home and Light and The Home: Exciting New Designs for Today’s Lifestyles.

Vincent Chang is a Partner at Grimshaw Architects, and was responsible for establishing the practice’s New York office. In this position he led the firm’s first American commissions - including the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center and the Experimental Media & Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Notable and award-winning projects in the UK include the Eden Project (winner of an AIA award for excellence in design in 2001) and the redevelopment of Paddington Station in London. In the US, Vincent is Partner-in-Charge of New York City Transit’s Fulton Street Transit Center in Lower Manhattan and the Miami Science Museum. Vincent’s lecture credits include a broad range of seminars and symposia for institutions such as the AIA and RIBA. He regularly teaches, focusing on Comprehensive Design and Systems Integration. Since 2006, he has sat on the AIA/NYS & ACEC/NYS Joint Practice Advisory Committee for Consultants. Outside the office Vincent is a co-founder of PlumOrganics, an organic babyfood company, inspired and run by his wife Gigi. He is also a consultant to EVATool, Environmentally Viable Architecture, an organization devoted to developing software tools to better integrate sustainable design into the creative process.

Dorothy Dunn is Director of Visitor Experience and Fellowships at the Philip Johnson Glass House. She is responsible for all site interpretation and designs programs and strategic partnerships, including “Conversations,” to position the site as a catalyst for promoting innovation and change. Dunn was the recipient of the inaugural Smithsonian Education Achievement Award in 2004 in recognition of her leadership as Education Director for Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. While at the Smithsonian, from 1989 through 2004, she launched and directed the signature programs A City of Neighborhoods: Bridging School and Community, Summer Design Institute, and Design Directions and planned numerous international conferences including Design on the Ecological Frontier (1994), Designing for the Senses (2002) as well as invitational study tours Icons of Modernism: LA and Palm Springs (1999), The Architecture of Landscape and Light (2003), Salone Internazionale del Mobile, Milan (2004 and 2005) and the invitational retreat, Craft and Design: Hand, Mind and the Creative Process (2004). Dunn worked with AIGA, the professional association for design, to reposition the International Design Conference at Aspen, the Aspen Design Summit, the world’s oldest forum for business and design leaders. As program director for AIGA, Dunn produced the program content for the international conferences Gain: AIGA Design and Business Conference (2006) & Design Conference (2005).

Steven Ehrlich began his career as Peace Corps volunteer in the mid-1970’s and was the organization’s first architect in Marrakech. He designed an eco-conscious building: a mud-and-thatch experimental theater in Zaria, Nigeria, where he also taught architecture. Because of its cultural relevance, the structure is still maintained. Ehrlich returned to the United States in 1979 and began designing buildings that fused innovation with sensitivity to the site, a pattern of practice that he learned and demonstrated in Africa. His is a singular multicultural modernism: simply but powerful forms invested with the particulars of place and people. The firm’s work includes a recent biotech laboratory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as well as institutional and commercial facilities around the country. The architect’s interest in global resources has him lately thinking beyond green to blue: He can envision a community that floats on and is completely sustained by the ocean. Steven Heller wears many hats (in addition to the New York Yankees): For 33 years he was an art director at the New York Times, originally on the OpEd Page and for almost 30 of those years with the New York Times Book Review. He is co-chair of the MFA Designer as Author Department at School of Visual Arts, Special Consultant to the President of SVA for New Programs, and writes the Visuals column for the New York Times Book Review. For over two decades he has been contributing editor to Print, Eye, Baseline, and I.D. magazines and has contributed hundreds of articles, critical essays, and columns (including his interview column “Dialogue” in Print) to a score of other design and culture journals. He is editor of the AIGA Journal of Graphic Design and AIGA Voice: Online Journal of Design. The author, co-author, and/or editor of over 100 books on design and popular culture, he is currently completing Iron Fists: Branding the Totalitarian State. Heller is the recipient of the AIGA Medal for Lifetime Achievement, the Art Directors Club Hall of Fame Special Educators Award, The Pratt Institute Herschel Levitt Award, and the Society of Illustrators Richard Gangel Award for Art Direction.

Michael LaFetra launched his production company, Foundation Films, in 2005. He is currently in development on a number of productions. A third generation Los Angeles native, LaFetra began acting at an early age. After he discovered the work of renowned California architect Pierre Koenig, LaFetra purchased the architect’s Case Study House #21, which he restored and listed on the Los Angeles Cultural Registry. LaFetra continues to collect and restore architecture. After Koenig’s Case Study House # 21, LaFetra became the steward of Neutra’s Kaufmann addition, R.M. Schindler’s Wolff House and How House, John Lautner’s Wolff House, Robert Skinner’s Idyllwild House, Ray Kappe’s Gould/LaFetra House, and Thornton Abell’s Rich House. He is currently working on Pierre Koenig’s last design, the LaFetra Beach residence, John Lautner’s Stevens residence and A. Quincy Jones’ Volk House. LaFetra serves on the boards of Rain Bird International and the MAK Foundation.

Christy MacLear is the Executive Director of the Philip Johnson Glass House. She was brought to the National Trust for Historic Preservation to develop the strategy, hire all staff and prepare the site and Visitor Center to open to the public this past June 2007. With the goal to “reshape the historic house museum model”, Christy and the staff team of the Glass House have sold out tours through 2008, launched a survey of 90+ modern homes in New Canaan, structured a “center for Modernism” to co-lead the National Trust’s investment in Modernist preservation, managed the NTHP board approval to purchase adjacent properties to preserve the Glass House view in perpetuity, and developed the “conversations” series to continue the legacy of new ideas through diverse leaders on-site. Christy is known for her ability to conceive of and lead large scale projects through opening and on-going operations. She was the Manager of Strategy for the Walt Disney Company’s new town project called Celebration, was the Director of the Museum Campus in Chicago where she represented 3 museum boards through the movement of Lake Shore Drive and the creation of a lakefront park, and was an independent consultant in Strategy & Visitor Experience to such clients as the Field Museum, the Cleveland Clinic and the leaders of the UAE. She has a degree in Urban Design from Stanford University and an MBA from Wharton in Real Estate Finance where she received a Barnes fellowship. She has been a professor in the graduate program of Arts Administration for the School of the Art Institute in Chicago and has served on the boards of Chicago’s Three Arts Club, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum and Steppingstones Museum for Children.

William Massie is the Architect-in-Residence / Head of Architecture Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan and a Tenured Professor of Architecture at Rensselear Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. He is participating as the Keynote Speaker and appointed Bruce Goff Chair at the University of Oklahoma on the future of technology and digital processes in architecture and architectural education. Massie’s work utilizes computer applications and digital information as a way of redefining “formal architectural construct” - a synthesis of ideas linked to construction in conjunction with the development of a theoretical position, all in support of an attempt to redefine architectural practice and making. His work is included in several exhibitions: Liquid Stone: New Architecture in Concrete at The National Building Museum in Washington, DC., P.S. 1 Young Architects Competition from 2000-2004 at KW – Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin, Germany. His Big Belt House is included in the “reopening” show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and a scaled model was acquired by MoMA as part of their permanent collection.

Toshiko Mori is the Robert P. Hubbard Professor in the Practice of Architecture and the Chair of the Department of Architecture at Harvard University Graduate School of Design since 2002. She is also principal of Toshiko Mori Architect, which she established in 1981 in New York City. Mori taught at the Cooper Union School of Architecture from 1983, until joining the Harvard GSD faculty with tenure in 1995. She has been a visiting faculty member at Columbia University and Yale University. The work of Mori’s firm has been widely published and has received awards and prizes internationally. Current work includes houses in Connecticut and New York, and institutional projects in Syracuse, Providence, Buffalo and New York City. Mori’s work was included in the exhibition, Design Life Now: National Design Triennial 2006. In the fall of 2005, her work was exhibited in Renewing Wright at the Heinz Architectural Center of the Carnegie Museum of Pittsburgh. Her profile, Postscripts: Building on Sacred Ground, appeared in The New York Times in May 2005 and she has edited a volume on material and fabrications research, Immaterial/Ultramaterial. A monograph of her work, Toshiko Mori Architect: Works and Projects, is forthcoming from Monacelli Press. In 2003 Mori was awarded the Cooper Union Inaugural John Hejduk Award. In 2005, she received the Academy Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Medal of Honor from the New York City chapter of the AIA. She is currently an advisor to A+U Magazine and serves on the President’s Council for the Cooper Union.

Fiona Morrison is currently working with JetBlue Airways to develop the brand and customer experience elements of the New York-based airline’s new terminal – Terminal 5 – which will open at John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK) in fall 2008. Terminal 5 is designed to complement and connect to the historic and iconic “TWA Flight Center” designed by Eero Saarinen and opened in 1962. Fiona joined JetBlue in 2000 shortly after the airline launched and held a series of senior marketing and communications roles, including Director, Brand Management. She has a BA in Communications from the University of Technology Sydney in Australia.

Chef Nils Norén is the Vice President of Culinary Arts of The French Culinary Institute (The FCI) and The Italian Culinary Academy (The ICA), at New York City’s International Culinary Center. An embodiment of the new international chef, disciplined in the classic sensibilities and driven by immense creativity, Norrin was appointed in 2006 to lead the schools’ culinary, pastry, bread and Italian programs. For the previous 10 years, he had been at Aquavit, where Marcus Samuelsson appointed Chef Nils to be Executive Chef in 2003. At Aquavit, under Marcus Samuelsson’s exemplary leadership, Chef Nils strove to solidify the restaurant’s place on the culinary map and to show the world what Swedish food and cooking techniques are all about. Prior to joining Aquavit, Chef Nils worked in Stockholm as Executive Chef at Restaurant Riche, which features a fine dining room, tapas bar and bistro; and as Chef de Cuisine at Restaurant KB, one of the country’s classic Swedish restaurants in the center of town. He also coordinated cooking classes for Restaurant Akademin. Chef Nils is a graduate of Culinary School in Gävle, Sweden.

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