In collaboration, the Helms Bakery District and the Cal Poly SLO LA Metro Program in Architecture and Urban Design present:

Cathy Simon

Cathy Simon's five-decade long career has focused on transformative design at all scales. Her award-winning work comprises design for higher and secondary education, civic and commercial buildings, reinvention of historic structures, waterfront projects and urban design of numerous postindustrial Bay Area waterfront sites including the renovation of Pier 1, the Ferry Building and the masterplan for Treasure Island. Academic master plans include Harvard Futures, a study of Harvard in Allston, Brown in the Jewelry District, NYU Plans 2031, Stanford in Redwood City, and 2008 and 2017 Master Plans for Bard College, where she has also designed four buildings. In 1986 she was elevated to Fellow of the American Institute of Architects for her work in Design. Educated at Wellesley College and Harvard Graduate School of Design, she was the William A. Bernoudy Architect in Residence at the American Academy in Rome in 2015 and taught architecture at both Stanford and UC Berkeley where in 1996 she was the Howard Friedman Distinguished Professor of Architecture in Practice. From 1985-2008, Simon founded and led SMWM, a celebrated women-owned architecture and urban design practice with offices in San Francisco and New York. In 1999 SMWM won the AIACC Firm Award, the youngest firm to be so awarded. In 2008, SMWM joined Perkins + Will and from October 2015-January 2018, she served as a Senior Consulting Design Principal. 

A speaker, design juror and critic, Simon is a member of the University of Washington Architectural Commission and the University of California Berkeley Design Review Committee. In 2016 she was the Board Chair of the Dutch organization OrangeGoesGreen, and in 2017-2018 served as a Research Advisor for the Bay Area Resilient by Design Challenge. From 1993-1997, she was President of the GSD Alumni Council and served several terms on the GSD Visiting Committee. She also served for 12 years as a Trustee of the Golden Gate Parks Conservancy from 1992 to 2005.

Cathy's design philosophy and expertise have made her a natural spokesperson for the burgeoning revitalization and resiliency of post-industrial waterfronts worldwide and she was recently an urban design and architecture consultant to a multi-firm engineering team developing the Port of San Francisco’s Waterfront Resiliency Program. Her book about design and the waterfront, Occupation: Boundary, Art, Architecture and Culture at the Water was published in 2022 by ORO Editions. In 2023 she received the Harvard Graduate School of Design Distinguished Alumni Award. Cathy’s and SMWM’s papers, drawings and models are collected in the Environmental Design Archives at UC Berkeley, where last fall they were shown at the College of Environmental Design in an exhibit entitled, “Giving Voice to Values.”

In collaboration, the Helms Bakery District and the Cal Poly SLO LA Metro Program in Architecture and Urban Design present:

Neal Schwartz, FAIA

Neal J. Z. Schwartz established the modern design studio, S^A | Schwartz and Architecture in 1997. Recent recognition for the firm's design work includes several Chicago Athenaeum American Architecture Honor Awards, the James Beard Foundation Award for Excellence in Restaurant Design, the International Trends Home of the Year Award, an Architizer A+ Award, and multiple RADA and Residential Design Awards. In addition, the firm's work has consistently been honored by the AIA California Council, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Redwood Empire, and Boston chapters. S^A is also committed to significant pro-bono work with non-profits, including La Cocina, The Children’s Creativity Museum, Larkin Street Youth Services, Public Architecture, and the National AIDS Memorial Grove.

S^A's work has been profiled broadly, including features in Architectural Record, The New York Times, Dwell, Architect, Metropolis, and Residential Architect, among others. Recent book publications include the New View California collection of 20 of the region’s best residential firms and Influencers Architecture’s review of 37 international design leaders.

Neal has been actively involved in teaching for over 25 years, most recently as a full Professor of Architecture at the California College of the Arts (CCA). He was the founding chair of the AIASF Public Policy & Advocacy Committee (PPAC) advocating for improvements to SF Planning’s residential design review policies and procedures. Recognition of this work has included an AIACC Presidential Citation and two AIASF Community Alliance Awards.

Neal completed dual master’s degrees in architecture and public policy at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design and the Kennedy School of Government, respectively. He graduated with Distinction in Architecture, received the Thayer Award for Meritorious Scholarship, the Sheldon Traveling Fellowship, and national awards from the Urban Land Institute and American Planning Association.

Young & Ayata formed as a partnership in New York in 2008 to explore the conceptual and aesthetic possibilities of architecture and urbanism.

The practice is dedicated to building commissions, exploratory mediations, and published arguments where the reality of the contemporary environment is engaged as a provocation for experiments in form, material, and imagery. Both principals teach and view pedagogy as crucial to the continual development of architectural ideas. Young & Ayata have received the Progressive Architecture award, the Design Vanguard Award, the Young Architects Prize, the AIA Honor Award, and a first-place prize for the design of the Bauhaus Museum in Dessau, Germany. 

Michael Young is an Assistant Professor at The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at the Cooper Union. He is the recipient of the 2019-20 Rome Prize from the American Academy of Rome. He is the author of The Estranged Object (Graham Foundation 2015) and Reality Modeled After Images (Routledge 2021). Michael received his Masters of Architecture from Princeton University and his Bachelor of Architecture from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. Michael is a Registered Architect in the State of New York.  

Kutan Ayata is an Associate Professor and the Vice Chair in the Department of Architecture and Urbanism at UCLA, where he also serves as the Director of Master of Architecture Program. He received his Masters of Architecture from Princeton University and his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Massachusetts College of Art. He is a registered architect in the Chamber of Architects in Turkey.  

Born and raised in Rosario, Argentina, Marcelo Spina and Georgina Huljich are both renowned architects and distinguished educators.

Together, they lead Los Angeles-based and award-winning architectural practice PATTERNS, which they founded in 2002 as a speculative platform to explore an increasingly global design culture. Their work reveals a rigorous and progressive approach to projects and buildings across materials, scales, agendas and geographies, insisting on the cultural and social relevance of architectural form, contemporary aesthetics and emerging technologies. Their books include ‘PATTERNS: Embedded’, the studio first monograph published in 2010 by Shanghai based ACDCU and ‘Mute Icons & other Dichotomies of the Real in Architecture’ recently released by ACTAR Press. Marcelo Spina is a Design Faculty at SCI-Arc and Georgina Huljich is an Associate Professor at UCLA AUD.  

PATTERNS is a leading architectural practice led by partners Marcelo Spina and Georgina Huljich. The studio brings a critical and progressive approach to projects across scales, programs, and geographies, insisting on the cultural and social relevance of architectural form, contemporary aesthetics, and emerging technologies. Based in Los Angeles, the forward-looking studio takes advantage of the city’s decidedly global stance and idiosyncratic identity to create engaging and speculative architectural projects that become civic and cultural landmarks within the public realm.  PATTERNS gained international recognition as one of the most intriguing and broadminded firms in contemporary architecture with work exhibited worldwide, most notably at the Venice Biennale in Italy, The Chicago Biennial, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, The Art Institute of Chicago, The San Francisco MOMA, The MAK Museum in Vienna, and The FRAC in Orleans, where it is also part of their permanent collections.  

Victor Jones is a designer, writer, and cultural activist.

His creative and intellectual work stands at the intersection of architecture, community engagement, and the urban experience.  Infrastructure as a social, political, and spatial instrument is central to his scholarship, design research, and teaching.  Jones’s written works include (IN)FORMAL L.A.: The Space of Politics (eVolo Press, 2014), A Distant Bridge | Un pont à part (MétisPresses, 2016), and "New Orleans - Ecological Urbanism" in Shaping the City: Studies in History, Theory, and Urban Design (Routledge, 2013). 

In addition, Jones is design principal of Fièvre + Jones Inc. Projects include Near Noah (2021), Bywater Houses (2015), and Watt House Project Platform (2011). Currently Graduate Director and Assistant Professor of Architecture at Cal Poly Pomona, Jones has taught design studios and seminars at Tulane University, the University of California at Los Angeles, and the University of Southern California.  He lives and works in Los Angeles with his partner Alain Fièvre.   

Peter Tolkin + Sarah Lorenzen Architecture (working under the moniker TOLO Architecture) design projects that are meaningful to the people that use them, and that are reflective of the time and place in which they are built.

We work out of a renovated warehouse at the nexus of the Arts District, Little Tokyo and Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles. First founded by Peter Tolkin in 2000, our studio has designed and built projects of various types and scales, including creative workspaces, single and multi-family housing, mixed-use and retail, restaurants and hotels, and arts-based projects. As a collection, the work is formally and aesthetically varied given that we strive to respond to the particularities of a project’s location and given our emphasis on engaging clients as active participants in the design process.

TOLO’s designs draw from the rich material and cultural conditions that characterize the world we live in. Rather than conceiving our architectural role as primarily inventors of form, we also see our role as one that interprets and shapes relationships and situations. We believe that similar criteria apply to the design of a building as to the development of a visual concept for an exhibition. Design solutions in both are created to communicate a story through spatial and graphic means. The specific media and narrative device used depends on the intended audience and setting. Often our design process starts with us constructing a narrative about the project, which is then combined with relevant cultural, material, and aesthetic references (be they from the fine arts or from popular culture). This method of working allows us to connect site fragments, materials, textures, sounds, emotions, and images to arrive at an architecture that is representative of our multifaceted needs. 

For twenty years, James Rojas and John Kamp have been using art, creative expression, and storytelling to re-envision the outdated community meeting structure.

James Rojas is an urban planner, community activist, educator, and artist who runs the planning, model-building, and community-outreach practice Place It!. Through Place It!, he has developed an interdisciplinary, community-healing, visioning, and outreach process that uses storytelling, objects, art-production, and play to help improve the urban-planning outreach process. He is now an international expert in public engagement and has traveled around the US, Mexico, Canada, Europe, and South America, facilitating over 500 workshops, and building over 100interactive models. His research has appeared in The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Dwell, Places, and in numerous books. Relevant areas of expertise include using model-building as a means of community and planning outreach; working with underserved, disadvantaged communities and bringing overlooked voices to the planning discussion; making the physical form of cities relevant to broad audiences; and understanding how immigrants—especially Latino immigrants—see and understand urban and suburban space in the US and why they oftentimes reshape those forms in the ways that they do.

John Kamp runs the landscape, design, and engagement practice Prairieform. He has developed innovative tools to engage people of all ages and backgrounds in urban and landscape design, transportation, walkability, climate change, and water conservation. Frequently collaborating with Rojas, and building off of his 15 years of experience in landscape and urban design/build, he is able to translate findings from Place It!'s community-engagement workshops and trainings into designs for inclusive and livable streets and neighborhoods that leave room for all residents to improvise and help create amore welcoming public realm.

John Friedman Alice Kimm Architects (JFAK) was founded in 1996 and is based in Boyle Heights. With the belief that architecture has the power to uplift people’s lives, John and Alice use current technologies and tools to celebrates identity and joyful places that inspire.

Recently, with like-minded collaborators, John and Alice founded Open Source Homelessness Initiative (OSHI), a nonprofit that mines open data to accelerate innovations to eradicate homelessness. OSHI expanded the boundaries of what defines the work of an architect, and OSHI was recently named a winner of Metropolis’s Responsible Disruptors inaugural awards program.  

JFAK’s civic work includes public spaces and schools. JFAK has recently commenced work on two innovation- and equity-focused public school projects – the Iovine and Young Center in Leimert Park, and the Russell Westbrook Why Not? Academy Middle and High Schools in South Gate. The firm’s Wonderland Elementary School Kindergarten Classroom Building for LAUSD is under construction, along with a new Alumni Center for CSU Long Beach and a new Associated Students facility for UC Santa Barbara.

JFAK’s first book is scheduled to be published by Actar in late 2022. Titled Architecture, Not Architecture, the book will highlight an illustrative range of projects that the JFAK team and its collaborators have had the privilege to design, along with the inspirations and passions that shaped them. John and Alice were named Emerging Voices by The Architectural League of New York in 2004 and are elected Fellows of the American Institute of Architects. They live in Silverlake and have three children. 

Daniel López-Pérez (b. Madrid, 1973) is an Associate Professor of Architecture and a founding faculty member of the Architecture Program at the University of San Diego.

He holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University, a Masters of Advanced Architectural Design from Columbia University with honors, and an AA Diploma from the Architectural Association.  López-Pérez’s scholarship focuses on the historiography of modern architecture and its relationship to questions of technology, design-research, models of design pedagogy, material and environmental culture. He is the recipient of numerous research, publication grants and awards including the Graham Foundation, Mexico’s National Council for Culture and Arts (CONACULTA), Princeton University’s Barr Ferree Foundation, and a University of San Diego’s Faculty Undergraduate Research Mentor Award. 

His work has been exhibited and presented nationally and internationally at institutions such as the University of Southern California; University of California, Los Angeles; Harvard’s Graduate School of Design; Storefront, New York; Canadian Center for Architecture, Montreal; Museo Tamayo, Mexico City; Tec de Monterrey, Campus Guadalajara; the Venice Biennale; the University of Applied Sciences, Bochum; Bauhaus-Universität, Weimar; Alvar Aalto University Jyvaskyla, Finland; and Busan National University, South Korea. 

Space Popular is directed by Lara Lesmes and Fredrik Hellberg, both alumni of the Architectural Association in London (2011).

They founded the practice in Bangkok (2013) and have been based in London and Spain since 2016. Space Popular creates spaces, objects, and events in both physical and virtual space, concentrating on how the two realms can blend together. The studio has completed buildings, exhibitions, public artworks, furniture collections, and interiors across Asia and Europe, as well as virtual architecture for the immersive internet. Clients, collaborators, and commissioners include national institutions such as MAXXI - National Museum of 21st Century Art, Rome, Italy; The Swedish Centre for Architecture and Design –ArkDes, Stockholm, Sweden; Royal Institute of British Architects, London, UK; National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Seoul, South Korea; as well as independent galleries such as MAGAZIN, Vienna, Austria; and Sto Werkstatt, London, UK. Lesmes and Hellberg both have extensive academic experience having taught architectural design studio since 2011, first at INDA, Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok from 20211 to 2016, at the Architectural Association in London from 2016 to 2021, and currently at Daniels, Faculty of Architecture, University of Toronto sinde 2020, and UCLA Architecture and Urban Design since 2022. Their current MArch design and research studios both at Daniels and UCLA investigates visions for civic architecture in the immersive internet.