Julien De Smedt is to lecture on The Power of Diversity on Friday, May 1, 2009 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California from 10-11:30 AM.

Speakers: Amale Andraos; Minsuk Cho, AIA; Craig E. Dykers, AIA; and Julien De Smedt

Providers: The American Institute of Architects and McGraw-Hill Construction

The Power of Diversity: Practice in a complex world challenges us to understand and balance the needs of our clients with the complexity of our world.

Our actions can no longer be localized as issues of environmental well-being and cultural relevancy now extend beyond political borders. We must work to be more inclusive in meeting the challenges of the next 150 years, for we cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them. There is strength in diversity. It offers us a wealth of experience from many sources. It will inform us and open our minds to the other ways necessary to liberate us from the problems generated by traditional modes of thought operating within a single cultural lens. We know we can affect change. We have a responsibility to pave the way for future generations while we attend to the concerns of everyday enterprise.

This session will be moderated by the extraordinary John Hockenberry, Emmy and Peabody award winning journalist, 2007 Distinguished Fellow at MIT’s Media Lab, and co-host of the morning news program, The Takeaway on Public Radio, Amale Andraos has lived in six countries before opening a practice in New York. Craig Dykers, an American architect, is based in Oslo. Minsuk Cho, AIA, worked and studied in the US before founding Mass Studies in Seoul. Julien De Smedt has worked in Brussels and Copenhagen. Collectively, this group covers the globe, working in a wide range of scales and negotiating multidisciplinary and transdisciplinary networks within their practices to, as Amale Andraos of WORKac puts it, “better confront structures of power, create alternative universes, and produce work that resonates with the contemporary condition.”

Weblinks
AIA homepage
AIA National Convention 2009
AIA National Convention 2009 Online Program