Nathan Koskovich speaks with Georgia Tech Urban Design Professor
Ellen Dunham-Jones about why she, like so many architects, changed her focus
towards urban design, and her work as a professor, theorist, and author.
The lesson? In order to build meaningful buildings,
buildings that fulfill the promise of design helping to create a better world,
buildings must be placed in a meaningful context.
Ellen Dunham-Jones
is an award-winning architect, professor and Coordinator of the MS in Urban Design
at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She serves on the Policy Subcommittee
of the AIA Design and Health Leadership Group, is on the Board of Commons
Planning, and is past Board Chair and Fellow of the Congress for the New
Urbanism.
A leading authority
on suburban redevelopment, she lectures widely, conducts workshops with
municipalities and consults on individual projects. She has published over 60
articles linking contemporary theory and practice. She and co-author June Williamson wrote Retrofitting Suburbia; Urban Design
Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs (Wiley & Sons, 2009, updated
paperback edition in 2011, mandarin translation in 2013). The book’s documentation
of successful retrofits of vacant big box stores, dead and thriving malls, and
aging office parks into more sustainable places has received significant media
attention in The New York Times, PBS, NPR, Harvard Business Review, Urban Land,
Planning, Architectural Record and other venues. The book received the PROSE
award from the American Association of Publishers as best architecture/urban
planning book of 2009, was featured in Time
Magazine’s March 23, 2009 cover story, “10 ideas changing the world right
now” and is the subject of her 2010 TED talk and 2012 TED-NPR Radio Hour
interview.
She continues to
research short and long-term tactics for scaling up suburban retrofitting in
the U.S. and abroad. She appeared in the 2011 documentary Urbanized, the 2012 PBS series “Designing Healthy Communities” and
contributed chapters to the honorable Henry Cisneros’s 2012 book, Independent for Life, Homes and
Neighborhoods for an Aging America and “Irrational Exuberance: Rem Koolhaas
in the Nineties” to the 2013 book Architecture
and Capitalism. She received undergraduate and graduate degrees in
architecture from Princeton University and taught at UVA and MIT before joining
Georgia Tech’s faculty to serve as Director of the Architecture Program from 2001-2009.
First a video to set the stage
LINKS
Books
The Death and Life of Great American Cities (read this first!)
Triumph of the City (then read this)
Retrofitting Suburbia (now read this)
and this also if you're interested
and this if you want a mental work out
Names to Know
Groups
