Dionne Darling

Architect’s Newspaper

Dionne Darling has been with The A|N Media Group for over six years. As A|N’s Associate Publisher, she manages A|N’s Texas headquarters and handles accounts in the West, Southwest and Europe territories. Dionne has over 28 years of direct B2B sales, management and business development experience.

Lauren Rogers

Sherwin Williams

Lauren Rogers joined Sherwin Williams Coil Coatings Division as a Sustainability Marketing Manager. She graduated with a B.S. in Biology, B.A. in Spanish Language and Culture, and a minor in Sustainability from the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul. She is passionate about creating a more sustainable, equitable environment in both her personal and professional life.

Liana Giacherio

Bison

Liana Giacherio is an experienced Business Development Manager at Bison, bringing 15-years of expertise in supply chain management, deck systems, and green roof manufacturing/sales. Liana has been instrumental in forging partnerships with architects to drive the growth of eco-friendly roofing systems across commercial, residential, and public sectors. With a firm belief in the transformative power of outdoor spaces and their positive impact on mental well-being, she invites collaboration to create something beautiful and enduring.

Robert Levit

University of Toronto

A partner in the design firm Khoury Levit Fong, Robert Levit is associate professor and acting dean at the University of Toronto’s John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design. His work links the urban and architectural scales, and his design work and writing on architecture have appeared in numerous anthologies and journal publications. Levit has been the director of both the Architecture and Urban Design programs at the Daniels Faculty, and holds a Master’s degree in Architecture from Harvard University and a Bachelor of Arts degree from Columbia University. Prior to starting his own practice, he worked for the architect Alvaro Siza in Portugal.

Stephan Schütz

gmp

Stephan Schütz studied architecture at Braunschweig Technical University. After qualifying he joined gmp · von Gerkan, Marg and Partners Architects in 1994 and was appointed Partner in 2006. Since 2009, Schütz has been regularly leading workshops at the Academy for Architectural Culture (aac), which he helped to initiate. His most important projects include the Civic Center in Weimar, the New Tempodrom in Berlin, the Christian Church in Beijing, the CYTS Plaza office building in Beijing, the Grand Theaters in Qingdao and Tianjin, the National Museum of China in Beijing, the Universiade Sports Center in Shenzhen, the conversion and refurbishment of Dresden’s Kulturpalast as well as the Isarphilharmonie Gasteig HP8 in Munich.

Michelle Old

Kirksey

Michelle is an experienced senior project designer, and a Design Director at Kirksey. She is passionate about designing spaces that promote creativity, collaboration, and health. Michelle frequently speaks at conferences and has been honored with an AIA Ben Brewer Young Architect Award, and named as one of BD+C Magazine’s 40 Under 40, Houston’s Emerging Voices by the AIA Young Architects Forum (YAF) and one of the nation’s Diverse Designers in 2021. Her work has garnered design awards from Texas Architect, AIA Houston, SCUP, and IIDA. She has become an expert in mass timber projects as well.

Stephanie Phillips

Senior Deconstruction & Circular Economy Program Manager

City of San Antonio Office of Historic Preservation

Stephanie Phillips is the Senior Deconstruction & Circular Economy Program Manager at the City of San Antonio Office of Historic Preservation. In this role, she administers the largest deconstruction ordinance in the United States, scales reuse workforce development, and advances local building material recovery and reuse through the City’s Material Innovation Center. Her work contributes to nonprofits and coalitions that focus on embodied carbon and circular economy policy and advocacy, including the Climate Heritage Network and Build Reuse. She is the co-founder of Circular San Antonio, a local circular economy nonprofit, and is a 2023 J.M.K. Innovation Prize awardee.

Alexis Feitel

KL&A, Inc

Alexis is a licensed structural engineer, turned embodied carbon director at KL&A Engineers & Builders. With a decade of experience, Alexis leads a dedicated team in developing and implementing innovative strategies to quantify and reduce embodied carbon in design and construction practices. She is nationally recognized for her embodied carbon advocacy, mass timber life cycle assessment studies, and salvaged steel reuse. She was named ACEC Colorado’s 2024 Young Professional of the Year for her efforts to advance sustainable practices in the industry.

Dave Bennink

NYC Circular Construction Network

Dave Bennink is Director of the Building Deconstruction Institute and owns Re-Use Consulting. He trains groups focusing on reusable materials and embodied carbon, and has salvaged/deconstructed over 5000 projects in North America, existing within the circular economy since 1993. Significant to the city, Dave has formed the NYC Circular Construction Network whose goal is to unite various projects in the NYC area that are working towards a circular economy, spurred by the recent ‘Circular Design and Construction Guidelines’. The network’s focus is on driving action and facilitating “material matchmaking” between current and future projects.

Meredith Miller

T + E + A + M

Meredith Miller is a licensed architect and Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, where she was an A. Alfred Taubman Fellow in 2009 – 2010. She received her Masters of Architecture from Princeton University and holds a BS in architecture from the University of Virginia. Her work has been exhibited at the 2012 and 2016 Venice Biennales, Van Alen Institute, Storefront for Art and Architecture, and Boston Society of Architects. Her writing has been featured in Journal of Architecture Education, Scapegoat: Architecture, Landscape, and Political Economy, MONU, Pidgin, Thresholds, and ARPA Journal. Meredith has received research support from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and the American Institute of Architects. Meredith led the design practices Mer-Mer (2013-2015) and MILLIGRAM-office (2009-2014).

Eric Law

Urban Machine

Eric Law is the co-founder and CEO of Urban Machine, a robotics company on a mission to reclaim the millions of tons of wood waste from construction and demolition for reuse as high volume, locally sourced, premium lumber products.

Previously, Law built an industry-leading innovation team at Swinerton, and he led the Construction Product team for Bentley Systems after his company, EADOC, had been acquired. Eric earned his BS in Mechanical Engineering from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. When escaping technology, Law heads to the mountains with his family to ski, mountain bike, and climb a rock or two.

Stephen Pallrand

Carbonshack

Stephen Pallrand founded Home Front Build approximately 20 years ago, design/build company that specializes in renovating and restoring homes of L.A. vernacular architecture. He and his team also have long encouraged clients to incorporate sustainability as part of the renovation process. Stephen also launched his sustainable- only design-build and interior design products company, CarbonShack, a few years ago, to dive heavily into his eco-focus and where he feels design-build needs to go.

Stephen Pallrand’s background in construction, architecture, architectural history, painting, and set design has aided him in pulling together the diverse group of artists, craftsmen, architects and designers who work on the CarbonShack projects. His father was a scientist/educator and his mother an educator and patron of the arts. This exposure to art, science and education led him to realize that building in an environmentally conscious manner is unimportant if you do not communicate the need and educate the consumer, for there are no green buildings, only green users. Our understanding of the environment is changing radically and so is the fate of the earth based on our actions as a civilization. Art and architecture have always played a critical role in representing the knowledge and culture of a period and Pallrand’s use of the CarbonShack projects is to transform our shelters, our homes, into vehicles of change.

https://www.homefrontbuild.com/

https://www.carbonshack.com/

Susan Jones

atelierjones

Susan Jones, FAIA

Susan Jones, FAIA is an architect with over 30 years of experience and is founder of the award-winning architectural Seattle firm, atelierjones focuses primarily on designing and building lower-carbon, mass timber buildings. With eight completed mass timber projects, atelierjones is a national leader. atelierjones, a solely woman-owned and woman-led architectural firm, designs tall and mid-rise, multi-family mass timber housing, as well as mass timber institutional buildings and single-family homes. In June 2023, atelierjones completed the new workforce housing tall mass timber 126-unit project, Heartwood in Seattle, the first Type IV-C building in the US.

atelierjones’ prolific work over the decade to advance and restructure the carbon intensive construction industry towards lower carbon materials is an exemplary example for the role architects can play to innovate at all scales, and urgently lower our carbon footprint. Susan regularly partakes in local, national and international leadership-level collaborations to create change at scale and ensure rigor on multiple levels, from forest health to LCA studies, to fire testing, including a multi-year pro-bono commitment, representing AIA National to write and pass new national 2021/2024 ICC Tall Wood Building Codes.

A third-generation native of the Pacific Northwest, Susan grew up in Bellingham, Washington, and has raised her family in Seattle. Susan earned her B.A from Stanford in Philosophy, and her M.Arch from the Harvard GSD. She is licensed in multiple states, has been a visiting design critic at numerous universities, and is Affiliate Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Washington. She was made a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects in 2010. Using hyper-local forest management practices, Susan has spent the last five years managing her own family-owned 140-acre forest in the San Juan islands in Washington State.

Brent Buck

Brent Buck Architects

Raised in the American Midwest, Brent grew up in a family of makers–masons, carpenters, plasterers, and machinists. At a young age he developed a respect for people who work with their hands, which impacts his viewpoint on architecture and design today. He earned a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Carnegie Mellon University and a Master of Architecture degree from Yale University. He was awarded the John Stewardson Fellowship from the University of Pennsylvania, which he used to travel throughout India to study the centuries-old tradition of stepwells. He was awarded the Drawing Prize from Yale University.

Brent founded Brent Buck Architects in 2015 after spending ten years apprenticing at the firm Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects. A registered Architect in the states of New York and Connecticut, Brent is a member of the American Institute of Architects and has been certified by NCARB.

Liana Giacherio

Bison

Liana Giacherio is an experienced Business Development Manager at Bison, bringing 15-years of expertise in supply chain management, deck systems, and green roof manufacturing/sales. Liana has been instrumental in forging partnerships with architects to drive the growth of eco-friendly roofing systems across commercial, residential, and public sectors. With a firm belief in the transformative power of outdoor spaces and their positive impact on mental well-being, she invites collaboration to create something beautiful and enduring.

Lauren Rogers

Sherwin Williams

Lauren Rogers joined Sherwin Williams Coil Coatings Division as a Sustainability Marketing Manager. She graduated with a B.S. in Biology, B.A. in Spanish Language and Culture, and a minor in Sustainability from the University of St. Thomas, St. Paul. She is passionate about creating a more sustainable, equitable environment in both her personal and professional life.