01st Voice

1st Voice

American Homes was inspired by Lester Walker's illustrations for American Homes: An Illustrated Encyclopedia of Domestic Architecture. He has an abiding interest in the graphic arts and loves to draw. He’s the author of eight books including: Tiny Houses and American Shelter and Carpentry for Children, which won an American Library Association Award in 1988. Walker’s essays, illustrated with his drawings and photographs, have been published in national magazines including Yankee, House Beautiful, Popular Science and Family Circle. We found it remarkable that he imagined a history of American residential architecture along a timeline with images so aesthetically consistent and elegant.

Walker has been practicing architecture for nearly thirty years in the Hudson Valley. Prior to that, he was a founding member of Studio Works in New York City, which won several national awards for innovative design. His MArch is from Yale University.

He lives in Woodstock with his wife, Karen.

02nd Voice

2nd Voice

Robert Ivy is the Chief Executive Officer of the American Institute of Architects, the premiere organization representing licensed architects and professionals in the design and construction industry since 1857. Highly regarded as a thought leader in the field, he was formerly the Editor in Chief of Architectural Record, the world’s largest professional architectural publication. Under his leadership, Architectural Record received publishing’s highest honor in 2003, the National Magazine Award for General Excellence. A frequent spokesperson for the profession, he travels extensively as an advocate for many of the most important social, political, and environmental issues affecting the built environment. In 2002, the US Department of State appointed Ivy as US Commissioner to the Venice Biennale of Architecture. In 2003, Ivy was named Vice President and Editorial Director of McGraw-Hill Construction Publications. He holds a master’s degree in architecture from Tulane University, where he serves on the advisory board, and a bachelor’s degree (cum laude) in English from the University of the South.



03rd Voice

3rd Voice

Allison Arieff writes the "By Design" column for the Op/Ed section of the New York Times, and is editor at large for Sunset, Good and Food & Shelter magazines. From 2002-2006, she was the founding editor-in-chief of Dwell magazine. During her tenure at Dwell, the magazine received the National Magazine Award for General Excellence while she spearheaded the Dwell Home Design Invitational competition, which culminated in the creation of the Dwell Homes by Empyrean program, a partnership for the design and manufacture of modern affordable prefab homes.

She is the author of the books "Prefab" and "Trailer Travel: A Visual History of Mobile America," and has written about architecture and design for Travel & Leisure, and the House & Home section of the New York Times. Arieff has been featured on CNN, KCRW’s dna (Design and Architecture), Sound Money, Marketplace, and the Sundance Channel's sustainability series "Big Ideas for a Small Planet."



04th Voice

4th Voice

Richard Meier appeared on the map in the public's mind in 1984 with a $1 billion commission to design the Getty Center in Los Angeles, California. But, even then he was already a prominent residential architect and has since become an iconic figure in residential design history. His is an interesting example of how commissions by the wealthy gave him the liberty to be highly creative, making innovative residential work which stretched common notions of modernism.

Meier was born in Newark in 1934 and graduated from Cornell University in 1957. He has been awarded the Pritzker Prize for Architecture. In addition to the Getty Center, his best-known projects are the High Museum in Atlanta, the Frankfurt Museum for Decorative Arts in Germany, the Canal Plus Television Headquarters in Paris, the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, The Hartford Seminary in Connecticut, and the Atheneum in New Harmony, Indiana.

“I tried to create a new concept of space for spending free time and holidays, using human dimensions as a unit of measure.”
—Richard Meier

05th Voice

5th Voice

Thom Mayne is principal of Morphosis a renowned architectural firm located in Santa Monica, California. Its name is derived from metamorphosis  (“change in form or transformation”) highlighting Mayne’s design process and philosophy. Mayne’s aesthetic concerns focus on a groundless modern society exemplified by the shifting landscape of Los Angeles. His working method values contradiction, conflict, and change, and approaches each project as a dynamic entity. Aided by computer technology, designs have a layered quality often including multiple organizational systems and sculptural forms that appear to arise effortlessly from the landscape. Recent projects include graduate housing at the University of Toronto; the San Francisco Federal Building; the University of Cincinnati Student Recreation Center; the Science Center School in Los Angeles; Diamond Ranch High School in Pomona, California; and the Wayne L. Morse United States Courthouse in Eugene, Oregon.

Educated at USC and the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Mayne helped found the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) in 1972. Since then he has held teaching positions at both SCI-Arc and UCLA. He received the Pritzker Prize for Architecture in March 2005.



06th Voice

6th Voice

Tracy Kidder is well known for his book, House (1985), a drama about the interactions between architect, builder, and newlywed clients. House reads like a novel but is a documentary chronicle of the architect, builders, and homeowners in the design and construction of the award-winning Souweine House in Amherst, Massachusetts.

After graduating from Harvard in 1967, he served as first lieutenant in Vietnam from 1967 until 1969 and was awarded a Bronze Star. He returned to school and received a Masters from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. Other bestselling works by him include The Soul of a New Machine (1982)—which earned him a Pulitzer and a National Book Award; Among Schoolchildren (1989); Old Friends (1993); Home Town (1999); Mountains Beyond Mountains (2003); My Detachment (2005); and most recently, Strength in What Remains (2010). Kidder is a regular contributor to the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly and The New York Times Book Review. 

 He lives with his wife in western Massachusetts and Maine.

"I’m interested in how ordinary people live their lives." —Tracy Kidder



07th Voice

7th Voice

Alex Artigas is an artist, archi- tect and up and coming inte- rior designer practicing in Los Angeles. His design philosophy reflects new currents in contemporary architecture and yet his perspective is surprisingly preservative. He identifies perceived notions of modernism, speaks to what is important in that movement and what exists as something to work against. He feels, for instance, that the Spanish style architecture that is vernacular to LA is underappreciated and should be preserved.

Artigas is an architect at Sami Hayek Studios in Los Angeles. He and interior designer Sami Hayek have collaborated on a fresh new line of furniture, "California" by Junction.

"What I want to preserve is any work that has harmony or that sense of atmosphere; that sense of capturing youth but in a passive or subjective way." – Alex Artigas



08th Voice

8th Voice

Denise Scott Brown is an architect, planner, urban designer, theorist, writer and educator, whose work and ideas have influenced architects and planners worldwide. Scott Brown participates in the broad range of Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates' projects in architecture and is principal-in-charge for many projects in urban planning and design.

Her years of experience in interdisciplinary work and teaching contribute to the firm's unusual breadth and depth. She has led major civic planning projects and studies, and more recently has directed many university campus planning projects. She has also served as principal-in-charge with Robert Venturi on the firm's larger architectural projects, including the Sainsbury Wing of London's National Gallery, the capitol building in Toulouse and the Nikko Hotel and Spa Resort in Japan.



09th Voice

9th Voice

Douglas Garofalo is a Chicago-based architectural maverick known for pioneering the use of computer modeling to encompass his engineering practice. With the completion of his Hyde Park Art Center he’s become accepted by the mainstream as an important designer of public space. His projects vary greatly in scale and location. They include forms of collaboration that cross both geographical boundaries and professional disciplines. They push the limits of conventional design practices by taking full advantage of electronic media.

Douglas Garofalo was born in Schenectady, New York. He graduated from Yale University in 1987. The work of Garofalo Architects has been recognized as part of "The New Vanguard" in Architectural Record, and the "Emerging Voices" program at the Architectural League of New York.



10th Voice

10th Voice

Eric Owen Moss was born and raised in Los Angeles, California and received his Masters of Architecture from the University of California at Berkeley, College of Environmental Design in 1968 and a second Masters of Architecture from Harvard University Graduate School of Design in 1972.

Over the last 30 years Eric Owen Moss Architects has built a wide array of award-winning buildings, and has helped shape the discourse of architecture internationally. That discussion continues to manifest itself both in the continuing production of innovative structures, in lectures, exhibitions, publishing, and teaching around the world. Along the way, his work has been recognized with well over 50 local, national, and international awards.  Eric Owen Moss was the recipient of the Academy Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1999. He received the AIA/LA Gold Medal in 2001 for the achievement of an outstanding body of architectural works and was a recipient of the Distinguished Alumni Award for the University of California, Berkeley in 2003.

A Fellow of the American Institute of Architecture, Eric Owen Moss was appointed director of the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) in 2002.