20th Voice

20th Voice

Hadley Arnold is an architect and an educator. Reflecting a progressive minded moral code, her work emphasizes the importance of morality and ethics in the design of the built environment.

She and her husband Peter Arnold are the founding directors of the Arid Lands Institute, a self-sustaining edu- cation, research, and outreach center of Woodbury University dedicated to issues of aridity, climate change, and the design of the built environment. Its purpose is to train designers and leaders who will be resourceful and inventive in addressing water scarcity in the west. They have led the Institute’s on-location Dry Studio since 2002, and have taught multiple history and theory seminars on landscape, infrastructure and urbanism in arid lands. Their design work has been recognized by Los Angeles’s MAK Center for Art and Architecture; the LA Architecture + Design Museum, and the AIA/ LA. Their ongoing research on contemporary and historic water infrastructures of the west is supported by grants from the Graham Foundation, LEF, Maxine Frankel Foundation, and the Julius Shulman Institute. She has an MArch from SCI-Arc.

"We accept scarcity. We are interested in exploring abundance in something that appears to be scarcity or restraint, scarcity of size, restraint of power and materials--the discipline surrounding what gets used in the making of the house and the resources that are used to heat it and cool it and run it.  And those constraints we find squeeze us and yield a kind of richness that is surprising and delightful to us." –Hadley Arnold