11th Voice

11th Voice

Julie Eizenberg is an astute observer and institutional iconoclast investigating and reshaping the way we think about the everyday conventional buildings. Eizenberg is a founding principal of Koning Eizenberg Architecture, established in Santa Monica, California, in 1981. The motto: When budgets don’t allow for air-conditioning, cross-ventilation is designed and instead of surveillance cameras, open vistas enhance security, comfort, and community. Their affordable housing projects have redefined the medium by demonstrating that even the humblest shelter, designed for the most financially distressed citizens, can contain a touch of the spiritual at places like Ocean Park 12, Boyd Hotel, and Simone Hotel, the first new SRO hotel built in Los Angeles in thirty years. They have taken small budgets and crafted spaces with dignity and a sense of place.

Australian born, Eizenberg teaches and lectures around the world, is a frequent advisor to the U.S. Mayor’s Institute on City Design and has recently completed a book titled Architecture Isn’t Just for Special Occasions. She received her MArch from University of California Los Angeles, 1980.



12th Voice

12th Voice

Architect Robert A.M. Stern (Robert Arthur Morton Stern) is Dean of the Yale University School of Architecture. He is a practicing architect, teacher, and writer. His design approach is generally classified as postmodern with a particular emphasis on context and continuity of traditions, and he’ll use the phrase "modern traditionalist" to describe his work.

Stern's work has been exhibited at numerous galleries and universities and is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Deutsches Architekturmuseum, the Denver Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1976, 1980, and 1996, he was among the architects selected to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale. Stern served on the Board of Directors of The Walt Disney Company from 1992 to 2003. He hosted the television series "Pride of Place: Building the American Dream" on PBS and his book New York 1930 was nominated for the National Book Award. He is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects.

Stern worked as a designer in the office of Richard Meier in 1966, prior to forming the firm of Stern & Hagmann. In 1977 he founded the successor firm, Robert A. M. Stern Architects. As founder and Senior Partner of Robert A.M. Stern Architects, he personally directs the design of each of the firm's projects, overseeing a staff 220+ designers and architects.



13th Voice

13th Voice

Frances Anderton is the host of DnA: Design and Architecture, monthly on radio station KCRW and is also a full-time producer of KCRW's national and local current affairs shows, To The Point, and Which Way, LA?

In addition, Ms. Anderton is the L.A. Editor for Dwell Magazine and a regular contributor to the New York Times and many other publications on Los Angeles design and architecture.  She has been an on-air commentator on TV and documentary programs about architecture; the latest is Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman, released in 2009.

The LA/AIA Chapter has awarded her for her work in highlighting the LA design and architecture scene and DnA has been featured in the Los Angeles Times magazine as well as Los Angeles, Angeleno and Metropolis magazines.

 Ms. Anderton studied architecture at University College London (Bartlett School), and then traveled to Jaipur, India, to study the Haveli courtyard house for a Royal Society of Town Planning paper. As associate editor of The Architectural Review magazine (one of the oldest architecture publications) her first assignment was to produce a special issue on Los Angeles.

She fell in love with Los Angeles, and moved there in 1991 to take up the post of editor of L.A. Architect, a monthly journal for the Los Angeles architectural community, published by the LA Chapter of the American Institute of Architects. On hearing the LA-focused discussion program, Which Way, LA? she was drawn to KCRW, and volunteered there before moving into a staff position. She wed her love of design and architecture to the medium of radio when she started hosting DnA: Design and Architecture in April 2002.



14th Voice

14th Voice

Michelle Kaufmann is a leader in the green design community. Kaufmann's commitment to affordable, sustainable, well-designed homes is reflected throughout her design work. Examples of sustainable home designs include the Glidehouse™, Sunset Breezehouse™, mkSolaire™, and mkLotus™, custom homes and holistic, green communities. She believes that our landscape is such an integral part of our culture that what we build, and how we build it, should positively impact the environment (rather than harm it).

Kaufmann received her MArch from Princeton University. She has taught at Iowa State University and Woodbury University. Prior to founding Michelle Kaufmann Designs in 2002, Kaufmann was an Associate with Frank O. Gehry. MKD was listed as one of "The Green 50" by INC magazine, and Michelle Kaufmann was listed as one of the top 100 people Who Matter Now by Business 2.0 magazine.

Michelle and her husband, Kevin, live in their Glidehouse home in Marin County.



15th Voice

15th Voice

SARAH SUSANKA is a bestselling author, architect and cultural visionary. Her "build better, not bigger" approach to residential design and her "Not So Big" philosophy lead an anti-elitist movement to re-popularize residential architecture.

The Not So Big House (Taunton, 1998), her groundbreaking first book, was followed by eight more books in the Not So Big series, including Home By Design (Taunton, 2004) a book describing the different principles and concepts that allow one to build "Not So Big."  Inside the Not So Big House (Taunton), about the built-in details that bring personality to a home, Outside the Not So Big House (Taunton, 2006) weaving inside and outside together with 20 examples of gardens that surround "Not So Big" houses; and more recently, Not So Big Remodeling, which applies the Not So Big principles of design to our existing homes. 

Susanka is a registered architect, a member of the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects and is a certified interior designer.



16th Voice

16th Voice

David D Salmela is an internationally renowned architect whose work combines regional vernacular elements with modernist design. Salmela's modern homes and buildings draw upon Minnesota's Scandinavian culture, his own Finnish-American roots, and the region's rugged, diverse landscape. His work often reflects how playful and flamboyant his solutions to architectural problems can be.

He has become one of the most awarded architects in Minnesota with more than 30 state and national design awards including the Honor Award from the national American Institute of Architects.  These awards speak to his personal talent since Salmela became licensed at a time when work experience could substitute for formal education. This self- trained architect has a busy practice in Duluth, MN.



17th Voice

17th Voice

Cameron Sinclair is the co- founder and executive director of Architecture for Humanity, a Non-profit organization promoting architecture and design solutions to humanitarian crises and design services to communities in need. Projects range from school build- ing, tsunami and hurricane recon- struction to developing mobile medical facilities to combat HIV/ AIDS.

Sinclair has worked on projects in more than 20 countries including England, Mexico, Russia, South Africa and the United States since 1996. He worked with Lauster/Radu Architects on the restoration of the Brancusi sculptural complex and a 30-year rejuvenation plan for the town of Tirgu Jiu, Romania. This project received the AIA/BSA Willo von Molke Urban Design Award in 1999. As a project architect with Gensler, Sinclair helped design the award-winning school of the International Center of Photography in Manhattan and was a key member in the disaster recovery team for Lehman Brothers after the World Trade Center was destroyed on September 11, 2001. Other projects included a health center for UNITE (Union of Needletrades, Industrial and Textile Employees) and a mixed-use redevelopment plan for Frederick Douglass Boulevard in Harlem.

In 2003, Sinclair was named "Nice Modernist" by Dwell Magazine. He is a recipient of the ASID Design for Humanity award and the Lewis Mumford Award for Peace. In 2004 Fortune Magazine named him as one of the Aspen Seven, seven people changing the world for the better.  Sinclair was one of three winners of the 2006 TED Prize. He trained as an architect at the University of Westminster (BArch Hons) and at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London.



18th Voice

18th Voice

Marianne Cusato is known for her Katrina Cottage (2005), displayed as a prototype at the International Builders’ Show in Orlando, FL, and then picked up by Lowe's.

She was part of a team of architects invited to New Orleans by Andrés Duany, designer of New Urbanist towns across the country, who was drafted by Haley Barbour, the governor of Mississippi, to provide advice on how to rebuild devastated coastal cities. Cusato’s cottages — unlike their prefabricated competitors — are not designed to fit on trucks. With British architect Leon Krier,  Cusato published the wrote the book, Get Your House Right: How to Avoid Common Mistakes in Today’s Traditional Architecture (2008). The volume is meant to show people how to design houses, of any size, with appropriately scaled details.

Cusato studied architecture at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana.



19th Voice

19th Voice

Kimberli Meyer is an architect known for reflecting on the intersection of theory and practice. Through her leadership of the MAK Center in Los Angeles, she has created a ‘think tank’ charged with educating the ideals expressed in Schindler's practice — the transformative power of ideas. She is an academic radical propagating, as Schindler and Neutra did, that a house is a machine that coalesces ideas about how one lives one's life, while conscious of the greater context of community.

Since 2002, Meyer has been Director of the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, a contemporary, experimental, multidisciplinary center that operates from architect Rudolph M. Schindler’s own ‘House and Studio’ (1922) in West Hollywood.

Before moving to Southern California Meyer earned her Bachelor of Architecture at the University of Illinois, Chicago, where she practiced architecture for six years.  She received her M.F.A. from California Institute of the Arts in 1995.



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