Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM) is an American architectural, urban planning and engineering firm. It was founded in 1936 by Louis Skidmore and Nathaniel Owings in Chicago, Illinois. In 1939, they were joined by engineer John Merrill. The firm opened its second office, in New York City, in 1937 and has since expanded internationally, with offices in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., London, Melbourne, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Seattle, and Dubai.
New Urbanism is an urban design movement that promotes environmentally friendly habits by creating walkable neighbourhoods containing a wide range of housing and job types. It arose in the United States in the early 1980s, and has gradually influenced many aspects of real estate development, urban planning, and municipal land-use strategies. New Urbanism attempts to address the ills associated with urban sprawl and post-Second World War suburban development.
Peter Steinbrueck is an American architect and politician from Seattle, Washington. He is the principal and founder of Steinbrueck Urban Strategies and was a city councilmember from 1997 to 2008. He also previously served as a Seattle Port Commissioner from 2018 to 2022.
HOK, formerly Hellmuth, Obata + Kassabaum and legally HOK Group, Inc., is an American design, architecture, engineering, and urban planning firm, founded in 1955.
Bruce Bunji Kuwabara, is a Canadian architect and a founding partner of the firm KPMB Architects. He is an invested Officer of the Order of Canada and recipient of the RAIC Gold Medal. He is Board Chair of the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal.
Eric Corey Freed is an American architect and principal of organicARCHITECT.
The A. Alfred Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, also known as Taubman College, is the school of urban planning and one of the nineteen schools of the University of Michigan located in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
Bruce D. Judd, FAIA, is a historic preservation architect based in Seaside, Florida, and San Francisco, California. He is a principal in the Bruce Judd Consulting Group in Seaside and a Consulting Founding Principal at the Architectural Resources Group in San Francisco. His projects have included surveying the historic African American community of Mound Bayou, Mississippi resulting in its being listed in the National Register of Historic Places. He has also consulted on the restoration of the Alamo Mission in San Antonio, Texas. Judd has directed more than 300 planning, rehabilitation, and expansion projects for architecturally significant buildings throughout the west and is a nationally recognized expert in his field. He has led rehabilitation and new construction projects for library, cultural, and performing arts facilities. He has also directed various high-profile projects including: master plan and restoration of the Hotel Del Coronado; repair and restoration of the San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park, which received a National AIA Honor Award; master planning and seismic retrofit of the block-square Beaux-Arts style Pasadena City Hall which received LEED Gold certification; and rehabilitation of the historic Linde Robinson Laboratory for the Center for Global Environmental Ecology at Caltech in Pasadena, the first laboratory in a historic building to receive a LEED Platinum certification. Judd meets The Secretary of the Interior's Historic Preservation Professional Qualifications Standards in Architecture, Historic Architecture, Architectural History, and History.
Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture (AS+GG), an architecture firm and design firm based in Chicago, is engaged in the design and development of energy-efficient and sustainable architecture. AS+GG designs buildings, cities, masterplans and components of these, for an international clientele, with projects located throughout the world. The primary uses of these designs are civic, commercial, cultural, hospitality, residential and mixed-use. AS+GG also specializes in supertall skyscrapers, such as the Jeddah Tower, which will overtake the Burj Khalifa as the world's tallest building when completed.
Edward Lifson is an American journalist, architecture critic, and academic. He was the Director of Communications for the Pritzker Architecture Prize. He was also a domestic, foreign and war correspondent and bureau chief for NPR National Public Radio; and he created and hosted a radio show in Chicago called "Hello Beautiful!" to explore and tell stories of urban issues, architecture and design. Lifson is an Adjunct Instructor in the Media Center at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. For NPR, in the U.S. Lifson covered urban affairs, politics, economics, labor and arts and culture. In 1996, he established the National Public Radio Bureau in Berlin, Germany. In Europe, he covered the rebuilding of Berlin as a city and a national capital, European Union, post-Cold War politics, NATO, the launch of the euro, immigration issues, and Central Europe’s transition to democracy and capitalism. As a war correspondent, he reported extensively for NPR from Serbia, Kosovo, Montenegro and Macedonia before and during the war in Kosovo. In addition to Berlin, he has lived for many years in Paris, Florence, Italy and in England. Lifson was the interim Director of the Shanghai-based American Academy in China, an urban design think tank and studio.
Perkins&Will is a global design practice founded in 1935. As of 2022, Perkins&Will had 28 offices and over 2,500 employees. In the same year, Perkins&Will generated $572.47 million in earnings, making it the second largest architecture firm by revenue in the United States. Phil Harrison has been the firm's CEO since 2006.
Sustainable gardening includes the more specific sustainable landscapes, sustainable landscape design, sustainable landscaping, sustainable landscape architecture, resulting in sustainable sites. It comprises a disparate group of horticultural interests that can share the aims and objectives associated with the international post-1980s sustainable development and sustainability programs developed to address that humans are now using natural biophysical resources faster than they can be replenished by nature.
Sustainable urbanism is both the study of cities and the practices to build them (urbanism), that focuses on promoting their long term viability by reducing consumption, waste and harmful impacts on people and place while enhancing the overall well-being of both people and place. Well-being includes the physical, ecological, economic, social, health and equity factors, among others, that comprise cities and their populations. In the context of contemporary urbanism, the term cities refers to several scales of human settlements from towns to cities, metropolises and mega-city regions that includes their peripheries / suburbs / exurbs. Sustainability is a key component to professional practice in urban planning and urban design along with its related disciplines landscape architecture, architecture, and civil and environmental engineering. Green urbanism and ecological urbanism are other common terms that are similar to sustainable urbanism, however they can be construed as focusing more on the natural environment and ecosystems and less on economic and social aspects. Also related to sustainable urbanism are the practices of land development called Sustainable development, which is the process of physically constructing sustainable buildings, as well as the practices of urban planning called smart growth or growth management, which denote the processes of planning, designing, and building urban settlements that are more sustainable than if they were not planned according to sustainability criteria and principles.
John W. Clark is an American architect and planner and a founding partner of the firm Cordogan Clark & Associates. Clark has been recognized for his architectural, planning, and sustainable design work for a series of projects.
Cordogan Clark & Associates (CCA) is an architecture, planning and engineering firm based in Illinois with offices in Chicago, Aurora, IL, and Lafayette, IN. The firm was founded in 1951 by Louis Cordogan. John Cordogan joined the firm in 1981 and in 1984, he and John Clark became founding partners of Cordogan, Clark & Associates. In February 2016, it was announced that Cordogan Clark & Associates merged with Lafayette based firm Keystone Architecture, Inc.
Gwynne Pugh is an American architect, born in Wales, who until 2010 was a partner of Pugh + Scarpa. He is known for his use of environmentally sound architecture and alternative energy in his designs. In 2010, he was inducted into the AIA College of Fellows. Currently, he is principal of Gwynne Pugh Urban Studio, a firm he founded in 2010.
NEMA (Chicago) (also 1210 South Indiana and formerly 113 East Roosevelt or One Grant Park) is a 76-story residential skyscraper in Chicago, Illinois in the Central Station neighborhood, of the Near South Side. The tower, built by developer Crescent Heights, has 800 apartments and rises 896 feet (273.1 m) making it the city's tallest rental apartment building. NEMA is the eighth-tallest building in Chicago as of 2022 and the forty first-tallest building in the United States. It is the tallest all-rental residential building in the city.
Peter Daniel Alexander Jacobs is a Canadian landscape architect specializing in the conservation and development of rural and northern landscapes and in urban landscape design. He is Emeritus professor of the School of Planning and Landscape Architecture of the Universite de Montreal, Emeritus Chair of the Commission on Environmental Planning of the International Union for the conservation of nature (IUCN), Past President of the Canadian Society of Landscape Architects (CSLA), Chair of the Kativik Environmental Quality Commission and a Member of the Royal Canadian Academy of the Arts.
Urban Design Associates is an international urban design and architecture firm headquartered in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States.
Herbert R. Schaal is an American landscape architect, educator, and firm leader notable for the broad range and diversity of his projects, including regional studies, national parks, corporate and university campuses, site planning, botanical gardens, downtowns, highways, cemeteries, and public and private gardens. Schaal is one of the first landscape architects to design children's gardens, beginning in the 1990s with Gateway Elementary, Gateway Middle, and Gateway Michael Elementary school grounds in St. Louis, Missouri, the Hershey Children's Garden at the Cleveland Botanical Gardens, and Red Butte Garden and Arboretum.
