As Managing Director of Busby Perkins+Will, Peter is involved in the design and sustainable direction of each project the firm engages. Overseeing design offices in Vancouver, British Columbia and Seattle, Washington, and now San Francisco, Peter directs more than 100 employees working on projects across Canada, the United States, Europe, and the Middle East. As a director of Perkins+Will since 2004, Peter has expanded his role to include sustainable design leadership to the firm’s 23 offices worldwide; and Perkins+Will has been recognized internationally as the leader in sustainable building design, having the largest portfolio of built green projects in North America. Read more...
Jeanne Gang, founder of Studio Gang, a leading Chicago-based architecture firm, received her B. Arch degree from the University of Illinois, Champaign Urbana in 1986. After obtaining a M.Arch degree from Harvard's GSD and a fellowship to the ETH in Zürich, she spent two years with the Office of Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam, then with Booth/Hansen Associates in Chicago. After the founding of Studio Gang Architects in 1997, the firm received several commissions, including the Starlight Theater in Rockford, Illinois. The firm later won two national competitions, The Ford Calumet Environmental Center and the Hoboken (NJ) 9/11 Memorial Competition. Later she was the runnerup finalist in the Taipei Pop Music Center Competition, Taiwan. A MacArthur genius grant is among the various awards she has received.
Craig Hartman joined Skidmore Owings and Merrill immediately after receiving his B.Arch from the new Ball State architecture program in Muncie, Indiana. At SOM he was mentored by Principal, Walter Netsch, who became a life-long friend. By 1985 he became a design partner at SOM's Houston office, then Partner-in-Charge at SOM's Washington office two years later. There he collaborated with Charles Correa and Nikken Sekkei on the Second Place entry to the World Bank competition. Shortly thereafter he moved to SOM's West Coast region in San Francisco as Partner-in-Charge. In 1993 he won the San Francisco International Terminal Competition, which was completed in 2000. SOM's San Francisco office became very active in China, winning competitions for two large projects in 1993 and 1994. That same year, SOM won the extension competition for the California State Office Building in San Francisco. Led by Craig, SOM prevailed over four other high-profile firms in an invited 2001 competition for the U.S. Embassy in Beijing—which opened in 2008. In neighboring Oakland, SOM was invited as the only U.S.-based firm to participate in the Christ the Light Cathedral competition, where they were again up against stiff competition, Santiago Calatrava among others. After winning the competition, the site was changed to a new location, but the result drew wide-spread acclaim upon the building's dedication in 2009.
In July 2019 the Vilnius Concert Hall competition jury began its deliberations to identify a suitable design for this major performing arts project. As one might have anticipated, two of thejurors on the seven member panel, Ole Gustavsen (Snohetta) and Andreas Cukrowicz (Nachbaur Architekten) had won high profile competitions for similar music center projects—in Oslo and Munich.The jury was confronted with a formidable task, as the competition, organized according to UIA regulations and anonymous in its format, had attracted 248 entries from around the world. For this one-stage competition, the organizers listed the following evaluation criteria, whereby the order of the criteria was not to reflect any priority:
Form and Dichroic Light Scott Hall at Carnegie Mellon University Michelle LaFoe and Isaac Campbell
OFFICE 52 Architecture
Forward by Cesar Pelli, FAIA
Introduction by Michael J. Crosbie, FAIA
Leete”s Island Books, Maine USA
Hard cover; 96 pages in color
ISBN 9780918172709
In his introduction to Form and Dichroic LIght, Michael Crosbie never mentions the term, “wild card,” to describe Office 52’s participation in the invited competition for the Carnegie Mellon Engineering Building. The four finalists, picked from a list of 17 firms, also included three household names: ZGF, Wilson, and BCJ (Bohlin Cywinski, Jackson). So what possible chance could a firm, which had just recently opened a small office in Portland, Oregon, have against a competition lineup of this magnitude? But as OFFICE 52 Principal, Isaac Campbell explained, as a small firm, “we were quite nimble,” and the $50,000 stipend the firms all received to produce a design could allow OFFICE 52 more time to undertake the research involved than might be the case with a larger office, where a cost controller is constantly focusing on the operation.
Memorials to commemorate atrocities committed by the Nazis during World War II have taken many forms. Holocaust museums such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. by Pei Cobb Freed or the Jewish Museum in Berlin by Daniel Libeskind, all endeavor to paint a broad picture, including narratives covering most of the major events and sites. Former concentration camps such as Auschwitz, Dachau, Theresienstadt and Buchenwald have been frequent tour destinations. In the case of Buchenwald, the local city of Weimar has placed pictures of “Witnesses” throughout the downtown area as a reminder of the Nazi legacy.
Detroit’s Dia Plaza competition is hardly unique in initiating a search for urbanistic solutions to a cultural cluster. Vienna, Berlin, Mesa, Fort Worth, Chicago’s Millennium Park and Paris’ Parc de la Villette are just a few examples of projects where the focus on spaces between buildings, and arriving at a connective plan to infuse new energy into the site, has been the primary goal of other projects. All of these have been faced with their own challenges: solutions for some have been relatively simple—Vienna’s Museum Quarter and Berlin’s Forum—while others such as Paris’ La Villette and Mesa’s Downtown Plaza represent a more challenging subject spatially. In the case of Detroit, the aim of the competition was clear: “The design competition centers around enhancing and enlivening the DIA’s exterior campus and aims to connect all the institutions with a beautiful series of settings that support all types of programming and public art.”
Milton Keynes, known simply as MK, represented one of the more significant results of the UK’s “new town” programs from the 1950s and 60s. Situated almost equidistant between Oxford and Cambridge, and within easy access from London, the city had everything one might expect from a modern community—except a university. For a city having a population exceeding 250,000, and projected to have 500,000 inhabitants by 2050, that will all change, as a competition supported by the MK Council (MKC) and Cranfield University has resulted in five firms competing for the opportunity to design a higher educational institution to eventually accommodate 15,000 students.
If cities in the U.S. are anticipating funding from government entities to solve a dire need for affordable housing, they should be prepared for a long wait. The national government, a traditional source of funds for such projects, has shown little if no interest in the issue, and state and local sources are at a minimum. To exacerbate the problem, the construction cost of affordable housing has risen exponentially the the past few decades. Gone are those days when architects such as Oakland-based Michael Pyatok could build affordable housing for $100 a square foot.
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Craig Hartman joined Skidmore Owings and Merrill immediately after receiving his B.Arch from the new Ball State architecture program in Muncie, Indiana. At SOM he was mentored by Principal, Walter Netsch, who became a life-long friend. By 1985 he became a design partner at SOM's Houston office, then Partner-in-Charge at SOM's Washington office two years later. There he collaborated with Charles Correa and Nikken Sekkei on the Second Place entry to the World Bank competition. 
