Search

Editor's Note - Mui Ho

Triton Museum Visit - Suzan Swabacker

We are celebrating our 50th Anniversary this year with several activities sprinkled through the year. Our programs are almost in place and our members are working very diligently to get them all finalized.

There will be a one-day 50th Anniversary OWA+DP Symposium to be held on Saturday 22 April 2023, from 10 am to 5 pm in the Brower Center, Berkeley. I have introduced our speakers for the event below to get you interested, and I hope that you will put this on your calendar.

In our last retreat, we asked people what they have in mind that is most urgent. The answer was resounding: housing. Many members have been very concerned about the inequality and inadequacy of housing. It is shameful that the wealthiest country on earth has so many homeless; why is it that we as a civilized society cannot find the means to provide affordable housing for every citizen? Is it due to a lack of will or conscience, bad social priorities, greed, government incompetence? I just returned from Singapore. Seeing the vast quantity of government-funded housing for all economic classes, we have to ask, how do other countries, with far less collective wealth than the US, manage to make a reasonable effort at housing everyone? Those are the questions we want to ask in this Symposium.

Our 40th Anniversary Symposium was held at the College of Environmental Design on the Berkeley Campus. We learned last November from the Dean of the college that the auditorium we reserved two years before would not now be available. Fortunately, the David Brower Center, in downtown Berkeley, was able to accommodate us in a large conference room with an adjacent outdoor terrace. It does mean that fewer people can attend this conference, however.

The Symposium is a whole day event, a two hour presentation in the morning and a two hour presentation in the afternoon with a lunch break and a final discussion moderated by our discussant. Tickets for the symposium include a box lunch from a well-known local restaurant. Because we are holding the Symposium in the Brower Center Conference room instead of the college, it will be closer to the BART Station and the UC Art museum.

The Symposium committee is finalizing all necessary details. By early February, you will be receiving our formal announcement of the Symposium online, its schedule plus all the necessary registration and payment requirements.

Please put this date in your calendar:
Date: Saturday 22 April 2023
Time: 10am to 5pm (Registration starts 9:15am)
Place : The David Brower Center, 2150 Allston Way, Berkeley, California

There will be an evening reception for the speakers after the Symposium in a small restaurant, Cafenated, in Berkeley. You are highly encouraged to come and meet the speakers. Payment for the reception is separate from the Symposium ticket.

Victoria Beard

---

Victoria Beard is Professor of City and Regional Planning at Cornell University and Director of the Cornell Mui Ho Center for Cities. Beard’s research and teaching focus on comparative urbanization and international development planning. Her focus is on exploring how planners address urban inequality and poverty.

In cities in the Global South, communities often plan for themselves, outside of, in collaboration with, and in opposition to formal planning and regulatory frameworks.
In response to the limitations of community-based planning, Beard explores the city’s perspective both with regards to basic services, particularly water and sanitation access, as well as to the broader processes that create and sustain city-wide transformation.

From 2015 to 2017, Beard served as Director of Research for the Ross Center for Cities at the World Resources Institute. In this role, she was lead contributor to the World Resources Report, Towards a More Equal City. She has also worked for the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, AusAID, Mercy Corps, the Research Triangle Institute, and RAND.

Beard holds a PhD in community and regional planning from the University of British Columbia (1999); an MA in urban planning from University of California, Los Angeles (1995); and a BA in urban studies and planning from the University of California,
San Diego (1992).

Karen Parolek

---

Karen Parolek is co-founder and President of Opticos Design, Inc., an architecture and urban design firm specializing in walkable, sustainable, and equitable communities. Their work has earned a variety of national awards, including four national American Planning Association Awards and two NAHB Best in American Living™ Awards, including the Game Changer, Platinum Award for Culdesac Tempe, the first car-free neighborhood designed for shared mobility and built from scratch in the United States. www.opticosdesign.com

Parolek is a leading innovator and educator in zoning reform across the US and abroad, and co-author of the book Form-Based Codes: A Guide for Planners, Urban Designers, Municipalities, and Developers (Wiley, 2008). Her efforts redesigning zoning codes have helped revolutionize the way we regulate land development in our communities to enable and reinforce walkable and sustainable places. She is Vice Chair of the steering committee of the Form-Based Codes Institute, a non-profit that offers classes, technical assistance and other resources to communities and professionals interested in learning about form-based codes.

Through that expertise, Opticos introduced the concept of Missing Middle Housing, a transformative idea that highlights the need for diverse, affordable housing options in walkable urban places. Parolek and her firm design, enable and educate about Missing Middle Housing as both a critical element of walkable communities and an effective tool to address the needs for housing choice and affordability. www.missingmiddlehousing.com

Committed to developing better ways of running a business, Parolek led Opticos to become a founding B Corporation in 2007 and a California Benefit Corporation in 2012—new types of impact-driven companies committed to a triple bottom line of social, environmental, and fiscal responsibility.

Clara Irazábal

---

Clara Irazábal is the Director of the Urban Studies and Planning Program in the School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at the University of Maryland, College Park. In her research and teaching, she explores the interactions of culture, politics, and placemaking, and their impact on community development and socio-spatial justice in Latin American cities and Latinx, immigrant, and minority communities in the US.

Irazábal was previously the Director of the Latinx and Latin American Studies and Professor of Planning at the University of Missouri, Kansas City; Associate Professor and Director of the Latin Lab at Columbia University; and Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California. She received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley and Masters degrees from UC Berkeley and the Central University of Venezuela. 

Irazábal is the author of Urban Governance and City Making in the Americas: Curitiba and Portland (Ashgate, 2005) and the editor of Transbordering Latin Americas: Liminal Places, Cultures, and Powers (T)Here (Routledge 2014) and Ordinary Places, Extraordinary Events: Citizenship, Democracy, and Public Space in Latin America (Routledge 2008, 2015). She is associate editor of the Journal of the American Planning Association and on the editorial board of other internationally accredited architectural and planning journals.

Irazábal has worked as a consultant, researcher, and professor in the Americas, Europe, and Asia. She is a lecturer at Universitat Internacional de Cataluya, Barcelona, and has taught award-winning planning and multidisciplinary studios in Brazil, Colombia, Chile, and Trinidad and Tobago as well as in Latinx, Black, and immigrant/refugee communities in the US.

Inés Sánchez de Madariaga

---

Inés Sánchez de Madariaga is UNESCO Chair on Gender in Science, Technology and Innovation, Professor of Urban Planning at Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, and Chair of AGGI the Advisory Group on Gender Issues to the Executive Director of UN-Habitat. She is a leading international expert on gender in transportation, urban planning, architecture, and STEM, with extensive experience in policy, practice, and research. She is a member of the Advisory Council of the Spanish UN-Sustainable Solutions Development Network, has been Chair of the international COST network Gender, Science, Technology and Environment, and co-Director of the EU-US Gendered Innovations Project. As member of the European Commission Helsinki Group on Gender in Research and Chair of the EC Expert Group on Structural Change, she led the negotiations to introduce gender as a central element of the EC research program Horizon2020. She has been a member of the Scientific Committees and Principal Investigator of a dozen European Research and Technology Development projects. Sánchez de Madariaga has also held public office as Deputy Director General for Architecture, Advisor to the Minister of Housing, Advisor to the Minister of Science, Director of the Women and Science Unit at the Cabinet of the Secretary of State for Research.

A former Fulbright grantee, Sánchez de Madariaga received her Masters and PhD from the School of Architecture of Madrid. She has been a Visiting Scholar at UCLA, the Bauhaus-Weimar, London School of Economics, and Columbia University. She is author of over 100 articles and editor of two reference books on gender in planning: Engendering Cities: Designing Sustainable Urban Spaces for All, Routledge, 2020, and Fair Shared Cities. The Impact of Gender Planning in Europe. 2013. In 2021, she received the Matilde Ucelay Award in recognition for her professional trajectory in promoting women in transportation, mobility and urban planning granted by the Spanish Ministry of Transportation and Urban Agenda.

Willow Lung-Amam

---

Willow Lung-Amam is Associate Professor of Urban Studies and Planning at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she also serves as Director of Community Development at the National Center for Smart Growth Research and Education and Director of the Small Business Anti-Displacement Network. She has written extensively

on suburban poverty, racial segregation, immigration, gentrification, redevelopment politics, and neighborhood opportunity. She is the author of Trespassers? Asian American and the Battle for Suburbia, and a forthcoming book on redevelopment politics and equitable development being organized in the Washington, DC suburbs. Her research has also appeared in various journals, books, and popular media outlets, including The New York Times, Washington Post, Baltimore Sun, National Public Radio, New Republic, Bloomberg’s CityLab, and Al Jazeera.

Dr. Lung-Amam is a non-resident Fellow at the Urban Institute’s Metropolitan Housing and Communities Policy Center and a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution’s Governance Studies program.

Triton Museum Asks Winners of 1982 Competition to Speak To Audience in 2023.

The winner was the architectural office of Barcelon and Jang. OWADP Member Darlene Jang and Wayne Barcelon presented the history of the project to a crowded 40 attendees in the Triton Museum on Wednesday, January 25, 2023, to hear about the intense competition that their firm won some 40 years ago.  

To begin with there were 5 semi-finalists selected from 57 entries invited to a 56-hour charette at the future museum’s location in Santa Clara, California. In those days teams arrived with paper, pencils, T-squares, lots of pens, and lots of coffee.  The 2½-day competition was continuous.  Each team could choose to sleep or not.  Each team was allowed five members at the competition site, although Darlene and Wayne’s team had 7 rotating members.  Two remained at the hotel where they found wrappers from the bars of soap and shredded them to create palm trees with toothpicks for the final model.  Oh yes, in those days one built a model out of cardboard.  No such 3-D renderings existed although pen and watercolor perspectives were prevalent.

The primary competitor at the time was the JV joint venture team of William Turnbull (think Sea Ranch) and Frank Gehry (think some buildings that leak).  Journalists showed up to ask questions and “bug” the competitors, but they informed the public about the event, as well. 
Wayne and Darlene did an excellent job educating the audience about the values and the considerations of their team.  A sense of place, a strong consideration of energy conservation strategies (unusual at that time), and a focus of the museum to an existing quiet garden became the cornerstone of their design. 

Having been involved with several major galleries prior to the competition, Wayne and Darlene recognized the pitfalls that several of the competitors incorporated into their final presentations.  These included: One, some 40 doors leading outside; a security breach, noted Wayne.  Two, using maximum glass in the façade which meant UV light deterioration of the artwork -- not to mention a buildup of the heat in summer, leading to an increase in cooling, not a decrease.  Darlene and Wayne’s solution included elements of a curved serpentine windows creating a softer edge for garden viewing, colonnades to create deeper set windows for shading, and UV ultra-violet protected glazed skylights with two movable baffles that allowed curators to regulate the amount of light entering the galleries. Thirdly, only Darlene and Wayne’s model complemented the scale of neighboring adjacent homes.  Their design took into consideration the Museum’s size relative to its neighbors.  The audience murmured with this juicy detail.

According to Wayne, they were quite surprised to win the competition, but win it they did.  Holvick Construction completed the Triton in 1987.   The budget of $1.7 million, tiny even for the time, was met.  Pretty remarkable given that no homes in the area could be purchased for under $2 million today. 

Darlene and Wayne finished their talk by highlighting some of their more well-known projects in San Francisco:  City College of San Francisco Chinatown North Beach Campus; conversion of the Julia Morgan Chinatown YMCA to a Chinatown Historical Society Museum; Associated Architects for the Jeanne Gang’s unique  MIRA SF Apartment building at 160 Folsom Street.  

As one of the directors said to them afterwards: “We should have a retrospection every 37 years!  May you be around for the next one.”

A video of the event can currently be seen at https://www.facebook.com/TritonMuseum/