Editor's Note

We have celebrated our 50th Anniversary with a very successful Symposium. Our speakers were well prepared and the presentations were inspiring. They shared their work on housing, their experiences and their insight in making housing a human right. They opened our eyes to different ways of addressing neighborhood housing. They challenged traditional and conventional ways of solving housing problems. We learn from countries with different political systems and see how they address the housing need of their people. I was particularly inspired by the different ways speakers addressing housing issues. They would not be successful without passion, persistence and ingenuities.

The symposium was well attended with 85 people plus a few on zoom. After the whole day affair, we had a dinner reception in the garden of Cafenated restaurant in Berkeley. We were happy that it came together in spite of couple rocky issues like finding that we could not use the CED auditorium in Wurster Hall after having reserved the auditorium three years ago. This news threw the Symposium committee into crisis mode. We love having our Symposium in Wurster auditorium because we held our 30th and 40th symposiums there and were able to reach many more architectural students.

After frantically looking for meetings places, we were lucky to find David Brower Center. Brower Center is the home of Environmental Movement and it fits well with our interest and its location is only one block from Berkeley BART Station. In fact it is closer to public transit than Wurster Hall. Since the meeting room include an adjacent patio, we could open all the doors for better airflow and have a private outdoor space for our lunch break. Though we did not get as many architectural students, all attendees found the Brower Hall friendlier and easier for mixing. Unfortunately the cost was significantly higher. We appealed to our older members for donations and they were most generous. I would like to thank the members that stepped up to make the symposium possible: Lucia Bogatay, Phoebe Bressack, Christie Coffin, Janet Crane, Merle Easton, Leslie Golden, Mui Ho, Darlene Jang, Judy Rowe, Marda Stothers, Judy Wasserman.

Our speakers talk will be stored in our OWA achieve.

More on the 50th Anniversary Symposium is here