Keynote Speech

Sergio A. Palleroni, (B.Arch. University of Oregon, MSArchS MIT) is currently Professor and Fellow of the new Center for Sustainable Processes and Practices Portland State University. He has also served as a tenured professor at the University of Washington and at the Luce Foundation Visiting Professor in Sustainable Development at the University of Texas, Austin. His research and fieldwork for the last two decades has concentrated on integrating sustainable practices to improve the lives of the most underserved communities worldwide. In 1988 he founded an academic outreach program with the complementary aims of addressing the needs of these communities while transforming the education of architecture students. These efforts later became the Basic Initiative (www.basicinitiative.org), a service learning fieldwork program which each year challenges university students in various disciplines both in US and abroad to apply their education in service of underserved communities throughout the globe. Today, the Basic Initiative is one of the most recognized outreach programs worldwide, with over 100 development projects in Asia, Latin American and Africa to date. Professor Palleroni has worked as a consultant on sustainable architecture and development in the developing world since the 1970's both for nonprofit agencies and international agencies such as UNESCO, the World Bank, and the governments of China, Colombia, Costa Rica, India, Kenya, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Taiwan.

Professor Palleroni’s numerous awards include the 1997 American Institute of Architects/ Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture National Education Award, the 2003 and 2006 NCARB Prize for Creative Integration of Architectural Practice and Education, and the 2005 US National Design Award given annually by the Smithsonian and the White House. He has also been inducted into the international Design Hall of Fame (2007), and in 2007 he was one of the first three international Smithsonian Artists in Residence. His fieldwork with students has also received national design awards from the US, India, Taiwan, Colombia, and Mexico, among others. He has also served on the advisory boards to the UN Climate Change Commission (Built Environment), HGTV, National Endowment for the Arts, Lemelson Foundation, Re:Vision and the International Earth Awards.

The work of the BASIC Initiative has been most recently been documented in Studio At Large: Architecture in Service of Global Communities (University of Washington Press, 2004), Building One House (Princeton Architecture Press, 2005), Architecture Like You Give a Damn (Metropolis Books and Princeton Architecture Press, 2006, 2007, 2008), Expanding Architecture (Metropolis Books and Princeton Architecture Press, 2008), The Alley Flat Initiative: Infill Housing as a Strategy in Sustainability (University of Texas Center for Sustainable Practices, 2008) , as well as the PBS series Design e2 (2006). All of these explore the BASIC Initiatives efforts to improve, and make sustainable, the lives of the planet’s poorest citizens.

Interlocutor: Frederick Steiner (School of Architecture, University of Texas at Austin)

Frederick Steiner (B.S. M.S., University of Cincinnati; M.A. Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania) is currently the dean of the School of Architecture and Henry M. Rockwell Chair in Architecture, University of Texas at Austin. He has served at Arizona State University and at Washington State University, the University of Colorado-Denver, and the University of Pennsylvania. He has received a Fulbright-Hays fellowship in 1980 and was the National Endowment for the Arts Rome Prize Fellow in Historic Preservation and Conservation at the American Academy in Rome. He is a Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects and an Academic Fellow of the Urban Land Institute. He is also a visiting professor at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China.

Dean Steiner has worked with local, state, and federal agencies on diverse environmental plans and designs. These activities include the analysis of watershed level growth management for the upper San Pedro basin on the U.S.-Mexico border, the design and implementation of the U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service agricultural land evaluation and site assessment system, the Teller County/ City of Woodland Park Growth Management Plan in Colorado, the conservation plan for the Missouri Flat Creek watershed in Washington and Idaho, the establishment of the Blackstone Heritage Corridor in Massachusetts and Rhode Island with the National Park Service, and the farmlands protection and rural housing plans for Whitman County, Washington. He initiated a multidisciplinary team of environmental scientists, planners, and designers in the exploration of the future of a 130-square-mile "undeveloped" northern portion of the City of Phoenix. He collaborated on the design of two prototype sustainable communities as part of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Sustainable Development Demonstration Grant Program. Currently, he chairs the five-county Envision Central Texas Project. He was part of the UT curatorial team that organized an exhibit on the resilience of the Gulf Coast and the city of New Orleans for the 10th Architecture Exhibition at the 2006 Venice Biennale. In 2005, he was on a team, selected from over 1,000 entries, to be one of five finalists in the United Flight 93 National Memorial Competition in Pennsylvania.

Dean Steiner has written numerous books, articles, and papers. His most recent books include The Essential Ian McHarg: Writings on Design and Nature (Island Press, 2007), Planning and Urban Design Standards: Student Edition (with Kent Butler, John Wiley & Sons, 2006), and Human Ecology: Following Nature’s Lead (Island Press, 2002). He teaches courses in the areas of environmental impact assessment, landscape analysis, and landscape architecture theory.