UMass Lecture Series

Spring Architecture Lecture Series at UMass
Self Report for Learning Units
More information here.

All lectures will be held in Design Building 170 at 5:30pm

Wednesday, 3/6
Mimi Love, Principal, Utile Architecture and Planning

Wednesday, 3/27
Joseph Zeal-Henry, 2024 ArtLab Loeb Fellow at Harvard

Wednesday, 4/17
Alan Organschi, Principal, Gray Organschi Architecture

Wednesday, 5/1
Katie Faulkner FAIA, Principal, West Work

SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES
Mimi Love is a principal at Utile. Her expertise ranges from complicated renovations to new construction projects with challenging programmatic requirements. Mimi led a master plan for Belmont Day School, and oversaw the recent construction of “The Barn,” a 24,000 square foot building that houses specialty classrooms to support their STEAM program and a Field House. She managed campus master plans for two independent schools; St. Andrew’s School in Austin, TX and The Park School in Brookline, MA. She also served as a consultant to Reed Hilderbrand for the Cranbrook Educational Community Master Plan in Bloomfield Hills, MI. Mimi led an urban campus master plan for a global search engine company based in Kendall Square in Cambridge, MA that will eventually occupy a half million square feet of office space. Several phases of the expansion have been completed. She was the design principal for Autodesk’s office expansion at The Innovation and Design Building in Boston’s Seaport District and was one of the Utile principals who led the Rethink City Hall project for the City of Boston. She completed the redesign of the Boston City Hall lobby as well as other pilot projects throughout the building. Prior to joining Utile, Mimi was an Associate at Machado Silvetti in Boston where she was the lead designer for the renovation projects at the Getty Villa in Malibu, CA. Mimi co-authored Color Space Style, a reference book on interior design for Rockport Publications. She has recently been appointed as a Commissioner for the Boston Civic Design Commission (BCDC).

Joseph Zeal-Henry is a designer, urbanist and curator whose practice advocates for a more equitable built environment through policy and cultural production. His unique multi-disciplinary practice bridges public service and art.
He has written for Dezeen, Casabella, and Architectural Review. In addition to his role with the Greater London Authority’s Culture Team, he is a cofounder of Sound Advice, an ‘extra-institutional’ platform exploring new forms of spatial practice through music. In 2022, the British Council selected Joseph to co-curate the British Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023 alongside Jayden Ali, Meneesha Kellay and Sumitra Upham. Their pavilion, Dancing Before the Moon, explores the need for architecture to look beyond buildings and economic structures and toward everyday social practices, customs, and traditions to meaningfully reflect how people use and occupy space.

Joseph works for the mayor of London in the Culture and Creative Industries Unit, delivering new cultural infrastructure for the city. He works on the New London Museum, East Bank, and the Thames Estuary Production Corridor. He cofounded the social enterprise platform Sound Advice alongside Pooja Agrawal to explore new forms of spatial practice through music. In 2020 they published the book NOW YOU KNOW. He is a trustee of UD Music, a charity that empowers and harnesses opportunities for young people through Black music culture.

Alan Organschi is a principal and partner at Gray Organschi Architecture, an architectural practice in New Haven, Connecticut recognized internationally for its integration of design, construction, and environmental research. He is also the founder of the fabrication workshop and construction management firm JIG Design Build which in 2018 created the Ecological Living Module, a fully self-sustaining micro house for the United Nations Environment Program.

In April 2021, Mr. Organschi was appointed Director of the Innovation Lab at the Bauhaus der Erde (Earth Bauhaus – www.bauhausdererde.org) a global interdisciplinary initiative that seeks to transform the building sector from a major source of anthropogenic environmental and social impact into a regenerative and ecologically sensitive means to meet the housing and infrastructural needs of an urbanizing global population. In that capacity, he will direct the development of the Lab, its experimental projects, public programs and trans-sectoral collaborations with global partners.

Mr. Organschi continues as a Senior member of the faculty at the Yale School of Architecture where he has taught architectural design and building technology for two decades. During the 2019 and 2020 academic years, he also served as the Portman Critic at the Georgia Institute of Technology School of Architecture. The findings of the research and design work of the studios he conducted were published in the two-volume collection entitled Technosphere/Biosphere.

His ongoing research project, the Timber City Initiative (www.timbercity.org), examines the application of emerging structural wood fiber technologies to the construction of global cities. Timber City has been awarded grants from the Hines Fund for Advanced Sustainability Research in Architecture, the US Forest Service Wood Innovation Grant program and the SITRA Finland innovation Fund for the Circular Economy. Mr. Organschi has written and lectured extensively on the carbon storage benefits of biogenic material substitution in urban building and is a co-author of the upcoming book Carbon: A Field Manual For Building Designers and the scientific paper “Buildings as a Global Carbon Sink” published in the journal Nature Sustainability in January 2020. That same year, the paper received the Aquila Capital Transformation Award which honors scientific research that contributes to the decarbonization of Europe.

In addition to features in numerous publications, Gray Organschi Architecture was recognized by the Architectural League of New York as an Emerging Voice in Architecture and has received American Architecture Awards for the Storage Barn in Washington, CT, the Common Ground High School in New Haven, and the Ecological Living Module at the United Nations General Assembly in Manhattan. In 2012, Mr. Organschi and his partner Elizabeth Gray were honored for their work with an Arts and Letters Award in Architecture by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Katie Faulkner, FAIA, LEED AP has been working for twenty-five years on spaces and buildings for education, working, living, and healthcare. She received her MArch from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design and an MBA from Boston University.
Before West Work, Katie was a Vice President of Design for Katerra, focusing on a mid-rise mass timber housing prototype. She was a founding partner of the firm NADAAA, recognized with notable awards, including the 2014 Holcim Award, an AIA COTE Award, and numerous other accolades. Before NADAAA, Katie was an Associate Principal at Shepley Bulfinch. In 2017 she received the BSA’s Women in Design Award. In 2020 she was named to the American Institute of Architects College of Fellows.