Join us for the second quarterly Design News Roundtable, a space for freewheeling conversation with architects, designers, preservationists, planners and community leaders exploring our ever-changing city.
Design News Roundtable: Downtown Chicago
The endangered Century and Consumers buildings on State Street. Photo by Eric Allix Rogers
Our tapped-in panelists will scour the headlines and opine on recent design, development, and planning news impacting Chicago’s downtown. Office-to-residential conversions, efforts to revive our great shopping streets, public activations and open space, megadevelopment, historic preservation, and arts and culture are primary areas of focus. Brush up on the past few months of built environment news and gain a deeper appreciation for the projects, the ideas, and the difference-makers charting a path forward future of downtown.
This roundtable is hosted by Dario Durham, co-founder of the popular podcast 77 Flavors of Chicago. Our panelists are Preservation Futures co-founder Elizabeth Blasius; Gensler Principal & Cities Sector Leader Andre Brumfield; and Site Design Senior Project Manager Mejay Gula, founder of the Tender House Project.
Keynote speaker
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Phasellus leo nulla, porta a ligula ut, commodo ultrices quam. Suspendisse non mollis odio.
Sed vestibulum ut arcu vel feugiat. Morbi iaculis augue risus, at pharetra nibh blandit nec. Etiam feugiat volutpat nunc vel aliquet. Maecenas mollis turpis at odio fringilla, eget iaculis tortor congue.
Speakers:
Dario Durham is a Chicago-based videographer and content creator. He is co-host of the highly popular podcast 77 Flavors of Chicago, which explores the city’s 77 community areas and tells the stories of each. He has appeared on the award-winning Netflix series “High On the Hog.” Dario is also an avid photographer and world traveler.
Andre is a Principal and Global Cities Sector Leader at Gensler and recognized across the industry for leveraging his extensive experience in the fields of urban design, planning, and architecture to catalyze neighborhood revitalization and drive the redevelopment of urban districts.
Andre has committed his career to improving cities and underserved neighborhoods. A true urban strategist, he works seamlessly across public agencies, private sector clients, and non-profit organizations to develop master plans that shape the future of neighborhoods and cities. His strong background in transit-oriented development, corridor master planning, and repositioning urban industrial centers, is represented in his broad range of work and product types.
Andre offers his leadership and expertise to a variety of prestigious organizations and civic groups including the American Institute of Architects, the Urban Land Institute, the Chicago Plan Commission, and the Chicago Architecture Center. His thought leadership can be found in publications including the New York Times, The Guardian, and Fast Company, and he speaks frequently on global stages including WRLDCTY, MIT DesignX, and the Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat.
Elizabeth Blasius is an architectural historian and writer, and partner in Preservation Futures, a Chicago-based firm exploring the future of historic preservation through research, action and design. Elizabeth works on preservation projects at the forefront of the preservation movement, including buildings designed in the 1980s, 1990s, and beyond. She advocates to bring the recognition and resources of preservation into communities that have been historically overlooked. Prior to founding Preservation Futures in 2021, Elizabeth worked in natural disaster recovery and mitigation, providing guidance on the care of historic places in the aftermath of hurricanes, floods, and other acts of climate violence. Blasius’s writing has been published in The Architect’s Newspaper, Bloomberg CityLab, Curbed and The Chicago Tribune. Elizabeth writes a monthly column for Mas Context, a non-profit architecture and design platform.
As a Senior Project Manager at site, Mejay Gula focuses on different scales of landscape and urban design projects, employing innovative engagement strategies to promote design collaboration. Mejay is committed to advocating for environments that foster thriving communities, believing that urban design rooted in trust and active listening is essential to realizing client visions that cultivate place and belonging. In addition to her role at site, Mejay is the founder of the Tender House Project, a collaborative initiative with local organizations to activate Chicago’s underutilized bridgehouses. Through partnerships with the city and community groups, she envisions these neglected structures transforming into a vibrant civic and cultural network, breathing new life into the Chicago River and its surrounding areas.
##
###
