February 10, 2025 | 3:30 p.m.
Jennifer Yoos
Jennifer Yoos, FAIA, is a founding partner (1997-present) and president of VJAA. She is also professor and head of the Schools of Architecture, Landscape Architecture and Interior Design in the University of Minnesota College of Design (2020-present). VJAA is known for its innovative approach to practice that prioritizes context, environment, social space and building craft. Since its beginnings in 1995, the firm has received twenty-three national design awards, including six National AIA Honor Awards, six Progressive Architecture Awards and two AIA/COD Top Ten Green Building Awards. VJAA is the recipient of the 2012 National American Institute of Architects Firm Award. Jennifer received a MArch in Architecture and Urbanism from the Architectural Association in London, a professional BArch from the University of Minnesota and a Loeb Fellowship in Urban and Environmental Studies at Harvard’s GSD. In addition to teaching at Minnesota (1997-2015), she has taught as the NADAA Visiting Professor at Cooper Union and as the Ruth and Norman Moore Visiting Professor at Washington University in St. Louis. She is co-author, with partner Vincent James, of a monograph on their work published by Princeton Architectural Press as well as their book Parallel Cities: The Multilevel Metropolis (2016).
March 17, 2025 | 3:30 p.m.
WAI Architecture Think Tank
WAI Architecture Think Tank is invested in the development of design experiments and new curricula that support public engagement with the built, destroyed, and imagined environments. Founded by Cruz Garcia Nathalie Frankowski, and who now practice with their child Ema Yuizarix, WAI is one of several platforms of public engagement that include the alternative trade school of critical spatial practices LOUDREADERS and the anti-disciplinary collective Post-Novis. Garcia and Frankowski are associate professors at Iowa State University, where they are Design for Critical Futures Fellows in Activism and Emancipatory practice respectively, as well as faculty at the Advanced Architectural Design program at Columbia University. Their work has been part of the inaugural Chicago Architecture Biennial and exhibitions at the Centre Pompidou Metz, Neues Museum Nuremberg, Museum of Modern Art New York, and the Museum of Art, Architecture, and Technology Lisbon. They are authors of several books, manifestos and publishing projects, including The Pocket Universal Principles of Architecture; Universal Principles of Architecture: 100 Archetypes, Methos, Conditions, Relationships, and Imaginaries; Narrative Architecture: A Kynical Manifesto, and Pure Hardcore Icons: A Manifesto on Pure Form in Architecture.