Keynote Speakers

Bouwman Zago

Led by partners Laura Bouwman and Andrew Zago, Bouwman Zago brings open-ended, creative inquiry to disciplinary concerns in architecture. Noted for its prescient articulation of emerging sensibilities, the practice weds quasi-autonomous aesthetic studies to the art of making buildings and cities. In doing so, Bouwman Zago reaffirms the substantial and productive link amongst art, architecture and urbanism.

The firm has completed projects in the US, Mexico, and Korea including the Fine Venture office tower in Seoul, the Cornell Synthesis Studio for Cornell University’s Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD). In 2011 Zago Architecture was selected by the Museum of Modern Art in New York for its Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream exhibition. In 2015 Andrew Zago and Laura Bouwman were selected to represent the United States at the US Pavilion for the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale. In 2018, the firm was selected to design a housing prototype for a rural house for Nanacamilpa, Mexico. The prototype was built this year as part of a housing exposition in Apan, Mexico.

Andrew Zago holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Michigan, and a Master of Architecture from Harvard University. In 1987 he co-founded AKS RUNO and later, Shirdel Zago Kipnis. Zago is Design Faculty at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI_Arc) and Clinical Professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Zago is a fellow of the American Academy in Rome and a recipient of both an Academy Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Fellowship Grant from the United States Artists organization.

Laura Bouwman holds a Bachelor of Science in Art and Design and a Master of Architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She is a registered architect in California and Michigan. Prior to joining Zago Architecture in 2003, Bouwman worked at the Renzo Piano Building Workshop. Bouwman has taught at the Ohio State University, University of California Berkeley, and the University of Michigan.

French 2D

Anda French (MArch, Princeton University) and Jenny French (MArch, Harvard University) are co-founders of French 2D, an award-winning practice deeply engaged with local issues of collectivity, housing, public space, history, and identity. Anda and Jenny’s interest in hybrid models that exist between practice and academia has been the catalyst for their practice-based research and advocacy.

French 2D’s work on mixed-use projects combines ideas of collectivity with more radical organizations and typologies. The firm completed the first all compact unit building in Boston, which provided 180 units and commercial space woven into the Boston University neighborhood. Their work in collaborative and participant led design, not only won a Progressive Architecture Award in 2020, but simultaneously created a transformational zoning ordinance in a major city in Greater Boston.  The firm has extensive experience with meaningful community engagement and focuses projects at multiple scales on novel forms of civic participation. These projects include custom environments for participatory events and dinners, urban-scale graphics, experimental facades, and spaces for collective living.

French 2D was named as an Architectural Record Design Vanguard winner (2019) and received a 2020 P/A Award from Architect Magazine for Bay State Commons Cohousing. The firm has been featured in numerous publications, including Domus, Metropolis, and The Architect’s Newspaper, and as Architect Magazine's Next Progressives. The firm was a MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program finalist, and has exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale.

Jenny is an Assistant Professor in Practice at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Anda is a Visiting Faculty member at the Princeton School of Architecture and is the 2022 President-Elect of the Boston Society of Architects/AIA, where she has co-chaired the BSA’s Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion Task Force since 2018.

Harriet Harriss

Dr. Harriet Harriss (RIBA, PFHEA, Ph.D.) is a qualified architect and Dean of the Pratt School of Architecture in Brooklyn, New York. Prior to her current appointment at Pratt, she led the Architecture Research Programs at the Royal College of Art in London. Her teaching, research and writing focus upon pioneering new pedagogic models for design education, as captured in Radical Pedagogies: Architectural Education & the British Tradition, and for widening participation in architecture to ensure it remains as diverse as the society it seeks to serve, a subject she interrogates in her book, A Gendered Profession.

Harriss earned 2014 Ph.D. in architecture Oxford Brookes University 2007 Chartered Architect, RIBA, UK / Kingston University, Architecture & Professional Practice (RIBA Part III professional accreditation) | Distinction 2006 Architectural Association | PG(Dip) Building Conservation (Martin Caroe Award) 2003 Royal College of Art | MA(RCA) Architecture + Interiors (RIBA Part II) 2001 Manchester University | BA (Hons) Architecture | First Class.

She has won various awards including a Brookes Teaching Fellowship, a Higher Education Academy Internationalisation Award, a Churchill Fellowship, two Santander Fellowships, two Diawa awards, and a NESTA (National Endowment for Science Technology and Art) Pioneer Award. Dean Harriss was awarded a Clore Fellowship for cultural leadership (2016-17) and elected to the European Association of Architectural Education Council in summer 2017.

Harriss is also recognized as an advocate for diversity and inclusion within design education and was nominated by Dezeen as a champion for women in architecture and design in 2019. Her most recent book Architects After Architecture (2020), considers the multi-sector impact of an architectural qualification.