Meryati Johari Blackwell

Meryati Johari Blackwell, AIA, ASID, LEED AP, brings over twenty-five years of experience to her role as Principal at Marlon Blackwell Architects where she also serves as Director of Interiors. Her sensitivity as a designer and knowledge of materials and details enrich every project in the office. Ati has been a guiding force in the growth of MBA, helping to transform the firm from a sole proprietorship to a thriving international practice it is today. She works alongside Marlon to thoughtfully ground and guide the design ethos as the firm grows; always supporting the creation of award-winning architecture for any place, at any scale, at any price and for anyone. With a degree in Architecture and Planning, Meryati is both a Registered Architect and a Registered Interior Designer as well as a LEED Accredited Professional.

Chris Cooper

Chris Cooper is an ambitious design leader who brings foresight, elegance, tectonic rigor, and artful experiences to his buildings. Throughout his two decades at SOM, he has led projects with a careful attention to scale, sustainability, and placemaking. As a co-founder of SOM’s Climate Action Group, Chris always seeks to elevate standards for sustainable design in his work—from 7 World Trade Center, New York’s first commercial office building to achieve LEED-C/S Gold certification; to the redevelopment of the U.S. Department of Transportation’s Volpe Center in Cambridge, a cutting-edge headquarters designed to achieve LEED Platinum certification; to a new, secure, and sustainable production facility for the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Bureau of Engraving and Printing in Maryland.

Michelle Arevalos Franco

Michelle Arevalos Franco seeks to cultivate thriving ecological and social relations through the work of landscapes. Critical to this work is the interrogation of race, class, and knowledge stratification inherent to contemporary landscape architecture practice. Franco’s recent publications are informed by her Mexican roots and explore landscape architecture’s dependence on Latinx immigrant labor for construction and maintenance. This work is both academic and activist, calling for institutional and individual reforms within the discipline and illuminating landscape architecture’s complex political and social entanglements with immigration.

Franco’s pedagogy and practice clarify the emancipatory potential of collective landscape labor. She aims to re-value the physical work and embodied knowledge necessary to the creation of regenerative, sustainable futures. In her courses, students learn the importance of collective social relations and envision how to foster and sustain them. This landscape work, as commoning, is a bodily- and community-engaged alternative to patron-based models of landscape production. Deeply rooted in collectivity, interdependence, and egalitarian organization, these novel practices aim to mend social, racial, and ecological degradation resulting from capital-centric spatial production.

Franco is an assistant professor in landscape architecture at The Ohio State University and founder of The Bureau of Commons. She was a landscape designer at Oehme, van Sweden & Associates in Washington, DC and holds a master’s degree in landscape architecture from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, where she received the Peter Walker Partners Fellowship and the American Association of University Women’s Selected Professions Fellowship. Prior, Franco was program director of The Richard Avedon Foundation in New York and received a bachelor’s of fine art (magna cum laude) from the University of Arizona.

Michael Hsu

Michael Hsu, FAIA, IIDA is the founder and principal of Michael Hsu Office of Architecture, a fully integrated architecture and interior design firm. MHOA was founded in 2005 and employs 85 team members across studios in Austin and Houston, as well as staff in Dallas, Denver, Nashville and Boston. MHOA is a nationally award-winning firm, including AN Interior’s Top Design firms of 2022.

Hsu graduated from the University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture and has practiced in Austin since 1998. Hsu is a member of the UT School of Architecture’s Advisory Council and a past member of the Texas Society of Architects Board. He is a Past President of AIA Austin and was elevated to AIA’s College of Fellows in 2021.

E.B. Min

E.B. Min is the principal of Min Design, an architecture and design studio in San Francisco. Drawing upon a foundation of architecture, landscape and art, the office creates objects and environments that bring pleasure and delight. She has taught at U.C. Berkeley and is an Adjunct Professor at California College of the Arts in San Francisco.  E.B. has received numerous honors and awards, including the prestigious Emerging Voices selection by the Architectural League in 2016, Architectural Record’s Design Vanguard, 2010, the AIACC’s 2007 Emerging Talent Award, and Residential Architect’s 2010’s Rising Star.

Maria Nicanor

Emily Conklin

Managing Editor

The Architect’s Newspaper

Emily Conklin (she/her) is a writer, architecture historian, and the managing editor of The Architect’s Newspaper. She holds a M.S. in Historic Preservation from Columbia GSAPP, and her current areas of research include office to residential conversions and designs for coliving.

Jack Murphy

Executive Editor

The Architect’s Newspaper

Jack Murphy is Executive Editor of The Architect’s Newspaper. Previously he was Editor of Cite: The Architecture and Design Review of Houston and an adjunct professor at the University of Houston. His writing has appeared in Architectural Record, Dwell, The Architect’s Newspaper, Texas Architect, Places, Cite, PLAT, Paprika!, the SF Gate, the Houston Chronicle, and the New York Review of Architecture, among other publications. He received an Honorable Mention for the Pierre Vago Journalism Award 2020 from the International Committee of Architecture Critics. He earned degrees in architecture from MIT and Rice University and contributed to award-winning architectural practices in Texas, New York, and Massachusetts.