Joshua Aidlin

Founding principal

Aidlin Darling Design

Joshua Aidlin, FAIA, leads a multidisciplinary studio—producing architecture, interiors, furniture, and sculptures—with a conviction that art and design are integral to vibrant public life. Joshua advances an architecture demonstrating environmental, cultural, psychological, and multisensorial sensitivity.

A tireless public advocate for design, Joshua has served on the board of the SFMOMA Architecture & Design Forum; the AIASF Public Policy and Advocacy Committee; and the Fundraising Committee for Youth Art Exchange.

Founded in 1997, his eponymic studio Aidlin Darling Design has garnered over 300 awards, including the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Award for the firm’s complete body of work.

Katherine Darnstadt

Founding principal

Latent

Katherine Darnstadt is the founder of Latent, an architecture and urbanism practice exploring the influence of design as small or as large as the context allows in the search of social and spatial justice. Since founding Latent in 2010, Katherine and her firm have pursued projects at the bench, building, and block scale across Chicago and the Midwest. They have prototyped new urban design systems to advance urban food access with Forty Acres Fresh Market, supported over 200 small businesses through Boombox micro retail popup program, designed new community centers with Boys and Girls Clubs of Chicago, and created community design frameworks through co-founding the nonprofit Design Trust Chicago.

Omar Gandhi

Founder and principal

Omar Gandhi Architects

Omar Gandhi Architects (OGA), founded in 2010 with studios in Toronto and Halifax, is internationally acclaimed for its innovative designs in homes, hospitality, urban infills, public works, and historic landscapes. Gandhi and his collaborative team create architecture that uniquely responds to briefs, incorporating playfulness and the unexpected. Their approach combines site-specific characteristics with creative reinterpretations of familiar forms, resulting in sophisticated projects like the Schlotfeldt Residence and Rabbit Snare Gorge cabin. OGA has earned prestigious awards, including the Architectural League of New York’s Emerging Voices and the Architectural Record Design Vanguard. Omar Gandhi has also taught at Yale.

Walter Hood

Founder and Creative Director

Hood Design Studio

Walter J. Hood, a multidisciplinary designer from Charlotte, NC, is globally recognized for his contributions in art, landscape architecture, urbanism, and research. Founding Hood Design Studio in Oakland, California in 1992, he now leads as its creative director. His passion for landscape and urbanism emerges from its broad, democratic scope, allowing experiences beyond architectural constraints. Infusing African American cultural arts into his philosophy, he established a unique voice, reshaping spaces to reflect contemporary needs without erasing their history. A professor at UC Berkeley and former Harvard educator, Walter penned Black Landscapes Matter and has received accolades like the 2019 MacArthur Fellowship, the 2021 Architectural League’s President’s Medal award, and 2023 WSJ Magazine Innovator in Design award.

Li Hu

Founding partner

OPEN

Li Hu, founding partner of OPEN, is an internationally known architect, Kenzo Tange Design Critic in Architecture at Harvard University Graduate School of Design, and visiting professor at the Tsinghua University School of Architecture and Central Academy of Fine Arts. He is a former partner of Steven Holl Architects, and director of Columbia University GSAPP’s Studio-X Beijing. Li received his bachelors of architecture from Tsinghua University in Beijing in 1996 and his masters in architecture from Rice University in 1998.

Alexandra Lange

Design critic

alexandralange.net

Alexandra Lange is a design critic. Her essays, reviews and profiles have appeared in numerous design publications including Architect, Harvard Design Magazine, and Metropolis, as well as in The Atlantic, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. She is a columnist for Bloomberg CityLab, and has been a featured writer at Design Observer, an opinion columnist at Dezeen, and the architecture critic for Curbed. Her latest book, Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall, was published by Bloomsbury USA in June 2022.

David M. Powell

Principal

HASTINGS

David M. Powell has been designing nationally celebrated, award-winning architecture since 1991. As a former musician, Dave’s work shares vocabularies across multiple art forms—drawing from the creative community and storytelling culture formed by the legendary songwriters of his home city of Nashville, Tennessee. As a principal of HASTINGS, Dave’s diverse body of work has garnered many accolades, including over 50 AIA design awards, and has been recognized by The Architect’s Newspaper, ARCHITECT Magazine, Architectural Record, The Chicago Athenaeum, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and the Urban Land Institute.

Mónica Rivera

Principal

Emiliano López Mónica Rivera Arquitectos

Mónica Rivera is the principal of Emiliano López Mónica Rivera Arquitectos, a Barcelona-based practice that understands architecture as a social and cultural endeavor deeply engaged with the environment. The firm’s, including Two Cork Houses, Social Housing for Young People, and Hotel Aire de Bardenas, has been widely recognized and featured in El Croquis, A+U, Detail, Architectural Review, the monograph Domestic Thresholds, and at the Venice, Ibero-American, and Spanish Biennials of Architecture and Urbanism, among others. Rivera is also the JoAnne Stolaroff Cotsen Professor and chair of graduate architecture at Washington University in St. Louis. She holds a BFA and a BArch from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MArch from Harvard University.

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.