Ellen Dunham-Jones is a Keynote Speaker for the 2024 AIA Utah Fall Conference. She will be speaking at 4:00 p.m. We chatted with her about her career and goals for the field. The following are excerpts from our conversation.
What is your current passion?
As much as I love well-designed buildings, I’m passionate about the social, environmental and economic impacts of well‑designed urban form. It hardly matters how beautiful or high‑performing an individual building is if you have to drive through a sad, unjust, ugly and toxic public realm to get there.
What do you wish you knew when you were a young practitioner?
I wish I had learned how to talk comfortably about money. As both a woman and a WASP, I was taught to NOT talk about money and to simply accept whatever salary was offered and assume it was fair. In addition, as a solo practitioner, I felt guilty and/or unworthy charging clients for every hour I put in. Now, as an educator, I insist on having my students rehearse how to counteroffer.
Where do you hope the field is going, and how can we help it get there?
I hope that the field is better engaged with the pressing challenges facing the world today and architectural pedagogy is re‑establishing the relevance of architecture to non-architects. Instead of teaching our young an elite, internalized discourse, we need to better prepare them to communicate and collaborate with the general public, as well as with the builders, policy makers and scientists. They greatly need architects to apply their design and visioning talents to adapt to climate change, integrate equity and affordability, and revitalize and repair underperforming buildings, communities and ecosystems.
Ellen Dunham-Jones is a professor of architecture and directs the MS in urban design at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta. She hosts the “REDESIGNING CITIES” podcast series and was recognized in 2017 and again in the 2023 poll by Planetizen as one of the 100 most influential urbanists ever. She is co-author with June Williamson of a pair of pioneering and award-winning books: “Case Studies in Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Strategies for Urgent Challenges” (Wiley, 2021) and “Retrofitting Suburbia: Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning Suburbs” (Wiley, 2009, 2011). Their documentation of successful retrofits of aging, automobile-oriented shopping malls, business parks, etc. into more sustainable places has been featured in The New York Times, TED, NPR and other prominent venues. She is a Fellow of the Congress for the New Urbanism as well as the Brook Byers Institute of Sustainable Systems, maintains a unique database on suburban retrofits and trends, lectures and consults widely while researching how to prepare communities for autonomous vehicles.
