This fundraiser enables AIA|LA to offer an extraordinary array of programming, from advocacy issues, sustainability, professional development, fostering the next generation of design professional, and much more! Gather with colleagues, reconnect with lifelong peers, and make new connections as we celebrate the 2024 Design Award winners, Next LA winners, and Board of Directors Honorees.

Learn more and RSVP here.

Visionary Women presents "Women in Design" featuring Monique Lhuillier and Irene Neuwirth, moderated by Jennifer Smith, Founder and CEO of C California Style & Culture Magazine

Date and time:

Tuesday, January 16, 2024 · 5 - 7pm PST

Location:

Billy Wilder Theater at the Hammer Museum

10899 Wilshire Boulevard Los Angeles, CA 90024

Learn more and RSVP here.

Don’t miss our biggest fundraiser of the year! To be held at our new Center for Communities this November.

This fundraiser enables AIA|LA to offer an extraordinary array of programming, from advocacy issues, sustainability, professional development, fostering the next generation of design professional, and much more! Gather with colleagues, reconnect with lifelong peers, and make new connections as we celebrate the 2023 Design Award winners, Next LA winners and Board of Directors Honorees.

Learn more and RSVP here.

We're thrilled to present this year's exceptional lineup of speakers at Design for Dignity. While we eagerly anticipate a future where discussions about the housing crisis and homelessness are no longer necessary, as long as these issues persist, it remains our responsibility to come together and seek solutions. We invite you to join us and lend your support to this critical cause - hosted by Studio MLA

The focus this year will be “Making It Happen”. 

Design for Dignity will serve as a forum to leverage the expertise of architects to achieve cost-containment, neighborhood engagement/ community buy-in, and insight about how to best overcome specific regulatory and procedural hurdles, hardships, and ‘red-tape’.

There's still much work ahead to transform Los Angeles into the equitable and vibrant city we all dream of. We can't do it alone; we need your expertise and collaboration. Join us, and let's embark on this transformative journey together.

Learn more and RSVP here.

The Design Awards party enables AIA|LA to offer an extraordinary array of programming, from advocacy issues, sustainability, professional development, fostering the next generation of design professionals, and much more!

Gather with colleagues, reconnect with lifelong peers, and make new connections as we celebrate the 2022 Design Award winners and Presidential Honorees.

Join us for a virtual conversation with winners of the 2022 AIA|LA Design Awards one week after the in-person awards ceremony, on 11/3. This event includes one-minute talks on the architecture of each project and highlights how the designers resolved challenges, elevated sustainability goals, fulfilled societal aspirations, and achieved design excellence. More info HERE.

As one of the most prestigious awards an architect and designer can win in the Los Angeles design community, AIA Los Angeles goes to great lengths to make the Awards as celebrated as possible.

Learn more and RSVP here.

Join ULI Los Angeles for an online panel discussion on what different jurisdictions are doing to create an accommodating environment for outdoor dining as we move away from an emergency solution to permanent planning and urban design guidelines!

As we move away from the COVID emergency, what are different jurisdictions planning to create a permanent, accommodating environment for outdoor dining? What will future planning and urban design guidelines look like? Has this changed how the development community and restauranteurs plan and implement their current and future projects?

Learn more and RSVP here.

AIA Los Angeles’ 7th in-person annual Design For Dignity conference will serve as a forum to highlight best-practices and pay tribute to the architects, contractors, housing developers, clients, funders, and service providers that are working to deliver housing and supportive services to our communities. This year’s theme will be: “HOUSING SOLUTIONS: What’s working well and why?”

The 7th annual Design For Dignity conference will feature a series of panel discussions and presentations that highlight successful programs, initiatives, and design innovations that the A/E/C community can replicate, improve upon, and expand. We’d like to emphasize housing solutions that can inspire the community and educate policy makers, planners, architects, designer, real estate professions, housing advocates, and civic leaders.

Find out more and RSVP here.

A Lecture Series Presented by the UCLA Division of Humanities and the Berggruen Institute

Speakers:

Alejandro Aravena

Aravena is an architect and founder and executive director of the firm Elemental. His works include the “Siamese Towers” at the Catholic University of Chile and the Novartis office campus in Shanghai. In 2016, the New York Times named Aravena one of the world’s “creative geniuses” who had helped define culture. He and Elemental have received numerous honors, including the 2016 Pritzker Architecture Prize, the 2015 London Design Museum’s Design of the Year award and the 2011 Index Award. Aravena currently serves as the president of the Pritzker Prize jury.

RSVP here.

This 90-minute workshop will give you the basics to use systems thinking in your studio or classroom through a four-step design process that includes virtual hands-on exercises to get you started today.

Wait, what is systems thinking? Systems thinking in design should result in a usable and beautiful object or service that improves not only our quality of life but nature as well (reparations for nature). Systems thinking is the way forward for designers to continue their practice and renourish what humanity has taken away from (and damaged) the planet, and, in turn, drawdown our global carbon emissions.

RSVP here.

Please join us to discuss Civic Space in Los Angeles.

With the election, pandemic and social justice still top of mind as we enter the Fall, people are also thinking about what our lives and common spaces may be like as we begin to reconnect.

With prospects of better testing, a vaccine, and a change in leadership, how will our transportation and open spaces evolve? Will streets given over to pedestrians, restaurants, bicycles remain like that? How can parks and other civic gathering places better accommodate the diverse needs of citizens in these new circumstances, especially the elderly and those with less access to traditional open spaces? How can the design of neighborhoods effect our public health, economics, education, civic life? 

This panel will include experts discussing the past, present, future of LA’s civic spaces in relation to neighborhoods, urban design, and environmental justice: how we got here, where we are now, and potential solutions for the healthy and beautiful city in which all can thrive. 

Free Registration Here:

https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_eK7CJrqFStCqjNrydEqXEQ

“Design justice is about how we build a better world, a world where many worlds fit; linked worlds of collective liberation and ecological sustainability,” says Sasha Costanza-Chock, author of the new book, “Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need.”

In “Design Justice,” professor, designer and media-maker Sasha Costanza-Chock explores how “design might be led by marginalized communities to dismantle structural inequality, and advance collective liberation and ecological survival.” (Read the first two chapters of Design Justice here, and an excerpt from Chapter 3 here. ) 

In a segment of their book, Costanza-Chock explores an example of how design justice can address the needs of a marginalized group. The Center for Migrant Rights developed a Yelp-like website called https://contratados.org, where migrant workers can review potential employers and recruitment agencies. The site also shares information on migrant worker rights and how to avoid recruitment scams. This site was developed through participatory design and included individuals who intended to use the site. 

Join us on Wednesday, May 13, at 1 p.m. Eastern time to learn from Costanza-Chock about design justice and the importance of participatory design. 

Sasha Costanza-Chock is associate professor of civic media at MIT. They are a faculty associate at the Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, faculty affiliate with the MIT Open Documentary Lab, and creator of the MIT Codesign Studio. Their work focuses on social movements, transformative media organizing and design justice. Costanza-Chock’s first book, “Out of the Shadows, Into the Streets: Transmedia Organizing and the Immigrant Rights Movement” was published by the MIT Press in 2014. Costanza-Chock is a board member of Allied Media Projects and a Steering Committee member of the Design Justice Network.

This webinar is to pay what you wish to register. Pay any amount that you would like or nothing at all. Those who become sustaining members of at least $10 a month, or who make a one-time donation of at least $60, may receive a copy of “Black In Place,” the new book by Brandi Thompson Summers. Your contribution toward this seminar will be used to find even more amazing guests, cover hosting fees and organize seminars like this one more frequently. A video of the webinar will be made available to those who register.

View more details here and RSVP.