A&AA Dean Frances Bronet will host a conversation with Susan S. Szenasy, longtime editor in chief and new publisher of Metropolis magazine, in Portland on May 22 as part of a series of national conversations exploring issues of design advocacy and ethics. The gathering will also celebrate the publication of Szenasy, Design Advocate, a new title by Metropolis Books. It will live tweeted at @johnhenrytweets.
Szenasy is publisher and editor in chief of Metropolis, the award-winning New York City-based magazine of architecture, design, and culture.
“Susan Szenasy has been the ethical center for design, a champion demanding from all of us in the public arena—architects, builders, makers, communicators—that we take responsibility for our work,” says A&AA Dean Frances Bronet. “Her clarity of vision about the role of design and creativity as political, social, and aesthetic act is central to how A&AA sees its work: building a better, more just environment, rooted in understanding the human condition.”
Above: (left) Susan S. Szenasy, publisher and editor in chief of Metropolis. (right) Frances Bronet, dean of A&AA.
A respected authority on sustainability and design, Szenasy served two terms on the boards of the Council for Interior Design Accreditation and the Landscape Architecture Foundation, the FIT Interior Design board, and the NYC Center for Architecture Advisory Board. Since 1986, she has led the magazine in landmark design journalism, achieving international recognition.
“Susan is the only one, among the major design editors, who has unabashedly made her magazine a forum for tacking grand challenges,” says Anna Dyson, director of the Center for Architectural Science and Ecology at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York. “What she chooses to publish in each issue cross-pollinates across all of the different design criteria—aesthetic, social, environmental.”
Such a cross-disciplinary philosophy—and one with environmental stewardship at its core—fits well with the educational foundation of A&AA, making Szenasy an ideal candidate for an A&AA-sponsored event encompassing disciplines ranging from landscape architecture to product design, public policy to architecture.
“Each day, something comes my way that confirms again and again the need for all design disciplines to collaborate with each other, and with other experts, to solve the most complex problems the designed environment is facing today: climate change,” Szenasy says. “Symposia discuss cross-disciplinary activity, cities are developing resiliency plans, architects search for ways to take their buildings off the grid and make them self sustaining, interior designers search for the least toxic materials to use, landscape architects are busy with remediating our poisoned earth and working with restorative nature, industrial designers are trying to figure out how best to become part of the team that creates a new, resilient, nontoxic, zero energy built environment. Exciting times.”
Szenasy has received two IIDA Presidential Commendations, is an honorary member of the ASLA and AIA NYC, was the 2008 recipient of the ASID Patron’s Prize and Presidential Commendation, and received the 2007 Civitas August Heckscher Award for Community Service and Excellence. She holds a master’s degree from Rutgers University and honorary doctorates from the Art Center College of Design, Kendall College of Art and Design, the New York School of Interior Design, and the Pacific Northwest College of Art.
Bronet, the pivotal leader charged with taking A&AA into the 21st and 22nd centuries, is a practicing designer as well as educator. Her dedication to social and economic sustainability and establishing positive global connections guides her commitment to innovative education and educational reform and transformation. Bronet was elected secretary of the Officers of the College of Distinguished Professors in the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) for 2013-14. She will subsequently serve as vice chancellor in 2014-15 and as chancellor in 2015-16.
Their conversation will take place from 6-7:30 p.m. Thursday, May 22, at the White Stag, 70 NW Couch Street at the University of Oregon in Portland. It will be broadcast to Eugene in Lawrence Hall Room 177 and live tweeted at @johnhenrytweets.
