Merritt Bucholz and Karen McEvoy
Founding Directors
Bucholz McEvoy Architects

Merritt Bucholz, MRIAI, and Karen McEvoy, FRAI, co-founded Bucholz McEvoy Architects, in Dublin in 1996. The firm creates durable and climate-resilient architecture that is inherently oriented to enhancing human experience. Carefully crafted, site specific, optimizing natural daylight and ventilation, its architecture is fine-tuned to its use and its particular micro-climate. Its ethos is based on collaborative practice, embedding concepts of energy reduction, based on a careful analysis of use of space, and well-researched construction technology for each step of the design process, enablers in developing truly sustainable, beautiful and resilient designs.

Chris Hardy, PLA, ISA CA
Senior Associate
Sasaki

Chris Hardy is a Senior Associate Landscape Architect and Arborist at Sasaki, based in Boston Massachusetts. Chris’s experience includes an array of projects around the world, ranging from master plans to complex, constructed urban landscapes. Chris focuses on the integration of ecology and culture, with a commitment to exemplary craft in the built environment. Chris has been the principal investigator for Sasaki’s landscape Carbon Conscience research team from 2019 to the present. This project includes building both landscape and architectural datasets and translating them into a free and accessible design application, providing carbon metrics for planning and urban design analysis. Chris serves as cochair of ASLA’s Climate Action Plan Carbon and Biodiversity Subcommittee. He has taught construction technology and recently co-authored ASLA’s guide to decarbonizing landscape specifications. Chris believes that every project is an opportunity to experiment, listen, and learn.

Photo credit: Holcim Foundation

John Ochsendorf
Professor
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

John Ochsendorf is the Class of 1942 Professor at MIT known for creative research and design at the interface between engineering and architecture. His research interests include the safety of historic structures, form-finding of efficient shell structures, and the design of more sustainable buildings and infrastructure. John has uniquely combined his interests in engineering, archeology and architectural history to become a leading authority on ancient building structures as well as sustainable design. He is Founding Director of the newly established MIT Morningside Academy for Design and was Director of the American Academy in Rome from 2017 to 2020. Ochsendorf is the author of more than 100 technical papers and a book on the structural tile shells of the Guastavino family (Princeton Architectural Press, 2010). His work has been supported by a Fulbright Scholarship to Spain (2000), the Rome Prize (2007), and a MacArthur Fellowship (2008).

Juliana Berglund-Brown
PhD researcher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Juliana Berglund-Brown (she/her) is a PhD researcher in Building Technology advised by Professor John Ochsendorf at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her research explores circular strategies to mitigate carbon emissions and new resource extraction in structural systems. She is focused on scaling the reuse of structural steel elements in buildings, through quantitative material, and carbon analyses, and close collaboration with the steel value chain. Currently, she is conducting work to better understand the end-of-life of buildings, building lifetimes, and obsolescence. Her work is supported by the USA EPA, as a part of the low carbon building materials grant program, and the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program. She currently holds a visiting research position in the Circular Economy for Architecture Group at ETH Zürich.

Ilias Papageorgiou
Founder
PILA

Ilias Papageorgiou is a Greek architect and the founder of PILA. He has extensive experience in designing and realizing cultural, commercial, and residential projects worldwide. His recently completed retrofit of the Piraeus Tower in Athens, the second tallest building in Greece, revives a structure that had been dormant since 1975. Before founding PILA, Ilias was a partner at SO-IL in New York.

His work has been widely published and exhibited at prominent institutions, including the Venice Architecture Biennale and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York. Ilias is a frequent lecturer and panelist at leading design institutions, such as the University of Patras School of Architecture and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation (GSAPP). He currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Athens Epidaurus Festival.

Anne Whiston Spirn
Professor of Landscape
Architecture and Planning, MIT

Anne Whiston Spirn is an award-winning author, landscape architect, photographer, teacher, and scholar. She is the Cecil and Ida Green Distinguished Professor of Landscape Architecture and Planning at MIT. Her previous academic appointments include chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning at the University of Pennsylvania and director of the landscape architecture program at Harvard University. Since 1987, Spirn has directed the West Philadelphia Landscape Project, a program integrating research, teaching, and community service. Her work is devoted to promoting places that are functional, sustainable, meaningful, artful, and just.

Ellis Herman
Product Manager
Forma

Ellis is the product manager for Forma's embodied carbon analysis and has led the development of other sustainability-focused functionality in Forma. Ellis is passionate about using machine learning to make sustainability tools accessible to all designers and decision makers in the earliest, most impactful stages of design.

Brian Raff
Vice President
AISC

Brian Raff is Vice President of the American Institute of Steel Construction leading the association's efforts in Sustainability and Government Relations. Since 2005, Brian has led several key marketing and business development roles within AISC and the National Steel Bridge Alliance. In 2013, Brian left the Institute to serve as Marketing Director for one of North America's largest structural steel building and bridge fabricators before returning to AISC in 2017 to lead AISC's marketing communications and government affairs efforts. Mr. Raff graduated from Penn State University with a Bachelor of Architectural Engineering degree and received his MBA from DePaul University in Chicago, focusing on economic business strategy.