Affordable Housing and Beyond: Addressing the Needs of All Populations

Andrew Bernheimer is a Brooklyn-based architect and Assistant Professor of Architecture at the Parsons School of Design. Bernheimer leads an eponymous firm responsible for a wide variety of residential, civic, and cultural projects, including new multi-unit affordable housing developments across the five boroughs as well as award-winning private residences in the northeast region. He recently edited “Timber in the City”, a book featuring innovative practices in wood construction published by ORO Editions. Bernheimer sits on the Advisory Board of the Institute for Public Architecture, is the Co-Chair of the Van Alen Institute’s Program Council, is a fellow in the Forum for Urban Design, and is a member of the Architectural League of New York.

David Leven is a partner at LEVENBETTS, an award winning New York City based architecture practice, and an Associate Professor at Parsons School of Constructed Environments. David holds a Bachelor of Arts from Colgate University, a Master of Architecture degree from Yale University and attended the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies. LEVENBETTS was founded by David with Stella Betts in 1997 and focuses on projects at all scales of urban design, public buildings, houses and housing, workspaces, exhibitions and furniture. The office employs a variety of methods to arrive at innovative solutions that involve incisive observation, interrogate programmatic and site givens and approach building systems as creative opportunities. LEVENBETTS has won several NYC AIA awards (2011, 2008, 2005, 2004, 2003), the Architectural League’s Young Architects Forum and Emerging Voices Awards (2009), Architectural Record’s Design Vanguard (2007) award, I.D. Annual Design Review Award (2004) and been exhibited widely. The work of LEVENBETTS has been published in various design magazines and books, and Princeton Architectural Press published a monograph on the firm’s work in 2008, called Pattern Recognition. David has lectured widely and has an been invited jurors at Columbia, Yale, Princeton, Harvard and University of Pennsylvania.  

David has served on advisory panels at the Architectural League of New York, committees at the New School, and holds architectural registration in New York and New Jersey.

David Lewis is a founding principal of LTL Architects, a design-intensive architecture firm realizing inventive solutions that turn the very constraints of each project into the design trajectory, exploring opportunistic overlaps between space, program, form, budget, and materials. The principals are co-authors of the monographs Intensities, Opportunistic Architecture, and Situation Normal....Pamphlet Architecture #21, as well as the only book on the architectural section, Manual of Section. LTL Architects’ work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Carnegie Museum of Art. David Lewis holds academic positions as Associate Professor at Parsons School of Design and Adjunct Professor of Architecture at the University of Limerick, Ireland, and is a member of the Advisory Council of the College of Architecture, Art and Planning at Cornell University. He received his Master of Architecture from Princeton University, a Master of Arts in the History of Architecture and Urbanism from Cornell University, and a Bachelor of Arts from Carleton College.

Martha Lewis is a senior architect and Head of Materials at Henning Larsen Architects, where she established an office-wide material database with the firm’s sustainability department and implemented material strategies for projects with a focus on healthy, ethically viable, and environmentally tenable materials. With two decades of professional experience in Copenhagen and Berlin, Martha is currently involved in establishing a Danish/Nordic material declaration, and was a member of the Buildings as Material Banks shareholders network, which has worked to establish an EU material passport. In 2016, she participated in the advisory group for the Danish Environmental protection Agency’s“Undesirable Substances in Sustainable Buildings”, and she has been involved in the Danish Green Building Council’s adoption of the German building certification system since 2011. Martha holds a MArch from Washington University and a BA from Vassar College.

henninglarsen.com

As Director of the Healthy Materials Lab, Alison leverages her practice-based experience as an architect and her knowledge and experience as a long-term academic leader to confront one of the more serious and often overlooked environmental challenges of our time: the health of the built environment. How do we make profound and long-term changes to everyday design practice to create truly healthy buildings, especially for those in the most need of affordable housing? HML creates resources, educational programming, and prototypical innovative housing models for a new post-petroleum world. Alison is co-Principal Investigator of the Healthy Affordable Materials Project (HAMP). The Project is a long-term coalition of four organizations that work together to remove harmful chemicals from the built environment. She is also the recipient of multiple grants that support the work of the Lab.

Alison’s work draws from the long tradition at The New School University’s commitment to promoting community-based sustainability, social engagement, and environmental justice, especially in her teaching in architectural design studios at Parsons. She lectures widely disseminating current thinking within the field of material health.

Alison Mears and Jonsara Ruth were awarded the 2022 Women in Architecture Innovation Award from Architectural Record and co edited the 2023 publication “Material Health: Design Frontiers”.

Wendy Vittori joined the Health Product Declaration Collaborative as Executive Director in May 2015. An accomplished business executive, Ms. Vittori was most recently founder and principal consultant of Vittori Consulting LLC, which provides executive counsel on innovative approaches for strategic management and organization performance to organizations in the private, public and non-profit sectors. In this capacity she was engaged with the HPDC as a strategic advisor from its inception. Previously, she was a senior executive with both Intel and Motorola, where she was a leader of open industry standards. She serves on several non-profit boards focused on the economic development of the Arizona-Sonora region, and is an associate faculty member at the ASU Lodestar Center for Philanthropy and Nonprofit Innovation Non-Profit Management Institute. Having begun her career as a software engineer, Ms. Vittori is a graduate of Harvard College, received her MBA from Northeastern University, and was a doctoral candidate at the Harvard Business School.