Design x Technology Series: Roy Decker and Anne Marie Duvall Decker

Join LTU CoAD for our next exciting Design x Technology Series talk featuring Roy Decker and Anne Marie Duvall Decker, Co-Founders of Duvall Decker. Their talk titled, Foundations will explore how the constructed environment can be critical, healthy, educational, and perhaps, therapeutic for a place and its inhabitants.

This conversational discussion with Assistant Professor Masataka Yoshikawa will provide our guests with a thoughtfully guided interview.

TITLE: Foundations

ABSTRACT: Design encompasses life in all its complexities and contingencies. Planning and design are the only activities that can improve the social and environmental health of our communities. Any professional can engage planning and design thinking in their work, but designers are trained for this challenge. Design methodologies include imagining a future and defining the systematic steps to achieve that future. Architectural projects are local and sited in a specific place and community. To have meaningful impact, architecture must be grounded in the place of practice, in its soil, weather, economy, history, and social context. To be productive, a studio must be aware of the cultural history and limitations of architecture and search for critiques and improvements that can help make a socially and environmentally healthy condition.

The work of Duvall Decker Architects is hopeful speculation through an expanded practice that includes architectural design, community planning, real estate development, and building care. In over twenty-seven years of doing this work, they have recorded what are called our foundations. They are our assumptions, principles, propositions, lessons, inspirations, and aspirations for both the how and the why of a practice. This lecture explores the work through the lenses of several of Duvall Decker’s foundations.

BENEFITS: Each new or renovated building and each new landscape changes its community. These interventions have consequences in the lives of all the people who encounter them over the years they exist. Architects face the challenges of program, budget, and schedule in every project, but the most important challenge is to find the public value for each project. Architecture can contribute to cultural growth, public safety, and environmental and social health. Architecture form is not simply a thing, but a transaction between us and our environment over time.

We believe the opportunity to design the built environment is a privilege that comes with public responsibility. For Duvall Decker, architecture is both a radical act of service and a hopeful artistic speculation. Architectural projects are local and come to be within a specific place and a unique community. As architects, we sometimes do not realize the public consequences that every building or landscape intervention carries. To expand our focus from the project-specific requirements, we ask questions that reframe our perspective. This presentation will explore how the constructed environment can be critical, healthy, educational, and perhaps, therapeutic for a place and its inhabitants.

🛂 CoAD Freshman, this event counts towards your Experience Passport. 

CEU: This lecture equals 1 professional architecture credit towards licensure requirements. ​​

Please note that LTU is not a registered AIA CE provider. By virtue of having a NAAB-accredited architecture program, the State of Michigan authorizes LTU to offer continuing education credit. A list of state-approved HSW subjects can be found on their licensing website by searching the page for ‘ HSW subjects for continuing education’.

As part of CoAD’s Design x Technology Lecture Series, this lecture is free and open to the public. Guests may watch online or on campus. Register for the location/viewing details.

*Image: Duvall Decker. US Courthouse Greenville MS. Timothy Hursley – Katherine Flannigan.