Your Voice is Your Power

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2024 Distinguished Alumni Awardee, Steven Bingler (MArch '72) brings his longstanding experience cultivating engagement to the A-School asking students, faculty, alumni, and critics to weigh in on what matters in design and the built environment.

As part of the Dean's Forum Weekend, Steven Bingler will facilitate an informal workshop for A-School students that shares the issues of the past and explores the future of the built environment. The goal of Your Voice is Your Power workshop is to share some high-level lessons learned from a cadre of seasoned design practitioners, educators and journalists as a prelude for a group of motivated future designers, planners and historians to explore the essence and trajectory of the built environment in the challenging decades that lie ahead.

For A-School student participants:
This is an opportunity to contribute your voice to what matters most to you — in your education, and your future and the future of the built and natural worlds. Results from the workshop will likely be compiled into a published piece for Common Edge, a nonprofit organization dedicated to reconnecting architecture and design with the public that it is meant to serve. 

Common Edge, co-founded by Steven Bingler and Martin C. Pedersen (who will co-facilitate the workshop) generates resources necessary to research, publish and advocate for a community of engaged designers, writers, public servants, and activist citizens who are committed to creating designs that manifest the highest aspirations of a democratic society.

Seats are limited and a sign-up has been shared with students through email. 
Email sarc-communications@virginia.edu with questions.

Workshop Background

The recent history of design and the built environment education and practice have encompassed a wide range of physical, cultural, social, economic, organizational and educational challenges.  From formalism to emerging materials and technologies, and complex issues around social equity, inclusion, climate change, democratic process (and more), the parameters of design have been persistently evolving.  Your Voice is Your Power is an informal workshop facilitated by Steven Bingler (Concordia, Common Edge), Bobbie Hill (Concordia) and Martin C. Pedersen (Common Edge), and others, with members of the UVA School of Architecture Class of '72.

Workshop Lead Facilitators

Steven Bingler
Growing up as part of a working-class family living in Charlottesville, Virginia, Steven Bingler was one of the first in his extended family to graduate from high school. He recounts that rather than pursue a career as an auto mechanic, he decided to study architecture and planning. Bingler received his Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Virginia in 1972, taking with him a passion for a design process where formal aesthetics are co-mingled with other critical social, cultural, and economic outcomes. In 1983, he founded a multi-disciplinary and internationally acclaimed company, Concordia, which he continues to lead today. For over four decades, Concordia has grown into a model community-centered planning and architecture firm, dedicated to its mission to pursue systemic, equitable, and collaborative design practices. 

Based in New Orleans, Bingler has also co-founded a series of organizations with missions focused on community-centered entrepreneurship and design innovation including Shibusa Systems, an affordable housing design and production company focused on precision component assemblies; New Harmony High, a progressive public open-enrollment high school focused on coastal restoration and preservation; and Common Edge Collaborative, an online news site and database of more than 700 essays published on community-centered planning and design and dedicated to public engagement. He was named the 2024 Distinguished Alumni Award recipient. 

Bobbie Hill
Through her planning and design efforts with Concordia, Bobbie Hill works with communities to help them realize their potential through consensus building and collaboration. She is committed to public scholarship by helping communities become healthy civil societies that are interconnected – not homogeneous – but integrated.

To expand on her knowledge of community planning, Hill has participated in a Women’s Leadership Journey in South Africa led by internationally known author and leadership development consultant, Margaret Wheatley. Wheatley writes about radically new practices and ideas for organizing in chaotic times. Hill's learning and experiences on this trip and subsequent learning journeys have greatly informed Concordia’s ongoing participatory planning and design work in New Orleans post Katrina and other urban and rural communities. Hill's project experience includes managing community engagement for the Unified New Orleans Planning project during which she provided coordination and oversight services for the city-wide New Orleans recovery plan. Additionally, she has led process design for the LASAFE National Disaster Resilience Competition grant awarded to the State of Louisiana by HUD.

Martin C. Pedersen
Editor, writer and critic, and executive director of Common Edge. For nearly a decade and a half, he served as executive editor for one of architecture and design's most respected publications, Metropolis Magazine. There, he was responsible for managing the staff, assigning and editing articles, choosing content, while also writing for both the magazine and website. He has recruited countless eminent writers, including Dave Eggers, Kurt Andersen, Bruce Sterling, John Hockenberry, Paul Goldberger, Blair Kamin, Inga Saffron, Robert Campbell, Karrie Jacobs, Philip Nobel, Andres Duany, among many others to write about the built environment. While executive editor, the magazine was nominated twice for a National Magazine Award for General Excellence.

Recent Common Edge pieces written by Pedersen include interviews with senior policy advisor Mary Landrieu discussing Louisiana's Coastal Masterplan; noted landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh on the making of the Brooklyn Bridge Park; and Sam Lubell and Greg Goldin, authors of "Atlas of Never Built Architecture."

Part of the Dean's Forum Weekend.