AIA Portland is proud to announce our first-ever all female Design Awards Jury:
Merrill Elam, AIA
Merrill Elam is a principal in the firm of Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects, in Atlanta, Georgia. In addition to her practice she lectures and teaches frequently, recently as the Gehry International Visiting Chair in Architectural Design at the University of Toronto, the Ruth Carter Stevenson Chair Visiting Professor of Architectural Design at The University of Texas at Austin, the Louis Henri Sullivan Research Professor of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and the William Henry Bishop Visiting Professor of Architectural Design at Yale University, among others, as well as having served as Visiting Critic at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc).
With Mack Scogin, she received the 2011 Arnold W. Brunner Memorial Prize in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the 1995 Academy Award in Architecture from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the 1996 Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design and a 2008 Honorary Fellowship in the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA). Their work has received seven National AIA Awards for Excellence, and their current projects include the Yale University Health Services.
Lisa Iwamoto
Lisa Iwamoto is a partner with Craig Scott at IWAMOTOSCOTT Architecture. She received her Master of Architecture degree with Distinction from Harvard University, and a Bachelor of Science degree in Structural Engineering from the University of Colorado. She has worked as a Structural Engineer at Bechtel Corporation, and Architectural Designer at Schwartz Silver Architects, Thompson and Rose, and Architectural Intern at Morphosis. She has taught previously at the University of Michigan where she was a Muschenheim Fellow, and Harvard University. She is currently an Assistant Professor at University of California Berkeley where her design research concentrates on the perceptual performance of material and digital fabrication techniques.
Vanessa Kassabian
Vanessa Kassabian is the Director of Design of Snøhetta’s NY office, a 30-person interdisciplinary design studio that integrates architecture, landscape, and interior architecture. Snøhetta was established in Oslo, Norway, when its members designed the competition-winning entry for the Alexandria Library in Egypt, and in 2004, its two founding members formed an office in New York City after winning the commission to design the new Museum Pavilion at the World Trade Center site. Recently having completed the new National Opera in Oslo, Snøhetta has gained a number of other prominent cultural buildings including the new King Abdulaziz Center for Culture in Saudi Arabia, the Petter Dass Center in Norway, The Center for the Arts at Virginia Tech, The Queen’s University Performing Arts Centre in Ontario, and the Museum of Environmental Sciences in Guadalajara, Mexico.
Vanessa attended Tulane University where she received a bachelor of architecture degree. She practiced architecture in Washington, DC for 5 years before moving to NY to pursue a master of architecture degree at Pratt. She is a co-visiting professor at Parsons, The New School for Design.
