AIASF + Center for A+D "Fresh Brew | From Graph to 'Graf: Writing About Architecture + Urbanism for a Lay Audience"

Hosted by Fast Company reporter Zlati Meyer, this morning conversation features a stellar line-up of architecture and design critics from the Bay Area and across the country to talk shop about their journalistic excursions and being on the front lines of the industry.

HOST

Zlati Meyer is a writer at Fast Company. She previously worked as a reporter at USA TODAY, the Detroit Free Press and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Her freelance work has appeared in a variety of publications, including the Boston Globe, the Christian Science Monitor and New York Magazine. Meyer has taught journalism and expository writing at colleges in New York City. She has a bachelor’s degree from Boston University and a master’s degree from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

GUESTS

John Gallagher is a veteran journalist and author of several books on architecture and urban planning. Born in New York City, he attended DePaul University in Chicago and Columbia University in New York. He retired recently after a 32-year career with the Detroit Free Press where he was the paper's senior business columnist and architecture writer. His books include "Yamasaki in Detroit: A Search for Serenity," a biography of mid-century modernist Minoru Yamasaki, and as co-author "AIA Detroit: The American Institute of Architects Guide to Detroit Architecture."

John King is The San Francisco Chronicle’s urban design critic, a beat that extends beyond architecture to public spaces, homeless shelters and the place of monuments in today's society. He is an honorary member of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) and has written for such magazines as Architectural Record, Metropolis, Blueprint and American Scholar. In 2018, King was a Mellon Fellow in Urban Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C.

Mark Lamster is the architecture critic of the The Dallas Morning News, a professor in the architecture school at the University of Texas at Arlington, and a Harvard Loeb Fellow. His acclaimed biography of the late architect Philip Johnson, The Man in the Glass House (Little Brown, 2018), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography.

Anne Quito is a journalist and design critic based in New York City. A staff reporter at Quartz, her coverage underscores the design angle of politics and business news. She is the inaugural recipient of the Steven Heller Prize for Cultural Commentary. Anne wrote “Mag Men: Fifty Years of Making Magazines,” (Columbia University Press, December 2019) a new book about the glory days of magazine design as told by Walter Bernard and Milton Glaser. She graduated from Georgetown University with a master’s degree in Visual Culture in 2009 and is an alumna of the School of Visual Arts Design Criticism MFA where she wrote a thesis on the nation branding of the world's newest nation, South Sudan.

Inga Saffron, is an architecture critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer and has been writing about the design of buildings and cities since 1999. Her work has been recognized with numerous awards, including the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, the 2018 Vincent Scully Prize from the National Building Museum and a 2012 Loeb Fellowship from Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. In June 2020, Rutgers University Press will publish a collection of her Inquirer columns from the last 20 years, Becoming Philadelphia: How an old American city made itself new again. Before becoming the Inquirer’s architecture critic, Inga spent the 1990s as a foreign correspondent for the Inquirer in Russia and the former Yugoslavia, covering the wars in Bosnia and Chechnya, and witnessing the destruction of Sarajevo and Grozny.

Thank you to our co-promotional partners: AIA San Mateo County, Marin Builders Association, San Francisco Chapter of the National Organization of Minority Architects (SFNOMA)