Talk
This discussion between Justin Garrett Moore and Kim Yao, AIA, will look at public realm issues we believe will be relevant to the 2021 local elections in NYC.
Justin Garrett Moore is a transdisciplinary designer and urbanist and serves as the executive director of the New York City Public Design Commission. He has extensive experience in architecture, urban design, and planning—from large-scale urban policies and projects to grassroots and community-based planning, design, and arts initiatives. At the Public Design Commission, his work focuses on prioritizing quality and excellence for the public realm and fostering accessibility, diversity, and inclusion in New York’s public buildings, landscapes, and art. He is a member of the American Planning Association’s AICP Commission, the Urban Design Forum, and the Black urbanist collective BlackSpace. Justin is an adjunct faculty member at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and the Yale School of Architecture. His social enterprise, Urban Patch, focuses on sustainable development through social and environmental design projects in the United States and Rwanda. He holds a Bachelor of Design from the University of Florida and a Master of Architecture and a Master of Science in Architecture and Urban Design from Columbia University.
Kim Yao, AIA, is Principal, with Stephen Cassell and Adam Yarinsky, of Architecture Research Office (ARO), a New York City firm dedicated to an architecture of strategy and intelligence with beauty and form. She is Adjunct Assistant Professor of Architecture at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, and has also taught at the School of Constructed Environments, Parsons, the New School for Design and Barnard College (2001-2011). She is on the Executive Committee and Board for AIA New York and the Center for Architecture as the 2020 President of AIA New York. ARO’s diverse body of work has earned the firm over a hundred design awards including the 2020 National AIA Architecture Firm Award and the Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt 2011 National Design Award.