For nearly two decades Brian Squillace has encouraged discourse on community empowerment and activism though architecture.  His work focuses on creating a unique design process to best support each community he serves.  Crafting the approach is critical to creating a safe space that allows participants to look beyond their day-to-day activities, acknowledge challenges, seek opportunities and strategize the implementation to enact change.

Through work that includes citizen-led development, sweat-equity design-build and asset based community planning, Brian knows the importance in bringing diverse voices together and helping to build new partnerships.  He advocates for the community to have ownership of and pride in the design intent if a designer’s best laid plans for sustainability, change-making and resiliency are to be effective.  To understand, and best benefit those that we serve, the architectural process must start long before conceptual design and look beyond the confines of the built environment.

Brian will share strategies and reflections from working closely with diverse clients in architectural and master planning efforts that range from cohousing, mission-based development, affordable housing, higher education, K-12 and child care.

The CPID Talks are aimed at fostering a dialogue about interesting work being done that is relevant to the public interest design field by inviting speakers from a wide variety of disciplines to share their work and thoughts in an informal setting. These talks are open to the public and held in the CPID office in the School of Architecture at PSU (Shattuck Hall 217).

Free and open to the public.