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Vision 2020 - The AIA WMR Summit

The six-state American Institute of Architects Western Mountain Region, established in 1959, is comprised of the AIA State Components of Wyoming, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico. These states take turns every year to host the annual regional conference. Join us in Albuquerque for visionary discussions about Design, Leadership, Sustainability, and Advocacy! The last day of the Summit is the first day of Albuquerque's International Balloon Fiesta, a great time to visit!

Open Call: "Beyond Cement: Towards an Alternative Vision for Chekka and Surrounding Towns"

Many challenges underline the urgency of reconsidering dominant approaches to development, land use, and the institutional framework that governs them, in addition to the political context, which requires a novel and creative counter-approach in Chekka and Surrounding Towns in North Lebanon.
As such, this competition is an open call for planners, designers, environmental scientists, agricultural engineers, economists and other professionals to draft an intervention framework, which simultaneously answers the concept of sustainable development and the immediate needs of the people, including job opportunities and a local economy, without compromising their health, the environment and local economic resources.

This competition proposes

Call for Submissions: 2018 Fitch Funding

Since 1989, the James Marston Fitch Charitable Foundation has been in the vanguard of historic preservation practice and theory. The mission of the Fitch Foundation is to support professionals in the field of historic preservation, and to achieve this we provide mid-career grants to those working in preservation, landscape architecture, urban design, environmental planning, materials conservation, decorative arts, architectural design and history, and allied fields.

AIA Emphatically Urges Looser Credit, Notes 30% Drop in Architectural Employment Since 2008

AIA Emphatically Urges Looser Credit, Notes 30% Drop in Architectural Employment Since 2008 - Featured Image
Construction at 1 WTC, by ShinyThings VIA Flickr. Used under Creative Commons

The AIA has issued a “comprehensive look yet at the built environment’s role in economic recovery, highlighting six specific policy steps that will generate jobs and help grow the American economy.” Coming on the eve of President Obama’s major jobs initiative, the report cites George Mason University economist Stephen J. Miller in arguing that every $1 million in new construction spending supports “28.5 full-time, year-round-equivalent jobs.”

Miller and the AIA blame tight credit markets blocking potential progress in this area. The publication, “The Built Environment’s Role in the Recovery,” is issued with this problem in mind. “We’re putting these recommendations forward now because it’s time for the Administration and Congress to get real about creating an environment in which people are willing to lend and borrow,” said AIA President Clark Manus, FAIA, quoted in a recent AIA press release. “When credit flows to worthy projects, it unleashes the job creation potential of the American economy.”