Cathy Simon Author

Cathy Simon is an architect and a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects whose practice has spanned five decades, focusing on transformative design at all scales. Her award-winning work includes design for higher and secondary education, civic and commercial buildings, reinvention of historic structures, waterfront projects, and urban planning schemes for numerous post-industrial waterfront sites in and around San Francisco. She is the founder of SMWM, a celebrated women-owned architecture and urban design practice that opened offices in San Francisco and New York during the mid-1980s. In 1999, after fifteen years of practice, SMWM became the youngest firm to be honored with the AIACA Firm Award, which the American Institute of Architects awarded for the consistent production of distinguished architecture. Her firm later joined Perkins + Will, where she served as a senior consulting design principal before retiring in 2018. Having gained expertise in the revitalization and resiliency of the post-industrial waterfront, she is currently an urban design and architecture consultant to a multi-firm engineering team developing the Waterfront Resiliency Program for the Port of San Francisco. Carrie Eastman is a writer and designer who practices landscape architecture independently after having spent 15 years working on large-scale public projects in and around New York City. She is an editor of In Search of African American Space (Lars Müller Publishers, 2020), a forthcoming book in which African American spatial typologies are reconsidered. She has a Master’s degree in landscape architecture from the University of Virginia and a bachelor’s degree in the history of art and architecture from Brown University. Ashley Simone is a writer, photographer, and educator whose practice investigates the intersection of architecture, art, and culture. She is the editor of A Genealogy of Modern Architecture: Comparative Critical Analysis of Built Form (Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2015), Absurd Thinking Between Art and Design (Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2017), Two Journeys (Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2018), Frank Gehry Catalogue Raisonné, vol. 1. 1954-1978 (Paris: Cahiers d’Art, 2020), and a co-editor of In Search of African American Space (Zurich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2020). John King is the Urban Design Critic at the San Francisco Chronicle — a post that ranges from architecture and planning to landscape architecture and the public realm of cities in all its forms. Justine Shapiro-Kline is an architect and urban planner who has worked across the U.S. on planning initiatives and infrastructure to advance adaptation to climate change and its impacts. Laurie Olin is a distinguished teacher, author, and one of the most renowned landscape architects practicing today.