Conference

Scaling Infrastructure

Lorena Bello is Lecturer in the Department of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she teaches students fundamentals of the design of the built environment ranging from the scale of the object and buildings to that of the city and larger territories. She is also a doctoral candidate in Urbanism at the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC). Lorena’s research focuses on large scale territorial implications of infrastructure and urbanization as catalysts for design. Her dissertation on this topic began under the guidance of the late Manuel de Sola-Morales and is concluding under Joan Busquets of the Harvard GSD. She is about to found TERRALAB in association with MIT’s Center for Advanced Urbanism to continue this research with projects in the USA and Europe.

Previous to 2008, Lorena worked in Barcelona as project director at Aldayjover Architecture and Landscape where she led projects at different scales including those within the Water Park 2008 international exhibit in Zaragoza. She was also research assistant at the Joan Miró Foundation and the Building Tech Institute of Catalonia (ITEC). Lorena holds a Bachelor and Master’s Degree in Architecture and Civil Engineering from the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC) where she graduated with honors, and a Masters of Architecture in Urban Design (MAUD) from the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Alfredo Brillembourg was born in New York in 1961. He received his Bachelor of Art and Architecture in 1984 and his Master of Science in Architectural Design in 1986 from Columbia University. In 1992, he received a second architecture degree from the Central University of Venezuela and began his independent practice in architecture. In 1993 he founded Urban-Think Tank (U-TT) in Caracas, Venezuela. Since 1994 he has been a member of the Venezuelan Architects and Engineers Association and has been a guest professor at the University Jose Maria Vargas, the University Simon Bolivar and the Central University of Venezuela. Starting in 2007, Brillembourg has been a guest professor at the Graduate School of Architecture and Planning, Columbia University, where he co-founded the Sustainable Living Urban Model Laboratory (S.L.U.M. Lab) with Hubert Klumpner. Along with Hubert Klumpner, Brillembourg holds the chair for Architecture and Urban Design at the Swiss Institute of Technology (Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule, ETH) in Zurich, Switzerland. As co-principle of U-TT, Brillembourg has received the 2010 Ralph Erskine Award, the 2011 Holcim Gold Award for Latin America, the 2012 Holcim Global Silver Award for innovative contributions to ecological design practices and the 2012 Golden Lion Award in the 13th Venice Architecture Bienal.

Richard L. Hindle is the Emerson/Womack Assistant Professor of design at the Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture, Louisiana State University. Professor Hindle's research focuses on technology in the garden and landscape with an emphasis on material processes, innovation, and patents. His current research explores innovation in landscape related technologies across a range of scales, from large-scale mappings of riverine and coastal patents to detailed historical studies on the antecedents of vegetated architectural systems. A recurring theme in Hindle’s work is the tandem history of technology and landscape, and the potential of technological narratives and reification to reframe theory, practice, and the production of sustainable urban systems. His recent articles “Inventing Landscapes’ in Landscape Architecture Magazine, and ‘Public Domains: material fiefdoms, entropy, and the built environment’ in UC Berkeley’s Ground-Up Journal, discuss the patent archive as a primary historical source and ‘landscape of power” with agency in landscape architecture and the built environment. He received a Graham Foundation Award for the reification of the “Vegetation-Bearing Architectonic Structure and Systems” and continues to explore the technological origins of other emergent technologies. As a consultant and designer, Hindle's work focuses on the design of advanced horticultural and building systems, from green roofs to facades, working with firms such as Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Steven Holl, Rios Clementi Hale Studios, and Atelier Jean Nouvel. Hindle holds degrees in horticulture and landscape architecture from Cornell University and the Rhode Island School of Design, respectively.

Adam Klaptocz is Head of Hardware and Mechanical Engineering at senseFly SA. He is passionate about civilian drones and their potential to do good to our planet and all its inhabitants, he splits his time between the R&D department at senseFly SA, developing the latest generation of drones for the GIS and mapping sectors, and Drone Adventures, traveling the world and flying drones for good causes. His passion was born during his Ph.D work at EPFL in Switzerland, where he designed several iterations of the AirBurr, a flying robot designed specifically to bounce off obstacles in crowded environments. His goal is now to bring drones out of the lab and into the hands of the people that need it the most, whether its in humanitarian aid, conservation or industry.

Ken Laberteaux is a Senior Principal Scientist for the Toyota Research Institute-North America in Ann Arbor, MI.

In his nineteen years in the automotive and telecommunication industries, Ken has produced twenty-five scholarly publications, eight patents, and fourteen additional invention disclosures. Ken’s current research focus is sustainable mobility systems, including grid-vehicle interactions, vehicle electrification feasibility, security and privacy issues of smart grid, battery lifetime modeling, and US urbanization and transportation patterns. Earlier in his time at Toyota, Ken worked on advanced safety systems, leveraging synergies in communication, sensing, and computation.

Credited with coining the term VANET, Ken was a founder and two-year (2004, 2005) General Co-Chair of the Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANET) workshop. Before joining Toyota, Ken spent ten years as a researcher at the Tellabs Research Center, working on echo cancellation, data networking protocols, call admission control, and congestion control.

While working full-time at Tellabs, Ken completed his M.S. (1996) and Ph.D. (2000) degrees in Electrical Engineering from the University of Notre Dame, focusing on adaptive control for communications. In 1992, he received his B.S.E., summa cum laude, in Electrical Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

Miho Mazereeuw is a landscape architect and architect, who has taught at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University and the University of Toronto prior to joining the faculty at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. As an Arthur W. Wheelwright Fellow, she is completing her forthcoming book entitled Preemptive Design: Disaster and Urban Development along the Pacific Ring of Fire featuring case studies on infrastructure design, multifunctional public space and innovative planning strategies in earthquake prone regions. Her design work on disaster prevention has been exhibited at the Architect's Museum in Tokyo Japan, University of Texas at Austin and de Ark Architecture Center in Leewarden Netherlands. As a co-director of OPSYS, Mazereeuw is collaborating on a number of projects with international non-profit organizations in the field of disaster reconstruction/prevention and is currently working in Haiti, Japan and Chile. She was formerly an Associate at the Office for Metropolitan Architecture in Rotterdam where she worked on projects in the Latvia, China, Belgium, Russia, Saudi Arabia and Dubai. She has also worked in the offices of Shigeru Ban and Dan Kiley. Mazereeuw completed a Bachelor of Arts with High Honors in Sculpture and Environmental Science at Wesleyan University and her Master in Architecture and in Landscape Architecture with Distinction at the Harvard Graduate School of Design where she was awarded the Janet Darling Webel Prize and the Charles Eliot Traveling Fellowship.

Lawrie is a strategic planner, urban designer and architect with experience in strategic regional and city planning, international development, urban and building design. Lawrie joined Happold Consulting in 2006 as Head of Strategic Planning, leading on multidisciplinary city-regional planning, urban development and infrastructure projects. His work has included leading HC teams for the 20 year strategic plan for Detroit, USA; Berezniki Solikamsk Usolye Region Masterplan, Russia; King Abdullah Research City for Atomic and Renewable Energy (KA-CARE); the Masterplan Framework for King Khaled International Airport City in Riyadh; the Hercogiste Eco City project in Latvia and the Gothenburg River City Regeneration project in Sweden as well as other new city projects in the Middle East, Asia and Europe.
Prior to joining Happold Consulting, Lawrie trained at Cambridge University Architecture Department and gained experience in architecture, urban design and international development working in London, Sarajevo, Prague, and Budapest. Working with Allies and Morrison Architects in London, Lawrie was project architect for the King’s Cross central development, London’s largest central city regeneration project creating a major new transport and employment hub. In Bosnia, Lawrie led integrated refugee return teams focusing on post war reconstruction and socio-economic development.

Richard Serino was appointed by President Obama and confirmed by the Senate as the Federal Emergency Management Agency's Deputy Administrator in October 2009. In this role, he works directly with Administrator Craig Fugate to promote the “whole community” approach to emergency management, which seeks to build, sustain, and improve the Department's capacity to prepare for, protect against, respond to, recover from, and mitigate all hazards. Since joining FEMA, Mr. Serino has traveled all over the country to communities affected by disasters to hear directly from survivors, and build relationships with whole community partners. During his tenure, he has seen flooding throughout the Midwest, fires in Colorado and Texas, tornadoes that devastated Joplin, Missouri, tsunami destruction in the American Samoa, and the Hurricane stricken areas in the south and along the east coast. Additionally, he spends time traveling to each of FEMA’s ten regional offices. 

Mr. Serino strives to improve FEMA programs and emergency management by hearing directly from disaster survivors, communities, and FEMA employees. These improvements are focused on emphasizing financial accountability, improving the use of analytics to drive decisions, advancing the workforce, and fostering a culture of innovation. Under Mr. Serino’s leadership, FEMA has championed initiatives such as FEMA Corps, FEMA Stat, the FEMA Think Tank, a detailed budgetary process, and a Disaster Workforce Transformation.

Mr. Serino brings 35 years of state and local emergency management and emergency medical services experience to his position at FEMA. Prior to his appointment as Deputy Administrator, he served as Chief of Boston EMS and Assistant Director of the Boston Public Health Commission. In that role, he bolstered the city's response plans for major emergencies, including chemical, biological, and radiological attacks. He also led citywide planning for H1N1 influenza. Mr. Serino has served as an Incident Commander for over 35 mass casualty incidents and for all of Boston's major planned events, including the Boston Marathon, Boston's Fourth of July celebration, First Night, and the 2004 Democratic National Convention, a National Special Security Event.

Since 1998, Serino has been a National Faculty member for the Domestic Preparedness Program. He was an original contributing member for the Defense Department's Domestic Preparedness Training Program and Metropolitan Medical Response System. Serino has been involved, since its inception, with the Lessons Learned Information Sharing www.llis.gov network for emergency responders. As a consultant to the Pentagon and the Defense Department, Serino served on the 9/11 after-action team to assess medical consequence management policies and procedures. Serino attended Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government Senior Executives in State and Local Government program in 2000, completed the Kennedy School's National Preparedness Leadership Initiative in 2005, and graduated from the Executive Leadership Program, Center for Homeland Defense and Security at the Naval Postgraduate School.

Paola Viganò is an architect and urbanist, has a PhD in architectural and urban composition and is professor in urbanism at the Università IUAV of Venice. She is also a guest professor at several European schools of architecture (including the Catholic University of Leuven, EPFL Lausanne, Aarhus, Harvard Graduate School of Design), serves on the board of the European Masters of Urbanism programme (EMU) and is coordinator of the PhD in Urbanism at IUAV. In 1990 Viganò founded Studio with Bernardo Secchi and has won several international competitions. Studio is currently working on various projects at different scales in Europe. In 2008 Studio was one of the ten teams selected for the Grand Paris research project and in 2012 for the New Moscow project. Her major publications include La città elementare (1999), Territori della nuova modernità/Territories of a new modernity (2001), Antwerp: Territory of a New Modernity (2009, with Bernardo Secchi) and I territori dell’urbanistica (2010), recently translated into French (Les territoires de l’urbanisme, 2012).

His research has concentrated on water systems in South Asia and the US from the site to river basin scales. For the greater part of his career, Professor Wescoat has focused on small-scale historical waterworks of Mughal gardens and cities in India and Pakistan.

He led the Smithsonian Institution's project titled, "Garden, City, and Empire: The Historical Geography of Mughal Lahore," which resulted in a co-edited volume on Mughal Gardens: Sources, Places, Representations, Prospects, and The Mughal Garden: Interpretation, Conservation, and Implications with colleagues from the University of Engineering and Technology-Lahore. These and related books have won awards from the Government of Pakistan and Punjab Government.

The overall Mughal Gardens Project won an American Society of Landscape Architects national research merit award, as did a project on The Moonlight Garden: New Discoveries at the Taj led by Elizabeth Moynihan. This work has been generously supported by fellowships from Dumbarton Oaks, the Freer and Sackler Galleries of Asian Art, and the American Academy in Rome.

In 2002, Professor Wescoat became head of the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Illinois t Urbana-Champaign where he taught courses on "Landscape Experience, Inquiry and Design," the "Theory and Practice of Landscape Architecture," and design studios on urban ecological design in Chicago. Together with colleagues and students at the University of Illinois he contributed to a cultural landscape heritage conservation project at the Champaner-Pavagadh World Heritage Site in Gujarat, India, for the Baroda Heritage Trust.

More recently, he has organized a garden and waterworks conservation workshop at the Nagaur palace-garden complex in Rajasthan for the Mehrangarh Museum Trust; and a workshop on the "Three Shalamar Baghs of Delhi, Lahore, and Srinagar" with colleagues from those cities.

At the larger scale, Professor Wescoat has conducted water policy research in the Colorado, Indus, Ganges, and Great Lakes basins, including the history of multilateral water agreements. He led a USEPA-funded study of potential climate impacts in the Indus River Basin in Pakistan with the Water and Power Development Authority (WAPDA). More recently, he led an NSF-funded project on "Water and Poverty in Colorado." He is currently conducting comparative research on international water problems.
In 2003, he published Water for Life: Water Management and Environmental Policy with geographer Gilbert F. White (Cambridge University Press); and in 2007 he co-edited Political Economies of Landscape Change: Places of Integrative Power (Springer Publishing) for LAF Landscape Futures Initiative.