By Michael Spory, 2024 Chair, Design Committee
The places we gather shape us. Just over a month ago, over two hundred of us grabbed our fancier clothes, empty notebooks, and perhaps a design-y friend or two and raced to Richmond’s Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) for AIA Virginia’s bi-annual Design Forum. You may not have known what to expect, other than the featherlight expectations of hearing about great design, something about AI, or at least to see that Steven Holl museum that I’d heard about?
Well, I know that even after planning for 18 months, I left with much much than I anticipated–a head swimming with creative energy, a thicket of insights, several pages of hastily scribbled ideas not nearly as organized as I’d like, and several new friends–and a great appreciation for our design community in Virginia. I was honored that amidst deadlines, phone calls, urgent construction responses, and class schedules, so many of my you all as my colleagues chose to join for a conversation about the present conundrum of how our architectural sensibilities of craft are crashing into the next waves of technological innovation–artificial intelligence, machine learning, automated fabrication, to name a few.
And amidst my own [un]certainty about all this, I felt this tension release slightly as I glimpsed the jagged, swirling white columns dotting the tables–collaboratively inspired by our Forum attendees and fabricated by the Center for Design Research students from Virginia Tech, UVA, Hampton, and Howard. I wonder where these young creative minds might further our traditional Virginia neoclassical columns as a living remnant of our historic material culture, that is on the precipice of something new.
I saw how the rigorous experimentation of Dwayne Oyler’s work collided with the material quietness of Billie Tsien, the refined and cantankerous earthiness of Rick Joy, the joyful embrace of ecologically minded craft for Ted Flato. I listened to the din of break-time conversations in the lobby, over dinner, with coffee and scribbled notes, sharing insights and imagery as we approach new horizons of craft on cyberfrontiers.
While listening to this energy, I wondered how we go from here. I wonder what design challenges we’ll face in two years for the next Design Forum, in 10 years, in 50 years, in 200 years. In a polarized, uncertain time, I came back from Design Forum XVI with both the gentle reassurance and the quiet unsettling of great conversations–the ones that always end before you are quite ready for them to be done. I felt that spark of creative energy again–and I hope it continues to echo out beyond our Forum gathering on Broad Street, beyond Richmond, beyond the mountains and rising tides of our wide Commonwealth.
If you did not get to enjoy Design Forum this time, I hope we see you in 2026! And until then, may you continue to gather in places of beauty, wonder, and gratitude that shape you as richly as our Design Forum has shaped me.
Photos from AIA Virginia Staff