2024
Design Awards / Next LA - Jury Bios

Design Awards Jurors

Andrea Love, FAIA, LEED Fellow
Principal, Director of Building Science | Payette

Andrea is a Principal and the Director of Building Science at Payette, the 2019 AIA Firm Award recipient for their work fusing design and building performance, and has worked on six recent COTE Top Ten Award winning projects. At Payette, she integrates building performance into all of their work and leads their internal research efforts. She was the Principal Investigator on the 2012 AIA Upjohn Grant research grant focused on thermal bridging and lead the development of Payette’s Glazing and Winter Comfort and Kaleidoscope tools. She has served on the AIA COTE Advisory Group, AIA 2030 Working Group, the boards of Built Environment Plus and the Boston Society of Architects where she was the 2023 president. She has been a Lecturer at MIT and Harvard on building performance, and has her BArch from Carnegie Mellon and a Masters in Building Technology from MIT where she was the recipient of the Tucker-Voss Award. She was a 2017 recipient of the AIA Young Architect Award and is a Fellow of the AIA and LEED.

John Sivills
Lead Urban Designer | City of Detroit

John Sivills (Associate AIA) joined the City of Detroit’s Planning & Development Department (PDD) in September 2016 as a Lead Urban Designer. Assigned to the Central Planning Region, John manages PDD’s efforts in the Eastern portion of the central region, including Downtown, East Riverfront, and Eastern Market. He has managed the direction of the East Riverfront Framework plan to a successful conclusion. He has had direct input in developing or advising the parameters of frameworks for Eastern Market, DTE Master Plan, Greater Corktown Framework, Jefferson Avenue Interim Plan, and Jefferson Avenue TOD, Greektown Neighborhood Framework, North End Framework, and the State of Michigan’s Milliken State Park, Joseph Campau Streetscape Program and Riopelle Streetscape program.

The East Riverfront Comprehensive Framework Plan won a 2019 AIA Award for Regional and Urban Design. A number of projects have been implemented as a result of the plan including: Jefferson Avenue’s reconfiguration to include bike lane and reducing automobile lanes from nine to four, the long-term planning for Jefferson Corridor Improvement, the installation of the Joseph Campau Greenway, the redesign and construction of Joseph Campau Street, the construction of Robert Valade Park (Atwater Beach), planned zoning update to enhance a walkable urban community, and a host of public-private partnership developments that include mixed-use housing, and grocery retail.

John led, along with the PDD Zoning Innovation Team, the implementation of the Eastern Market Zoning Update process that is critical to the full implementation of the Eastern Market Neighborhood Framework and Stormwater Management Network Master Plan.

John represents the city as a stakeholder in the master planning of Milliken State Park with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources, the Ralph C. Wilson Centennial Park design with the Detroit Riverfront Conservancy; and the redesign of I-375 into a surface boulevard with the Michigan Department of Transportation.

As part of the eastern sector of the Central Region, advises on tactical planning for neighborhoods and districts not covered under the strategic neighborhood fund such as McDougall-Hunt, Greektown, and DTE/ West Riverfront. This has resulted in the design and implementation of Randolph Plaza and Monroe Street in Greektown, and the design for Bailey Park in McDougall Hunt as part of the overall McDougall-Hunt Neighborhood Sustainability Master Plan that is to be a catalyst for future development. Currently, John is working to advance a framework for the I-375 boulevard conversion to ensure an urban and just solution.

John is a graduate of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute with a Bachelor of Architecture with concentrations in architecture, urban design, and planning. He also holds a Master of Science Degree in Architecture with a concentration in international construction management. He has practiced in Boston and Washington DC, taught a building construction laboratory at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute, and the graduate design studios at the Boston Architectural College. The projects have been international in scope and range from healthcare (see Architectural Record June 2005 Massachusetts General), institutional, government (Departments of Defense and State), and commercial, cultural, and civic, and multi-family residential. He is a periodic guest critic at the University of Michigan, University of Detroit, Lawrence Tech, Harvard University, and Boston Architectural College, and was a guest lecturer at Hampton University. He has served as a moderator on a panel discussion – Unfinished: Actualizing an Intersectional Antiracist Future with the Center for Transformative Action at Mills College. He also served as a panelist for the Congress of New Urbanism 2020, A Tale of Two Cities: An Urban Response to Inequality After a Pandemic. More recently John served as a panelist discussing “Black Bottom & I-375: Past, Present, and Future”, on the inaugural Reconnecting Communities Summit in St. Paul MN, and presented at the Main Street Now conference in Boston – “Eastern Market: Meshing New Industrial Development into Authentic Spaces.”

Patricia Oliver, FAIA
Dean, Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design
Past Chancellor, ACSA College of Distinguished Professors
Director, designLAB

Patricia Belton Oliver has served as dean at the Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture and Design since 2010. Before moving to Houston, Oliver served as the Senior Vice President of Educational Planning and Architecture at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, and Associate Dean at the College of Environmental Design at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. In her professional career, she has worked for such notable architects as Pritzker Prize Laureate Frank O. Gehry, Craig Hodgetts, and Charles Moore, and was a partner in Oliver, Kurze, Georges Architects, in Los Angeles, California.
In 2010, Oliver founded designLAB. designLAB is the professional/research arm of the college. Working with faculty, students, and consultants, designLAB works with the University Architect on master planning for the University of Houston’s six campuses. In the last few years, designLAB has developed the University of Houston’s Centennial Master Plan 2027, bringing five major landscape projects to fruition.
Patricia is an ACSA Distinguished Professor, and Past Chancellor of The College of Distinguished Professors. She received the 2018-2019 AIA Houston Educator of the Year award, and in 2019, she was awarded the Texas Society of Architects Award for Outstanding Educational Contributions. Patricia became a Fellow in the American Institute of Architects in 2009 and chaired the 2009 AIA National Convention in San Francisco. She served as Secretary of the National Architecture Accrediting Board in 2011 and 2012, and chaired the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture Administrator’s Conference in 2015,
Oliver received a Master of Architecture degree from the School of Architecture and Urban Planning at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA).

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Next LA Jurors

Dennis McFadden, FAIA
Global Design Principal | Leo A. Daly

Dennis McFadden FAIA Global Design Principal, Leo A Daly Dennis McFadden is a design leader whose work and career have focused primarily on public institutions. He is responsible for the design of multiple academic buildings on five UC campuses, as well as buildings and master plans on numerous other college, university, and healthcare campuses, including the VA medical campus in West Los Angeles. His work has been recognized through publications and over 30 national and local design awards. In addition to professional practice, Mr. McFadden has remained involved in teaching throughout his career, both as a visiting critic and studio instructor. He has taught at USC, the University of Oregon, and Cal Poly Pomona where he was a faculty member from 2010 to 2020. He also served on the Design Review Committee at UC Santa Barbara, helping guide the evolution of the campus for 15 years, from 2006 to 2021. Mr McFadden is a graduate of the University of Southern California and Princeton University. He was elected to the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects in 2008.

Lisa Little, AIA
Principal, Vertebrae Art and Architecture
Adjunct Associate Professor, University of Southern California (USC) School of Architecture

Lisa Little is founder and principal of award-winning Los Angeles based firm Vertebrae Art and Architecture, a firm known for redefining craft through computation, engineering, and artistic skill. Vertebrae projects face complexity head on, finding meaning in systems at all scales by utilizing machines—digital and analog tools—to manifest universal architectural principles: harmony, rhythm, asymmetry, and balance.
Recent projects include private residences, large scale public artworks, and commercial interiors and have appeared in the LA Times, Interior Design, The California Design Biennial and numerous museums and galleries.
Lisa Little holds a Master of Architecture from the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) and a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology. Little integrates her engineering and architecture backgrounds to create an atypical approach to research and design projects. Little is a licensed architect in the state of California and an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of Southern California currently teaching graduate and undergraduate level design studios.

Rachel Allen, AIA, FAAR
Founder + Principal | RADAR

Rachel Allen grew up in San Francisco and studied architecture at Princeton University. Following graduate school, she worked at Gehry Partners and then won the 2002-2003 Rome Prize in architecture, a yearlong fellowship at the American Academy in Rome. She returned to found the award-winning firm now known as RADAR, Inc, part of the team which won the international competition to redesign Downtown Los Angeles’s landmark park Pershing Square. She was Mayor Garcetti’s Appointee to the HPOZ Board of NELA neighborhood Lincoln Heights, and graduated from ICIC’s executive leadership training program and Goldman Sachs’ 10K Small Businesses Program. She lectures widely and has taught architecture for Cal Poly Pomona, the Mountain School of Art, SCI-Arc, UCLA, UC Riverside, USC, and Woodbury University. In 2023 LA Metro appointed Rachel the first-ever Senior Fellow of its Housing Lab, which is researching ways that Metro might build housing on its land faster, cheaper, and more equitably.