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Join LTU CoAD for our next exciting Design x Technology Series talk featuring Roy Decker and Anne Marie Duvall Decker, Co-Founders of Duvall Decker. Their talk titled, Foundations will explore how the constructed environment can be critical, healthy, educational, and perhaps, therapeutic for a place and its inhabitants.
This conversational discussion with Assistant Professor Masataka Yoshikawa will provide our guests with a thoughtfully guided interview.
TITLE: Foundations
ABSTRACT: Design encompasses life in all its complexities and contingencies. Planning and design are the only activities that can improve the social and environmental health of our communities. Any professional can engage planning and design thinking in their work, but designers are trained for this challenge. Design methodologies include imagining a future and defining the systematic steps to achieve that future. Architectural projects are local and sited in a specific place and community. To have meaningful impact, architecture must be grounded in the place of practice, in its soil, weather, economy, history, and social context. To be productive, a studio must be aware of the cultural history and limitations of architecture and search for critiques and improvements that can help make a socially and environmentally healthy condition.
The work of Duvall Decker Architects is hopeful speculation through an expanded practice that includes architectural design, community planning, real estate development, and building care. In over twenty-seven years of doing this work, they have recorded what are called our foundations. They are our assumptions, principles, propositions, lessons, inspirations, and aspirations for both the how and the why of a practice. This lecture explores the work through the lenses of several of Duvall Decker’s foundations.
BENEFITS: Each new or renovated building and each new landscape changes its community. These interventions have consequences in the lives of all the people who encounter them over the years they exist. Architects face the challenges of program, budget, and schedule in every project, but the most important challenge is to find the public value for each project. Architecture can contribute to cultural growth, public safety, and environmental and social health. Architecture form is not simply a thing, but a transaction between us and our environment over time.
We believe the opportunity to design the built environment is a privilege that comes with public responsibility. For Duvall Decker, architecture is both a radical act of service and a hopeful artistic speculation. Architectural projects are local and come to be within a specific place and a unique community. As architects, we sometimes do not realize the public consequences that every building or landscape intervention carries. To expand our focus from the project-specific requirements, we ask questions that reframe our perspective. This presentation will explore how the constructed environment can be critical, healthy, educational, and perhaps, therapeutic for a place and its inhabitants.
Roy Decker, FAIA, expands the role of an architect in search of public good. Roy’s dedication to design excellence, education, and craft infuses the firm’s work with meaning. For the past three decades, Roy has led the firm to complete public projects of varying scales and types and to achieve significant design recognition. Roy is a design and critical thought leader, whether he is participating in an inner-city neighborhood meeting, serving on student reviews across the country, sharing his perspective in lectures and publications, or inspiring an individual in conversation. In all of these encounters, he exhibits an unwavering commitment to considering the consequences of architectural design work in the lives of others.
Roy holds a Master of Architecture degree from Kent State University. He has been on the faculty of Temple University School of Architecture and Mississippi State University’s School of Architecture. He was selected by the Architectural League of New York to present at the 2017 Emerging Voices lecture series. In 2023, his firm’s work was published in The State of Housing Design by the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University where he was asked to speak at the book launch symposium at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. In 2024, The Architect’s Newspaper named Duvall Decker the Best Medium Firm in the Southeast as part of its Best of Practice Awards for the second consecutive year.
Anne Marie Duvall Decker, FAIA, sees architecture as instrument, engaging the material phenomena of our environment and culture to create the potential for education and growth. She leads the studio at Duvall Decker in creating elusive forms and engaging spaces, no matter the type, size, or budget of projects.
Anne Marie is a summa cum laude graduate of Mississippi State University where she earned a Bachelor of Architecture degree. Anne Marie was MSU’s Eminent Architect of Practice in 2015, and she held the 2009 Paul Rudolf Visiting Professorship at the Auburn University School of Architecture. She is a recognized contributor to the advancement of the profession and was selected by the Architectural League of New York to present at the 2017 Emerging Voices lecture series. She has served the profession in many capacities, as a long-term board member and past president of AIA Mississippi and as a Trustee and 2021 Chair of the AIA Trust. Anne Marie is often invited to share her experience as a lecturer, critic, visiting professor, and design juror. She was recently appointed to serve the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations as a 2021-2023 Industry Advisory Group peer and was awarded the 2023 Mississippi State University College of Architecture, Art, & Design Alumna of the Year Recipient. In 2023, Anne Marie Duvall Decker was a recipient of Architectural Record’s Women in Architecture Design Leadership Award.