April 2012: Big Thank You

The Drylands Design Conference---a month ago!--yikes!----was quite a wonderful milestone in the public conversation around water scarcity and design of the built environment.  One hundred seventy people attended.  The feedback has been very positive, and we will be harvesting its fruits, from design proposals to pedagogy and policy recommendations, for some considerable time to come.   In the meantime, ALI sends a big (if belated) thank you to the behind-the-scenes teams ----- The logistics teams led by Yvonne Correa at Woodbury and Laura Thompson and Ellen Robinson at Your Great Event produced an event that was impressive in its hospitality and polish for its guests. Mathew Stanley and James Ly of IT;  Erin Malleus of Bon Apetit; and Mimi Zeiger of Architecture/Communications provided great support to that team, from live streaming, to yummy food, to photography and press.   Jeremy Delgado, Woodbury alum, Dry Studio Veteran, and Principal at Friendly Office, provided amazing digital/social media support. Woodbury School of Architecture—esp. Jeanine, Anthony, Linda, Nick, Debbie, Clark, John, and Jennifer----Thank you for joining in with us this fall to generate so much thoughtful studio work. Louis Molina and Thurman Grant, great job with year-long Aquifer series in the Wedge Gallery. We think Anne Swett Predock of Swett Shop Graphic Design is amazing, and we hope you enjoyed the look of the conference, in print, on the web, and around campus.   Our beloved family members, Jerri, Hedi, and Josie Arnold, gave deeply of their time to make the conference a success for us in many hidden ways, and in one very big way:  documenting every talk (all of which will be posted in ALI's rich digital archive the coming weeks). To our Woodbury, CAF and AIA collaborators, thank you for working with us to bring participants, audience, funders, and new friends to this fantastic, complicated, and challenging discussion.  We were delighted to have the financial support of old friends---Burbank Water and Power; Metropolitan Water District; and Bernard Friedman—and new:  AC Martin and Concrete Masonry Association of CA and NV; and the production assistance of ARC Riot. One new friend, Kelly Duke of Valley Crest, blogs about the conference here; enjoy!   To our friends at CAF, who came to us a few years ago and said, let's play together.... Thank you!  The WIlliam Turnbull Competition was a huge opportunity for both organizations to create culture shift, and the conference and exhibition are an extension of that.  We appreciate your joining with us, and we think we might just be seeing the shift both organizations set out to create.     (+ Let's not forget:  Neither organization could have pulled off such a successful competition, and the programs that followed, without the deeply-hands-on volunteerism of competition maestro Bill Liskamm.  We all owe him a big one.) UCLA's Institute of the Environment and Sustainability: We loved working with you all. The input into the evolving competition entries was invaluable, and we learned a lot from putting our heads together with yours. To Madlyn Wohlman-Rodriguez and HUD's Office of University Partnerships: We are grateful for HUD's generous support of ALI's partnerships with the City of Burbank and with Rio Arriba County, NM.