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PitE Speaker Series: Doug Farr: "Sustainable Urbanism"

Thursday, January 23, 2014
12:00 AM
Alumni Center, Founders Room (200 Fletcher Street)

Doug Farr, is the founding principal of Farr Associates, an award-winning architecture and planning firm identified by The New York Times as "the most prominent of the city's growing cadre of ecologically sensitive architects."

People love cities because they offer so much choice—where to work, live, shop, and how to travel. Beyond that, cities are environmentally virtuous. Sustainable urbanism, the topic of this lecture, is a global design movement that capitalizes on these forces. This event is co-sponsored by the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning and the Goldring Family Foundation, and is free and open to the public.

Doug Farr, AIA, LEED AP is the founding principal of Farr Associates, an award-winning architecture and planning firm identified by The New York Times as "the most prominent of the city's growing cadre of ecologically sensitive architects." 

Having a mission to design sustainable human environments, Farr's niche is in applying the principles of LEED at the scale of the neighborhood and in designing green buildings exclusively for urban contexts. Farr Associates has designed seven LEED Platinum-rated buildings in Chicago, including the Center for Neighborhood Technology, Chicago Center for Green Technology and Christy Webber Landscapes., which stand as models of urban architectural sustainability. In December 2012, the firm was named AIA Chicago’s Firm of the Year.

Farr was born in Detroit and received his undergraduate degree in architecture from the University of Michigan and his graduate degree in architecture from Columbia University. Farr is the author of  "Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design with Nature (Wiley), a bestseller that visualizes Sustainable Urbanism—the growing sustainable design convergence that integrates walkable and transit-served urbanism with high-performance infrastructure and buildings—as the normal pattern of development in the United States by 2030. 

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