Founded by Ann Lui and Craig Reschke in 2015 and joined by principal Linda Chávez Baca in 2023, Future Firm works across spatial scales with a focus on arts and culture organizations, non-profits, and mission-driven businesses. Future Firm operates on the core belief that architecture and design is a key ingredient in the building of a more equitable and vibrant city, for everyone.
This talk will explore the role of curiosity, experimentation, and temporality through the work of two landscape architecture educators. It will use written, instructed, and built projects to make a case for a research and design practice that is more open to and inclusive of the spatial and temporal dynamics that make landscapes such delightful collaborators.
We like to say that buildings tell stories. The goal is always to find a thread between what a building or a site has been and what it can become—adding something new and distinctly contemporary without erasing what came before. In practice, this means new architecture layered within old, and materials reused rather than discarded—finding value in what is already there. The lecture will highlight projects that try giving people a more complex relationship with history: not as something finished and separate, but as something alive that we actively engage with, reinterpret, and continue.