Principal Caroline Souza kicking off the 2024 Design Round-Up.
As our firm grows, we’re developing new tools to connect our staff and studios, keep a broad view of our portfolio, and deepen DBA’s design ethos. One such tool is our Design Round-Up—an annual immersive gathering that invites all staff, along with guest experts, to evaluate our in-process projects with a critical eye.
Getting Started
Originally inspired by The Miller Hull Partnership, we launched our own version of this yearly comprehensive design review and celebration in 2023. We’ve taken some time to put our own spin on an initiative that will foster an ongoing deep dive into our collective work. In October 2024, we held the second DBA Design Round-Up. We gathered in San Francisco—with staff joining from our Birmingham and Los Angeles offices—to consider our in-progress work, hear reflections from our guest panel, and celebrate the buildings that have reached completion after many years of work.
The goal of the Round-Up is to expose our in-progress projects to air—in this case, to the broader firm consciousness beyond the project team—to think critically about the work and to ask big questions: Where could we push harder? What are the common threads across building types and regions? What can projects learn from each other or from an outside perspective? What are we “leaving on the table”?
In our first pass at this event, we presented 48 projects. While we revel in abundance, the sweeping scope of that undertaking was a little overwhelming. It was, however, a fruitful event that gave us much food for thought. Our inaugural panel included architect Julie Eizenberg, FAIA, LFRAIA, of Koning Eizenberg; architect David Miller, FAIA, of The Miller Hull Partnership; landscape architect Sarah Kuehl of EinwullerKuehl; and developer Phoebe Yee of Related California. This panel offered diverse, substantive, and incisive critique, with reflections on both the work and the approach and format of the event.
Round-Up Round 2
For the second event this past year, with a better understanding of both the effort that goes in and the potential feedback that comes out, we refined the process. Starting mid-year, we teed up the year-end Round-Up with six installments of Design Summer Camp—preliminary review sessions in which small groups of project teams presented their big ideas and primary challenges. This sweep through our portfolio honed team presentation skills, shed light on design elements that needed more consideration, and clarified the key elements in each project. These interstitial reviews continue to bear fruit in refined and invigorated design directions and solutions.
After reviewing all the projects, we selected 13 (a Baker’s dozen) to focus on in the 2024 Design Roundup. We were looking to curate a set of projects that would prompt strong discussion, that represented some new territory or aspect of our work, and that sparked emotion—elation, pride, uncertainty, curiosity. To us, emotion signals that the stakes are high, that we’re stretching in a new direction and fully engaged and invested in our process.
The 2024 panel included architect Anne Fougeron, FAIA, of Fougeron Architecture; architect/educator Renee Chow, Dean of the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley; landscape architect David Fletcher, FASLA, of Fletcher Studio; and developer Matthew Taylor of American Capital Management. These colleagues and collaborators took time to introduce themselves and outline their points-of-view before digging into our work. The event was structured to engage with sets of projects grouped by scale or theme. DBA team members shared their inspirations, designs, and challenges and panelists responded with targeted questions and insights about diverse projects from across the country, from Santa Barbara to Nashville.
Our 2024 Round-Up projects included housing in the Southeast (Park 24, Artist Lofts) and Bay Area (850 Turk, Nia and Amani at Sunnydale, 750 Golden Gate, 420 Mendocino, Sierra Garden, 57-67 Evelyn, 2610 International); master planning (The Neighborhood at State and Hope, Auburn Engineering Master Plan); hospitality (HH Residences); and a commercial space featuring office and community use (Building People Power).
The day was capped with a Celebration of recently completed and documented buildings, including our first residential high-rise (Isle House); affordable housing (Africatown Plaza, Sango Court, 555 Larkin); a hospitality project (Bay View Suites); and interiors projects (Wyatt Builds, Youth Art Exchange). The review of accomplishments from the year also included the North Berkeley BART Transit-Oriented Development Plan; REALIZE-CA, a series of energy retrofit demonstrations; and the DCHA Senior Housing Playbook, a best-practices guide for trauma-informed design commissioned by the District of Columbia Housing Authority.
Review and Renew
We are immensely grateful to our generous panelists, our event team, and our incredible design staff, who poured their time, skills, and selves into making this type of reflection possible. A portfolio-wide audit is a big lift, but we have already found that the effort has generated real benefit: We identified areas where we need to dig deeper; we honed developing designs at an actionable moment; and we clarified the key ideas of some projects how best to communicate them.
Plans are afoot for the next year-end review: We are continuing to refine and streamline our process, focusing our energy and efforts, and leveraging the contributions made by our designers and thoughtful panelists.
Most importantly, for each of these Round-Ups—and, we hope, going forward—we came together to connect around our shared passion of using our design skills, with pragmatism and joy, to shape places where people can thrive.
Caroline Souza, AIA, is a Principal at David Baker Architects. She is a skilled architect, architecture communicator, and leader in social justice-focused design—including affordable housing and design for underserved communities.