Baumer Lecture Series, Deanna Van Buren

Deanna Van Buren is an award-winning architect and activist recognized internationally for her leadership in using architecture, design, and real estate innovations to address the social inequities behind the mass incarceration crisis. Van Buren is co-founder of Designing Justice + Designing Spaces, an architecture and design firm with the mission of dismantling the punitive infrastructure of the prison system by designing and building new spaces informed by restorative justice: peacemaking centers, mobile re-entry housing, holistic behavioral health hubs, spaces for youth, spaces for diversion/re-entry, and more.

Van Buren’s work has been recognized by the American Institute of Architects San Francisco, as well as Architectural Record’s Women in Architecture Awards honoring pioneering professionals. Van Buren was a 2016 Echoing Green Fellow recipient, 2018 recipient of the Berkeley-Rupp Prize and Professorship, and is an alumna of the Loeb Fellowship at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. She is also the only architect to have been awarded the Rauschenberg Artist as Activist Fellowship.

Van Buren’s talk is entitled, “Reimagining Justice: Using Design for Whole Systems Change.”

For spring 2023, the Baumer Lecture Series returns to Knowlton Hall’s Gui Auditorium for nine in-person lectures that engage ”Engaging the Commons.“ This semester, Knowlton invites scholars, practitioners, and designers to think about how the design professions’ participation in and with the dense social and political webs of the built environment and how active practices might engage these places, our “commons.”

The Baumer Lecture Series invites prominent researchers and practitioners of architecture, landscape architecture, and city and regional planning to present their work and engage with Knowlton faculty and students.