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K-State Today

February 3, 2023

APDesign opens spring 2023 Ekdahl Lecture Series with Rob Rogers

Submitted by Thom Jackson

The College of Architecture, Planning & Design, or APDesign, will open its spring 2023 Ekdahl Lecture Series with "All ideas have scale" presented by Rob Rogers, founding partner of Rogers Partners Architects+Urban Designers, at 4:30 p.m. Monday, Feb. 6, in Regnier Forum, Regnier Hall.

All lectures are free and open to the public.

Rogers creates institutional and cultural buildings that are civic works. From reinventing the security bollard to redesigning a subtle icon on the National Mall, Rogers continually elevates accepted conventions in his quest to develop intelligent, rich and timeless contributions to our physical environment. Believing that even a single building is a piece of urban design, his work assertively and elegantly combines urbanism, landscape and architecture.

Rogers Partners Architects+Urban Designers was founded in August 2013. For more than 30 years, Rogers has explored the edges of architecture and the overlap of disciplines: the spaces where architecture, landscapes and the public realm converge.

The series continues with the following presentations: 

Ryan Heiser, 4:30 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 14, in Regnier Forum, Regnier Hall. Heiser is the director of design for Landscape Forms and leads all the company's industrial design and graphic design functions, its studio engineering team and its brand evolution initiatives. He is a talented industrial designer with more than a decade of design leadership experience, joining from Newell Brands, where he held senior positions in industrial design and design management for their housewares and writing instruments groups. Before Newell, he was a product designer for Chicago-based consultancy FreeForm. Heiser is a graduate of Purdue University with a degree in industrial design.

Andrea Roberts, 4:30 p.m. Monday, Feb. 27, in Regnier Forum, Regnier Hall. Roberts is a planning historian, theorist, public humanities scholar, place preservationist and educator. She is also the founder of The Texas Freedom Colonies Project, a research and social justice initiative documenting placemaking history and grassroots preservation practices in the African Diaspora. Roberts trains future planners and preservationists to move marginalized communities' histories, ontologies of place, methods and agendas from the edge to the center of practice and policymaking. Her "place preservation" framework creates applied research solutions, which address access, visibility and systemic and structural barriers to inclusion within preservation planning through engaged research.

As a scholar activist, she brings more than a decade of experience in community and economic development to her scholarship. Her public scholarship and research identify planning and historic preservation practices that sustain cultural resilience, with a specific focus on Black efficacy in these practices, grassroots planning history, and contemporary place preservation practices with settlements founded by formerly enslaved Africans in the Americas. Transdisciplinary in nature, Roberts works with critical theories of development, planning, human geography, gender and diaspora studies to help bridge grassroots and formal planning in the service of historic African American communities. Her engaged research raises awareness of the entrenched racial biases impeding the documentation, recognition and preservation of historic Black settlements' cultural assets.

View a full listing of the 2022 Ekdahl Lectures and previously recorded lectures.

The Oscar S. Ekdahl Lecture Series in Architecture and Design brings the finest professionals in the design and planning disciplines to APDesign and the K-State community. These individuals are selected to avail faculty, staff, students and regional professionals of the potency of design and planning in addressing the issues we face as a global society. The series honors Ekdahl, who received his Bachelor of Architecture from Kansas State University in 1933 and was a founding partner in Ekdahl, Davis, Depew, Persson Architects PA in Topeka.

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