Evaluating seminal works of architecture requires high professional competence and an ability to see the big picture.

DSs, DASLA, Hon FRIBA, Hon RDI, RAAR

Martha Schwartz is a landscape architect, urbanist, and artist. She works with the design of the urban landscape to enhance quality of life within our cities. Presently, Martha Schwartz’s focus is on urban afforestation and how new technologies can assist ecological systems to regenerate within urban areas.

As founding principal of Martha Schwartz Partners, she has over 35 years of experience within landscape architecture. A tenured professor at Harvard, she lectures internationally on a variety of subjects, such as how to create sustainability through design excellence and large-scale landscape interventions within cities. Her work has been featured widely in publications and gallery exhibitions.

Hon. FAIA

Xu Tiantian is founding principal of the DnA _Design and Architecture Beijing office, an interdisciplinary practice working with city planning, urban design, and architectural design with a special focus on addressing new relationships between architecture and urbanism in contemporary Chinese culture. 

She has received numerous awards throughout her career and in 2020, she was appointed an Honorary Fellow of American Institute of Architects. Xu Tiantian holds a Master of Architecture in Urban Design from Harvard Graduate School of Design and Bachelor of Architecture from Tsinghua University in Beijing. She has taught at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) School of Architecture in Beijing, China.

Founder and principal of the award-winning architecture and research studio Counterspace, Vally’s design, research, and pedagogical practice is searching for expression for hybrid identities and territory, particularly for African and Islamic conditions — both rooted and diasporic. The practice occupies a space between the functional and the speculative, pedagogy and praxis, simultaneously describing cities and their histories and futures and imagining them. Her design process is often forensic and draws on the aural, performance, and the overlooked as generative places.

Vally has always been involved in academics and has taught at The Bartlett, University of Sydney, Graduate School of Architecture, University of Johannesburg, and the University of Illinois, USA. In 2022, Vally was selected by the World Economic Forum to be one of its Young Global Leaders and, in 2021, was named TIME100’s Next list honoree. Vally completed her undergraduate studies in Architecture at the University of Pretoria and her master’s degree at the University of the Witwatersrand.

Aric Chen is General and Artistic Director of the Nieuwe Instituut, the Netherlands’ national museum and institute for architecture, design, and digital culture in Rotterdam.  American-born, Chen previously served as Professor and founding Director of the Curatorial Lab at the College of Design & Innovation at Tongji University in Shanghai; Curatorial Director of the Design Miami fairs in Miami Beach and Basel; Creative Director of Beijing Design Week; and Lead Curator for Design and Architecture at M+, Hong Kong, where he oversaw the formation of that new museum’s design and architecture collection and program. Chen is the author of Brazil Modern (Monacelli, 2016), and has been a frequent contributor to The New York Times, Wallpaper, Architectural Record, and other publications.