About
Open Building is an approach to designing buildings that imbeds adaptability to keep pace with changing patterns of living, working, learning, caring, and playing.
Our mission is to advocate for the power of Open Building to propel regulatory and SYSTEMIC reform to ensure the vibrancy and longevity of urban environments. Our vision is that cities will be made up of buildings and building complexes that are adaptable, resilient, and contribute to a sustainable future.
The Council on Open Building believes that adaptability is a fundamental and necessary characteristic of truly sustainable and resilient urban environments and buildings. It is the only responsible way to keep pace with changing patterns of living, working, learning, caring, and playing. To this end, we offer access to resources, education, and advocacy. Want to learn more about impacts on residential, healthcare, learning environments and urban neighborhoods?
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
JOHN DALE, FAIA | President
John Dale has been designing educational environments for over 25 years. In 2007, he was named a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) for this focus. By defining small learning communities which boost student achievement and galvanize community involvement, he creates high performance, sustainable learning environments. Building on evidence-based research, he puts in practice the theory that students are healthier and learn more effectively in sustainable, resilient environments. John is Principal, Architecture and Planning at Synchronis (www.synchronis.design). He was 2016 Chair of the AIA’s Committee on Architecture for Education. He is currently a member and Past-President of the Board of Directors of the A+D (Architecture and Design) Museum, Los Angeles and Co-Founder of the Council on Open Building.
STEPHEN KENDALL, PhD, RA | Vice President
Dr. Kendall is a registered architect and holds a PhD in Design Theory and Methods from MIT. His career in architectural practice, research and education spans more than 35 years. His research focuses on the Open Building approach, needed to make buildings more adaptable, easier to customize to meet changing preferences and thus more sustainable. His work recognizes the increasing size and complexity of projects and the dynamics of living environments, the workplace and the marketplace where design must go beyond short-term uses and where control is distributed not only during initial planning but over time. He is author of more than 50 papers, co-author of Residential Open Building (Routledge) and editor of Healthcare Architecture as Infrastructure: Open Building in Practice (Routledge).
FAROOQ AMEEN, AIA, RIBA | Secretary
Farooq Ameen is the founding principal of City Design Studio, a Los Angeles based architecture and urban design practice dedicated to revitalizing communities. He is the author of numerous publications that include deCoding Asian Urbanism, Fifty Under Fifty, Innovators of the 21st Century, and The South Asian Paradigm. Ameen has held academic appointments at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (Los Angeles / Lugano), Calpoly Pomona, and Woodbury University, among others. He has lectured widely, including at the Bauhaus, Dessau, Harvard, Columbia, Xian University, and UCLA. He is a member of the Board of Directors at the A+D Architecture> Architecture and Design Museum, Los Angeles. His recent project experience includes the Shanghai Zizhu International Hi-Tech Zone TOD Mixed-Use District Urban Design Plan in Shanghai, the Inglewood Basketball andEntertainment Center Plaza Buildings in Inglewood, California, the West Santa Ana Branch Transit Corridor TOD Strategic Implementation Plan for the Federal Transit Administration, and the King Fahd City Center Urban Design Plan on the Red Sea in Saudi Arabia. He received a Master of Architecture degree from UCLA.
MURAT KARAKAS, PE, LEED AP | Treasurer
Murat Karakas, PE, LEED AP, is a Project Director in Arup’s Los Angeles office. Since joining Arup in 2001, Murat has led the delivery of numerous high-profile projects including multiple Hospital projects for Kaiser Permanente, federal and state courthouses, museums, and mixed-use projects. Murat has a degree in mechanical engineering, an MBA from California State University, and master’s degree in interdisciplinary design from the University of Cambridge. Murat is a founding member of the Council on Open Buildings.
CHRIS FRENCH | Executive Committee
Chris is a co-founder of Annum Housing, a tech startup with an innovative model for creating vibrant urban workforce housing. Over nearly 3 decades, his career has spanned a broad cross section of the built environment, including architecture, urban design, commercial construction, and commercial real estate development consulting. For nearly two decades, his work has been strongly influenced by Open Building practice, resulting in innovative solutions to the most intractable question in the industry: How can we create buildings that are standardized enough to benefit from economies of scale in construction and at the same time adaptable enough to meet the site-specific needs of projects, the people who use them, and the communities they support. Chris holds one patent and one patent pending for standardized-and-adaptable residential design and construction, covering a range of scales including single family, townhomes, missing-middle, garden, mixed-use, mid-rise and high-rise up to 20 stories.
BEE RAREWALA | Communications Director
Bee Rarewala, Principal and Director of Corporate Brand Strategy at CallisonRTKL (CRTKL), has centered her twenty-plus year career at the nexus of design thinking and business strategy for the AEC industry. Bee works to fuel top-line growth, strengthen market position, and ensure relevancy in an evolving marketplace. She represents the brand globally to align CRTKL’s purpose with growth opportunities, marketing strategy and message, and business goals. Bee is also responsible for developing firmwide strategic initiatives and objectives into meaningful client engagement strategies. A native Angeleno, Bee serves as past president of the Southern California Development Forum, sits on the USC Architecture Guild Board and the USC Economics Leadership Council.
BEN CARLSON, AIA, LEED AP
Ben is a Principal at Goody Clancy and leads the firm’s campus planning and research practice area. He applies 25 years of award-winning experience in urban design, master planning, and architecture to creating inclusive places that drive discovery. He excels in integrating complex social, economic, and environmental factors into elegant and resilient design solutions for campuses, innovation districts, and their mixed-use city and town contexts. His inclusive engagement approach produces visions that earn broad stakeholder enthusiasm and benefit communities equitably. Ben became familiar with Open Building concepts while earning his Master of Architecture degree at the University of California, Berkeley, and applies them across scales – city, district, campus, building, human. Prior to Berkeley, Ben earned a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture at Yale. He has co-chaired the Boston Society for Architecture’s Urban Design Committee and served on its Architecture Boston editorial board. He participates in the Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Committee of the American Planning Association’s Massachusetts chapter, and volunteers with BosNOMA and Boston Public Schools to help connect students with arts and design.
CAREY UPTON
Carey Upton is the Chief Operations Officer with the Santa Monica – Malibu Unified School District where he oversees Facility Improvements, Maintenance & Operations, and Facility Use. He guides the construction and modernization of school facilities with over $800M in voter approved general obligation bonds. This includes construction of the recently completed Discovery Building at Santa Monica High School, the first K-12 building constructed from inception on the Open Building concept. Though Carey’s journey to supervising school facilities might seem unconventional, his extensive experiences have led to a passion for engaging learning environments. Carey directed, designed, produced, and stage managed over 400 theater productions at major regional theaters. He was a middle/high school Artist in Residence, a university lecturer, and a teacher in professional theater programs.
DARIN JELLISON
Darin Jellison is a graduate of Cornell University and a principal at Blackney Hayes Architects in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Education and hospitality are his core markets in the practice, but he serves as design principal on a wide array of project types, scales, and regions. As chairman of the Philadelphia chapter of the Cornell Real Estate Council, he connects Philadelphia-area professionals through monthly knowledge-sharing networking sessions. Personally, Mr. Jellison enjoys cheering on his wife of over 20 years and their children in all of their pursuits, and writing and performing music as a singer-songwriter with Guilt By Association Records.
JOSEPH MURRAY
Joe Murray is a PhD Student in the Architecture–Engineering–Construction Management (PhD-AECM) program at Carnegie Mellon University where he studies the long term operations of adaptable buildings and develops new strategies for facilitating iterative and cumulative change processes in architecture. His research interests include adaptable buildings, human-building interaction, natural user interfaces, embodied cognition and design for aging. Joe has previously worked as an architectural designer, archivist and as a marketer for global architecture and engineering firms. His work spans writing, visual and interactive design. Joe received his MA in Sociology and Social Anthropology from Central European University and his BA in Architectural History from Bard College.
FRANCIE MOORE, AIA, LEED AP BD+C
Overseeing SmithGroup’s Southern California Higher Education projects, Francie’s work focuses on innovative facilities that foster engagement and emphasize the student experience, while balancing the shifting demands of teaching, researching, recruiting, enrolling, and funding. Her early involvement in LEED Pilot projects—as well as her experience partnering with owners, builders, and consultants on design-build and IPD teams— has influenced her collaborative approach to designing integrated, high-performing buildings. Francie possesses nearly 25 years of experience and has honed a deep understanding of the drivers transforming today’s educational marketplace. She has focused much of her career on designing facilities that foster engagement and learning while enabling clients to balance the shifting demands of teaching, researching, recruiting, enrolling, and funding. Her career includes planning, design and implementation of instructional facilities, professional schools, libraries, and campus buildings for a range of clients, including California State University, University of California, the California University of Science and Medicine, Occidental College, Los Angeles Valley College, and University of Redlands, among others.
JOAN SABA, FAIA, FACHA
Specializing in healthcare architecture and planning, Joan Saba brings more than 25 years of expertise and strategic vision to all types of healthcare projects, with a focus on academic medical centers, pediatric and teaching hospitals. In addition to her leadership within the healthcare practice, she is a licensed architect who is responsible for helping manage the New York office of NBBJ. Joan’s expertise in translating current and future programmatic and operational needs into effective healing environments is applied to projects of diverse scales. She has developed long-term client relationships with a range of prestigious healthcare organizations and has advised on some of the nation’s most pressing healthcare design issues. Joan is a trusted advisor to boards and senior management teams in developing and implementing strategies and capital planning tailored to specific organizational needs. In 2012, Joan was named as one of Healthcare Design magazine’s HCD 10. She was also a recipient of the AIA / Academy of Architecture for Health’s Presidential Citation Award and was included in Healthcare Design’s list of “Twenty Who Are Making a Difference.”
JOSHUA LEE, PhD, AIA
Joshua D. Lee is an Assistant Professor in the Carnegie Mellon School of Architecture and Track Chair for the MS and PhD programs in Architecture, Engineering, and Construction Management (AECM). His book, "Flexibility and Design: Learning from the School Construction Systems Development (SCSD) Project" is a mixed-methods longitudinal investigation on the long-term effectiveness of spatial flexibility. His research interests include sustainable design, adaptable architecture, open building, systems-based architecture, circular construction, public interest design, post-occupancy evaluation, educational facilities, and qualitative and computational analysis of architectural language. Joshua completed his Ph.D. in Architecture, Master of Architecture, and Master of Sustainable Design at the University of Texas at Austin. Joshua served as a Lecturer and Assistant Director of the Restoration Institute at Clemson University and as an architect at SOM-NY, SHW Group/Stantec-Austin, and Davis Wince on a wide array of projects. He currently heads the Protean Design Collaborative, a research-oriented design assistance group primarily focused on public interest design projects in the U.S. and Liberia.
PAUL LUKEZ, FAIA LEED AP
Over the past 30 years, Paul Lukez has been actively engaged in architectural practice, research, and education. Mr. Lukez has received over 60 academic and professional honors. In recognition of design excellence, he was elected as aFellow of the American Institute of Architects. Paul is also NCARB certified and is licensed in MA, NY, CT, NJ, VA, NC, OH, WY, and TX. Before founding Paul Lukez Architecture in 1992, Mr. Lukez worked with Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, William Rawn Associates, Arrowstreet Inc. and Wallace-Floyd. In addition, Mr. Lukez has taught architecture for over 20 years. He was a full-time professor at MIT for seven years. He has also taught at Washington University, RISD, Roger Williams University, and Tsinghua University. He is a graduate of Miami University (BED) and MIT (M’Arch), where he received the Henry Adams Award and Goody Prize. He also wrote a book, Suburban Transformations (Princeton Architectural Press, October 2007), which proposes strategies and processes for transforming suburbs into more sustainable environments. In 1985, he wrote an 80-page booklet on New Concepts in Housing: Supports in The Netherlands. The book, published by Network USA and distributed by SAR, highlights Open Building projects and their economic advantages.