Designing Affordable Housing Future(s) with guest Victor Body-Lawson

A conversation on affordable housing design with guest Victor Body Lawson, Principal at Body Lawson Associates and MArch ‘84, facilitated by Juan Sebastian Moreno, MSUP Candidate '21 at GSAPP and a Graduate Research Assistant for 2020 at the Housing Lab.

Victor Body-Lawson is a licensed architect in New York and New Jersey and a founder of Body-Lawson Associates Architects and Planners (1993). The firm focuses on master planning, institutional, commercial and residential design. Victor has directed the production of several flagship projects including the Master Plan for the Riverside Church in New York City and the design of a new 2,500 person sanctuary for the Bethel Gospel Tabernacle in Jamaica, New York.

He was a partner at Brownstone Partners Real Estate Development Consortium where he designed and developed projects in Harlem (2000). He is the recipient of the 2011 HUD Door Knocker Award for outstanding work in Affordable Housing, based on his work for Grace Towers Housing Project in Mount Vernon, NY. Victor has taught at the School of Architecture at Yale University, City College of New York, and at the School of Architecture at the City of Havana, Cuba. He is a professional member of the National Organization of Minority Architects and the New York Coalition of Black Architects.

Born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia, Juan Sebastián Moreno is an urban historian with a master’s degree in geography. His professional interests gravitate around urban informality, affordable housing, and mitigation of the climate emergency in Global South cities. Before moving to New York, Juan worked for two-and-a-half years in the Bogotá City Council as an advisor for land use, environmental policy, transportation, and urban security; he also directed a research group on transportation and mobility that produced a novel study on the taxi industry in the Colombian capital. Since January 2020, Juan has been working as a research assistant for GSAPP’s Housing Lab.

This event is part of a series organized by the student team at GSAPP’s Housing Lab of informal interdisciplinary conversations on housing, race, racism, and whiteness during the fall 2020 semester, on Fridays between 1–2PM. Each session focuses on a specific theme, often with a guest expert practitioner or researcher on hand as a co-facilitator along with members of the Housing Lab student team. The series is part of the Housing Lab’s project to explicitly integrate an anti-racist agenda into its current engagements and methods of working.

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