New for 2012!!  Soul of the City is an engaging dialogue series between the public and the design profession on issues of importance to the community and the region with focus on improving communication, understanding and collaboration (formerly known as the 4th Wednesday Design Dialogue series).  Organized by the AIA Central Valley Chapter and the ASLA California Sierra Chapter, the dialogues are listed below for the year and the topics have come directly from the public and the profession from one of our dialogues last year.  We look forward to seeing everyone again this year for some engaging conversation!  See you at the first dialogue on February 29th, where we will kick-off the serie

Please join us on Wednesday evening, September 28th at 5:45pm at the AIA Central Valley Chapter office for this month’s 4th Wednesday Design Dialogue (4WDD). Encouraging community design excellence through the recognition of projects that exhibit Smart Growth principles in planning design and development actions. The Smart Growth Leadership Recognition Program seeks to encourage and promote those projects. How can this program be a benefit to your community and city? Find out at this month’s 4th Wednesday Design Dialogue presented by Bruce Monighan, AIA. For more information on the Smart Growth Leadership Program follow the link below. http://www.aiacv.org/resources/smart-growth/ Click he

Please join us on Wednesday evening, July 27th beginning at 5:45pm at the AIA Central Valley Chapter office for the this month's 4th Wednesday Design Dialogue (4WDD). LPAS Architecture + Design will be talking about their design and experiences with the Vegetative Green Roof at their newly constructed California State Lottery Headquarters. Curtis Owyang, Brady Smith and Dave Cubberly from LPAS will be giving the presentation and answering questions about the project and the first green roof of its kind in Sacramento. The California State Lottery Headquarters is LEED Gold Registered. Click here for the flyer. The event is FREE and open to anyone. Refreshments provided. Please RSVP to info@

There's a lot more green on a tree than just its leaves! At this month's 4WDD ISA-Certified Arborist Scott Gregory will talk about assessing the economic and environmental benefits of the urban forest. In April, Scott successfully defended his master's thesis, "Quantifying Street Tree Function and Distribution: Analysis of Environmental Services, Population Characteristics, and Sidewalk Uplift in the City of Chico, California". His thesis entailed inventory of 34,950 street trees, stumps, and available planting sites within the City of Chico and subsequent data analysis to quantify environmental services provided by the City's street trees. By identifying public and private trees in adva

Please join us on Wednesday evening, May 25th beginning at 5:45pm at the AIA Central Valley Chapter office for the this month’s 4th Wednesday Design Dialogue (4WDD). Gus Fischer, Architect and Partner with Dreyfuss & Blackford Architects will present their project, The California Independent System Operator (CA ISO) Headquarters facility. Gus will discuss how they are achieving LEED Platinum and its impact on the culture and community. This secure 275,000 SF complex on a 27 acre site is a consolidation of the organization’s operations, offices and public education components and just completed construction. The event is FREE and open to anyone. Refreshments provided. Please RSVP to info@

How can we design ‘greener’ landscapes in Sacramento?  With the growing focus on water conservation, responsible use of resources, and the impacts of the built environment on human health and well-being, the conversation about what makes a site design ‘green’ is being elevated to a higher level. From pre-design and planning through construction and operations, a new rating system, dubbed ‘SITES’, has been developed which sets the bar for what we can do to design more sustainable places.  Developed to be incorporated into future versions of the USGBC’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system, SITES is currently in its pilot project phase.  Please join us on Wed

In the residential sector, a building that produces as much energy as it consumes, or a Net Zero Energy (NZE) Building, is increasingly technologically viable. Yet, to achieve true scalability, these high-quality, efficient and architecturally advanced buildings must be coupled with affordability. Please join us on Wednesday Evening, Feb 23th beginning at 5:45PM at the AIACV Chapter Office for this month’s 4th Wednesday Design Dialogue (4WDD) where Shilpa Sankaran and Taeko Takagi of ZETA Communities will discuss an innovative approach to achieving affordability with offsite precision-building. The team will also present project case studies and live energy performance tracked by the DOE

Sacramento resident and architect David Sarti posed a contentious question at Thursday night's Urban Design Alliance meeting: Why do Sacramento neighborhoods resist modern architecture? The question spurred an hour-long dialogue that shifted several times among a group of 50 people. It touched on everything from the nature of different Sacramento neighborhoods to form-based architectural codes to the definition of modern architecture itself. But first, Sarti, who recently moved to Sacramento after living in a house he built in Seattle, showed how small urban developments can transform a neighborhood. His "Little Red House," which he built in Seattle in 2006 for around $200,000, including

Sacramento architecture can and should be designed for the city's climate, architect and green builder Matthew Piner said Wednesday. With its temperate Mediterranean climate, Sacramento usually experiences hot, dry summers and mild, wet winters. Its location on two rivers in a valley between the Sierra Nevada mountains and the Pacific Ocean contributes delta breezes to cool off most summer nights, he said at a monthly architectural design forum, Design Dialogue, sponsored by the Urban Design Alliance of Sacramento. Builders here — the same as builders throughout the world — once worked with Sacramento's natural climate to keep people comfortable when they sought shelter inside houses and

A group interested in shaping Sacramento's architectural future had quite a challenge Wednesday night: discussing how to design urban infill in a city whose buildings are viewed as largely mediocre. Figuring out where to go from here is the whole point of the Design Dialogues, sponsored monthly by the Urban Design Alliance and the Sacramento chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA). On Wednesday, 40 design and planning professionals, community residents and others met at the AIA offices to discuss how to move the city's structural landscape forward despite the architectural challenges of designing infill projects. The 90-minute dialogue was a give-and-take between participa

AMERICAN INSTITUTE OF ARCHITECTS - CENTRAL VALLEY (AIACV) presents - 4th WEDNESDAY DESIGN DIALOGUE Join your neighbors, colleagues and friends for the 4th Wednesday Design Dialogue series returning monthly in 2009.Each even numbered month this year, the AIACV will present an Architecture related topic while each odd numbered month, UDA-Sacramento will be presenting a Planning related topic. April’s AIACV Design Dialogue will focus on CATALYST DEVELOPMENTS with a panel presentation by: Ron Vrilakas, Principal, Vrilakas Architects Michael Malinowski, Principal, Applied Architecture Inc. Desmond Parrington, Infill Coordinator, City of Sacramento Date: Wednesday, April 22, 2009 Time: 6:00-