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The Committee on Design (COD) was founded to promote design excellence among members of the AIA, the broader design community, and the public at large, both nationally and internationally.

2024 COD Conferences

Arkansas

April 3-7 | 21c Hotel | Bentonville and Eureka Springs - Registration is sold out.

Brazil

Thu, Oct 17 - Sat, Oct 26, 2024
Sao Paulo > Brasilia > Rio de Janerio.  Registration will open in late April.

2024 Sponsorships

Download the prospectus for Arkansas and Brazil opportunities.


2023 COD Conferences

Last year, COD held two domestic design conferences investigating The Authenticity of Place.  The first conference was held in New Orleans, LA.  View the short video of the venue tours and download the conference program book. The second conference was held in Minneapolis/St. Paul, MN, September 21-24, 2023. Download the Minneapolis guidebook and view the conference video

Christmas Markets as Urban Placemakers

  • 1.  Christmas Markets as Urban Placemakers

    Posted 12-28-2015 10:48 AM
    Holiday pop-up installation: bakery
    Pop-up installations are all the rage. What is more pop-up than an open air market? It is in the nature of such markets to be not there one day and there another, bringing additional people into public spaces. The open air market is an altogether excellent place-making device. Like Russian dolls that nest inside each other, markets can create streets within a street, plazas on a plaza and a village inside a city. The booths and stalls are the buildings and stores, the spaces in between the streets and the intersections become small squares. Seasonal farmers markets have spread like wildfire all across America and no surprise that this popularity coincides with the general renaissance of cities during the past decade or so.
    A city within a city: The Weihnachtsmarkt Stuttgart on the Marktplatz


    It comes as a surprise, then, that the European tradition of Christmas markets has not caught on in the US in the same way, even if there is a recent wave of German "Christkindlemarkets" listed on christmasmarkets.com which appear to be a concerted commercial effort of creating those markets "in vitro".

    By contrast, especially German Christmas markets have a very long tradition (Dresden's Striezelmarkt claims to go back to 1434) and have developed in a variety of ways across Europe. The Nuremburg market has...Read full article

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    Nikolaus Philipsen FAIA
    Archplan Inc. Philipsen Architects
    Baltimore MD
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    2024 HRC Taliesin West