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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

  • 1.  Make the Invisibles Seen

    Posted 11-18-2017 06:24 PM

    Making the Invisibles Seen 

    The film Visages, Villages (Faces, Places) quite literally shows that buildings and structures are supposed to be about people, a realization of which some architects need to be reminded from time to time. The film's unique relationship of face, place and building is an intriguing instruction for those who deal with places and people.

    In a classic road movie, but set in France, an odd couple drives a box van through France to discover the type of usually invisible people who are constitute the silent majority. One by one, these people which normally blend in, begin to stand out, there faces become large and their stories remarkable.
    Visages,Villages, the miner's widow, larger than life

    Like a good architect the young photographer and Jean Luc Godard wannabe J.R. (always with sunglasses) and his nearly 90 year old companion photographer and filmmaker Agnes Varda, slowly going blind, (which is maybe why she hates those sunglasses) scout locations, landscapes and settings for an appropriate expression for their art (both essentially are playing themselves and their actual lives).

    More importantly, though, they scout for people and when they find them, their art consists of teasing out of them what makes them special, make that specialness visible and literally enlarge their faces in their own places. In a double coup, the two artists use photography to see buildings, places, faces and stories in an all new light, by making buildings the substrate for supersized faces scaling portraits to the size of buildings.
    The film's allusions to the Swiss French film revolutionary...
    Read full article

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