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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

How Berlin became a hip capital

  • 1.  How Berlin became a hip capital

    Posted 06-22-2017 04:59 PM

    How Berlin became a Hip Capital


    How Berlin became a Hip Capital
    "Berlin is a city condemned forever to becoming and never to being.")

    (Karl Scheffler, author of Berlin: Ein Stadtschicksal, 1910)
    The ICE train hurdles at 120 mph through the flat-lands between Goettingen and Berlin. There are extra seats in the coach, Berlin is far enough from most other German centers to make flying faster. After glimpses of Wolfsburg and its Volkswagen factory the most noticeable things to see are wind turbines that stand in clusters on seemingly endless lush green fields. These are the landscapes of East Germany which Helmut Kohl, the German Chancellor who died this week and who had overseen unification, promised to turn into bluehende Landschaften. (Flourishing landscapes).

    Germany still has more open space than one thought possible. Then, rather suddenly, there is Berlin, a city and also a state with probably the most turbulent history in all of Europe. Peeling back the layers of this particular onion reveals much of what shaped this continent in the last 200 years. For many visitors, no matter the nationality, it also opens a personal history and relationship to one or the other of those periods, whether as an original actor or as the offspring or relative of perpetrators, victims, liberators and bystanders.

    American soldier and German bicyclist in the destroyed
    Berlin of 1945 (photo: Noel Shutt)
    When Berlin was a divided city it was an island in the former socialist East Germany reachable only by air or via bumpy so-called "transit" autobahns that hadn't been repaved since Hitler had built them. Those routes couldn't be used by the "Easterners" residing to their left and right to leave their country. To ensure that nobody got away, control points on each end of the corridor back then already looked like those terrorism fortified check-points of highly secure locations look today: Zig-zag courses around concrete blocks, watchtowers, cameras and soldiers with machine guns and thorough inspections of each vehicle with underfloor mirrors and the like greeted travelers. Occupants ...Read full article 



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