School of Architecture

Spring 2025 School of Architecture / AIA Triangle Joint Lecture Series

Monday, March 17 @ 6pm in Burns Auditorium, Kamphoefner Hall

Roy Decker, FAIA
Duvall Decker Architects
Harwell Hamilton Harris Endowed Lecture

Roy Decker, FAIA, expands the role of an architect in search of public good. Roy’s dedication to design excellence, education, and craft infuses the firm’s work with meaning. For the past three decades, Roy has led the firm to complete public projects of varying scales and types and to achieve significant design recognition. Roy is a design and critical thought leader, whether he is participating in an inner-city neighborhood meeting, serving on student reviews across the country, sharing his perspective in lectures and publications, or inspiring an individual in conversation. In all of these encounters, he exhibits an unwavering commitment to considering the consequences of architectural design work in the lives of others.

Roy holds a Master of Architecture degree from Kent State University. He has been on the faculty of Temple University School of Architecture and Mississippi State University’s School of Architecture. He was selected by the Architectural League of New York to present at the 2017 Emerging Voices lecture series. In 2023, his firm’s work was published in The State of Housing Design by the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University where he was asked to speak at the book launch symposium at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. In 2024, The Architect’s Newspaper named Duvall Decker the Best Medium Firm in the Southeast as part of its Best of Practice Awards for the second consecutive year. Roy’s firm just released its debut book, Foundations, authored by Anne Marie and Roy, characterizing a list of propositions and foundations that were collected, developed, and tested over 25 years of practice.

Signed copies of Duvall Decker’s book, Foundations, will be available for purchase following the lecture. ...

Monday, March 3 @ 6pm in Burns Auditorium, Kamphoefner Hall

Link to register in bio.

Please join the College of Design for the spring 2025 architecture lecture series.

Yutaka Sho is a Principal and Co-Founder of GA Collaborative. Her research focuses on the roles of architecture and planning in development, humanitarian and post-calamity contexts. Yutaka has taught architectural design studios and theory at Kigali Institute of Science and Technology in Rwanda, and is an Associate Professor of Architecture at Syracuse University.

Leighton Beaman is a GA Collaborative Principal and Co-Founder. His research and interests focus on affects and material technologies within design culture for environmental responsibility, and socially conscious design practices. Leighton Beaman is currently an Associate Professor of Practice at Cornell University. He has been named a MacDowell Fellow, an American Institute of Architects Emerging Practitioner, and a University of Virginia Teaching Fellow in Architecture.

General Architecture Collaborative is a nonprofit architecture and landscape architecture design firm focused on housing, healthcare, and educational projects that serve underrepresented, vulnerable and developing communities. Their goal is to bring together individuals and organizations interested in contributing to innovative, impactful and empowering design projects that build sustainable and socially equitable spaces, with communities who might benefit most from these projects. They help funders navigate unfamiliar building processes and cultures, and work to ensure a community’s needs and aspirations are part of a collaborative process and reflected in the spaces they create. ...