2024
Join designer Victor Dover for a discussion to strategically rethink the dominance of automobiles in our daily lives. This talk explores new thinking about neighborhood design and street design, including the “Ten Ingredients for Car-Optional Neighborhoods.”
View the 2024 lecture on YouTube
Victor Dover, FAICP, LEED-AP is an urban designer and town planner whose work spans 22 states and five continents. He is known for the designs of Glenwood Park in Atlanta, Georgia, South Main in Buena Vista, Colorado, I’On in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, as well as the downtown plans for many cities including Richmond, Virginia. He co-authored Street Design: The Secret to Great Cities and Towns (Wiley, 2014 and 2024), the leading textbook on the subject, and has been awarded both the John Nolen Medal for contributions to urbanism (2010) and the Seaside Prize (2024).
2023
Join architect Zena Howard for an exploration of individual and shared experiences at the intersection of urban design, art, history, anthropology and public policy.
View the 2023 lecture on YouTube
Zena Howard, FAIA, LEED AP, is principal and managing director with the architecture and design firm Perkins&Will. Howard's career has been defined by visionary, complex, and culturally significant projects – like Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. and The Durham County Human Services Complex in Durham, North Carolina – that navigate social issues of dignity, equity, and justice in cultural and civic places. She has been recognized as a citizen architect for shaping architecture through Remembrance Design, a design process that responds to inequity and injustice by restoring lost cultural connections and honoring collective memory and history.
2022
Christopher J. Howard, an accomplished architect and scholar whose commentary and design proposals on monuments and memorials have earned him national recognition, was the 2022 presenter. His lecture was “Civic Art, Justice and Inclusion.”
One of the nation’s foremost architects and opinion leaders on reclaiming racially-charged statues, memorials and heritage buildings, delivered the 2022 Morton B. Gulak Lecture in Urban and Regional Planning on Oct. 27.
Christopher ‘CJ’ Howard, an architect and assistant professor in the School of Architecture and Planning at The Catholic University of America, discussed how Richmonders could jump-start the Herculean task of transforming a major thoroughfare once dotted with Confederate statues into a symbolically inclusive one. Howard, whose commentary and design proposals on monuments and memorials have garnered national attention, including the 2019 Leicester B. Holland Prize, for comprehensive documentation of the Lyceum building in Old Town Alexandria and an award-winning entry for a Contrabands’ and a Freedmen’s Cemetery Memorial in Alexandria, Va., offered a vision for moving forward that included investment in the six former pedestal circles as a dynamic civic space featuring art that might serve as a catalyst for racial reconciliation. Under Howard’s vision, the new circles would be mounted on the former Confederate pedestals but feature installations emphasizing a diverse range of historical figures, symbolizing the city’s maturation toward greater justice, equity, and liberty.
View the 2022 lecture on YouTube
2019
The 2019 speaker was Gary Hack, a professor emeritus and the former dean of the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania, who has developed and advised on plans for cities, neighborhoods, and developments in over 35 cities in the US, Canada, and Asia, including the redevelopment of Prudential Center in Boston and collaboration with Studio Daniel Libeskind on the winning entry for the redevelopment of the World Trade Center.
View the 2019 lecture on YouTube
2018
The 2018 speaker was Majora Carter, a leading urban revitalization strategy consultant, real estate developer and Peabody Award-winning broadcaster. She is responsible for the creation and implementation of numerous green-infrastructure projects, policies, and job training and placement systems.
2017
The 2017 speaker was Toni L. Griffin, founder of Urban Planning and Design for the American City. Through her New York City-based practice, Griffin served as project director for the long-range planning initiative of the Detroit Work Project, and in 2013 completed and released Detroit Future City, a comprehensive citywide framework plan for urban transformation.
View the 2017 lecture on YouTube
Previous years
Previous Gulak Lecturers include Sara Zewde, a designer at Gustafson Guthrie Nichol, and renowned planners Dhiru A. Thadani, Ellen Dunham-Jones, and Jeff Speck.