2024 Rowlett Lecture:
When Futures Collide | Positioning Value + Generating Momentum
Monday, April 15, 2024, 1:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m. | Bethancourt Ballroom in the Memorial Student Center
At the 2024 Rowlett Lecture, a spectrum of global leaders at world-renowned architecture firms will position exemplary work that confronts design practitioners’ challenges now and in the future.
The public event, 1-5 p.m. Monday, April 15 at the Bethancourt Ballroom in the Memorial Student Center, leading design, technology, and innovative-driven firms that infuse AI, digital fabrication, and immersive technologies into practice.
These are internationally significant and award-winning firms. Though they vary by size, characteristics, and project types, each firm intentionally incorporates the synthesis of performance into its innovative, research-based approach to design, technology, and practice management.
The 2024 Rowlett Lecture will include individual keynote presentations and a panel discussion.
Speakers include:
- Heath May, partner and Global Practice Director of HKS Line (Laboratory for Intensive Exploration), a studio dedicated to exploring materiality, processes, and toolsets.
- Cory Brugger, partner and Chief Technology Officer at HKS, directs the development and deployment of innovative advanced technologies.
Register for the 2024 Rowlett Lecture
Past Lectures
2023: Synthesis + Performance + Intention | Innovation
As outlined in the 1958 CRS Operations Manual – The founders of CRS engaged in the relentless pursuit of a better way of doing things. They searched for unattainable architectural perfection using relevant and innovative techniques at the time. In 1970, CRS implemented the “TROIKA” Plan to ensure parity between three interrelated components reflecting design, technology, and management practice. Today, over fifty years later, this framework continues to produce impactful results. Cristopher Connock, design computation director, KieranTimberlake; Gordon Gill, FAIA, partner, Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill; Steven McKay, RIBA, CEO, managing partner, DLR Group; and Sophia Razzaque, AIA, associate, Lake|Flato positioned their firms’ exemplary work. Though they vary by size, characteristics, and project types, each firm intentionally incorporates the synthesis of performance into its innovative, research-based approach to design, technology, and practice management.
2022: Patronage and Architecture: Making Texas Modernism
The 2022 Rowlett Lecture program will focus upon the interface between a leader of industry and an architect in the creation of innovative and notable settings for working and living. Following a luncheon, two sessions will be separated by a coffee break from the third session. The first session will focus upon Mark Wellen’s completed building projects and the attitudes and behaviors that produced success. The second session, presented by Michael Malone, will focus upon examples of patrons of architecture through history and in contemporary practice. The final session will be a conversation between Tim Leach, a patron of art and architecture, and Mark Wellen, a practicing architect, about their experiences working together. It will be moderated by Michael Malone.
2021: Work, Workers, Workplace — Post-Pandemic
Two experts will discuss designing for the workplace’s “new normal” during the virtual 2021 Rowlett Lecture, 1–5 p.m. April 7, hosted by the Texas A&M CRS Center for Leadership & Management in the Design and Construction Industry.
The experts, Larry Lander and Lauri Lampson, are executives at PDR, a Houston-based, multidisciplinary design firm. The firm is an international leader in the research, design and delivery of beautiful, effective workplace solutions. Lander and Lampson have looked carefully at the impact the coronavirus pandemic will have on the workplace.
The annual Rowlett Lecture is named in honor of John Miles Rowlett, former professor of architecture at Texas A&M, who was a founding member of the legendary architectural firm CRS.
The Rowlett Lecture was endowed in 1979 through a grant to the Texas Architectural Foundation by CRS Inc. and Mrs. Virginia Rowlett.