Rosalie Genevro, Executive Director of the Architectural League of New York (and an AAO Board member!), and Tracy Myers, Curator of Architecture, Heinz Architectural Center, Carnegie Museum of Art, led a dynamic session entitled "Construing and Constructing Design Excellence" at the 2009 AAO conference.  The session addressed strategies and experiences in engendering and supporting public interest in design quality; facilitating conversation about how design excellence is described and defined, and by whom; and translating concern for design excellence into actions and mechanisms that actually affect the shape of our shared environment.

We were lucky to get an audio recording of this session, and we hope you enjoy it!  Please be sure to scroll to the bottom for the audio. 

Rosalie Genevro, Executive Director, Architectural League of New York

Rosalie Genevro is executive director of the Architectural League of New York, a cultural organization dedicated to the presentation of important work and ideas in contemporary architecture and urbanism. Most recent among the many lecture series she has organized is Architecture and…, investigating the intersection of architecture with innovative work in other creative and scientific disciplines. She has directed the creation of a number of major traveling exhibitions, including Ten Shades of Green: Architecture and the Natural World, and Urban Life: Housing in the Contemporary City, as well as the design studies Vacant Lots, on affordable infill housing for small sites, New Schools for New York, The Productive Park, on parks and the water supply, and Arverne: Housing on the Edge. Ms. Genevro originated the online project www.worldviewcities.org, which presents reports by local young architects on cities around the world.

Ms. Genevro has served as a peer reviewer for the New York City Departments of Design and Construction, City Planning, and Parks and Recreation, and as a grant review panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York State Council on the Arts. She studied history and architectural history at Occidental College and Cornell University.

Tracy Myers, Curator of Architecture, Heinz Architectural Center, Carnegie Museum of Art

Tracy Myers has been a curator at the Heinz Architectural Center, Carnegie Museum of Art, since 1997. She has originated, managed, or facilitated more than a dozen exhibitions, including Aluminum in Contemporary Architecture; Lebbeus Woods: Experimental Architecture; and, with the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes. She has been part of numerous planning committees and task forces at both the art museum and Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh (the art museum’s corporate parent). Myers was named a Curator to Watch by Pittsburgh magazine in 1999 and, in 2003, one of the city’s top fifty cultural forces by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Prior to joining the Carnegie, she was special assistant to an assistant director at Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution in New York City.

An actively involved member of the Pittsburgh community, Myers is president of the board of the South Side Local Development and chair of its Design Committee; she also has sat on the boards of the Foundation for Architecture and Construction Junction. She teaches in the Master of Arts Management program at Carnegie Mellon University’s Heinz College and regularly participates in studio reviews at the University’s School of Architecture. Myers earned a B.A. cum laude/Phi Beta Kappa in Government and Economics at Franklin & Marshall College and an M.A. in Art History from Hunter College of The City University of New York. She is a doctoral candidate in Art History at the University of Delaware. Her monograph on Deborah Berke & Partners Architects was published by Yale University Press in 2008. Before pursuing a career in the arts, Myers worked on Wall Street and at a large general-practice law firm in New York City.