Ellen Dunham-Jones, AIA
Ellen Dunham-Jones is an award-winning architect, professor, and
coordinator of the MS in Urban Design at the Georgia Institute of
Technology. She has published over 60 articles linking contemporary
theory and practice, is chair of the Board of Directors of the Congress
for the New Urbanism, and serves on the national AIA Design and Health
Leadership Group. A leading authority on suburban redevelopment, she
lectures widely, conducts workshops with municipalities and consults on
individual projects.
Dunham-Jones and co-author June Williamson
wrote Retrofitting Suburbia; Urban Design Solutions for Redesigning
Suburbs (Wiley & Sons, 2009, updated paperback edition in 2011). The
book’s documentation of successful retrofits of vacant big box stores,
dead and thriving malls, and aging office parks into more sustainable
places has received significant media attention in The New York Times,
PBS, NPR, Harvard Business Review, Urban Land, Planning, Architectural
Record and other venues. The book received the PROSE award from the
American Association of Publishers as best architecture/urban planning
book of 2009, was featured in Time Magazine’s March 23, 2009 cover
story, “10 ideas changing the world right now” and is the subject of her
2010 TED talk (see below) and 2012 TED-NPR Radio Hour interview.
Dunham-Jones
is continuing to research short and long-term tactics for scaling up
suburban retrofitting in the U.S. and abroad. She appeared in the 2011
documentary Urbanized, the 2012 PBS series “Designing Healthy
Communities” and contributed chapters to the honorable Henry Cisneros’s
2012 book, Independent for Life, Homes and Neighborhoods for an Aging
America and “Irrational Exuberance: Rem Koolhaas in the Nineties” to the
2013 book Architecture and Capitalism. She received undergraduate and
graduate degrees in architecture from Princeton University and taught at
UVA and MIT before joining Georgia Tech’s faculty to serve as Director
of the Architecture Program from 2001-2009.