Roger Sherman
Roger Sherman is founder of Roger Sherman Architecture and Urban Design in Santa Monica, CA; and Co-Director of cityLAB, an urban design and research thinktank at UCLA.
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Roger Sherman is founder and principal of Roger Sherman Architecture and Urban Design (RSAUD) in Santa Monica, California. Mr. Sherman's work, which spans from both single and multi-family residences to large-scale public projects, utilizes design and planning strategies which maximize flexibility and can adapt to change. His firm has been the recipient of numerous awards. The most recent of these include an AIA Merit Award in 2005 for the 3-in-1 House in Santa Monica; the home was also featured in Architect magazine, which awarded it a Home-of-the-Year prize in 2006.
Mr. Sherman serves as Co-Director, with Dana Cuff, of cityLAB, an urban design and research thinktank at the University of California Los Angeles that was founded in the wake of Katrina and 9/11, dedicated to the development of more adaptive and agile planning practices designed to address the dynamic nature of today's metropolis. An Adjunct Associate Professor in the UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design, in 2006 he coauthored, with Cuff and R.E.Somol, "O-Z.LA: New Forms of Community for L.A.'s Holes", a proposal for Los Angeles 2106.
Sherman is the author of Under the Influence: Negotiating the Complex Logic of Urban Property (forthcoming from the Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2007). In 1995, he organized, edited and was a contributor to RE American Dream: Six Housing Prototypes for Los Angeles (Princeton Architectural Press), later published in Dense-City: After Sprawl, an issue of Lotus Documenti which he guest-edited along with Mary-Ann Ray and Mirko Zardini. His work has also been published in numerous other journals on contemporary urban design and theory, including Log, Praxis and Lotus International, and he has taught and lectured widely, including at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), at its 2001 conference "Things in the Making: Architecture and the Pragmatist Imagination".
Having received a B.A. magna cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania in 1980, Mr. Sherman graduated with an M.Arch with Distinction from Harvard University Graduate School of Design in 1985, where he was awarded the Henry Adams Medal for highest-ranking graduate, and later, in 1995, the Wheelwright Traveling Fellowship.
Risky Business
<p>With cities developing today at a rate that is outpacing architects’ and planners’ efforts to shape them, there is no longer sufficient time to plan. As a result, architecture’s role in the city has fundamentally changed from that of designing buildings which both engage and are a product of their context, to that of creating commodified experiences--like everything else, tied first and foremost to speculation in future identity, and real estate values. </p>
The End of Planning (as we know it)
<p><span style="font-family: 'Trebuchet MS'"><font size="2">For as often as the Gulf Coast and 9/11 debacles and their aftermaths have been analyzed, one discussion has been conspicuously missing: how starkly those events, natural and man-made, revealed the inability of planning today--however professionally designed, organized and regulated—to contend with the vagaries of circumstances and conditions out of its control.