Hank Koning, FAIA & Julie Eizenberg, FAIA | Superpowers
Hank Koning, FAIA & Julie Eizenberg, FAIA | Superpowers
AIA Colorado 2025 Practice + Design Conference
How can architecture meaningfully improve lives? In this keynote, Koning and Eizenberg explore how designers can use their “superpowers” to address some of today’s most pressing challenges, from mental health and education to housing and climate resilience.
Through projects like the University of Melbourne Student Pavilion, innovative learning environments in Santa Monica Malibu Unified School District, and affordable housing in Los Angeles, they demonstrate how thoughtful design fosters community, supports wellbeing, and creates opportunity. Their work highlights the power of adaptive reuse, flexible learning spaces, community engagement, and sustainable strategies in complex environments.
This talk challenges architects to reject formulaic solutions, embrace cultural diversity, and turn constraints into creative opportunities. From wildfire-responsive design to rethinking housing density, their approach centers on one core principle: lead with quality of life from the very beginning.
Key takeaways include:
• Using modest materials in meaningful ways
• Designing for diversity, choice, and discovery
• Building trust through deep community engagement
• Rethinking codes and constraints as opportunities
• Advocating for design quality through policy and leadership
Watch to learn how architecture can move beyond buildings to create lasting, positive impact in people’s everyday lives.
Learning Objectives:
- Identify design strategies that promote social inclusion and reduce isolation in higher education campus settings.
- Apply lessons from project-based learning design to understand how space configuration can support pedagogical transformation in K–12 public schools.
- Evaluate design approaches that produce equitable, dignified housing—including affordable and permanent supportive housing—within complex regulatory and budgetary constraints.
- Understand how ‘opportunistic’ code reading and cross-grain site planning can generate better environmental and community outcomes in high-density urban housing.
Julie Eizenberg, FAIA, FRAIA, Founding Partner of KoningEizenberg Architecture gives visibility to the design value and potential of community projects and people-oriented practice. Julie teaches and lectures around the world and has shared the practice’s interests in influential monographs including “Architecture isn’t just for special occasions” which highlights the value of social engagement and ’Urban Hallucinations” which examines how the idyll of local shapes neighborhoods.
Hank Koning, FAIA, LFRAIA, LEED AP is a Founding Partner of KoningEizenberg Architecture and leads the firm’s approach to regulatory and technical resolution. His strength with planning and code translate to unexpected opportunities at all scales of project development that propel signature solutions. A member of the U.S. Green Building Council, Hank continues to lead the effort in integrated sustainable design. His community involvement and planning expertise include 7 years of service on the Santa Monica Planning Commission and ongoing voluntary advisory work for the City.
Under their leadership, KoningEizenberg has earned over 200 design and sustainability awards and been widely published in the US and abroad. In 2009, the practice was honored as AIA California’s Firm of the Year and in 2012 and 2019, Hank and Julie were awarded the AIA Los Angeles and Australian AIA Gold Medals, respectively. Most recently, they were honored with the American Academy of Arts and Letters Architecture Award in 2021 and inducted into the National Academy of Design in 2022.