Los Angeles

Avideh Haghighi is an Associate Principal and Licensed Architect at ZGF where she dedicates herself to designing a regenerative built environment. As a firm-wide sustainability leader, she guides ZGF teams in discovering synergies between building, social, and ecological processes. Avideh has a diverse body of cutting-edge high performance projects spanning public and private sectors, such as schools, large mixed-use developments and institutional projects, including California’s largest Net Zero Energy, LEED Platinum building currently under construction. With a career equally rooted in design and advocacy, Avideh’s long list of affiliations in the AEC community include former Living Future Los Angeles co-facilitator, former AIA|LA COTE co-chair, current AIA California Climate Change Action Committee member, and current USGBC-LA Board member.

Mariana Ibañez is an Argentinian architect involved in practice, academia, and research. She is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA and the cofounder of Ibañez Kim, a genre-defiant practice that works with sensate materials, atmospheres, and new media to generate architecture, objects, and cities. Their work focuses on the disciplinary core of architecture and its growing periphery, with a focus on the relationship between technology, culture, and the environment. Before joining UCLA, Mariana taught at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design for over a decade and for the past four years at the MIT School of Architecture and Planning. As an author, Mariana has published two edited volumes, Paradigms in Computing by Routledge and Organization or Design? by a+t. She has also written numerous articles and chapters for Wiley and Sons, Harvard Design Magazine, ACTAR, Routledge, and others. Her work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the MAXII museum in Rome, and The National Art Museum in Beijing with projects including work for the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Biennale in Seoul. Mariana received her Bachelor of Architecture from the University of Buenos Aires and her Master of Architecture from the Architectural Association in London.

Tom Wiscombe, born in 1970, is Principal and Founder of Tom Wiscombe Architecture (TWA) in Los Angeles. His work is known for its powerful massing, alluring graphic qualities, and tectonic inventiveness, all underwritten by contemporary ecological thinking. Tom combines his renowned design expertise with a deep knowledge of construction and project delivery– gleaned from a thirty year professional career– to create projects with the highest level of care and craft. His recently released monograph Objects Models Worlds, captures the breadth of his practice and ideas. Tom is also Chair of the Undergraduate Program at SCI-Arc, where he has taught for over 15 years.