Gulak Lecture
Car-Optional Neighborhoods for the New Era
American cities are in a period of rapid change, and an ever-greater focus is needed to make them livable, convenient, beautiful, enduring, and environmentally responsible. This moves urban design to the center of decision-making for both private investors and public leaders and requires strategic rethinking of the dominance of automobiles in our daily lives. This talk will explore new thinking about neighborhood design and street design, including the “Ten Ingredients for Car-Optional Neighborhoods.”
Victor Dover, FAICP, LEED-AP is an urban designer and town planner whose work spans 22 states and five continents. He is known for the designs of Glenwood Park in Atlanta, Georgia, South Main in Buena Vista, Colorado, I’On in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, as well as the downtown plans for many cities including Richmond, Virginia. He co-authored Street Design: The Secret to Great Cities and Towns (Wiley, 2014 and 2024), the leading textbook on the subject, and has been awarded both the John Nolen Medal for contributions to urbanism (2010) and the Seaside Prize (2024).
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ABOUT THE GULAK LECTURE
The Wilder School brings leading experts in planning, architecture, or urban design to VCU each year through the annual Morton B. Gulak Lecture in Urban and Regional Planning.
Launched in 2013, the lecture series honors the memory of Morton B. Gulak, Ph.D., who helped found the Master in Urban and Regional Planning program more than 40 years ago.
Gulak, who died in 2012, taught at VCU for 38 years. He inspired legions of students in the areas of urban design, urban revitalization, physical planning, and the application of professional planning methods.
PAST LECTURES
2023
Join architect Zena Howard for an exploration of individual and shared experiences at the intersection of urban design, art, history, anthropology and public policy.
View the 2023 lecture on YouTube
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Zena Howard, FAIA, LEED AP, is principal and managing director with the architecture and design firm Perkins&Will.
Howard's career has been defined by visionary, complex, and culturally significant projects – like Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. and The Durham County Human Services Complex in Durham, North Carolina – that navigate social issues of dignity, equity, and justice in cultural and civic places. She has been recognized as a citizen architect for shaping architecture through Remembrance Design, a design process that responds to inequity and injustice by restoring lost cultural connections and honoring collective memory and history.
"One of the throughlines of my life and career has been an understanding of how cultural identities manifest through buildings, parks, and places. With my work as an architect, I have been able to help African Americans and other underrepresented groups share their vital stories. Whether a somber memorial or a site for celebration, cultural projects offer our diverse communities a unifying sense of self and create a greater understanding that heals and transcends divisions." – Zena Howard
Howard recognizes both the shared and individual sense of experience in the built environment – the emotional connection between people and spaces. This guides her role as Global Cultural and Civic Practice Chair and a body of work that unifies communities, strengthening public wellbeing and advancement.
Curiosity and compassion also drive Howard's approach with teams. She embraces cross-disciplinary collaboration with a broad range of specialists in urban design, art, history, anthropology, and public policy. As a founding member of Perkins&Will’s global Diversity and Inclusion Council and through advocacy and mentoring, she advances diversity within the architecture profession.
2022
Christopher J. Howard, an accomplished architect and scholar whose commentary and design proposals on monuments and memorials have earned him national recognition, was the 2022 presenter. His lecture was “Civic Art, Justice and Inclusion.”
One of the nation’s foremost architects and opinion leaders on reclaiming racially-charged statues, memorials and heritage buildings, delivered the 2022 Morton B. Gulak Lecture in Urban and Regional Planning on Oct. 27.
Christopher ‘CJ’ Howard, an architect and assistant professor in the School of Architecture and Planning at The Catholic University of America, discussed how Richmonders could jump-start the Herculean task of transforming a major thoroughfare once dotted with Confederate statues into a symbolically inclusive one. Howard, whose commentary and design proposals on monuments and memorials have garnered national attention, including the 2019 Leicester B. Holland Prize, for comprehensive documentation of the Lyceum building in Old Town Alexandria and an award-winning entry for a Contrabands’ and a Freedmen’s Cemetery Memorial in Alexandria, Va., offered a vision for moving forward that included investment in the six former pedestal circles as a dynamic civic space featuring art that might serve as a catalyst for racial reconciliation. Under Howard’s vision, the new circles would be mounted on the former Confederate pedestals but feature installations emphasizing a diverse range of historical figures, symbolizing the city’s maturation toward greater justice, equity, and liberty.
“America has complex and deep sins, but not insurmountable ones," said Howard.
"We have in our founding a great capacity for self-correction and maturation through virtue. Virtues such as prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance are written in our DNA making it very possible to achieve peace with this task. Richmond, in its unique circumstances, has an incredible opportunity that does not exist to this extent for any city in our nation to take this lead in the mending of our nation as a model of how to bring about welfare, justice, liberty, and unity.”
View the 2022 lecture on YouTube
2019
The 2019 speaker was Gary Hack, a professor emeritus and the former dean of the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania, who has developed and advised on plans for cities, neighborhoods, and developments in over 35 cities in the US, Canada, and Asia, including the redevelopment of Prudential Center in Boston and collaboration with Studio Daniel Libeskind on the winning entry for the redevelopment of the World Trade Center.
View the 2019 lecture on YouTube
2018
The 2018 speaker was Majora Carter, a leading urban revitalization strategy consultant, real estate developer and Peabody Award-winning broadcaster. She is responsible for the creation and implementation of numerous green-infrastructure projects, policies, and job training and placement systems.
2017
The 2017 speaker was Toni L. Griffin, founder of Urban Planning and Design for the American City. Through her New York City-based practice, Griffin served as project director for the long-range planning initiative of the Detroit Work Project, and in 2013 completed and released Detroit Future City, a comprehensive citywide framework plan for urban transformation.
View the 2017 lecture on YouTube
Previous years
Previous Gulak Lecturers include Sara Zewde, a designer at Gustafson Guthrie Nichol, and renowned planners Dhiru A. Thadani, Ellen Dunham-Jones, and Jeff Speck.