Dr. Andrew Gipe-Lazarou awarded the 2024 Sally Brown Excellence in Design Education Award

We’d like to congratulate Dr. Andrew Gipe-Lazarou on winning the 2024 Sally Brown Excellence in Design Education Award!

This award honors exceptional educators who have significantly advanced design education through innovative teaching methods, impactful research, and unwavering dedication to student success. The award aims to inspire excellence and foster a community committed to shaping the future of design.

In the spring of 2022, in collaboration with the Virginia Department for the Blind and Visually

Impaired, Gipe-Lazarou organized the first annual Blind Design Workshop, the world’s only career exploration experience in architecture for individuals with vision impairment. The workshop aimed not only to empower participants with the understanding that they can meaningfully impact the design of the built environment, but to provide an experience which they can leverage to gain entry into higher education and the profession. Furthermore, it challenged sighted students of architecture, who led the workshop under his guidance, to question the ocular-centrism / discover the multi-sensory potential of their profession and to consider the significance of accessible space-making. To date, the workshop has secured nearly $75k of external funding for our school, to support the education of our students.

His teaching, research, and university service evidenced a strong commitment to the centering of diverse backgrounds and perspectives in the discipline, with particular emphasis on learning from and creating opportunities for individuals with disability. Despite more than a quarter of the population (more than 61 million adults) living with a disability in the United States, architecture has the lowest rate of disability representation at 8%. Gipe-Lazarou carries out this commitment with the conviction that alternative modes of interacting with the built environment can inform meaningful and innovative approaches to multi-sensory design and temper architecture’s tendency to prioritize what is seen over what is felt.

Dr. Andrew Gipe-Lazarou will be presented with this award at The Branch Museum of Architecture & Design on October 18.