Valerie Hassett, AIA

by Heather Livingston
Contributing Editor

Summary: Valerie Hassett, AIA, IIDA, LEED-AP, is a registered architect and an interior designer. Hassett is the past president of the Mid-Atlantic chapter of IIDA, the president-elect of AIA Northern Virginia, and an AIA150 champion.

Education: I have a BFA in Interior Design from Virginia Commonwealth University and an MArch from the Virginia Tech Washington-Alexandria Architecture Consortium.

Becoming an AIA150 champion: The request went out [for champions] from AIA National. The current [AIA Northern Virginia] president asked me and I didn’t move one step to the left fast enough. He said, “I’m looking for somebody to volunteer” and he knew that I was a soft touch and that I would do it. I knew that AIA150 was going to occur while I was president-elect. That’s not as intense of a position as the presidency, so it allowed me to take on the task. AIA150 actually has been in place and we’ve been meeting and preparing over the past year, so it’s really been a two-year commitment.

The experience of being a champion: On a personal level, I have been able to meet some really great people. We’ve had opportunities to get all the champions together, so it’s been nice to meet people from different chapters across the country and hear about the important issues in their particular regions or state. I think that in a broader sense it’s been nice to do projects that are focused toward community outreach. Our chapter does some community outreach and the committees that I work on interact with our local communities, but it’s nice to be involved in something that’s part of a large matrix of different activities that are all focused on AIA members having a positive effect on their local communities.

Impact of AIA150 on communities: I think it has to be an ongoing dialogue and it has to be something that we do over and over again. I think that as we become more involved it will have more impact. It’s a cumulative process.

We’re developing the concept of the “Citizen Architect.” We’re trying to place architects in local and statewide committees that deal with our political issues like boards of architectural reviews, the historic committees, and zoning boards for all of our different jurisdictions. Although architects have done it in the past, we’re trying to do it in an organized way to make sure that architects who might be willing to volunteer to do those types of things have access to information on the positions available. It will be like a clearinghouse. Our local chapter has over 50 different jurisdictions, so just keeping up with what’s available in all the different committees is a huge job. We’re still gearing up and perfecting it because we want to do it in a way that isn’t a tremendous burden for the volunteers.

Architecture Week: Architecture Week was a little bit different for AIA Northern Virginia this year because it was in many ways usurped by AIA150. A lot of what we do traditionally with Architecture Week was refocused on AIA150 celebration activities. We had a series of proclamations done by six local jurisdictions and local Architecture Week programs to go along with state and national Architecture Week. We had an exhibit about Glenn Brown, a local architect who was the first executive secretary of the AIA [when the Institute moved from New York to Washington] and he did a lot to solidify the L’Enfant plan [for the layout of Washington, D.C.]. He also did a lot of documentation of the city of Alexandria and some important structures there, so we had an exhibit of his drawings and work as an architect. We’re going to take that exhibit and put it on our Web site so that it will be available to anybody who’s interested.

We have another program [that’s evolved] into an ongoing event. We have architects who go out to local elementary schools and talk with students in the third to seventh grades. They do projects together and get an introduction to what architecture is and what architects do so that if they’re interested they can become architects or at least become better aware as clients. This year we had their projects focus on the 10 principles of livable community. The kids did really well and we had a local exhibit of what they produced.

We partnered with the Torpedo Factory in Old Town Alexandria to do an exhibit called Sense of Place. We invited architects and artists to document something in place and reference it again back to the 10 principles of livable design. We’re also doing a weekend rendering class with the Torpedo Factory. There are going to be different artists as instructors who paint, do pen and ink, photography, and watercolors, so a broad range of media types will be available. Then, there will be an exhibit of what comes from that later this year.

Blueprint for America: AIA Northern Virginia had two different Blueprinting projects. This spring we had an event at the National Museum of Women in the Arts called Women Creating Community that discussed livable communities. Women Creating Community had a panel of architects including Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, Kathryn Prigmore, Kate Schwennsen, and Susan Maxman and it was basically a discussion about what creates a livable community. We went out into the community and asked people, “What do you think makes livable communities?” We asked a range of people and then took a photo of the person and made a slideshow of the photos and their answers. We started the event with that, then we had some directed questions, and then we had a dialogue between the panelists and the audience on how we can affect our communities to make them more livable for the people in them. That went on for three hours and I think a lot of people wished that it could go on a little bit longer.

We’re going to take that slideshow and put it on our Web site. We’re talking about making it so that people can add their own answers to that question so that it becomes interactive. One of the things we’re looking at is how to make the work that we’ve done for this special year be something that continues past AIA150. Our Web site is an easy tool for us to use to reach out to people.

Our second Blueprinting program will take place this fall. We’re having a student design charrette that will look at the future of the Martin Luther King Library, the main library for the District of Columbia. It was designed by Mies van der Rohe and right now there’s a bit of a public and political furor about whether they will keep the building as a library or some other use or rip down the building and put up another structure. So we’re partnering with the AIA DC and AIA Potomac Valley chapters to do a design charrette on what might be the proper use for that building or that site.

Most pressing issue facing components: The AIA right now is fortunate that it’s in a phase of growth. A lot of components—including our chapter—are dealing with issues of how to grow and expand service to our members, if we should expand staff, how to deal with the new technologies, and how successful we are at giving members what they need from the association.

Current read: I’m reading a biography of Eileen Gray by Caroline Constant. It’s interesting to me because Eileen Gray did not do anything to promote her own work and for a long time very little was known about her. This is a thorough accounting of her as a person and her work and I find it really interesting.

What architects can do to better engage the non-design community in a dialogue about architecture and livable communities: I think the first step is for them to know we want a voice at the table. When a question comes up, a politician has to be aware that a group like the AIA exists, and then beyond that, that we have an interest in a wide range of areas. I think that many architects have a need to serve the profession by serving within the community and being actively involved in decision making committees. A lot of times the decision making happens before the public is even aware of it and we need to be there early enough to really affect the decision making. I think a lot of architects are not politically active. It’s hard to make time for it, but it’s really important. It’s important for us and how we’re practicing today and it’s important for how our children will live tomorrow because a lot of the decisions made about community are ones that we live with for decades. If we go down an unfortunate path, it takes a lot to undo bad decisions.