 Diane Georgopulos, FAIA
by Heather Livingston
Contributing Editor
Summary: Diane Georgopulos has maintained the title “Architect” during her 22 years at MassHousing, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts’s affordable housing bank, but the scope of her work goes far beyond the title. She recently completed work on the architectural and construction coordination of the $275 million U. S. Department of Housing and Urban Development Demonstration Disposition Program, the largest single investment made in the history of that agency. Georgopulos also developed design guidelines for the Elder Choice Program, a model for state-financed rental assisted-living programs. Her work was recognized in 1995 by Ford Foundation’s Innovations in American Government Award and also by the National Council of State Housing Finance Agencies. In 2005, she received the AIA Thomas Jefferson Award for Public Architecture. Georgopulos also is the current president of the Boston Society of Architects.
Education
My first degree is in environmental design from the State University of New York at Buffalo. John Eberhard, FAIA, was the dean of the school at that time.
Because I finished the program at Buffalo a year early, I went to the University College London, the Bartlett School [of Architecture], for a year and finished my undergraduate work in London. I stayed there for a year and worked in the office of Robert Maxwell. When I got back from Europe, I went to work in Philadelphia for a little while and then decided to go to architecture school. I wound up at MIT in a master’s program. While I was at MIT, I took a year off for a fellowship in New York City called the New York City Urban Fellows program. Then, prior to graduating, I also was a participant in the International Laboratory for Architecture and Urban Design and was in a special visiting student program in Urbino, Italy, which looked at issues of participation and reuse.
Currently read
I’m reading Proust was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer, which is a very interesting book. It’s a compilation of profiles of different inventors and artists and how they are working in manners that actually parallel the discoveries in neuroscience.
I also have a few things on the cooker: Kyra by Carol Gilligan and Constantine’s Sword by James Carroll. I just finished The Architecture of Happiness by Alain de Botton, which is a wonderful book. I’ve been giving it to people because I think it’s such a beautiful statement of what architecture can mean.
Downtime activity
I read. I read and I walk. I’ve been in my own home for 18 years and recently sold it and moved into town, so now I walk everywhere. It’s just wonderful.
MassHousing and its mission
MassHousing was created by Chapter 708 of the Acts of 1966 as a self-supporting, independent public authority charged with increasing affordable rental and for-sale housing in Massachusetts. We made our first loan in 1970 and have since invested more than $9.9 billion to finance more than 88,000 apartments and 55,000 loans for homeowners and homebuyers throughout the state. We have the authority to float bonds, the proceeds of which are lent to private developers to build housing, of which at least 20 percent is affordable for rental and homeownership. We charge fees for our lending like a bank, so our salaries are not paid for by the state budget.
Role at MassHousing
Basically, I review plans and specifications that developers bring to MassHousing for financing through the multi-family affordable housing program. In the recent past, I was project manager for a very large housing development program called the Demonstration Disposition program, where MassHousing acted as HUD’s asset manager and helped them dispose of about 1,280 units of family housing that they could no longer manage. We had access to $275 million and HUD financing to either renovate or demolish and rebuild these units in three Boston neighborhoods. We worked extensively with the residents’ associations in each of the developments because they were all tenanted and brought all of the residents back—or the ones who wanted to come back—to be owners of the development, either by themselves or with profit or nonprofit partners. That was about an 11-year project.
Public sector versus practice
I believed that I could excel in a bureaucracy because when I graduated from MIT, I did not perceive there to be very many opportunities for women to advance in the field through traditional practice. This was in 1982, and if you looked around there were not that many women who were principals. Women were not really being actively courted to become members in firms. I just read the tea leaves and said, “Well, they’re not going to want me, so I should go someplace where I am wanted.” And I went to the public sector and did well.
Addressing the growing poverty rate in the suburbs
I think some of it has to do with the way we perceive economic development opportunities. I think we’re focusing on a scale that is perhaps too big and that we probably need to readjust our concept of how big a business needs to be in order for it to be a creditworthy loan. MassHousing doesn’t make loans to businesses, but I know that small business lending is a whole different kettle of fish. Sometimes renting a space or leasing a space for a business purpose can be onerous because you don’t have three months’ worth of business rent saved up in an account. There’s a wonderful development that I think Michael Pyatok did in San Francisco or the Berkeley area. He created what was like a flexible space where people could rent the equivalent of card tables to small businesses.
The thing that’s so compelling about those kinds of models is that the money circulates in the neighborhood, as opposed to, say, having a chain store that’s going to pay minimum wage jobs, take all the profits out of that business, and bring it to the central office, which could be in Akron, Ohio, or someplace. The consequence of having local businesses is that they’re the ones who actually have the heart to support local enterprises like the baseball team, the bingo group at the church, or whatever it is. They are more invested in the community life because they actually see the community as being their clients. I think that there’s a disconnection when too many businesses in the community are being operated by a chain operation and the profits are deflected back to the home offices as opposed to the profit staying and re-circulating within the community.
How can good design help reverse poverty?
- New housing in close proximity to public transportation that serves areas of employment would be a good start. We should be thinking very strategically about where we’re building, particularly when we’re starting to see gas prices at $3.50 or $4 a gallon.
- Using time-tested materials in affordable housing is probably advisable so that you’re not innovating with applications of materials that would potentially have a higher rate of failure because the households that are likely to be in those units are going to have less resources to fix the problem when and if it does occur. I love innovation, but I’m not sure affordable housing is the place to try it out.
- I think that cost-effective design and materials have to respond to the household. You have to know who the people are who are going to be in that unit or development to understand what the space really needs to be for them. In that way, I think flexibility is a very helpful attribute of a good floor plan so that, for example, if you were doing a townhouse, on the ground floor there would be some space that could be an office, bedroom, or workshop so that it could expand and contract as the family size and circumstances change over time.
- I also think mixed income communities are absolutely the way to go. I don’t agree with building large developments of exclusively low-income or high-income families. The community context should always be a primary concern so that if you are building an affordable housing development in a neighborhood, the context is considered as very important and the new development is considered a value to the neighborhood and not a blighting influence.
And on the urban scale?
I’m a big proponent of density. I think that ground-floor residential units above parking that is hidden and ratio-reduced is probably what we really need to consider, and becoming very direct in our demand for walkable cities, good public transportation, and functioning urban school systems. I don’t think there’s a short answer for that.
What not to miss at the AIA Convention
Any of the tours that the architects can get out to see if they haven’t been here before. There’s so much: Trinity Church, the Boston Public Library, Gropius House. We have the new Institute for Contemporary Art, Gehry’s Stata Center at MIT, Steven Holl’s Simmons Hall at MIT, the Carpenter Center—a Corbu building at Harvard University. There’s just an embarrassment of riches in some ways.
The thing that I intend to have the best time at is going to be the Host Chapter Party. We’re hosting the event at the Boston Public Library in the original McKim, Mead, and White structure, which is just gorgeous. I think it’s going to be wonderful to party in one of the most gracious historic public buildings that we have. Then, for families and sports enthusiasts, the self-guided walking tour of Fenway Park on Saturday morning is going to be terrific. The fact that it’s an iconic urban ballpark in America and that the Sox won the World Series last year doesn’t hurt. Eat your heart out, New York! |
