Dear Colleagues,

It gives me immense pleasure to invite all of you to attend excellent talks on “Developing Cities with Low Footprints” from speakers of corporate sections. There would be two speakers 1) Mr. Gregory Burgess, Senior User Experience Designer, Autodesk, and 2) Mr. Tom Ford, Practice Area Leader, Planning & Urban Design, Gensler.

We are organizing these talks as ‘Sustainability Speech Series’ in association with a firm Collective Responsibility, Shanghai. Mr. Charlie Mathews, Director of Collective Responsibility would also be present at this special event.

Time and location: October 19, 2015, 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM, Room 119, SHUES

This semester is quite busy for all of us; however, I am sure you all would get some time to attend this event.

Kindly encourage your students also to be part of it. For details, kindly go through the attached brochure.

Thanking you very much and looking forward to see you there.

Best regards,

Achal

Speakers

1. Gregory Burgess originally hails from Alberta Canada (just east of the Rocky Mountains) where he first developed an interest in design while on the University of Alberta’s Solar Vehicle project. He has spent the past 5 years living in Shanghai where was blessed to be part of an amazing range of projects including everything from Master Planning visualizations and Project Management to the design of Balance Bicycles, School Campuses, and LEED based Business Accelerators.

The slightly odd background of work, ranging in scale from Product, to Commercial Space, to Master Planning eventually led him to Autodesk - where he now has the privilege to explore at all these scales as part of an amazing group of people developing the Urban Infrastructure software:  InfraWorks 360. 

He is presently the Sr. UXD with Team Lynx whose focus is on bringing Roundabouts into InfraWorks as part of their Road and Highway feature.

2. Tom Ford has been with Gensler since 2012, initially in Hong Kong, before relocating to the Shanghai office in late 2013 to become the Planning & Urban Design Studio Leader. He is a motivated member of multiple project teams and provides senior leadership and urban design expertise to Gensler projects throughout the Asia Region. Tom is particularly interested in the cultural and physical contexts in which large and complex projects are envisioned, planned, and developed. He is highly successful in maintaining good client relationships and is valued by both clients and team members for his collaborative design approach, work ethic, sense of humor, and communication skills.

Prior to joining Gensler, Tom worked throughout Asia beginning in 2010, generally from a base in Hong Kong, and he provided urban design services as a consultant to international firms. This urban design work followed the founding of The Office of Tom Ford in California in 2008. Over the course of Tom’s career, his urban design work and form-based design guideline documents have won awards on both sides of the Pacific Ocean from a variety of organizations, including local and State chapters of the American Planning Association and the Hong Kong Chapter of the American Institute of Architects