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Humana Scholar Sergio Palleroni to discuss sustainable architecture

RELEASED: January 8, 2009

DANVILLE, KY—Sergio Palleroni, a leader in socially conscious architecture for the past two decades, will speak at Centre College on Wednesday, January 14 at 7:30 p.m. in Weisiger Theatre. Palleroni is the national and international award winning co-founder and director of the BaSiC (Building Sustainable Communities) Initiative. He also is an architect, professor and fellow at the Center for Sustainable Practices and Processes at Portland State University in Portland, Ore. His talk, titled "Farming the City and Other Urban Strategies to Achieve a Healthy Planet," is free and open to the public.

The BaSiC Initiative, founded in 1995, is a collaboration of faculty and students from the University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture that supports communities in initiating development using appropriate technologies that reinforce local values.

One of Palleroni's most ambitious undertakings has been the Katrina Furniture Project, which aims to salvage and reuse the destroyed building stock of New Orleans. Working at studios around the city, starting in the Ninth Ward, students and faculty design prototypes for simple furniture and build it with old-growth cypress, long-leaf pine and other materials previously destined for the landfill. The team teaches local residents how to make the furniture, in addition to the fundamentals of operating a workshop safely.

Palleroni's work has received numerous honors including the American Institute of Architects/Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture National Education Award (1997); the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards Prize for Creative Integration of Practice and Education in the Academy (2003); and the U.S. National Design Award (2005), an award given annually by the Smithsonian and the White House Millennium Project.

In addition, his projects have received national and international design awards and public recognition from Mexico, India, Nicaragua, Taiwan, China and Spain.
 
Palleroni's work is the subject of one segment of a PBS six-part series on sustainability, "Design-E2," which features the work of worldwide leading advocates of sustainability. Additionally, his work was recently the subject of two books, "Studio at Large: Architecture in Service of Global Communities" and "Architecture Like You Give a Damn," which further explore the BaSiC Initiative's efforts to improve and make sustainable the lives of citizens around the world.

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Founded in 1819, Centre College is ranked among the U.S. News top 50 national liberal arts colleges. Consumers Digest ranks Centre No. 1 in educational value among all U.S. liberal arts colleges. Centre alumni, known for their nation-leading loyalty in annual financial support, include two U.S. vice presidents and two Supreme Court justices. For more, visit http://www.centre.edu/web/elevatorspeech/

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