Why Isabel?
Isabel has a passion for contemporary and bold design expression of landscapes where culture, identity, architecture, engineering, and poetry form unique concepts within the urban context of her work. She is an accomplished design initiator with a consistent eye toward collaboration and integration of art and allied disciplines. Her role in the Think-Tank is Designer—imagining a bold landscape strategy for the center and its waters edge through a European lens of urban landscape design.

Isabel’s Practice
Isabel is a principal and landscape architect with Sasaki Associates. She has led the design of high profile projects all around the world on award-winning urban, academic, cultural, and hospitality landscape projects in the United States, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Her work includes large urban scale public landscapes, plazas, botanical gardens, waterfront developments, art installations, and the design of sculpture parks. She inspires a love of beauty—understanding that beautiful spaces are successful spaces people want to be in and care for.

Why Blaine?
Blaine combines a passion for the craft of making things with a design activist’s zeal for championing the culture of the commons. He’s worked for more than a dozen years in the urban context as a landscape architect, maker, and advocate while bridging the disciplines of design, engineering, and the social sciences to make space for experimentation and play. His role in the Think-Tank is Maker—strategizing and prototyping things, places, and experiences at the center.

Blaine’s Practice
Blaine is a principal and co-founder of Rebar’s Art and Design Studio, a hybrid practice in the Mission that combines design thinking with the artist’s eye. Projects like Park(ing) Day and the Panhandle Bandshell demonstrate Rebar’s belief that the human environment—public spaces in particular—should be infused with ecological knowledge, resilient to changing social conditions, responsive to creative impulses, and filled with opportunities for benevolence, conviviality, and delight.

Why Gina?
Gina brings to each project a passion for the process of making vibrant landscape spaces—from the conceptual design to the details of implementation—with a particular focus on the life and use of urban, public environments and waterfront developments within the United States. Her role in the Think-Tank is Urbanist—imagining, engaging, and orchestrating landscape strategies for the center and its waters edge.

Gina’s Practice
Gina is a principal and landscape architect with Sasaki Associates, and serves as the Chair of Sasaki’s Urban Studio—an energized and interdisciplinary group of practitioners solely dedicated to the improvement of quality of life in American cities through rigorous planning, exceptional design, and strong community partnerships. Her work in this realm encompasses a wide range of scales and project types—from public parks and plazas to large scale landscape planning and waterfront projects. She loves the complexities that come with designing for urban life—including community engagement, use and abuse of public space, and environmental dynamics.

Why Jeffrey?
Jeffrey has extensive experience working with cities, developers, and regional governments fostering economic development while improving quality of life through smart transportation investments. He uses direct community involvement to ensure long term success and feasibility. His expertise covers four key areas: planning for urban infill and new towns, transit-oriented development, regional transit planning, and multimodal planning. His role in the Think-Tank is Mover—enabling a holistic approach to mobility systems in and around the center.

Jeffrey’s Practice
Jeffrey is a Principal at Nelson\Nygaard Consulting, a practice distinguished by its commitment to planning transportation systems and mobility improvements that help build vibrant, sustainable communities. A fully multi-modal approach, drawn from the real world experiences of industry specialists, is a hallmark of every Nelson\Nygaard project. Covering all modes of transportation, Nelson\Nygaard specializes in planning, operations, and implementation.

Why Douglas?
Douglas advances new models of public and private space anchored in compelling visions of the emerging urban condition. An engaged member of the SF design community, he is an adjunct professor at the CCA as well as the former Chair and current Executive Committee member of the SFMOMA’s Architecture + Design Forum. His experience includes residential, educational, commercial, civic, and hospitality building and renovation projects, as well as exhibition design, product design, furniture, and custom lighting fixtures. His role in the Think-Tank is Architect—imagining adaptive strategies for the center’s vertical fabric as well as the deployment of temporary programs.

Douglas’ Practice
Douglas is the founder and principal of envelope A+D, an award-winning collaborative design firm made up of deep listeners, critical thinkers, thoughtful interpreters, and prolific generators of ideas. They seek to create an immersive architecture that alters people’s relationships to each other and heightens awareness by intelligently disrupting the normative condition.

Why Kristina?
Kristina has consulted on ecological design for large urban projects, bringing an emphasis on the special circumstances of coastal cities and water infrastructure systems. Kristina uses her knowledge of ecology to develop innovations that support biodiversity and human health, and combines these insights with her design skills to propose aesthetic experiences that help people adapt to climate change. Her role in the Think-Tank is Ecologist—exploring ways of increasing the ecological performance of the site and its aquatic edge.

Kristina’s Practice
Kristina recently joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley after leading the Department of Landscape Architecture at Virginia and holding regular faculty positions at the University of Washington and MIT. Her professional practice focuses on the integration of water and water-related systems such as riverfront parks, stormwater management, sea-level rise strategies, and urban water and infrastructural systems.

Why Anya?
Anya has developed her expertise in sustainable food and business management with over a decade of hands-on experience including leading the California Farm-to-School Initiative; launching the California Buy Fresh, Buy Local Campaign; directing Slow Food Nation; founding Live Culture Co.; spearheading Eat Real, a series of annual events that engage hundreds of thousands of Americans in sustainable agriculture and DIY food-making; launching the Food Craft Institute; and most recently, Belcampo. Her role in the Think-Tank is Advocate—furthering the potential of sustainable food businesses to find a home and thrive at the center.

Anya’s Practice
Anya recently became the CEO of Belcampo where she leads a group of innovative agricultural companies seeking to make good food the old fashioned way on a larger scale than ever before. Belcampo owns and manages agricultural ventures across the globe—each sharing a commitment to sustainably-managed land, the principles of organic agriculture and a focus on delicious, authentic foods.

Why Matt?
Inspired by the creativity and sense of community found in Asian night markets while living in Japan, Matt has played an integral role in the street food movement in the Bay Area, first through his successful ramen cart, Tabe Ramen, and later as the founder of Off the Grid, an organization dedicated to creating shared experiences through street vendor gatherings. His role in the Think-Tank is Purveyor—harnessing the power of a unique food experience to connect the center community.

Matt’s Practice
Off the Grid began with the simple idea that grouping street food vendors together creates an experience that connects communities. Since then, Off the Grid has developed urban markets that activate underutilized spaces. Currently, Off the Grid operates 18 weekly markets in the greater Bay Area, and works with more than 100 vendors weekly.

Why Jay?
Jay worked both at the NYC office of SOM—gaining early experience on an urban scale—and as an architect for the San Francisco Architectural Heritage. He has applied his thoughtful and deliberate approach to the restoration of historic buildings to projects throughout California and has touched nearly every important historical renovation project in San Francisco. Jay’s role in the Think-Tank is Restorer—bringing his years of experience working with historic sites in the San Francisco bay area to our team.

Jay’s Practice
Page & Turnbull is interested in the intersection between the built surroundings we have inherited and the way we live now. Their mission is to imagine change within historic environments through design, research, and technology. The firm was established in 1973 to provide architectural and conservation services for historic buildings, resources, and civic areas. They were one of the first architecture firms in California to dedicate their practice to historic preservation and are among the longest-practicing such firms in the country.

Why Andrew?
Andrew Wood has worked in the performing arts industry for over twenty years. As founder of the San Francisco International Arts Festival, he coordinates multiple Bay Area non-profit organizations and artists to produce an annual series of events that comprise the festival. Andrew has worked with many world class international artists and their equally brilliant local counterparts for the festival. His role in the Think-Tank is Presenter—bringing an understanding of the performing arts and their role in the center’s future.

Andrew’s Practice
SFIAF celebrates the arts through an annual gathering that brings together a global community of artists and audiences. The organization produces innovative projects focused on increasing human awareness and understanding, with an emphasis on collaboration between Bay Area and international artists. Prior to creating SFIAF, Andrew was the Director of ODC Theater, worked with presenting organizations for Life on the Water and the San Francisco Ethnic Dance Festival, and served as an artist manager.

Why Ben?
Ben Davis runs two SF-based graphic design and communication firms—Words Pictures Ideas and I Shot Him Because I Loved Him—driven respectively by the mission statements: “Do Good. Have Fun. Learn. Make a Living.” and “Changing Hearts, Minds and Habits.” Ben’s role in the Think-Tank is Communicator—connecting the vision to the broader psychological, social, and cultural fabric that envelops Fort Mason Center.

Ben’s Practice
Founded in 1995, Words Pictures Ideas is a creative agency based in San Francisco that works on amazing social and civic projects, providing solid advice and inspiring ideas and powerful design which typically result in a creative outreach online or in print. Over the past half-decade, the small, passion-driven firm has named and created the visual identities for more than $15 billion in civic and private mega-projects.

Why Stacy?
Stacy Kozakavich’s professional and academic background is in historical archaeology with a specialization in nineteenth and early twentieth-century communities, sites, artifacts, and documents. Through her extensive work in research, archaeological survey, and excavations, she’s been reminded history isn’t just about famous people and places, but about, around, and for all of us. Her role in the Think-Tank is Archeologist—excavating a broader understanding of the fort and its context.

Stacy’s Practice
Currently a Project Assistant at the Observatory Library Exhibit at the Prelinger Library, Stacy provides archival research and consultation as well as layout and design for reproductions and displays. She has served as a project consultant for cultural resource management throughout the Bay Area and taught various university-level courses in American material culture, introductory archaeology, historical archaeology, and archaeological field methods.

Why Dominic?
Dominic Willsdon has curated cultural and educational programs and projects for 12 years in the field of contemporary art at both the Tate Modern and at SFMOMA. The work has primarily been concerned with the possibilities offered by different forms of public space for live, collective, cultural encounters. It has included talks, screenings, performances, educational projects, and artist commissions and has occupied interior and exterior museum sites and site-specific projects. His role in the Think-Tank is Curator—integrating an understanding of the visual arts into the vision.

Dominic’s Practice
Dominic is currently one of the two lead curators for a series of citywide projects which SFMOMA will present during 2013-15. For the past five years, his teaching has comprised two courses: the history of the concept of the public, and the historical and theoretical relationships between education and architecture.