2007 Jury Members
Jeremy Newsum, Chairman
Group Chief Executive, Grosvenor Estate
Jeremy Newsum is chief executive and a trustee of the Grosvenor Estate, responsible for international strategy and development of the business. He is a director of TR Property Investment Trust plc; an adviser to Bidwells; chairman of the Property Advisory Committee for the Rector of Imperial College; chairman of the advisory board to the Land Economy Department at the University of Cambridge; a director of Sonae Imobiliaria (Portugal); a past president of the British Property Federation; and trustee of the Urban Land Institute.
Newsum joined Grosvenor in 1976 after reading Estate Management at Reading University. In 1979 he left to join Savills where he advised institutional and corporate clients on commercial property investment and development. In 1984, he established a London office for Bidwells, and in 1987 he returned to Grosvenor, where he has been chief executive since 1989.
Under his leadership, Grosvenor has expanded from its home base in London’s Mayfair and Belgravia neighborhoods to an international property development and investment group with interests across the United Kingdom and Ireland; the Americas; continental Europe; and Australia and the Asia Pacific. Grosvenor manages a portfolio valued at approximately $7.8 billion, with interests in 16 countries.
Bonnie Fisher
ROMA Design Group
Bonnie Fisher is a Principal of ROMA Design Group and Director of Landscape Design. Her project experience ranges in scale from planning for major open space preservation and restoration projects and the planning of new urban districts to the specific design and implementation of urban open space, plazas, and streetscapes.
Fisher is a registered landscape architect, and holds a Masters of Landscape Architecture in Urban Design from UC Berkeley and a Bachelor’s of Arts (Cum Laude) from UCLA. Over the course of her career, she has taught and lectured at various educational and other institutions, has contributed numerous articles and chapters and authored a book (in progress); has served as major speaker at various conferences, such as the National Society of Ecological Restoration, the Urban Land Institute, and the American Planning Association. She has served on numerous awards juries, including the American Society of Landscape Architects and the Congress for New Urbanism, and has also received numerous awards for her professional work. Currently, she serves as a member of the newly formed Urban Forest Council for the City and County of San Francisco and is a member of the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee for the new University of California campus at Merced.
Over the past twenty years, Bonnie has played a key role as the lead designer and planner on a number of projects in California, across the country and around the world. In San Francisco, she has played a longstanding role in the redevelopment of the urban waterfront and its transformation from industrial and maritime uses to a vibrant mixed use urban district served by transit and connected by a necklace of diverse open spaces. Currently, she is actively involved in the urban design effort associated with the replacement of the Alaskan Way Viaduct and Seawall on the Seattle waterfront and is the landscape architect for the design of the Martin Luther King National Memorial on the Capitol Mall in Washington, DC.
Christopher B. Leinberger
The Brookings Institution/University of Michigan
Chris Leinberger is a land use strategist, developer, and author, based in Washington, D.C. He is a Professor of Practice and the Director of a new Graduate Real Estate Development Program at the University of Michigan. Leinberger is responsible for providing leadership to the university’s emerging real estate initiative which has been spearheaded by the architecture college and involves the Stephen M. Ross School of Business and the Law School as well as several other University of Michigan schools and colleges.
He is also a Visiting Fellow at The Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C, focusing on research and practices that help transform traditional and suburban downtowns and other places that provide “walkable urbanity.” In addition, he is a founding partner of Arcadia Land Company, a progressive real estate development firm with projects in downtown Albuquerque; Independence, Missouri; Seaside, Florida; and five projects in the Philadelphia metropolitan area. Leinberger also spent 20 years as managing director and co-owner of Robert Charles Lesser & Co., the country”s largest independent real estate consulting firm.
Leinberger has written award-winning articles for publications such as the Atlantic Monthly, Wall Street Journal, Urban Land magazine, among others, and is the author or has contributed chapters to six books. He has been profiled by CNN, NBC’s Today Show, National Public Radio, Progressive Architecture, among others. Chris is a graduate of Swarthmore College and Harvard Business School.
Witold Rybczynski
Witold Rybczynski, of Polish parentage, was born in Edinburgh, raised in London, and attended Jesuit schools in England and Canada. He studied architecture at McGill University in Montreal, where he also taught; he is currently the Martin and Margy Meyerson Professor of Urbanism at the University of Pennsylvania. His architectural experience has included designing and building houses as a registered architect, as well as researching low-cost housing for which he received a 1991 Progressive Architecture award. In 1993, he was made an Honorary Fellow of the American Institute of Architects, and he has received honorary doctorates from McGill University and the University of Western Ontario. In 2007, he received the Vincent Scully Prize, the Seaside Prize, and the Institute Collaborative Honors from the AIA..He serves on the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts.
Described as “one of our most original, accessible, and stimulating writers on architecture” by Library Journal, Rybczynki is currently architecture critic for the on-line magazine Slate. He has written twelve books on subjects as varied as the evolution of comfort, a history of the weekend, American urbanism, a search for the origins of the screwdriver, and the life of America’s greatest landscape architect. Home has been translated into ten languages, and was nominated for a Governor General’s Literary Prize, while A Clearing in the Distance, a biography of Frederick Law Olmsted, received the J. Anthony Lukas Prize, a Christopher Award, a Philadelphia Athenæum literary award, and was shortlisted for the Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Nonfiction.
His essays appear regularly in the New York Review of Books, and The New York Times, and he has written for The New Yorker and The Atlantic. His latest book (written with Laurie Olin) is Vizcaya: An American Villa and Its Makers. His new book, on real estate development, Last Harvest, will be published in 2007.
Witold Rybczynski lives with his wife Shirley Hallam in Chestnut Hill in Philadelphia.
Paul Schell
Paul Schell was born in Fort Dodge, Iowa in 1937, and graduated from Roosevelt High School in Des Moines. He attended Wartburg College and graduated from the University of Iowa and Columbia Law School. He practiced law in New York City and Seattle, Washington, where he moved with his wife, Pam, in 1967.
Paul determined that his true interest was in the planning and building of urban communities. In 1973 he was appointed Director of the Seattle Department of Community Development. He founded and served as president of Cornerstone Development Company from 1979-87 that created twelve blocks of mixed use with historic preservation in Seattle, multi-block redevelopment in Tacoma, and Portland, Oregon.
In 1989 Paul was elected Commissioner for the Port of Seattle, becoming commission president in 1995. He was asked to serve as acting Dean of the UW College of Architecture and Urban Planning and did so from 1993-96. During that time he built the Office of Sustainability and enhanced the Rome Studies Program.
The Inn at Langley, one of the most awarded resorts in the Northwest, was created and built by Paul in 1989. He is at present adding to the 26-room inn by adding two penthouses. Paul and a friend built another inn in Langley, The Boatyard Inn.
Paul was elected Mayor of Seattle from 1998-2002. During that time he oversaw the building of a new symphony hall, opera house, downtown library and numerous branches, City Hall, Justice Center and 100 new parks and promoted the Seattle Art Museum’s sculpture park.
Upon leaving the mayor’s office, he became a strategic advisor for architectural firm, NBBJ. In 2004 he became a co-developer for a new Four Seasons Hotel and Residences in Seattle, which will open in 2008.
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