Docomomo US is pleased to announce two new guest speakers for the opening and closing receptions, Sid Snyder and Dean Sakamoto. We are also excited to welcome special honored guest Alexandra Lange. 

Sid Synder, architect and business partner of Vladimir Ossipoff for over 30 years, will welcome guests at our opening night event at the Outrigger Canoe Club. 

Mr. Snyder worked with Ossipoff for over 30 years, designing many of the buildings that the office was known for. At Ossipoff, Snyder and Rowland, the design concepts were based on strong foundations of context and nature. Snyder and Ossipoff were considered the masters of indoor-outdoor living spaces in Hawaii, known for capturing natural elements in design. They were well ahead of the times for green practices, using passive design before it was a common term.

Dean Sakamoto, FAIA, Principal of Dean Sakamoto Architects and founder of the SHADE group (Sustainable Humanitarian Architecture Design for the Earth), will close out the week at IBM.

Mr. Sakamoto is an educator and practicing architect with a national presence and diverse local expertise. As an educator, he served on the faculty of the Yale University School of Architecture and is currently a lecturer at the Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and associate affiliate faculty at the University of Hawaii at Manoa in the Department of Urban and Regional Planning. His New Haven and Honolulu based firm, Dean Sakamoto Architects, is known for its environmentally sensitive and culturally specific designs. He is the architect of the Juliet Rice Wichman Botanical Research Center at the National Tropical Botanical Garden on Kauai, Hawaii, a LEED Gold certified and hurricane resilient building and recipient of the 2010 American Institute of Architects (AIA) Honolulu Award of Excellence. Mr. Sakamoto currently serves on the AIA National Advisory Committee on Resilience and is the lead developer of HURRIPLAN: Resilient Building Design for Coastal Communities, a Federal Emergency Management Agency certified professional training program offered at the National Disaster Preparedness Training Center. Mr. Sakamoto earned a bachelor’s degree in architecture from the University of Oregon, a master’s degree in architecture from Cranbrook Academy of Art, and a master’s degree in environmental design from Yale University.

Alexandra Lange, architecture critic for Curbed, will be a special honored guest of the Symposium.

Her work has appeared in numerous design publications including Architect, Harvard Design Magazine, Metropolis, and T Magazine, as well as in New York Magazine, the New Yorker, and the New York Times. She has been a featured writer at Design Observer and an Opinion columnist at Dezeen. Her most recent book is The Design of Childhood: How the Material World Shapes Independent Kids. She was also a jury member for the 2019 Modernism in America Awards. If you don't follow her on Instagram and Twitter, you should.