2024 Charter Awards Jury

Matthew Bell, Jury Chair

Principal, Perkins Eastman

Matthew Bell, FAIA is Professor of Architecture at the University of Maryland and Principal at Perkins Eastman in Washington, DC. He has served as president of the Neighborhood Design Center, and Director of the Northeast Mayor’s Institute for City Design. His work has been exhibited at the Triennale di Milano and he has served as a juror for the Biennale of Venice (Italy). Bell’s graduate students have won awards from the AIA, the CNU and the Urban Land Institute/Gerald Hines Urban Design and Development Competition. Recent projects with Perkins Eastman include: master plans for the new town of Crown, MD and McMillan in DC; Dunbar High School (DC); the new Garvey Hall (Dining Commons) at Catholic University; Cleveland Park Library (DC); Collection 14 (DC) residential and retail development; and campus master plans for George Washington University and American University. Bell is a Fellow of the American Institute of Architects and his work has received awards from the AIA, the CNU, the USGBC, and the Urban Land Institute. In 2020 he was appointed by Mayor Bowser to the Historic Preservation Review Board in Washington, DC. Bell has degrees in Architecture and Urban Design from the University of Notre Dame and Cornell University.

Diane Jones Allen

Professor and Program Director, University of Texas at Arlington

Diane Jones Allen, MLA, D.Eng., FASLA, PLA is Professor and Program Director for Landscape Architecture, College of Architecture, Planning, and Public Affairs, at the University of Texas at Arlington. As Principal Landscape Architect with DesignJones LLC she became elevated to Fellow in the American Society of Landscape Architects in 2019. Design Jones LLC also received the 2016 American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) Community Service Award under her leadership. Diane also served on the Board of the Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF), serving as Vice President for Education for 2021. Diane is part of one of two cross disciplinary teams that won 2020 SOM Foundation Research Prize focused on examining social justice in urban contexts through research titled “Reclaiming Black Settlements: A Design Playbook for Historic Communities in the Shadow of Sprawl”. Her research and practice are guided by the intersection of environmental justice, identity, and sustainability in cultural landscapes, including “Nomadic” responses to “Transit Deserts,” places of increasing transportation demand and limited access, as discuss in her book “Lost in the Transit Desert: Race, Transit Access, and Suburban Form” published by Routledge Press in 2017. Diane, co-edited “Design for Democracy: Techniques for Collective Creativity”, published by Island Press in 2017. She was a 2021-2022 fellow for Garden and Landscape Studies at Dumbarton Oaks working on her upcoming book “The Maroon Landscape: A Cultural Approach to Climate Resiliency”.

David Baker

Principal, David Baker Architects 

David Baker, FAIA, is the founding Principal of David Baker Architects, a collaborative architecture and urban design firm based in California and Alabama that creates acclaimed communities nationwide. A leader in multifamily housing, David has guided and overseen the design of more than 15,000 homes, more than half of those affordable homes. DBA recently published 9 Ways to Make Housing for People (ORO Editions), an exploration of the philosophy and approach the firm has evolved over the four decades of community-based design. David lectures and teaches widely, including several years developing and co-leading the James R. Boyce Housing Studio Symposium at UC Berkeley.

DBA’s work has garnered more than 500 architectural design honors, including two national AIA COTE Top Ten awards. A Fellow of the AIA since 1996, David has led DBA to be recognized with the 2020 AIA California Firm Award and 2012 Distinguished Practice designation. In 2010 he received the Hearthstone Builder Humanitarian Award, honoring the housing industry’s 30 most influential people of the past 30 years. Along with partner Yosh Asato, David is a founder of StoreFrontLab, a participatory space in San Francisco that explores the storefront as a place of community, creativity, and local industry. He creates ceramic items of utility under the name de Bakker Clay. Learn more about David Baker’s work at www.dbarchitect.com.

Neal I. Payton

Senior Principal at Torti Gallas + Partners 

A Charter Member of the CNU, Neal I. Payton has worked to promote the ideology and the agenda of the Congress since its founding in 1994. As an Architect, Urban Designer and Senior Principal at Torti Gallas + Partners (TG+P), he created and directs the firm's West Coast office in Los Angeles. His design efforts have been honored nationally with AIA Honor Awards for Regional and Urban Design and five Charter Awards from the Congress for the New Urbanism. A frequent contributor to Public Square (the CNU Journal) he has authored “The Metropolis Versus the City” in Landscape Urbanism and its Discontents, and his latest essay entitled “Colin Rowe’s Impact on the New Urbanism” is due to published in The Urban Design Legacy of Colin Rowe in 2023. Before joining TG+P Neal was in academia, beginning at The University of Virginia, and then moving onto visiting positions at Rice University, Washington University in St. Louis and then onto The Catholic University of America. During this he wrote a ground- entitled, “The Machine in the Garden City, Patrick Geddes Plan for Tel Aviv” in the University of Miami’s journal, The New City 3, which offered a significant contribution to the body of knowledge on proto-New Urbanism. He also supported the formation of a CNU international spinoff organization, called the Movement for Israeli Urbanism (MIU), speaking at its inaugural event, participating in its first ever Mayors’ Forum and helping to lead the first public design charrette ever held in Israel.

Rico Quirindongo

Director of the City of Seattle Office of Planning and Community Development 

Rico Quirindongo, AIA, has been working for 28 years to revitalize and reimagine Seattle historic landmarks and neighborhoods. He is the Director of the City of Seattle Office of Planning and Community Development. Rico believes that through proactive design, vision, and multi-agency collaboration, opportunities for social change can be realized through community-invested civic projects.

Rico was a mayoral appointee to the Historic Seattle Council for six years, was a founding member of the National Organization of Minority Architects Northwest Chapter and Rico sat on the AIA+2030 national steering committee, a committee born out of AIA Seattle that has seen to it that 24 cities nationally provided curriculum to help design teams and owners meet the 2030 Challenge. Rico works with organizations to positively influence communities through design and is committed to the betterment of his hometown, Seattle, through public engagement, design, and civic service. Rico is a recognized expert on civic projects and city-convened taskforces to create and execute processes for inclusive and authentic engagement. Rico was chair of the Pike Place Market Preservation and Development Authority Council, was a Downtown Seattle Association board member, and was AIA Seattle President in 2012-13. In 2020, Rico completed his first Ted talk, called Transforming Communities Through Architecture. That same year, he was recognized by AIA as a Citizen Architect. He was given a Commercial Real Estate Leadership Award as a Neighborhood Champion by the Puget Sound Business Journal in 2021.

Rico was a Northwest and Pacific Regional Representative on the AIA Strategic Council, a national think tank of the member organization and was awarded the Jennie Sue Brown Lifetime Achievement Award by the AIA Washington Council in 2022.