The League’s FF – Distance Edition, an online version of the long-running First Friday series, is returning to the first Friday of every month, with a new start time of 12 p.m. FF – Distance Edition brings participants on site, offering virtual access to practices’ workspaces and current projects. Following each presentation, join in an open conversation with the designers.

This season’s events feature design practices that are redefining the contemporary public landscape by responding to social and environmental concerns and exploring the intersections of architecture, technology, and ecology.

Lake|Flato was founded in 1984 in San Antonio, Texas, by David Lake and Ted Flato. Over its nearly 40 years of practice, the firm’s work has expanded from single-family homes to major public institutions and urban regeneration projects. At multiple scales, Lake|Flato’s projects blur boundaries between inside and out, embracing the particularities of place and landscape. Its designs evolve in conversation with “vernacular architecture, the honesty of modernism, and the context of our rich and varied landscape,” in the words of the firm. 

Completed projects include: 

• Carraro Residence, a home built from the salvaged and reconfigured steel frame of a shuttered cement plant.
• Confluence Park, a park and living laboratory at the meeting point of the San Antonio River and San Pedro Creek.
• Pearl Brewery District, a 26-acre mixed-use development in San Antonio, revitalizing over 7,000 linear feet of river frontage.
• Dixon Water Foundation Josey Pavilion, an environmental meeting and education center that is Texas’s first certified Living Building.

Current and upcoming projects include: 

• Ryerson Education Facility, a net zero energy building at the trailhead of a forest preserve in Northern Illinois. 
• The Holdsworth Center, a retreat center for Texas’s public educators designed to connect users to the native landscape and neighboring Lake Austin. 
• Trinity University Dicke Hall, a new academic hall unifying Trinity’s Business and Humanities District around a central courtyard and historic grove of live oak trees.

The program will be moderated by Cathleen McGuigan. McGuigan is editor-in-chief of Architectural Record.