Mr. Tang, who graduated from the University of Kansas with Honors in 1989, is a registered Architect at Ferraro Choi and Associates, Ltd. He has 20 years of experience in a variety of projects in retail, high end residential, public housing, military housing, resorts and restaurants and most recently, healthcare. His skills include design, project management and construction management for both interiors and architecture.

His hobbies include drawing, painting, model building, carving, printmaking, sculpting, and making Halloween costumes.

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Lorena Yamamoto—Second Honorable Mention

After spending 10 years in Los Angeles and the Bay Area, Lorena Yamamoto returned home to Hawaii and joined her father’s practice, Roy K. Yamamoto Architect, AIA, Inc. in late 2009.  Lorena’s work is an assemblage of various influences from her academic and professional career blended with her interests in graphic design, rapid prototyping and sustainability.  Lorena has been involved with LEED certified projects at varying scales as a designer with Los Angeles firms Johnston Marklee & Associates and Graft, Inc. She played an integral role on project teams for the first LEED gas station, Helios House in Los Angeles and the largest LEED certified development in the world, City Center in Las Vegas. Lorena also received a comprehensive perspective on sustainability as a designer for David Baker & Partners in San Francisco, where the firm focused on minimizing environmental impact through transit oriented, mixed-use developments throughout the Bay Area.

Lorena received a B.S. in Architectural Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Master of Architecture degree from the University of California Los Angeles School of Architecture & Urban Design. During her studies at UCLA, she received the Mimi Perloff Fellowship in 2006 and also graduated with distinction in 2008.

Being a person with a graphic design background and a strong interest in architecture, I was especially excited to see Jennifer Siegal’s lecture. It might have been her portfolio of work or the title of her lecture, but for me, it was her portrait. Symmetrical: her arms fallen comfortably to her sides with her hands meeting in front as she holds a pair of red wings firmly… held high enough as if she is offering it to you, the viewer. The gift of mobility.

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Her work is clean, sophisticated, well thought out, and representative of our times. It has everything you need in a structure… and nothing you don’t need. It is an expression of our values of today combined with our needs of tomorrow. (Tomorrow is the key word.) She said, “When you’re not pushed to perform, there’s a reluctance to see beyond what’s already here.” Siegal has overcome this.

Using reclaimed and high-performance materials, she designs modular pieces, prefabricated, then assembled on site to what will become… a home. “These buildings have no borders,” she said.

After the lecture, the young aspiring architect beside me said, “She’s everything I thought she would be: strong, intelligent, and confident.” He forgot to add “brilliant.”