Welcome to Blueprint South Dakota, a blog created by architects in South Dakota to provide a forum for public conversations with citizens, city planners, developers, property owners, designers, public office holders and others. Through these conversations, we want to participate with the public and community leaders in the creation of vibrant, prosperous, beautiful and effective places to live, work and play in South Dakota. Please join us in conversing about design and planning issues in our state.
THE IMPORTANCE OF DIVERSITY IN DESIGN
Architects and engineers have worked together throughout history. These successes could not have been achieved without collaboration and working through differing perspectives and opinions.
SDSU School of Design: Getting to Know Sandra Callies
We’re back with another post featuring architectural teaching staff at SDSU. Featured this week is Instructor of Architecture, Sandra Callies, AIA, NCARB, a registered architect since 2017. Since graduating from the University of Minnesota with both her Bachelor and Master of Architecture in 2015, Callies has gained a plethora of real-world experience. From working in …
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SDSU School of Design: Getting to Know Sean Ervin
In case you haven’t noticed, there are many new faces roaming the halls of Chicoine AME Hall at SDSU, and it’s not just related to the constant influx of new students. The recent years have brought forth an array of bright-eyed professors with bright ideas, and a passion for shaping the future generation of architects. …
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AIA Female Leadership
Following up on last week’s post on the newly elected AIA president, Emily Grandstaff-Rice, it appears that female leadership may be on the rise for AIA. In an article titled “Women in Architecture” published by AIA back in 2020, goals were set for increasing viability and visibility of women in the profession, and this year, …
New Year, New AIA President
A few days late, we’d like to wish everyone a happy start to the year 2023! It has certainly been quite an eventful start over here on the east side of the state with some record snow falls and record snow piles (snow fort competition anyone??). Of course with the fresh snow, the new year …
Pride and Architecture
The gratefulness and thankfulness that is supposed to accompany this season is somewhat at odds with a culture that preaches one to be “proud” of one’s accomplishments or to take “pride” in their work. How often do we hear hear someone tell us to be “proud” of this or that, or even parents telling their …
Obligatory Thanksgiving Post
This week is a bit of a punt (no Thanksgiving football pun intended), as the week quickly got away from me to produce some original content. We’ll try again next week. Instead, I’ll reshare a post put together by some other folks at TSP, about some of the projects we are grateful for being a …
Design Competitions
While still not really a common request by clients in our state and region, design competitions are nonetheless become more prevalent. In recent years, some competitions have been more controversial than others, with such controversy focusing more or less on how they compensate (or rather, didn’t compensate) those competing. With that said, I will cover …
Beauty: What It Is (and Why It Matters… to Architecture)
Full admission, the title of this post is stolen from the title of a book I just finished reading a few months ago, written by John-Mark Miravalle. While it detailed aspects of beauty from the traditional fine arts, it also was broad enough to cover the literary and culinary arts, and even touched on the …
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It Takes a Village
For over 35 years I have had the pleasure of working with Architects, Engineers, Interior Designers, and Landscape Architects as they have used their unique perspective and skill sets in creating our built environment. The Sioux Falls Arts Council (SFAC) Board includes members with backgrounds in law, business, human resources, arts, education, architecture and engineering. For a …
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