LA DALLMAN is recognized for design works that transform site and culture, expanding the architect’s agency in the spatial and material recalibration of new and existing buildings, infrastructures, and landscapes. The practice has received numerous professional honors from the AIA, BSA and Chicago Atheneum among others, and has exhibited and lectured widely on the nature of design practice as an interconnected field, including at the National Building Museum in DC, the New Museum in NYC, the Danish Architectural Museum, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Houston Museum of Fine Art, and the Roca London Gallery. LA DALLMAN received a Progressive Architecture Award (featured on the cover of Architect Magazine, 2021) for the Granary Transformation, was named an Emerging Voice by the Architectural League of NY, and was honored as the first U.S. recipient of the Rice Design Alliance Prize, an international award recognizing exceptionally gifted architects early in their career. LA DALLMAN’s projects have been featured in Architect, a+t, Architectural Record, Azure, Praxis, and Topos among others, and the first comprehensive monograph of the firm’s work, entitled LA DALLMAN: Middle Front, is forthcoming. 

James Dallman and Grace La founded LA DALLMAN, based in Massachusetts, Wisconsin, and Florida. Projects include civic and residential buildings, public spaces, bridges, dwellings, installations, and furniture. Committed to practice and academia, Grace La serves as tenured Professor and Chair of the Department of Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design; James serves as Visiting Design Critic in Architecture at the Harvard GSD.  

Masami Kobayashi is an active teaching scholar and practitioner in architecture and urban design. As Professor Emeritus Meiji University, he has actively executed architectural education and research internationally, and as Principal of Archi-Media Architects & Associates, he has designed diverse urban spaces and architectural buildings in Japan and overseas. He served as Vice President of Meiji University from 2016 to 2020.  He has taught at Harvard University (2001), and University of California at Berkey (2013).

After studying at the Graduate School of University of Tokyo, he worked at Kenzo Tange associates (URTEC) from 1977 to 1983. Through his work experiences under Tange, he learned professional skills about the strategic process of urban design in diverse countries such as Singapore, France, and Nigeria. After leaving URTEC, he went to the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University to carry out urban research and received a Master in Design Studies (1988). After returning to Japan, he set up his own architectural design firm and joined the Department of Architecture at Meiji University.

His major academic interests are the dynamic interrelationship between the changing modern urban landscape and people’s sustainable satisfaction based on their quality of life, and hence the prediction of Asian Urbanism with longer perspective. He has written many books such as Tokyo Urbanism (World Scientific), Public Space Design with Citizens’ Participation (X-knowledge, 2015),Tokyo Inner-City Project (Gakugei Shuppan, 2003), Boston by Design (Process Architecture, 1991), and he was awarded many prizes such as “Award of Architectural Institute of Japan (2018)” for “Contribution to architectural design education”, “Good Design Special Award (2015)” for “Himeji Station Front North Plaza Project”, “Highest prize of the Design Award (2008)” of “Japan Society of Civil Engineering” for “Kakamigahara Project”, and “Award of Architectural Institute of Japan (2007)” for “Preservation and Regeneration of International House of Japan”.