Dean’s Medal for Service
Leslie J. Laskey, Professor Emeritus
St. Louis, Mo. / Manistee, Mich.
Laskey is professor emeritus of architecture at Washington University, where he trained generations of students in a career spanning five decades. As a young man, Laskey studied at the Institute of Design in Chicago (now the Illinois Institute of Technology) with founder and American Bauhaus pioneer Lászlò Moholy-Nagy. He came to the School of Architecture in 1956 and soon was charged with developing the basic design program. In 1982, he received the Washington University Distinguished Faculty Award and in 1986 received a Distinguished Professor Award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture. Named professor emeritus in 1987, Laskey remains a prolific painter and printmaker, dividing his time between St. Louis and a second home in Manistee, Mich.
Distinguished Alumni Awards
Stephen N. Abend, FAIA (BArch ’62)
Kansas City, Mo.
Abend is president and principal-in-charge of design for ASAI Architecture, a full-service, Kansas City-based architectural firm nationally recognized for design excellence. Over the past three decades, virtually every project Abend has worked on as lead architect has been cited for excellence. Under his leadership, ASAI Architecture has received more than 150 major awards for architecture, urban design, interior design and planning, and its work has been featured in every major American architecture and interior design journal as well as in numerous books. In 1988, Abend was elected to the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects (AIA).
Alan E. Goldberg, FAIA (BArch ’54)
New Canaan, Conn.
Goldberg began his career in New York working on a number of important buildings, including the Seagram’s Building. This experience heightened his interest in the Bauhaus Movement and helped shape his thoughts on architecture. In 1966, Goldberg joined Eliot Noyes & Associates, one of the nation’s most respected design firms. He was named the head of the firm’s architectural practice in 1972, became a partner in 1974, and in 1977 became the sole principal under the firm’s new name, AG/ENA. His leadership in design and design management is evident in a remarkably wide range of projects — office buildings, research laboratories, exhibit buildings, computer centers, corporate training centers, museums, hotels, passenger terminals, schools, houses, interiors — for major clients such as IBM and Mobile Oil.
Aseem Inam (MAUD ’92)
Ann Arbor, Mich.
Inam is assistant professor of urban planning at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. He has written widely on urban design issues for Mimar: Architecture in Development; The International Journal of Urban Policy and Planning; Journal of the American Planning Association and other publications. Recent research includes studies on Developer-Planner Interaction in Transportation and Land Use Sustainability (2000); Transportation and Land Use Innovation: Impacts on Household Residential Choice (1999) and Urban Design as Stimulus (1998). He also recently led design charrettes for the city of Detroit, focusing on the area surrounding Tiger Stadium and the Lower Cass Corridor.
Jack L. Nasar, Ph.D. (BA’69)
Columbus, Ohio
Nasar is professor of city and regional planning at Ohio State University’s Austin E. Knowlton School of Architecture, where he also edits the Journal of Planning Literature. He has published widely on issues of urban design and city planning and is a foremost expert in the field of environmental aesthetics — a field he helped establish with the book Environmental Aesthetics: Theory, Research and Applications (1988). His most recent books — Design by Competition: Making Design Competition Work (1999) and The Evaluative Image of the City (1998) — address the issue of how citizens view buildings and urban areas and how designers can incorporate such assessments into their work.
Laurent J. Torno Jr. (BArch ’62)
St. Louis, Mo.
Torno is principal of Laurent Jean Torno Jr. & Associates, a St. Louis-based architecture firm specializing in historic preservation and adaptive reuse, which he founded in 1975. Torno has directed high-profile public renovations both in St. Louis and around Missouri. From 1984 to 1989, Torno served as special consultant to the Saint Louis Art Museum’s Decorative Arts Period Rooms restorations. In 1993, he worked with the Mark Twain Home Foundation in Hannibal, Mo., to adapt the historic Sonnenberg and Meyer Building into the Mark Twain Museum. Since 2000, he has served as project architect on the excavation and reconstruction of Hannibal’s Huckleberry Finn House, torn down in 1911. In 2003, his widely lauded Forest Park Boathouse opened on the shores of Post-Dispatch Lake.