Michael Christoff

Welcome to my new - and pretty simple - homepage.

My intent with this page is to briefly define and connect the various things I am involved with. I will continue to provide updates and links as new information regarding each effort becomes available. Hope you enjoy.


Cleveland Design Competition
http://www.clevelandcompetition.com

The annual Cleveland Design Competition is an open, anonymous, insgle-stage, ideas competition founded as a tool for generating ideas around under-utilized sites and showcasing the talent of emerging designers on Cleveland’s built and unbuilt environment.

Now in its third year, the 2009 Cleveland Design Competition hopes to build on the excitement generated from the previous two years where over 250 designers from around the world looked at two very different sites and program requirements.



PechaKucha Night Cleveland
http://www.pecha-kucha.org/cities/cleveland

As we all know, give a mic to a designer (especially an architect) and you’ll be trapped for hours. The key to PechaKucha Night is its patented system for avoiding this fate. Each presenter is allowed 20 images, each shown for 20 seconds each – giving 6 minutes 40 seconds of fame before the next presenter is up. This keeps presentations concise, the interest level up, and gives more people the chance to show.

Idea Box Cleveland
http://www.ideaboxcleveland.com

Idea Box is a small group of friends that got together to share energy, unique skills in varied professions, resources, networks, and the desire to positively impact the community here in Cleveland.

FORUM Architectural Services
http://www.forumarc.com

This is where I live...I mean work. Check out some of our work. I've been here for almost 5 years now.

Cleveland Design Competition Jury

The jury for the 2009 Cleveland Design Competition has been finalized and it is pretty incredible….cannot wait to see the review of Submissions in January…..

2009 Cleveland Design Competition Jury

Stanton Eckstut
Founding Principal, Ehrenkrantz Eckstut & Kuhn Architects (EEK)

Stan Eckstut, EE&K’s senior principal, has a national reputation as an innovator and leader in large-scale architecture extending back over thirty years to his pioneering work designing the master plan for Battery Park City. His singular understanding of architecture as a practice that creates and sustains the public realm is evident in all his designs, from large-scale waterfront developments and intermodal transportation hubs to campuses, schools, and even prototypes for bus shelters. Stanton is currently assisting the Cleveland-Cuyahoga County Port Authority is developing a master plan for over 100-acres of lakefront property located north of the Competition Site.

Vincent Chang
Principal, Grimshaw Architects


Vincent has been with Grimshaw since 1996, and was responsible for establishing the practice’s New York office. In this position he led the firm’s first American commissions - including the Donald Danforth Plant Science Center, the Experimental Media & Performing Arts Center at PRI, and the Fulton Street Transit Center in Manhattan. In addition to leading projects for Grimshaw, Vincent servces on the advisory council for the New York Center for Architecture and regularly contributes to coures in systems integration at Yale and Cornell universities. He is also a Director of EVA, Environmentally Viable Architecture, a not-for-profit organization devoted to developing software tools to better integrate sustainable design into the creative process. Vincent graduated from Cambridge University in 1991 and is a qualified architect in the US and UK.


Mehrdad Yazdani
Principal, Cannon Design - Design Director, Yazdani Studio

For most of his design career, Mehrdad Yazdani has practiced at the intersection of the large office and the small studio. Named by Progressive Architecture magazine as one of the world’s top emerging architects just three years after earning his Master of Architecture from Harvards Graduate School of Design, Mehrdad has succeeded in bringing a design sensibility characteristic of boutique firms to a broad portfolio of significant civic buildings. Recently, Mehrdad was awarded the commission for a new Greater Cleveland Rapid Transit Station in University Circle.


Ann Pendleton-Jullian
Director, Austin E. Knowlton School of Architecture, The Ohio State University

Ann Pendleton-Jullian is an architect, writer, and educator of international standing. Believing in the vital exchange between ideas and architecture, thought and action, she has founded her practice - Ann Pendleton-Jullian Architects in Boston - on both commissioned work and theoretical projects. Independently, and in previous partnership with Guillaume Jullian de la Fuente, she has produced a portfolio of work that exhibits a thoroughness of approach. Her work has been exhibited and published extensively and has developed a reputation for the manner in which it poeticizes the intersection between pragmatic concerns and the ambitions of the immaginiation. As a graduate of Cornell University with a degree in architecture, Pendleton-Jullian had first pursued astrophysics at Wellesley College and Cornell before changing her major. She earned a master of architecture degree from Princeton University in 1983.

Robert Brown
Director, City of Cleveland Planning Commission

Robert is responsible for helping to shape the Mayor of Cleveland’s vision for improving the quality of life in Cleveland’s neighborhoods and creating a vibrant 24-hour downtown. He and his staff accomplish this through neighborhood and comprehensive planning, zoning code and map updates, development project facilitation, and research and data annalysis. Currently, he and his staff are leading the Connecting Cleveland 2020 Citywide Plan, a plan for the future of Cleveland’s neighborhoods.