LIVE-WORK - Key Persons

Job Titles:

• Consultant to the City of Vancouver

Job Titles:

• Member of the Congress for the New Urbanism

Thomas Dolan Biography and Thomas Dolan Architecture Firm Description Thomas Dolan received his education at the University of Pennsylvania, graduating with degrees in architecture (B.A.) and landscape architecture (M.L.A). His primary mentors at Penn were Edmund Bacon, author of Design of Cities and Ian McHarg, author of Design with Nature. He was also influenced by another Penn faculty member, Louis Kahn, who inspired Tom's sense of the power of place to add meaning to peoples' lives. After graduation from Penn, Tom lived in several loft spaces in Tribeca, New York City. The form intrigued him. Subsequently, extensive travels in Asia gave him perspective on lives not separated from work, both in big cities and rural villages. In 1983, he and three friends bought an old Italian family compound in Oakland, where he lived and worked for seventeen years; it was there that he discovered the power of courtyards to build community; based on this continuing experience, he conceived the live-work courtyard community, essentially a new building type. Tom has worked at or near his home in Oakland for much of the last 27 years. His comprehensive book, Live-Work Planning and Design: Zero Commute Housing (Wiley: 2012), is the summation of his work and of the subject of live-work to date. The book rigorously defines the different types of live-work, in an effort to help developers, regulators and designers avoid "re-inventing the wheel" each time live-work comes to a new city. Thomas Dolan served until recently on the Advisory Board of ArtHouse in San Francisco. Through his involvement there he stayed in close touch with the live-work controversy in the San Francisco Planning Department, which became a valuable case study in his book. His efforts to help colleagues and others to understand live-work will doubtless lead to further publications in the near future Thomas Dolan is a charter member of the Congress for the New Urbanism, and is CNU- Accredited. He is a licensed architect in the state of California.