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Date of Lecture: September 30, 2026
Bio
Brian Phillips, FAIA, is Founder and Creative Director of ISA, an urbanism and architecture practice based in Philadelphia, as well as Executive Director of Meantime, a nonprofit dedicated to activating vacant urban spaces through community-driven programming. Recently, Meantime on Market brought six pop-up businesses — from a record shop to a vintage furniture store — to the long-vacant storefronts of Market East, in partnership with the Center City District. For over 25 years, Brian has led award-winning projects spanning experimental housing, adaptive reuse, and civic infrastructure — including Cherry Street Pier, the 100K Houses, and Ambler Yards — that treat design as a tool for urban resilience. He is a Pew Fellow in the Arts, an Architectural League Emerging Voice, and teaches a graduate urban housing studio at the University of Pennsylvania.
Abstract
Cities have always balanced the accumulation of wealth and power with the production of culture and community — and that balance has historically depended on face-to-face human interaction. As screen-mediated life erodes the conditions that made cities both equitable and vital, what does it mean to design for the city for everyone? Drawing on nearly three decades of work in Philadelphia — from affordable housing and civic space to turning vacant storefronts into cultural laboratories — Brian Phillips will examine how design and advocacy can resist the flattening of urban life and hold our cities to a higher human standard.
