Community Design Center leader Lubenau heads for Harvard classes
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Anne-Marie Lubenau
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In 20 years, Pittsburgh has gone from classifying spaghetti and meatballs as ethnic food to having two Ethiopian restaurants.
Once-dowdy Lawrenceville is hip. East Liberty has gone from being grimly blighted to a destination. Almost everywhere you go, you are sharing the road with bikes in bike lanes.
In this dynamic time, good design as an integral part of new development has gotten traction. This is due in large part to the efforts of Anne-Marie Lubenau.
Ms. Lubenau, after 10 years at the helm of the Community Design Center of Pittsburgh, recently left the Downtown nonprofit to spend a year as a Loeb Fellow at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design.
She said her goals have been to make design standards second nature to development and to get worthy neighborhood projects out of the gate with seed money and professional advice.
At Harvard, "I will be able to compliment my architectural training with studies in public policy and governance and to learn how I can be more effective in advocating design," she said.
"I am also eager to share Pittsburgh's story with more people."
Community development specialists say Ms. Lubenau has sown seed grants with soft-spoken insistence that anything worth building is worth building to look as if it belongs there.
Seed grants of a few million dollars over 20 years have leveraged investments 10 to 20 times that amount, and this has changed the dynamic of the city, they say.
Ms. Lubenau -- who came to Pittsburgh from Washington, D.C., to study architecture at Carnegie Mellon University -- said the design center's largesse is dependent on support from the city's foundations.
"We have the city we have today because of leadership in our neighborhoods and our philanthropic community," she said. "I have lived in lots of cities, and Pittsburgh is unique. This is an incredible time in our city's history, one of the most important.
"People are starting to come here out of choice, not because of family or a job. I have heard that Pittsburgh is the next Portland." But she said her wish is that Pittsburgh strive to remain like no other city because that "is our calling card."
First Published May 23, 2011 12:00 am
