Lawrence W. Speck is Senior Design Principal for the large (1400 person) architectural firm, Page, with offices in eighteen cities across the U.S. He is also a well-known design educator having been a faculty member in schools of architecture at M.I.T, University of Western Australia and University of Texas at Austin for many years. He served as Dean of the School of Architecture at University of Texas at Austin 1992-2001.
Speck has helped lead six major master planning projects for his home city, Austin, including master plans for a seven-mile stretch of the Colorado River as it moves through downtown, for a 40-block area around the Texas State Capital and for the new Dell Medical School campus at UT Austin. He has also been lead architect for two major park projects in downtown Houston—Discovery Green and Buffalo Bayou Park. In additional to designing many urban commercial buildings, Speck has been lead designer for Austin Bergstrom International Airport Terminal (3 phases), Austin Convention Center (2 phases) and academic buildings on six university campuses.
His work has been profiled in such popular publications as The Atlantic, The New York Times, and Business Week; in American architectural publications such as Architectural Record, Architecture, Architectural Digest, Architect, interior Design, Contract, and Progressive Architecture; and in international architectural journals such as The Architectural Review (England), OFX (Italy), Design Community (China), Baumeister (Germany), Projeto (Brazil), Tasarim (Turkey), Ottagano (Italy), Nikkei Construction (Japan) and Architectural Design (England).
In the last 25 years, Speck’s design work has won over 120 design awards—30+ from the AIA. As an educator, he has received over 40 teaching and service awards including the AIA/ACSA Topaz Medallion. He is a Fellow in the American Institute of Architects and served as chair of the jury to select fellows in 2005.