It is our great pleasure to announce that Dhiru Thadani has accepted our invitation to join the board of our fledgling Institute. But the truth is that he has been a hard-hitting advocate and champion of our work – as well as an inspiration and our generous teacher – for many years now.

We look forward to bringing you his eye-opening presentation from our Seaside Symposium just as soon as we have finished editing the film and preparing the transcript. He will make you look at the way we situate our concert halls in our communities – or lack of them – in a way that will just about blow your mind. At the very least, he will definitely blow the cobwebs out of it!

For those of you unfamiliar with his work, we encourage you to look around. Here’s a little incentive:

Dhiru A. Thadani is an architect and urbanist. As a design principal and partner, he has completed projects the world over. Thadani was born to the boisterous urbanism of Bombay, India, and moved to Washington, D.C. in 1972 to attend The Catholic University of America, where he received his undergraduate and graduate degrees in architecture. During his forty years in Washington, he has taught, practiced, and worked to place architecture and urbanism in the public eye. He is the author of Visions of Seaside: Foundations / Evolution / Imagination / Built & Unbuilt Architecture, published by Rizzoli in June 2013. His previous book, The Language of Towns and Cities: A Visual Dictionary was published by Rizzoli in 2010. He is also the co-editor of Leon Krier: The Architecture of Community published by Island Press in 2009. Since its formation in 1993, Thadani has been a charter member of the Congress for the New Urbanism (CNU), and is a former board member. He was a 2001 Fellow in the Knight Program for Community Building, a five-time recipient of the CNU Charter Award for design, and the recipient of the 2011 Seaside Prize.

Thank you, Dhiru, Remover-of-Obstacles, for all that you do for us and for the future of live classical music.