Peter L. Gluck is founder and principal of GLUCK+ in New York City. Since 1972, the firm has generated a multi-faceted approach to the design of award-winning buildings recognized for their inventive, conceptually unique and comprehensive design solutions. Most designs are constructed by the firm through their unique approach to Architect Led Design Build. He has also spoken on urban housing design and the responsibility of architects to change the profession, as well as authoring the chapter on Architect Led Design Build in the current edition of The Architect’s Handbook of Professional Practice from the American Institute of Architects.

Gluck received both a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Architecture from Yale University. He has taught at the schools of architecture at Yale University and Columbia University and has curated exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Milan Triennale in Milan, Italy. He is a frequently invited guest lecturer and keynote speaker on the work of GLUCK+.

Gluck serves on the Board of Trustees at The East Harlem School, an independent middle school for which GLUCK+ designed and built their new school building in 2008. He also serves on the Auburn University Rural Studio Advisory Group, a university design-building in rural Alabama, and on the Board of Visitors for the College of Architecture and Design at the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

A typical project has as many as 20 consultants, each playing defense (risk management), limiting their role and involvement. Are architects just another player providing a design component, or are they the quarterback, conceiving the game plan and carrying it through to the last second of the fourth quarter? Can real significant design be achieved as an initial concept, or must it be the result of a true integration of all the elements and pressures on the project; program, site, cost, time, quality, structure, use etc. The design process cannot only reflect initial thoughts but must be agile and respond to the realities of construction and of evolving client attitudes during the designing and building processes.

The firm’s projects are a result of an Architect Led Design Build process that positions the firm as a single source of responsibility from inception to completion, and often through commissioning of a project. Gluck admits the firm has no one to blame if their work is not successful, and says they want to illuminate that process for others to evaluate. Given complete responsibility to design and build, GLUCK+ has a different perspective on processes that have evolved in the environment of separate areas of responsibility. They draw differently and budget differently, and the design process itself has a completely different trajectory.

Gluck will present a lecture titled “What’s Wrong with Us?" at 5 p.m. March 30 in Ken and Linda Sue Shollmier Hall, Room 250 of Vol Walker Hall, on the University of Arkansas campus in Fayetteville, as part of the Fay Jones School of Architecture lecture series.

This is the ZweigWhite Leadership in Design Lecture.