Something’s in the air. Call it community-based design. Call it architecture for people. In any understanding, socially conscious architecture seems to be blossoming again. Kate Schwennsen, FAIA, the incoming president of the AIA and an educator, says the sea change is palpable in the design studio. According to Schwennsen, students seem interested in a different agenda from an earlier generation, which was more focused on career or technology. Quietly, the people-centered component of architecture is spreading like goodwill, putting designers and builders in touch with real people in real places.

Our collective hunger for humanistic design and planning is not new. In the not-so-distant past, think of Frederick Law Olmsted and the 19th-century parks movement, offering open space and fresh air for tenement-bound urban dwellers. More recently, remember storefront architecture of the late 1960s and 1970s? The attitude accompanied the haircuts and the tie-dyes; environmentalism of the same period had a strong social component.