See the full agenda from AD PRO Design Dialogues here
Nothing was going to keep architect Elizabeth Graziolo from her date with AD PRO last week—not even a fractured knee. On September 16 the founder and principal of Yellow House Architects arrived at One World Trade Center on crutches for the inaugural AD PRO Design Dialogues, AD’s daylong design summit at One World Trade Center. The previous weekend, while visiting family in Toronto, she revealed she had been struck by an e-bike. “I delayed my surgery until next week so I could make it here!” she said of the panel discussion she was headlining alongside architect Michael K. Chen. “I wouldn’t have missed this for the world.”
She wasn’t alone. AD PRO Directory members flew in from Phoenix, Chicago, Miami, and beyond for the full day of expert panels and networking, while plenty more tuned into the livestream. The talks—featuring such top talents as Heidi Caillier, Corey Damen Jenkins, and Stephen Kent Johnson were honest, practical, and refreshingly unfiltered; topics included how to build, promote, and scale a design business; the freshest approaches to color; powerful kitchen technologies; and how AD editors decide what gets published. “Pulling the curtain away was really helpful,” said architect Tana Nesbitt-Hayes of New York’s Studio8 Architect, an AD PRO Directory member since 2024. Eyeing her own studio’s growth, Nesbitt-Hayes said she hung onto every word of Caillier’s conversation with AD’s Global Interiors and Garden Director Alison Levasseur, where the AD100 designer revealed how she works with a fully remote staff.
Building and maintaining relationships was a consistent theme across the day, including offstage, when AD’s editors joined attendees for lunch at the Condé Nast cafeteria. Architect Lauren Schlesinger of Glickman Schlesinger and Jeffrey Ramirez, brand designer of The Up Studio, discussed real estate development. At another table, designers Amanda Hickam, Manon Roux, Rebecca Roberts, and Shani Core shared advice on the latest apps and cameras for measuring projects’ as-built conditions, while across the room photographer Haris Kenjar, AD100 designer Leyden Lewis, and architect Erik Peterson swapped industry intel.
“There is something incredibly powerful about getting talented, creative people together and allowing conversations to happen organically,” said Hickam, founder of Birmingham, Alabama, interiors studio Harper Harris Design.
Estudio EA