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Joel Berman

WS04 – The Value of Composition

Joel Berman, RA, NCARB, ALA, is the founder and principal of Joel Berman Architecture & Design, an international Chicago architecture firm specializing in inner city adaptive reuse and heritage restoration for restaurant, hospitality, institutional and residential development.

Joel’s practice has national and international clients and project work includes an award-winning historic preservation of a 1920s White Castle Hamburger building, conversion of a 1906 Chicago fire station into a major video production and post-edit facility and design of franchise system retail prototypes and branding.

Joel emphasizes the use of clear and fast sketching as part of the creative process, utilizing his notorious freehand drawings as conceptual design tools. He incorporates his extensive experience as an educator at The Ontario Association of Architects, the Royal Architect’s Institute of Canada and as adjunct faculty of architectural sketching at Columbia College Chicago.During summer programs for the joint Chicago Architecture Foundation – National Endowment of the Humanities, Joel showed groups of primary school teachers from across the US how to freehand sketch and teach those techniques to future students. Joel will be teaching at Fine Line Arts Center spring of 2024.

Find Joel online at:
Facebook: Joel Berman
Instagram: @bermansketching
Web: bermanarchitecture.com