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April 11, 2021AIANY-NYS Unified Crisis Task Force (Ongoing)
![AIANY Task Force Meeting]()
In March 2020, in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Illya Azaroff, as AIANYS Disaster Coordinator, convened the cross-sector AIANY-NYS Unified Crisis Task Force within days of New York’s COVID-19 response shutdown. The Task Force provided immediate needs response coordination to the City, State, and AIA membership. Those responses included identifying more than 1,000 buildings suitable for hospital and emergency expansion with the New York State Department of State (DOS) and AIA members; PPE production and delivery statewide; liaisons to healthcare architects and engineers with the Department of Health (DOH); working with restaurants on outdoor dining solutions, and coordinating with ASHRAE’s National Task Force on building advisories. The Unified Task Force is currently sharing best practices nationally.
Design for Risk and Reconstruction
The Design for Risk and Reconstruction Committee (DfRR) harnesses the design community's expertise to address disaster mitigation and adaptation in situations caused by major events that threaten people in the built environment, such as major storms, extreme heat, climate change, sea-level rise, terrorist attacks, etc. Our mission is to foster awareness within the profession and the public of the necessity of anticipating risk at multiple scales, from a single building to comprehensive regional planning. Our goals: To formulate programs that engage the profession, stakeholders (public), and policymakers in important conversations around these issues; To develop appropriate professional-public partnerships to bring leaders and innovators together; To examine the design sequence to address mitigating natural and human-made disasters, developing disaster preparedness scenarios, mobilizing disaster relief response and recovery, and planning and executing reconstruction projects; To improve the designed environment to protect the health, safety, and welfare of its inhabitants—functionally, technically, economically, and aesthetically. Illya Azaroff, FAIA, and Lance Jay Brown, FAIA founded DfRR in recognition of the growing need to address the increasing vulnerabilities that communities face across the world. The Board of the AIA New York Chapter formally established DfRR on May 17, 2011, and sanctioned the committee name on June 21, 2011. Meetings typically occur at 6:30 pm on the second Wednesday of each month.
