by: AIA New York
Becky Yurek, AIA, is a licensed architect and Chief Strategy Officer at the NYC Department of Design and Construction (DDC), New York City’s primary design and construction agency overseeing over $34 billion in public works. At DDC, Yurek leads major reform efforts to transform how the City plans, designs, and delivers public projects in service of a sustainable, dynamic, and inclusive New York City.
Yurek partners with leaders in government and the AEC industry to modernize capital project delivery, tackling some of the city’s most complex challenges. She is leading the charge to launch a new capital planning program for New York City, bringing together agencies and information to support strategic, long-term capital planning for the city’s public buildings portfolio. Her efforts include streamlining interagency design reviews in collaboration with the Public Design Commission, advancing state legislation to expand DDC’s toolkit of alternative delivery methods, and strengthening partnerships with the incredible community of designers who contribute to building New York City.
Yurek’s leadership includes a passion for translating complex technical and bureaucratic systems into clear, simple, actionable frameworks so that more people can participate. She is a 2025 recipient of the AIA New York State Excelsior Award for Public Awareness of Architecture in recognition of her commitment to transparent, accessible government that delivers quality design for everyone. She served previously as DDC’s liaison to the Public Design Commission, following a decade in practice in architecture, landscape, and urban design. Yurek is an alumnus of the AIANY Civic Leadership Program and Coro Leadership New York.
Q: How/why did you decide to pursue architecture?
My love for cities and public space drove me to pursue architecture. Growing up in suburban northern Virginia, what counted for the “public realm” was the space between strip malls and 12 lane highways. I came to architecture school with a conviction that we can do better, and that public space can do more.
This same instinct later led me to public service. At the design table, we asked big, formative questions about what was possible for the projects we were designing, yet so many of these decisions had already been made. By whom? I moved over to the City side and further up the decision-making chain to find out.
At DDC, the toolkit for change is not what I expected as a student—tools like procurement, contract terms, planning and design processes. These details often go unnoticed, yet they are incredibly powerful tools for articulating our goals and values as a public owner. They define what’s possible in a project, from what the scope will be (and won’t), to the criteria by which we select a design team, to how we define and measure success. I have learned that it’s incredibly important to have architects and other built environment professionals at the table at every level of government to shape these policies and decisions with a real understanding of how they will be implemented in the real world.
Q: What has been particularly challenging in your recent work?
It can take years and even decades to get public projects built. This status quo has become so ingrained that we accept it, even as we roll our eyes. That’s crazy! Many of the invisible steps that make public projects take so long have been put in place for good reason, like to protect taxpayer dollars and prevent corruption. But we have to distinguish those admirable goals from the decades of accumulated “process” that slows us down. There must be a better way.
At DDC, we are focused on making the process work better at every step so we can get more great public projects built—a necessity, given the urgent need to upgrade the city’s aging infrastructure and adapt to climate change. Every day, we are transforming our own practices as an agency, negotiating with city agency partners and oversights to change the rules that govern the system, and advocating to pass new State legislation.
With the notion of “government efficiency” getting airtime lately, it’s important to be clear what we mean. This work isn’t easy, and it isn’t fast. Our approach is grounded in a basic respect for the role of effective government and for the public servants who contribute at every level. It requires careful listening to distinguish what works from what doesn’t—we need to be sure we’re solving the right problem! And it takes care and perseverance to implement, because transformative change often means asking people to work differently.
But the results speak for themselves. DDC’s design-build program, born out of years of legislative advocacy, is delivering projects literally years faster at the same level of design quality and with real collaboration between the designer, builder, and owner. We have shown what’s possible when we throw the status quo out the window and aim higher.
Q: What are some of your favorite recent projects that you’ve worked on?
DDC is launching a new program that will completely transform how New York City plans its capital projects. When it comes to public buildings, the City doesn’t know what we’ve got: there is no central repository of buildings data, and certain key information isn’t gathered at all. As a result, city agencies tend to plan in siloes, with limited data, and are ill-equipped to plan for long-term change. The City sets ambitious policy goals like decarbonizing our buildings portfolio, yet we lack some of the basic tools to implement those policies.
Seeing the need, DDC developed a three-part program called Advanced Capital Planning (ACP) that will completely change the system. We’re building a data portal to gather the available information on public buildings, a building assessment tool that will allow us to fill the gaps, and a planning program to leverage this data to support holistic, long term capital planning. After completing a multi-year proof of concept and earning the support and partnership of our sister agencies, we secured funding for the program this year and will begin the full buildout.
This is the kind of project that motivates me: finding the “hidden in plain sight” challenges in the system and then working through a deeply collaborative process to unlock solutions. While it has taken years of case-making and advocacy to come to this point, it’s impossible to overstate the impact: ACP will literally transform how New York City plans its capital work and will give us the tools to meet some of our most ambitious strategic goals for buildings.
Q: What are your thoughts on architectural education today?
I tell my seven-year-old daughter that architects and engineers are the world’s problem-solvers, working together to design solutions for the future today. We’re trained to think through complex issues and test many different solutions, learning from what doesn’t work. We hone in on greater levels of resolution until we arrive at an approach that reconciles what had seemed to conflict. As projects become more complex, contentious, and necessary, this kind of thinking is urgently needed across roles and sectors.
Yet, in my experience, our education still seems to prioritize architectural practice as the end goal; in fact, to do anything outside an architecture firm is called “leaving the practice.” This shortchanges our students, and it shortchanges the work of the many kinds of contributors we need to get major, impactful work done. From architecture school onwards, I would love to see a more expansive view of “practice” that encompasses these different ways of contributing, because they are all badly needed.
Q: What do you think are the biggest challenges, or opportunities, facing cities today?
It’s an exciting and crucial time for cities: as some of the most sustainable places to live, and the places that bring us together in our differences, cities can also be hotbeds of innovation and transformation, the places we test new strategies and lead the way. As we face parallel threats of climate change, housing affordability, and deep cultural divisions, cities can be a change agent.
Right now, we’re tasked with adapting New York City to rapidly changing conditions: updating our aging infrastructure to support housing growth and more extreme storms, reclaiming street space from cars and making it safer and more inviting for everyone, decarbonizing buildings and integrating renewable energy. Tackling these challenges means that every project we build needs to do more. Our infrastructure and buildings must meet many objectives at once, fulfilling their basic purpose while mitigating the effects of climate change, restoring ecologies, and making daily life better.
The good news is that this is exactly what design is equipped to do, and the design of public spaces, systems, and buildings can contribute significantly. Take DDC’s East Side Coastal Resiliency project (ESCR), for example, designed by a multidisciplinary team that includes BIG, MNLA, AKRF, and many others. Instead of walling the city off from its waterfront, ESCR lifts the ground up over eight feet to protect the nearby community from floodwaters. It replaces narrow, winding pedestrian bridges with wide, inviting bridges that meet the new park at grade, welcoming everyone regardless of how they get around. It redistributes active and passive spaces so that more people can participate in new kinds of ways. And it replaces the ecologically inert East River Park with thousands of native and adapted tree and plants to foster a functioning ecosystem right in the heart of the city.
These kinds of multifunctional, multi-outcome projects are the “what”—but we also need to tackle the “how.” We literally can’t build fast enough to meet the need, so we have to get out of our own way! This means slashing the bureaucracy where it no longer serves us, incentivizing performance and innovation through tools like alternative delivery, and leveraging the deep expertise of architects, engineers, and other built environment professionals across sectors to get extraordinary public projects done better and faster.