Dr. Vyta Pivo is a scholar of the intersecting histories of material lifecycles, construction labor, ordinary landscapes, and climate change. Her forthcoming book, Cast in Concrete: How the US Built Its Empire (University of Chicago Press), traces the history of the US cement and concrete industries and their global and transplanetary expansion. The book examines how concrete structured not only architecture and infrastructure, but also labor, culture, and political systems that deepened global addiction to this material of modernity. Pivo’s research has been published in various academic and public-facing outlets, including the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Journal of Architectural Education, PLATFORM, Psyche/Aeon, and others. Her research has received support from the National Science Foundation, Andrew Mellon Foundation, American Council of Learned Societies, the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, and the MacDowell Fellowship, among others.  

Don Worth is a long time Preservationist who has lived for over 30 years with his wife Nina in Miami Beach. He was a co-founder of Friends of Miami Marine Stadium, the original group established in 2008 to advocate for the Stadium restoration. Don presently remains involved in all aspects of the Stadium restoration efforts and is a co-founder of the current advocacy group Restore Marine Stadium.

Since joining Wiss, Janney, Elstner Associates, Inc., forty years ago, Paul has been involved in a wide range of investigation and repair projects. The majority of his experience includes repair of concrete structures, and preservation of various types of historic and contemporary concrete structures. Paul’s work on concrete structures includes work on John J. Earley’s Edison Memorial Tower in Edison, NJ and Baha’i House of Worship in Wilmette, Illinois; Mies van der Rohe’s Promontory Apartments building in Chicago, Illinois; Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute in LaJolla, California; and Eero Saarinen’s Jefferson National Expansion Memorial in St. Louis, among others.  

 

Rosa Lowinger is a Cuban-born American art conservator and founder of RLA Conservation of Art + Architecture, LLC, a sculpture and architectural materials conservation practice based in Miami and Los Angeles. She is also a published author, most well-known for Tropicana Nights: The Life and Times of the Legendary Cuban Nightclub (Harcourt, 2005), a book on Havana’s pre-Castro nightclub era; Promising Paradise: Cuban Allure American Seduction (FIU press: 2016); and Dwell Time: A Memoir of Art, Exile, and Repair (Row House, 2023). A Fellow of the American Institute for Conservation, the Association for Preservation Technology, and the American Academy in Rome, Rosa holds an M.A. in Art History and Conservation from NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts.