John Dwyer named director of the Albert and Tina Small Center for Collaborative Design

The Tulane School of Architecture and Built Environment has appointed John Dwyer as director of the Albert and Tina Small Center for Collaborative Design and professor of practice in architecture.

An educator, architect and longtime housing champion, Dwyer will lead the Small Center, Tulane's community design center, as it enters its third decade of community-engaged work in New Orleans.

Dwyer succeeds outgoing director Ann Yoachim, who for more than eight years led the center through major initiatives and milestones - including its recent 20th anniversary. Yoachim will continue to teach at the school as a professor of practice.

Reflecting on her tenure as the previous director, Yoachim said, "Leading the Small Center was a daily reminder of the power of collaborative design practice and what is possible when we each have the power to shape the places we live, work and play."

For Dwyer, the appointment is a homecoming. Nearly two decades ago, he served as an Architecture for Humanity Design Fellow in the Lower Ninth Ward, joining the wave of designers who worked alongside New Orleans communities in the years after Hurricane Katrina. It was the same period in which the Small Center, then known as Tulane City Center, was also helping neighborhoods across the city rebuild.

"Ever since briefly serving as an Architecture for Humanity Design Fellow in the Lower Ninth Ward, I have admired the resilience, impact and empathy of the Small Center," Dwyer said. "The center, in no small way, played a critical role in the preservation of communities throughout the city post-Katrina. Now, 20 years later, it is exciting to explore how the center can build upon its extraordinary base of community trust and genuinely participatory design."

As director, Dwyer hopes to focus on housing opportunities for all across New Orleans, both as a civic initiative and as an architectural typology, building on the center's two-decade legacy and stewarding it into a new era.

That focus grows directly out of Dwyer's current practice. In Philadelphia, he is working with executive leadership at Thomas Jefferson University and the City of Philadelphia to reimagine the Market East corridor, developing a vision that addresses the city's population of unhoused youth through graduate housing and public space. The initiative aims to intervene in the lives of individuals at the critical ages of 18 to 24 through a collaboration with the many academic institutions along the corridor.

Dwyer sees New Orleans as fertile and urgent ground for that same work.

"New Orleans, in my opinion, is a systems design question that I am deeply excited to immerse myself in," he said.

He is equally clear about what should remain at the heart of the center's work. "The Small Center's greatest resource and asset is the trust it has established with the people," he said.

An architect with a wide-ranging record of practice and academic leadership, Dwyer is the founder of John Dwyer Architecture, where his work spans housing, adaptive reuse, urban design and community-based design.

Dwyer began his teaching career at Dunwoody College of Technology, an institution with a small two-year program which he helped transform into a five-year Bachelor of Architecture program accredited by the National Architectural Accrediting Board. He went on to serve as department chair at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. He has also taught at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and the University of Minnesota, where he earned both his Bachelor of Arts and his Master of Architecture.

For Dwyer, stepping into the leadership role at the Small Center is deeply personal.

"In my heart and soul, I feel like I am coming back home, and I am filled with gratitude for being given the opportunity," he said.