Sergio Palleroni

Founder, the BaSiC Initiative and PSU Professor, Department of Architecture

“My(original) ambition was sustainability, in a cultural sense: sustaining cultures that were in danger of disappearing culturally or politically... in the late ‘80s as we began to realize that this was both an environmental and economic issue, because the poor tend to live in the most environmentally degraded places. So we combined both missions.”

Sergio Palleroni is an architect, professor, and Fellow at the new Center for Sustainable Practices and Processes at Portland State university. His projects demonstrate how architecture and design build community and contribute to the cause of solving urgent social problems. Highlights include a solar-powered kitchen for a school in a Mexican squatter community, a straw-bale adult education center for Native Americans in South Dakota, and a Seattle public garden accessible to the elderly.

Palleroni is internationally known for his social and environmental designs. He is founder and director of BaSiC Initiative, a social outreach and service learning program using college students to build projects all over the world. A native of Argentina, Palleroni received his Bachelors in Architecture from the university of oregon and a Masters from MIT and has been a tenured professor at the university of Washington and the Luce Foundation Visiting Professor in Sustainable Development at the university of Texas, Austin. He has worked and been a consultant on sustainable architecture and development in the developing world since the 1970s both for not-for-profit agencies and for governmental and international agencies such as uNESCo, the World Bank, and the governments of China, Colombia, Costa Rica, India, Kenya, Mexico, Nicaragua, and Taiwan.