Please join us on March 1st from 4:30 PM to 6:30 PM in the Lecture Hall for Jen Masengarb’s farewell celebration. We will be sending her off with as much love as we can – so come and say goodbye to her as she embarks on a wonderful new adventure.
Please read below Lynn Osmond’s letter about Jen’s time at CAF.
It is with great sadness that I announce the departure of long time staff member and trusted colleague, Jen Masengarb, effective March 2. Jen has accepted a “once in a lifetime” opportunity to serve as the Senior Project Director of Tours at the Danish Architecture Center in Copenhagen. There she will be creating a brand new volunteer guide/host program and training this new corps; developing new tours of the city in English, and helping DAC interpret Copenhagen’s architecture for international visitors at their new center, BLOX – which opens in May 2018.
Jen currently serves as Director of Interpretation and Research – simply put, everything that has to do with CAF’s content delivery comes through Jen! She has been instrumental in building our brand and reputation. I still remember Jen coming to us in 1999 as a young grad student interning from the University of Virginia. A year later she was on the payroll for CAF and neither of us have looked back since.
Some of Jen’s most memorable accomplishments during her 17 years with us include:
- Training over 500 docents in Chicago’s architectural history, building technology, and how to ‘read’ buildings
- The creation of Schoolyards to Skylines (2002, lead author) ; The Architecture Handbook (2007, lead author) and Discover Design.org (2011, co-creator). These earned CAF three national AIA Honor Awards and positioned us to be a leader in design education
- Leading the development and teaching of six National Endowment for the Humanities workshops, bringing skyscrapers, urban history, and place-based education to 500 teachers from around the country
- Developed new partnership with WBEZ’s Curious City (2013), bringing architectural curiosity and storytelling to a broad new audience.
- A Recurring host on the Science Channel’s Impossible Engineering, explaining how buildings work
- A frequent lecturer to outside groups; adult education course leader; exhibition writer and researcher; CAF publication writer and editor
To say Jen will be missed is an understatement, however we wish her much success in her new position and hope that she will come back and celebrate the opening of the new Chicago Architecture Center with us.