AIA Austin WiA Presents Site Tour // 01: HouseMade
Date: Thursday, April 23, 2026 at 4:00 – 6:00pm
Location: Near MLK & Airport Blvd
NO PPE Required. Rideshare is encouraged.
2 CEU Credits PENDING.
This tour presents an Architect-built house that showcases design strategies for deep sustainability, inspired by its wooded east Austin site. Owners, as designer, contractor, and partial builder, will walk through the design drivers, unique process of construction, and end results that feature rammed earth walls, a courtyard center, terracing landscapes including a green roof, and emphasis on material repurposing. The ~2,600 sf family house is both a thick-walled quiet oasis and life hub, demonstrating a strong street presence, expansive interiors, and more generous public than private spaces.
The Austin Energy Green Building consultant for the project will outline the single family rating process from project submission through, design, construction, and final rating and explain how rating a project helps architects to organize their sustainable and regenerative project goals, incorporate them into their designs and specifications, and ensure that what is designed and specified ends up in the final project.
Site Tour Presenters
Lauren Woodward Stanley, AIA brings together design, advocacy, academic engagement, writing, community service, and art in an architectural practice rooted in awareness of context and layered disciplines. She is joint owner and director of Stanley Studio, a hybrid Austin design practice, with Lars Stanley, FAIA, since 2005. Their architecture studio and metal arts shop produce award-winning civic, institutional, residential, public art, and accessory/detail, a full range of scales with a focus on crafted detail, material expression, low-carbon construction, ecological health, and social connection. A UTSOA M.Arch graduate, Lauren worked for close to a decade in notable Seattle design firms before returning to Austin with a strong ethic championing the integration of buildings and sites. Her design work and civic engagement is grounded in weaving green infrastructure into the built fabric to produce healthy and socially resilient cities.
Lars A. Stanley, FAIA has practiced architecture since 1983. As both architect and artisan, he translates his craft and passion for the process of making into creating resonant places. His award-winning work conveys a profound sense of the human hand and a sensitivity to material and craft. Stanley Studio, the east Austin studio and shop practice he shares with Lauren Woodward Stanley, issues architectural and metalwork projects at a wide range of types and scales, from campus master planning to construction detail. Their work includes schools, libraries, residences, parks, spas, public amenities, public art, architectural accessories, lighting, and furniture, much of it having become part of the urban fabric of Austin.
Catherine Lee Doar is Austin Energy Green Building residential team’s Utility Strategist. For twelve years she served as the Design Coordinator at Austin Habitat for Humanity, developing their green building program and advising Habitat’s U.S. office on green building initiatives. After twelve years at Austin Energy, she is serving single family custom and volume customers as well as multifamily teams and leads special projects. Lee has a Master of Architecture degree from the University of Virginia, and she is passionate about promoting strategic shading in hot climates with a new interest in promoting retrofits in hot places that used to be cool.