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 architect, educator, and longtime advocate for housing as a catalyst for social change, Dwyer steps into the role as the Small Center, Tulane's community design center, enters its third decade of community-engaged work in New Orleans.

Dwyer enters the position following outgoing director Ann Yoachim, who served more than eight years in the role and 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.

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, the same period in which the Small Center, then known as Tulane City Center, was 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 advance housing-first, both as a civic initiative and as an architectural typology, across New Orleans, building on the center's two-decade legacy and stewarding it into a new era. That focus grows directly out of his 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 invisible population of unhoused youth through graduate housing and public space. The initiative aims to begin systemically ending homelessness by intervening at the critical ages of 18 to 24, through a collaboration among the many academic institutions that intersect along the corridor.

Dwyer sees New Orleans as fertile and urgent ground for that work. "New Orleans exists as a constant attempt to dwell within an ever-moving ecology," he said. "This tension raises countless unique research questions, not the least of which is how we conceive of truly equitable and sustainable housing. New Orleans, in my opinion, is a systems design question that I am deeply excited to immerse myself into."

He is equally clear about what should remain at the center of the center's work. "The Small Center's greatest resource and asset is the trust it has established with the people," he said. "The center's fundamental questions will always be rooted in 'who.' Who benefits from what we do? Who do we serve? And, perhaps most importantly, who decides?"

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.

His teaching career reflects a similar breadth. Dwyer began at a small two-year institution, which he helped transform into a five-year Bachelor of Architecture program that earned initial NAAB accreditation, and 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.

Dwyer succeeds a director who shaped the Small Center over a defining stretch of its history. Reflecting on her tenure, 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.   I'm endlessly grateful for the community partners, artists, and makers, students, faculty, and staff, who inspired me along the way and made all the work possible. I'm honored to have led the center and look forward to seeing the center’s next chapter."

For Dwyer, that vision is also deeply personal. "While the work of the center and the focus of the school certainly align with my academic and professional experience, this is a deeply personal moment for me," he said. "In my heart and soul, I feel like I am coming back home, and I am filled with gratitude for being given the opportunity."

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