John Maisto dedicated his life and career to being a community architect. This year, two scholarship awards will ensure that his legacy continues by inspiring young architecture students to follow in his footsteps. Nusheen Majidi, a dual architecture and real estate development student and Bhavishya Venkitaraman, a dual architecture and community planning student each received $10,000 to go towards tuition and fees in their final year of their graduate programs.
“We are truly grateful to John’s friends and family for providing this gift,” said Architecture Program Director Brian Kelly. “The ideals that John stood for throughout his 27-year career—enthusiasm for a project, the desire to capture a community’s wants and needs, the art of listening—are the same standards we work to instill in each of our students. We are honored to commemorate his impact to the profession in this way.”
John Maisto (July 10, 1965 - March 8, 2021) was a career architect with a focus on creating vibrant communities throughout the greater Washington, D.C. area. A well-regarded listener with an “infectious smile,” John relished in frequent collaborations with non-profit and neighborhood groups to create thoughtful, intuitive design solutions that give voice and agency to their inhabitants. He later developed market rate and senior housing with the same care and creativity.
“What struck me when I came across John's work, was how meaningful his projects were to community members and end users,” said Venkitaraman, who is currently working on a thesis project that incorporates sustainable strategies, like urban farming, in transit oriented, affordable, mixed-use development along the Purple Line in Riverdale Park. “Through thoughts and writings by friends and family, I realized that John was a community architect who understood the sensitivity and ever-changing aspect of design and was able to create customized solutions for communities that needed that. As a dual degree student in architecture and community planning, my aspiration is along the same lines. I hope to work towards designing community spaces that have all the ideals that shape a responsible and unbiased generation.”
Created by friends and family shortly after Maisto’s sudden death earlier this year, the scholarship awards are a tribute to John’s love for mentoring and supporting the next generation of architects.
“It was John Maisto’s dedication to supporting and advancing diverse communities through design leadership that resonated deeply with my personal philosophies and goals as a future architect,” said Majidi. “He leveraged his position as an architect to help uplift different communities, and he did that by investing a great deal of time in understanding and involving the people in the design process. That's what I appreciate the most; that he took this hands-on, immersive approach in his career to ensure that what he was creating was going to serve the community in the ways they needed. I hope to do the same kind of community-centric work in my career.”
Read more about John, his career and legacy in this tribute from BKV.