Building Together: NYC's Chief Infrastructure Officer Alison Landry on Civic Leadership, Change Management, and High Performance
Alison’s portrait by Matthew Lapiska at NYC DDC.
By Julia Gamolina
Alison Landry is a licensed architect who provides leadership for New York City’s capital projects. As NYC’s Chief Infrastructure Officer, she is modernizing city processes to improve our built environment, ensuring reliable operations, expanded resiliency, and dynamic communities.
Alison previously served as Associate Commissioner for Alternative Delivery at NYC Department of Design and Construction (DDC), Vice President in the Capital Program at the NYC Economic Development Corporation (EDC) and as an associate at Handel Architects. In her interview with Julia Gamolina, Alison talks about how her training as an architect, and her time in New Orleans, helped propel her design thinking across interrelated systems, and to work on frameworks to prepare for the future.
JG: As Chief Infrastructure Officer for the Office of the Deputy Mayor of Operations, you're in a very critical role right now. What are you most focused on in 2024 and what are your priorities for infrastructure in the city right now?
AL: New Yorkers rely on infrastructure every single day — the systems that provide us one billion gallons of drinking water; the thousands of miles of roads and transit networks that we use to get around; the acres of parks and public spaces where we spend our time; our public buildings and the facilities that our public agencies use for maintenance and operations. And because all of these elements are impacted by more and more extreme weather, like heat and intense rainfall, we need to protect our vulnerable facilities and design them to be higher performance.
As an architect working at the scale of New York City, this means design thinking across interrelated systems, rather than tackling our city’s climate, housing and infrastructure crisis one problem at a time. For example, why do our bread-and-butter projects — recreation centers, libraries, bathrooms, streetscapes — take so long to construct, and what can we do about it? How can we assemble accurate information about our vulnerable infrastructure to make informed decisions about priorities? What can we do to encourage innovation in construction technology to build more efficiently and sustainably? I am focused on our frameworks to maintain a state of good repair and prepare New York for the future.
Capital Process Reform Event. Courtesy of the NYC Mayors Office.
Let's go back to the beginning — how did you choose where you studied architecture?
Growing up, I lived in suburbs of Chicago, Louisville, and Boston, so an urban campus in a new city appealed to me. Tulane’s School of Architecture had a five-year Master of Architecture program and a substantial scholarship that made it an easy decision, but I otherwise had no connection to New Orleans. I didn’t expect it to become my adopted hometown.
Living and studying in New Orleans before and after Hurricane Katrina completely shifted my academic experience, like going from black-and-white to technicolor. It wasn’t just the storm itself, the levee failure or the flooding that traumatized the city; it was also the lack of political leadership around recovery. It centered the role of our work as practicing architects in shaping the future of the city.
Our architecture studio projects took on new meaning and urgency, with our professors contextualizing the inequities in the devastation and systemic racism embedded in the urban planning. The school launched the Tulane City Center [now called the Small Center], pairing professors and students with community partners. This effort occurred in parallel to New Orleans’ broader planning efforts: years of community meetings, the green dot map, the changing politics, and evolving housing recovery efforts. I chronicled this in our 2014 publication: ‘New Orleans Under Reconstruction: A Crisis In Planning.’ Almost a decade of my academic and professional life was spent working on this effort, spanning from New Orleans up to NYC.
“We talk about design excellence and the importance of having the best designers as part of our process. We need to think about how the city facilitates quality, and a core component of this is the way we hire our builders and leverage their expertise.”
You practiced for a number of years and then joined the EDC. Why did you leave practice?
When I moved to NYC in 2011 and landed at Handel Architects, I was fortunate to work under Blake Middleton on a Parks Department facility. Our project for the Eastern Queens Alliance in Idlewild Park ultimately won a PDC Excellence in Design Award, but the nature center took years to get through design and construction.
Being at a large architecture office working on a public project presented a real contrast in implementation. Why is it that 60-story buildings for developers were moving quickly to construction, but this 5,400 square foot nature center was stuck in limbo? My way of channeling that frustration was to pivot into a role in city government.
Tell me about your time at the EDC.
At EDC, I had an exciting mix of projects all over the city: a historic theater renovation on Staten Island, a public art installation in Long Island City, a streetscape in Lower Manhattan and critical resiliency projects at Bellevue Hospital. This work was purposeful, and I learned my way around the planning, procurement and project management functions needed to get things done.
Being at EDC was also a crash course in civic leadership, decision-making, and resourcefulness. When Maria Torres-Springer was president, she projected and expected this high standard of excellence that was contagious, and she challenged assumptions about what’s possible in public service. This theme continues to be a way to channel my energy and enthusiasm for doing good work.
You then went to the DDC. What did you learn there?
New York City has pushed for years to change the procurement laws that constrain contractor selection, and so when a law was passed to allow ‘design-build’ — essentially, an innovative process for hiring contractors during design, with quality-based selection rather than status quo low bid — I joined the Department of Design and Construction in early 2020 to launch their design-build pilot program. Then, of course, within weeks of me joining the agency, with the emergence of the Covid-19 pandemic, our non-essential projects effectively went on pause.
The State and City emergency declarations allowed us to cut through the layers of red tape we typically encounter in our public construction work. Tom Foley, who’s now the commissioner, was head of Public Buildings at the time, and empowered me to lead the city’s temporary hospital projects. It was an adaptive leadership challenge: working around the clock on a project with no road map, and I’m very proud of the work that our team got done in a matter of days. We also built three permanent clinics in a matter of months, a process that would normally take years. We hired a construction manager to partner with the architects for integrated delivery, working in close partnership with our owner and end users to make iterative decisions. This was essential to completing these projects.
Idlewild by Handel Architects.
NYPL Charleston, Courtesy of NYCEDC.
How did you eventually get to your current role?
In 2022, the Mayor’s Office brought together a capital process reform task force to look comprehensively at how we build our city’s projects. I’ve been through multiple life cycles of a project, and this range brings me to the intersection of all the groups involved in getting things built. I know what it was like an architect to go through public design review, and now I’m involved in streamlining our review process. I know what it was like to prepare invoices as a vendor and as a project manager, and now I'm leading a group to modernize the city’s construction payment process. These processes sounds tedious because they are tedious, but it’s so important to be a reliable owner and client and keep attracting good industry partners.
This means that changing the way we work requires changes at every single step of the process, in a way that’s scalable. When we’re doing five or six billion dollars of capital work a year, we do need to have a structure and a system. Some of our capital process reform initiatives require legislation, but there’s a lot we can do at the city level by figuring out what’s going on and where we can make an impact. When we root these changes in reality, we’re inspiring our agencies to tackle these challenges because each aspect of our project life cycle is connected to an impact on our architects and engineers, our contractors, and eventually the people who rely on our facilities and our systems to work for them.
Looking back at it all, what have been the biggest challenges?
The biggest challenge is death by a thousand paper cuts, because progress can be incremental and there’s a steep learning curve. In June, on the very last day of our state legislative session, Albany passed our capital process reform bills that expand NYC’s project delivery methods. It took years of partnering with our legislators and their staff to lay this groundwork and hash out technical aspects. It’s going to take many more steps to get to the point of a shovel in the ground, but it’s an amazing step in the right direction to modernize our work and provide more flexibility in how we select qualified partners to work with us.
Adaptive change management is not for everyone. I’ve had to field a lot of, “No, no, Alison, this will never work, I've been doing this for 37 years, have you ever built X, Y, Z?” I’ve had to synthesize a very wide range of inputs and figure out where the change is possible. I’ve worked through this is by listening and offering suggestions that people can react to, reflecting their expertise and our collective goals.
How did you manage through?
I get through it by focusing on the results. The core value is a vision that we can build better: not just saving time and money, but to be a better partner to the industry and the community. That feeling expands beyond being at a groundbreaking or a ribbon cutting. It’s being on site and seeing the people who are part of the workforce. It’s visiting once the work is done and seeing people using the bike lane and the benches, or the new building.
I’m fortunate to work with Deputy Mayor Meera Joshi and experience her leadership. She’s constantly questioning the status quo, asking very smart question that get to the heart of the matter, and centering our work on the people it impacts. She inspires our capital agencies to find creative ways to get things done, and it’s her curiosity is contagious: it sets a high bar for our team and helps me through the more unpleasant parts of working through the challenges to focus on where we can make progress.
“Empathy plays a big role. We need to make it easier for people to move around our city. You shouldn’t have to wonder why a playground takes years to build, why there are no public bathrooms near you, why your street is cracked open again. These very fundamental questions motivate me.”
What is the impact you’d like to have on the world? What is your core mission? And, what does success in that look like to you?
My core mission is to make it easier to build better projects in our city. We talk about design excellence and the importance of having the best designers as part of our process. We need to think about how the city facilitates quality, and a core component of this is the way we hire our builders and leverage their expertise. We're moving the needle and taking this incredibly onerous, complicated process and making it easier to get the results we need.
Empathy plays a big role. We need to make it easier for people to move around our city. You shouldn’t have to wonder why a playground takes years to build, why there are no public bathrooms near you, why your street is cracked open again. These very fundamental questions motivate me. Especially when compounded with our changing climate and the experience of hotter summers and heavier rainfall.
Who are you admiring now and why?
Coleman Coker has had an expansive career in public interest design. We met when he was my thesis advisor and after I graduated from Tulane, he gave me a desk in his New Orleans studio. Most recently he established the Gulf Coast Design Lab for the University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture. Through his teaching he has inspired connections between architecture, urbanism, civic engagement and the environment. Coleman’s interdisciplinary and inclusive approach to service learning has changed the career trajectory of so many students, myself included.
Battery groundbreaking, Courtesy of NYC Mayors Office.
Finally, what advice do you have for those starting their career? Would your advice be any different for women?
I am consistently impressed by young professionals that figure out where to wedge themselves. It’s amazing what you can do when you learn enough that you can slice through something and use that slice of information to get things done. Disruption is important, but being disruptive without being informed or results-oriented is impractical and drains resources, particularly in city government where so many of our patterns and behaviors are informed by legal or regulatory requirements. To have a lasting impact, changes need to work down to the standard operating procedure and template and training materials that our agency’s civil servants rely on to consistently do good work.
Don’t worry that spending a phase of your early career on something will pigeonhole you into only doing that work forever. I’ve worked with some amazing young professionals who helped us move the needle with situational awareness that is only possible by getting really in the weeds: organizing the information we know to figure out what we don’t know, what resources will help us answer those questions, and where there are opportunities to do something differently.