Alvin is one of a dozen creative “Trailblazers” featured in the Spring 2021 issue of Alta Journal, which celebrates “The Next West”…

Alta Journal identifies the “Next West” as “the people and ideas that exemplify the unceasingly imaginative spirit that has made our region synonymous with creativity and ingenuity.”

“I want to be the type of architect who is thinking about the potential role for architecture, not just the required role,” he says. “I talk to students about the value of the runway versus the rack. What shows up on the runway, 99.5 percent of it will never see the light of day on a rack. But pretty much everything that’s on the rack has been influenced by the runway.”

Huang points out that the flu pandemic of 1918 was a key factor in the birth of modernism and the modern city, and that public parks emerged during Victorian times in response to outbreaks of cholera and yellow fever. “Now we have a very different context to think about, whether it’s what post-pandemic architecture looks like or architecture that is invested in being anti-racist,” he says. “2020 has given us a lot of opportunities to challenge ourselves to rethink and not just do.”