The ART of Design‑Build: Creating the Timeless Together

What if design‑build wasn’t just a delivery method—but an art form?

The DBIA Northwest Annual Conference keynote offers an immersive experience that redefines creativity, collaboration, and performance in the built environment. Through poetic storytelling and lived experience, award‑winning speaker and artist Marcus Lattimore challenges design‑build professionals to rethink how great work is created—not just by what we build, but by how we build it together.

Drawing on his journey from elite athlete to nationally recognized spoken‑word artist, Marcus explores the power of listening, alignment, and shared vision to produce work that is authentic, resilient, and impossible to duplicate. This keynote goes beyond inspiration—it’s a call to intentionally craft results rooted in trust, integrity, and human connection.

Prepare for an artistic opening experience that reframes design‑build as the collaborative masterpiece it was always meant to be.

Closing Keynote: Design-Build as a Performing Art: 14 Years of Festival Structures for the Pickathon Music Festival

Design-build challenges us to collaborate differently—to integrate people, materials, and ideas in ways that produce meaning beyond the finished structure. In that spirit, this keynote highlights an unconventional design-build laboratory where temporary architecture becomes a tool for experimentation, ethics, and shared making.

The Diversion Design/Build Studio at Portland State University’s School of Architecture, created by Professors Travis Bell and Clive Knights, is a student-led design experiment exploring the experiential qualities of architecture through the design and realization of temporary celebratory spaces. The studio embraces responsible and ethical design practice by diverting non-typical, reusable industrial materials and diverting design toward non-traditional experiences—particularly those rooted in festival culture and collective gathering.

Over the past 14 years, the studio has collaborated with the Pickathon Music Festival, architecture students, engineers, lighting designers, and builders to create annual projects that prioritize shared making, interdisciplinary collaboration, and design as a communal act.