On April 19, 1995, Hans Butzer and his wife, Oklahoma-native Torrey Butzer were in Germany, partners at an international architectural firm, but their lives quickly became interconnected with the story of the bombing and the creation of Oklahoma City National Memorial & Museum. As part of a design competition for the Memorial, the Butzers’ design won over 624 submissions from 23 countries and all 50 states. During the process of making the Memorial a reality, the Butzers made Oklahoma their permanent home and continue to shape the development of downtown OKC from their firm, Butzer Architects and Urbanism.

Gina Sofola, AICP is the President and Principal Consultant of Sofola & Associates, Inc a planning and project management consulting firm. She has thirty-nine years of experience as an engineer, project manager and planning professional. She has managed projects around the country for Fortune 500 Companies in NYC; with the City of Kansas City Missouri on multiple municipal projects; with Denver International Airport’s Infrastructure Management Group; and currently she acts as developers agent for Colony Development Partners on the Page Woodson Restoration Project, a multi-phase, mixed income, mixed use development that will consist of Affordable and Market Rate Housing along with dynamic public spaces and for White River Development Partners/Colony /Carlyle on The MUSE (formerly 700 West) Development Project, a 302 Unit Multi-Family Mixed Use product. Gina has been part of multi-disciplined planning, design, and implementation teams that have impacted, catalyzed and/or completely re-envisioned communities and/or companies as well as, collaborated on multiple planning and public engagement projects around Oklahoma City, Oklahoma State, and the continent of Africa that are firsts of their kinds in the jurisdictions in which they have occurred. Many of her projects have been recipients of multiple awards, a testament to the caliber of the teams she has collaborated with. Her training gives her an eye towards how humans interact with the built and work environments. She is interested in environmental, transportation, and international planning issues and has a great passion for urban design that seeks to optimize the human experience, especially for underserved communities. She has worked with underserved communities in OKC and the state since 2004, and continues to pioneer ways to help communities of color champion their community destinies through civic engagement. She has a proven track record of navigating through strong community, o

Hans E. Butzer is an award-winning architect and educator and co-founder of Butzer Architects and Urbanism (BAU), together with his wife Torrey A. Butzer, Assoc. AIA. Butzer is best known for his role in the design of key public sites in Oklahoma City, his civic engagement and advocacy, and his role as an educator and leader at the University of Oklahoma. His work has been awarded fifteen awards from the AIA and ASLA. His work has been celebrated among the 10 best designs of 2000 by Time Magazine and listed among the “Top 50 Best Public Art Projects” by Public Art Network Year in Review by Americans for the Arts. The Dallas Morning News twice listed the Oklahoma City National Memorial among the “Ten Best Designs”—once in 1997 and again after completion in 2000. Butzer was raised in Wisconsin and Chicago but always had a foothold in Germany, where his parents were born and where he spent summers as a child. This early international experience helped Butzer develop an appreciation for the subtle ways in which different cultures shape their environments. Butzer’s attention to place was also framed by seeing the world through the lens of his parents, one a physical geographer and the other an anthropologist. Family field trips took Butzer through the glacially formed landscapes of the upper Midwest while nearly a third of his childhood was spent in Europe. There, he experienced a range of cultures and their built expressions across varied landscapes. “Place” could be defined with topographies of landscape, materially built form and cultural identities over time. Butzer’s understanding of service, community and ethics grew out of his family’s broader history. While his father’s family fled Nazi Germany via England to Montreal Canada in the 1930’s, Butzer’s mother survived nightly bombing raids over Bonn. His parents would emphasize the importance of civic duty, maintaining a clear sense of right and wrong, and the power of diversity. One’s work should contribute to a greater sense of understanding, Butzer concluded, and thereby to a community’s sense of unity, shared values and common ground over time.

Ronald E. Bradshaw graduated from Harding High School in 1962 and continued his education at The University of Oklahoma where he graduated in 1966 with a Bachelors Degree in Business and Finance. He and his wife Martha who graduated from Harding in 1964 were married in 1968 and have spent their lives together in Oklahoma City. They have two children, Jason and Libby, and four grandchildren. After a business career in banking, real estate development and manufacturing Ron and his son Jason who had been an investment banker with JP Morgan Chase started a real estate development and investment company. They form Colony Partners Inc in August 2001. They acquired and operated a 211,000 square foot portfolio of office buildings. They then acquired the former 17-acre Fred Jones Estate adjacent to the Oklahoma City Golf and Country Club and developed it into 31 single family luxury residential lots now known as Grand Circle. Colony became involved in downtown development by acquiring the former Kerr-McGee surface parking lots totaling four city blocks north of Bricktown and east of E.K. Gaylord Blvd. and have developed or co-developed The Brownstones at Maywood Park, 2nd Street Lofts, and The Maywood Apartments Phase 1 and Phase 2. Their latest project is the Page-Woodson School property and the surrounding ten acres. Colony Partners Inc and its partners acquired the Page-Woodson School at 6th and High Street on December 5, 2012 from the Oklahoma City Public School System. The building contains 90,000 sq. ft. and sits on 3 acres. It is listed on the State and National Historical Register and is two blocks south of the Oklahoma Health Science Center. It was built in1911 and was home to Douglas High School from 1934 to 1954. It stood vacant for almost 25 years. It has undergone a $28 million renovation into 60 affordable apartment units and an additional 68 affordable new units were built adjacent to the school building.