The newly established Reinsch-Pierce International Initiatives Endowment Fund accelerates ambitious international research and teaching platforms at the Georgia Tech College of Architecture. Alumnus Al Pierce and his wife Lola Reinsch, along with their family, generously awarded the gift, jointly commemorative of Mr. Pierce's 50th reunion, son Gerald's recent graduation and Alan Balfour's recent appointment to Dean of the College of Architecture.

Balfour's aspirations for the College of Architecture includes a focused effort to advance strong international programs and projects in the most impacted areas of global development. "These programs must be in countries like India, China, Central America or South America, where issues will arise that will increasingly disturb the futurerapacious resource consumption—uncontrolled population growth and seemingly irrepressible urban formations of extremes in wealth and poverty," said Balfour. "These must be explicitly humane and public projects committed to applying all the power of design and planning knowledge in anticipation of the emergence of vast global cities with vast concentrations of power, wealth, chaos and disease—uncontrolled and uncontrollable."

The Pierce Family made a special five year, $50,000 commitment to fuel the initiative. In addition, they generously funded a workshop class to design a sustainable hospital in the Southeast Asian island of Borneo for Health In Harmony, a rural clinic, with a grant of $10,000.

"The Borneo Workshop represents a great win-win for College of Architecture students and, we hope, for rural Indonesians living adjacent to the rainforest with limited access to healthcare," said Architecture Program director Ellen Dunham-Jones. "Through the generous support of the Reinsch-Pierce Family, our students will have a rare opportunity to approach a real-world design challenge head-on, looking at socio-cultural contexts in addition to architectural, healthcare and sustainable design contexts. In addition, the project will serve as a model for future hospitals in other locations, making a lasting impact on development in these areas."

The workshop will be led by graduate student Arief Setiawan, who draws from Georgia Tech's research strengths in appropriate building traditions, green construction and healthcare.