Wolfgang Wagener is a German-American architect, author, and real estate development advisor based in Palo Alto, California. He runs WOWA WEST, helping clients define, design, develop, and deliver high-value real estate, and has advised companies including Apple, Cisco, and Daimler-Benz. Trained with a PhD from RWTH Aachen and an advanced management degree in real estate from Harvard, he cut his teeth on landmark projects like Berlin's Potsdamer Platz with the Richard Rogers Partnership before becoming a custodian of California midcentury modernism, authoring the first monograph on Raphael Soriano and the award-winning postcard history NEW WEST.
Chris Giattina is the founder and CEO of BLOX, a Bessemer, Alabama company that builds hospitals the way Detroit builds cars. A University of Pennsylvania-trained architect who runs the family firm Giattina Aycock (GA Studio), he turned a former Pullman railcar plant into a million-square-foot factory where acute-care medical facilities are designed, manufactured, and assembled using his Design-Manufacture-Construct (DMC) method. His pitch is a clean equation: buildings at twice the quality, twice the speed, and twice the value - what he calls 2x2x2.