Instructor: James Canestaro, AIA, AICP

James Canestaro, AIA, AICP

James Canestaro is a registered architect and certified urban planner, with professional expertise in design programming, building characterization, strategic facility planning, capital asset management, and project economic analysis. He is the author of books, articles, and computer simulation models dealing with real estate cost-benefit and feasibility analysis.

He has been licensed as an architect in Virginia and Wisconsin, is an Emeritus Member of the American Institute of Architects as well as a member of the American Planning Association. Before returning to teaching continuing education programs, he was a senior architect and planner for a top-500 U.S. architectural and engineering firm. He received a Bachelor of Architecture degree from the University of Notre Dame, and Masters’ degrees in Architecture and Urban Planning both earned at the University of Illinois-Urbana.

James Canestaro has also been a faculty member of both the Architecture and Finance Departments at the University of Illinois; the Department of Real Estate and Urban Land Economics, Graduate School of Business, University of Wisconsin-Madison; the College of Architecture at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University; and the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He was the L.J. Hooker Visiting Fellow, in the Department of Applied Economics, at The Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia and USAID Advisor to the facility of Architecture at Gdansk Technical University in Poland.

He developed and is the only instructor for the Evaluation Commercial Construction and Evaluating Residential Construction Seminars. These professional education programs have been offered hundreds of times around the country during the last fourteen years to real estate fee appraisers, tax appraisers, and assessors. These seminars have been approved by the Appraisal Institute and Appraisal Foundation as well as forty-three states for continuing education credit. The seminars present unique images of building construction methods and adding to this library collection of more than 50,000 digital images by visiting notable commercial and residential construction projects everywhere he travels and teaches the seminars.

Comments from students:

“Best seminar I’ve ever attended”

“I think this is one of the most beneficial courses I have taken”

“I can use new info immediately. Very helpful, highly pertinent”

“This was a very informative class”

“Use of visual aids was awesome”

“I especially liked the reference manual”

“Interesting and humorous presentation”

“Excellent – in a word”