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2024 Spring Lectures

Joan Busquets headshot

Feb. 12, 1:30 pm
Joan Busquets

Joan Busquets is the Martin Bucksbaum Professor in Practice of Urban Planning and Design at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. A world-renowned urban planner, urban designer, and architect, Busquets served as Head of Urban Planning for the Barcelona City Council during the formative years, from 1983 to 1989, and in the preparations for the Barcelona Olympics in 1992, including the New Downtowns program for the City and the improvement process for existing neighborhoods.

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Boonserm Premthada

Feb. 23, 1:30 pm
Boonserm Premthada

Boonserm Premthada and his award-winning practice, Bangkok Project Studio, move away from placing humans at the center. He argues that architecture is the physical creation of an atmosphere, serving to heighten our awareness of our natural surroundings. In doing so, we can learn how to be humane and treat humans, nature, and animals as all equal in a space. This sensitivity is visible in all his projects, for which he credits 50% of his design as being left to nature, allowing unexpected moments of interaction between humans and animals; these works invite their visitors to slow down and connect with nature.
Beyond the realms of theory and practice, Premthada’s work also carries a strong socio-economic, cultural, and environmental agenda, as many of his projects have social programs that aim to improve the lives of the underprivileged and the ecosystem.

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Chandra Robinson headshot

Mar. 4, 4:30 pm
Chandra Robinson

Chandra Robinson is a principal at Lever Architecture, a firm founded in Portland, Oregon by Thomas Robinson and Pamela Kislak in 2009. Now based in both Portland and LA, the practice currently numbers over 55 employees. Lever Architects operates at the intersection of research and design, developing and testing next-generation building assemblies and sustainable tools while foregrounding human experience and equity. Recognized for innovation in timber construction by Fast Company in 2021 and 2022, the firm won Architectural Record’s Vanguard Award in 2017 and was named an Emerging Voice by The Architectural League of New York in 2017.

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Mauricio Rocha

Mar. 18, 4:30 pm
Mauricio Rocha

Mauricio Rocha founded his practice in Mexico City in 1991, and was shortlisted for the AR Emerging awards in 2009 for the School of Plastic Arts in Oaxaca. Since then, Rocha has designed buildings around Mexico, many in collaboration with the architect Gabriela Carrillo, who was a partner at the practice between 2012 and 2019. Projects include the Centro de Invidentes y Débiles Visuales (Centre for the Blind and Visually Impaired) in 2001 – and the renovation of a library on the site in with Carrillo in 2015 – the Pátzcuaro Criminal Courts from 2015, a brick studio for Rocha’s mother in 2016, and most recently the extension of the Museo Anahuacalli in Mexico City.

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Roberto de Leon

Mar. 25, 4:30 pm
Roberto de Leon

Roberto de Leon AIA LEED AP NCARB is a partner and co-founder of De Leon & Primmer Architecture Workshop (DPAW), a collaborative design studio focusing on public projects with a cultural, civic or not-for-profit basis. His work is recognized for its contextual sensitivity, innovation in material applications, and the holistic integration of sustainable strategies rooted in regional specificity. His research operates at a range of scales and environments – both urban & rural – while exploring relationships between the local & global. Roberto holds a Master In Architecture from Harvard University and a Bachelor of Arts In Architecture from the University of California at Berkeley.

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Anne Schopf

Apr. 10, 6:30 pm
Anne Schopf

Anne Schopf, FAIA is a partner emeritus, senior principal and director of design at Mahlum Architects. Working across all studios in the firm in her role, Anne continually challenges teams to question deeply and listen intently to support the firm’s goal of creating healthy and sustainable spaces for their clients and the communities they serve. A dedicated champion of design excellence and environmental stewardship, Anne’s projects and professional activism continually enhance the discourse on design and place. With more than 80 regional and national design awards to her credit, she continually strives for the highest quality of design within strict parameters of performance.

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2023 Fall Lectures

Arthur Clement

Sept. 18, 4:30 pm
Art Clement

Arthur Clement is an accomplished construction executive and results-driven, project leader. His forte is successfully managing complex architectural/engineering projects from concept to completion. Art’s professional successes are enhanced by a multi-faceted background and cultural perspective, and a 35-year career with several architectural, construction, and program management firms.

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Kelly Van Dyck Murphy

Oct. 2, 4:30 pm
Kelley Van Dyck Murphy

Kelley Van Dyck Murphy is an assistant professor of architecture in the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts at Washington University in St. Louis. In the College of Architecture, she teaches design studios and seminar courses in digital fabrication and representation. She is the co-director of Van Dyck Murphy Studio, a multidisciplinary architecture and design collaborative based in St. Louis, Missouri. The practice engages in built and speculative projects at the scales of objects, installations, and environments, focusing on work that explores materiality, craft, and experiential narratives.

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Carol A. Wilson

Oct. 16, 4:30 pm
Carol A. Wilson
Roger Clark Endowed Lecture

Carol A. Wilson, FAIA has been working in Maine since 1981. “Deeply tied to the landscape of Maine, my desire is to produce buildings worthy of this place.” She established her own firm in 1986. In addition to the work of her studio, she teaches, lectures and is an active force in the Portland Society of Architects. Her work has been published and widely recognized for its excellence in design.

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Thomas Barrie

Oct. 23, 4:30 pm
Thomas Barrie

Thomas Barrie, FAIA, DPACSA is a professor of architecture and director of the Affordable Housing and Sustainable Communities Initiative at the NC State College of Design. Two parallel interests comprise Professor Barrie’s teaching, scholarship and publication – both of which occupy the common ground of syncretic approaches to meaningful placemaking in the built environment.

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Paul Masi

Nov. 6, 4:30 pm
Paul Masi

Paul Masi is an architect and founder of Bates Masi + Architects, a full-service architectural firm with roots in New York City and the East End of Long Island for over 55 years. The firm has received 225 design awards since 2003 and has been featured in national and international publications including The New York Times, New York Magazine, Architectural Digest, Interior Design, Architectural Record, Metropolitan Home, and Dwell. In 2013, Bates Masi was inducted into the Interior Design Hall of Fame.

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Shawn Protz

Nov. 9, 6:00 pm
Shawn Protz

Shawn Protz is an assistant professor of architecture at the NC State College of Design. He has explored a range of subjects spanning from structural and environmental systems to digital representation and fabrication; past classes have covered design communication, building information modeling, climatic design, housing, inflatable architecture, and tectonics.

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Molly Wright Steenson

Nov. 13, 4:30 pm
Molly Wright Steenson

Dr. Molly Wright Steenson is the president and CEO of the American Swedish Institute in Minneapolis, a 90+ year-old museum and cultural institution that celebrates histories of craft, migration, and culture through enduring ties to Sweden.

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2023 Spring Lectures

Sigrid Andriaenssens

Jan. 30, 6:30 pm
Sigrid Adriaenssens
Robert P. Burns Lecture

Dr. Adriaenssens’s research focuses on lightweight surface systems and how they can be optimized and realised to interact with extreme structural or environmental loading. This includes research on flexible and rigid shells and plates, submerged flexible membranes and nets, and metamaterials with applications for a resilient urban environment. The applications range from adaptive building shading devices to large-scale inflatable storm surge barriers and are sometimes inspired by systems that evolved in biology, art or architecture.

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Mira Henry, Matthew Au

Feb. 6, 6:30 pm
Mira Henry + Matthew Au

Mira Henry & Matthew Au are principals of the collaborative architectural design practice Current Interests and design faculty at SCI-Arc in Los Angeles. 

Mira’s built work is grounded in notions of material specificity, color relationships, assembly details, and an engagement in critical cultural thinking. Her formal research and writing focus on architecture, race, and materiality. Matthew’s professional expertise is in design with an emphasis on fabrication, custom software development, complex building systems, and architectural installations. His projects include exhibition design, interactive media, façade systems, and large-scale installations.

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Lyndon Neri

Feb. 20, 6:30 pm
Lyndon Neri
Tesar Lecture

Lyndon Neri is a Founding Partner, along with Rossana Hu, of Neri&Hu Design and Research Office, an inter-disciplinary international architectural design practice based in Shanghai, China. The practice’s burgeoning global portfolio includes commissions ranging from master planning and architecture, to interior design, installation, furniture, product, branding and graphic works. Currently working on projects in many countries, Neri&Hu is composed of multi-cultural staff who speak over 30 different languages. The diversity of the team reinforces a core vision for the practice: to respond to a global worldview incorporating overlapping design disciplines for a new paradigm in architecture.

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Melissa DelVecchio

Feb. 27, 6:30 pm
Melissa DelVecchio
In partnership with DDes

Melissa DelVecchio is a partner at Robert A.M. Stern Architects. She is the design lead for many of the firm’s most complex academic and institutional projects, and directs the Research Department. Building upon her education that included an intensive study of classical architecture and a subsequent immersion into contemporary design, her work synthesizes tradition and invention, reinforcing the many visual, social, environmental, and cultural influences that give places identity and meaning.

Melissa organized and collaborated on Project Soane, the worldwide crowdsourced BIM reconstruction and rendering competition of Sir John Soane’s Bank of England using advanced modeling and visualization tools.

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Yasmin Vobis, Aaron Forrest

Mar. 27, 6:30 pm
Yasmin Vobis + Aaron Forrest

Yasmin Vobis is co-founder of Ultramoderne, an office committed to creating architecture and public spaces that are at once modern, playful, and generous. Their view that architecture is not a boutique luxury but plays an important role in all aspects of urban life, has driven them to mine the rich possibilities for contact between the discipline and the everyday.

Aaron Forrest is a registered architect and co-founding Principal of Ultramoderne. He has extensive professional experience, having practiced in New York with Bernheimer Architecture and Guy Nordenson and Associates Structural Engineers, and in Madrid with Ábalos & Herreros Arquitectos. Aaron’s work has been recognized widely, both for design excellence and for innovations in architectural technology and the design of public space.

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Jha D Amazi

Apr. 12, 6:30 pm
Jha D Amazi
AIAT Design Awards Lecture

Jha D is the Director of the Public Memory and Memorials Lab at MASS Design Group, which is an initiative that advances research, training, and built work around a central thesis: spatializing memory can heal us and inspire collective action for generations to come. Projects in the Lab’s portfolio include the Sugar Land 95 Cemetery Revitalization Project, Harris County Remembrance Project and several initiatives with the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

At MASS, Jha D has also contributed to the Gun Violence Memorial Project, Franklin Park Action Plan, and the Louise B. Miller Memorial and Freedom Garden at Gallaudet University. Previously, she worked as a Designer at Sasaki Associates. She received her Bachelor of Science in Architecture from Northeastern University and her Master of Architecture I from the University of Pennsylvania.

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2022 Fall Lectures

Felecia Davis

Sept. 12, 4:30 pm
Felecia Davis
MacMillan Family Lecture
In partnership with Art + Design

Felecia Davis is an associate professor of architecture, lead researcher in the Stuckeman Center for Design and Computation, and director of SOFTLAB in the Stuckeman School. Davis’s work in architecture and textiles connects art, science, engineering and design and re-imagines how we might use textiles in our daily lives and in architecture.

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Traci Rider

Oct. 12, 12 pm
Traci Rider

Dr. Traci Rose Rider is an Assistant Professor of Architecture, Doctor of Design faculty, and PhD Faculty at North Carolina State University’s College of Design. Dr. Rider’s research has focused on the relationship between the design culture and the notion of sustainability, exploring factors impacting environmental attitudes of designers including environmental education, learned associations, and informal influences. Dr. Rider teaches courses focusing on sustainability and health for the School of Architecture, addressing topics such as existing building operations and maintenance, and holistic considerations for both health and sustainability.

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Sarah Robinson

Oct. 24, 4:30 pm
Sarah Robinson

Sarah Robinson is an architect, writer, educator and organic farmer whose practice is based in the Langhe region of Piemonte, Italy. She is an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Architecture Design and Media Technology at Aalborg University, Denmark and teaches in the NAAD program at IUAV, Venice. She was the founding president of the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture board of governors and co-edits the journal Intertwining. Her writing and interdisciplinary research is concerned with understanding the many ways the built environment interacts to shape body, mind and culture in a more-than-human world.

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Jack Halberstam

Nov. 3, 4:30 pm
Jack Halberstam

Jack Halberstam is Professor of Gender Studies and English at Columbia University. Halberstam is the author of seven books including: Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Duke UP, 1995), Female Masculinity (Duke UP, 1998), In A Queer Time and Place (NYU Press, 2005), The Queer Art of Failure (Duke UP, 2011), Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (Beacon Press, 2012) and, a short book titled Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variance (University of California Press).

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David Benjamin

Nov. 7, 4:30 pm
David Benjamin
Harwell Hamilton Harris Lecture

David Benjamin is Founding Principal of The Living and Associate Professor at Columbia GSAPP. He also directs the GSAPP Incubator. Benjamin’s work combines research and practice, and it involves exploring new ideas through prototyping. Focusing on the intersection of biology, computation, and design, Benjamin has articulated three frameworks for harnessing living organisms for architecture: bio-processing, bio-sensing, and bio-manufacturing.

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Takuro & Hitomi Shibata

Nov. 14, 4:30 pm
Takuro & Hitomi Shibata

Hitomi and Takuro Shibata are potters from Shigaraki, Japan, and set up STUDIO TOUYA in Seagrove, NC, USA. They make handmade pottery and sculptural work using natural material, wild clays, and wood firing techniques.

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2022 Spring Lectures

Bryan Bell

Jan. 24, 6 pm
Bryan Bell

Bryan Bell is an associate professor in the School of Architecture at NC State’s College of Design. In 1991, he founded the nonprofit organization Design Corps with the mission “to provide the benefits of design for the 98 percent without architects.” His current work includes research in the field of public interest design and the SEED Network, which Bell co-founded. Bell has published four books in this field, and he has organized 33 Public Interest Design Institutes and 18 Structures for Inclusion international conferences.

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Virginia San Fratello

Feb. 7, 6 pm
Virginia San Fratello

Virginia San Fratello is an educator, designer and creative technologist. She is the chair of the Department of Design at San Jose State University in Silicon Valley and an International Interior Design Association Educator of the Year recipient. She is a design activist, author and thought leader within the fields of additive manufacturing, architecture, interior and product design.

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Julia Watson

Feb. 21, 6 pm
Julia Watson

Julia Watson is an Australian born lecturer and landscape designer living, teaching and practicing in New York. She teaches in the Urban Design program at Columbia GSAPP. Watson previously taught at Harvard University, Rhode Island School of Design and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. In 2013, she founded Studio Rede, a landscape design and conservation practice that works at the intersection of anthropology, ecology and innovation.

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Guy Nordenson

Feb. 28, 6 pm
Guy Nordenson
Robert P. Burns Lecture

Guy Nordenson is a structural engineer and professor of architecture and structural engineering at Princeton University. He studied at MIT and the University of California at Berkeley and began his career as a draftsman in the joint Long Island City studio of R Buckminster Fuller and Isamu Noguchi in 1976. In 1987, he established the New York office of Ove Arup & Partners and was a director until 1997, when he began his independent practice.

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Dahlia Ndoum

Mar. 7, 12:30 pm
Dahlia Nduom
In partnernship with DDes

Dahlia Nduom is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Architecture at Howard University. She is a licensed architect who has practiced and taught in the US and Ghana. These educational and professional experiences have informed her research interests which investigate the relationship between history, culture and perception and the impacts on the architecture of the African Diaspora and their role in shaping definitions of the home and what it means to dwell. She investigates cultural, economic, social, political and sustainable issues to understand the spatial implications and systems occurring in the home to begin to address design criteria for housing suited to the complexities of our time.

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Eleena Jamil

Mar. 28, 8 pm
Eleena Jamil
Tesar Lecture

Eleena Jamil is the founder of Eleena Jamil Architect. Jamil set up her eponymous studio in Kuala Lumpur in 2005, and it has since been growing steadily with an expanding portfolio of work that has won international accolades. Projects developed within the studio have been widely published in the international press. In 2018, EJA was shortlisted for Dezeen Architect of the Year.

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Anupama Kundoo

Apr. 4, 12 pm
Anupama Kundoo
Tesar Lecture

Anupama Kundoo’s architecture centers around traditional craft traditions and construction techniques. Her buildings feature handmade materials assembled by local craftsmen, which she favours over mass-produced production methods.

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Peter D. Cook

Apr. 6, 6:30 pm
Peter D. Cook
AIAT Design Awards Lecture

Peter D. Cook has an outstanding portfolio of design leadership and award-winning projects throughout the United States—particularly in the D.C. area—encompassing museums, memorials, embassies, libraries, cultural and learning centers, and mixed-used corporate and neighborhood master planning. Among Cook’s high-profile projects are the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of African American History and Culture, Watha T. Daniel / Shaw Neighborhood Library, Embassy of South Africa, and Saint Elizabeths East Gateway Pavilion.

2021 Fall Lectures

Ross Gay

Sept. 28, 12:30 pm
Ross Gay
MacMillan Family Lecture

Gay is the author of four books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; Be Holding; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His new poem, Be Holding, was released from the University of Pittsburgh Press in September 2020. His collection of essays, The Book of Delights, was released by Algonquin Books in 2019.

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Rahul Mehrotra

Oct. 11, 6 pm
Rahul Mehrotra

Rahul Mehrotra is an architect, urbanist and educator who is the founding principal of RMA Architects and is a professor of Urban Design and Planning at the Department of Urban Planning and Design at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. Mehrotra has designed projects that range from recycling urban land and master planning in Mumbai to the design of art spaces, boutiques, weekend houses, factories, social institutes and office buildings across India – thereby engaging diverse issues, multiple constituencies and varying scales: from interior design and architecture to urban design, conservation and planning. 

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Antoine Bryant

Oct. 18, 6 pm
Antoine Bryant

Bryant comes to Detroit from Houston, where he served as business development and project manager for Moody Nolan. His career has centered around the development and social empowerment of underserved communities. He is a nationally recognized thought leader in civic engagement, urban planning and community-led design. With more than 25 years of experience, he has directed efforts across the country, from neighborhood plans to full-scale strategic planning activities.

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Caroline Shannon

Oct. 25, 6 pm
Caroline Shannon

Shannon’s practice as an architect and researcher is focused on health, equity, and social justice in the design of the built environment, exemplified by her work on the Memorial to Enslaved Laborers at the University of Virginia (with Hӧweler + Yoon Architecture, current) and the University of Global Health Equity in Butaro, Rwanda (with Shepley Bulfinch, 2016-2018). Prior to joining HYA, Caroline worked at Shepley Bulfinch, +D Studio (Rio de Janeiro), nbbj, and MASS Design Group. 

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Emmanuel Pratt

Nov. 1, 6 pm
Emmanuel Pratt

Emmanuel Pratt is an urban designer creating a model of resident-driven community development in neighborhoods that have suffered the effects of long-term disinvestment. Pratt is co-founder and executive director of the Sweet Water Foundation (SWF), a nonprofit organization based on Chicago’s South Side that engages local residents in the cultivation and regeneration of social, environmental, and economic resources in their neighborhoods.

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Tatiana Bilbao

Nov. 8, 12 pm
Tatiana Bilbao
Harwell Hamilton Harris Lecture

Tatiana Bilbao began her eponymous studio in 2004 with the aim of integrating social values, collaboration and sensitive design approaches to architectural work. Prior to founding her firm, Bilbao was an advisor in the Ministry of Development and Housing of the Government of the Federal District of Mexico City, during this period she was part of the General Development Directorate of the Advisory Council for Urban Development in the city.

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