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Joint Lecture Series

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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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