Mariam Issoufou (Mariam Issoufou Architects) in conversation with Mario Gooden (GSAPP, Mario Gooden Studio).

Mariam Issoufou is the founder of architecture and research firm, Mariam Issoufou Architects (formerly atelier masōmī). The firm’s portfolio encompasses public, cultural, residential, commercial and urban design projects. Completed works include the Hikma Community Complex, a library and mosque complex in Niger, which won two Global LafargeHolcim Awards for sustainable architecture. Niamey 2000 Housing, a response to Niger’s housing crisis was shortlisted for the 2022 Aga Khan Award for Architecture. Additional and upcoming projects include the Yantala Office in Niger, the Ellen Johnson Sirleaf Presidential Center for Women and Development in Liberia, and Bët-bi Museum in Senegal.

What is the relationship between that entity we call “the state” and the built environment? To reframe this question, this one-day conference draws from recent literature that has challenged the conception of the state as an autonomous monolith that exerts uniform power on the world around it. What does it mean to understand the state, instead, as an entity that gains its coherence from its effects? How can architecture, understood as a state effect, help re-conceptualize the state as a central conceit in modernity?

To attend in person, please RSVP via email: buellcenter@columbia.edu. To attend virtually, register here.

Organized by GSAPP’s Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture.

• Dean Andrés Jaque delivers lecture, “The Politics of Transscalar Architecture” at University of Hong Kong, Dept. of Architecture. Tuesday, September 24, 6:30 AM EST. Join on Zoom.

• Faculty Anthony Vanky presents at the UN General Assembly Science Summit on the subject of better data collection and urban engagement around the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. Wednesday, September 25. Register to view full schedule and attend virtually. Free and open to the public.

• For Climate Week, Nocturnal Medicine (faculty Michelle Farang Shofet and Larissa Belcic) host SENSUOUS PLANET, an experimental party dedicated to earth. Friday, September 27. More information and tickets.

• Submissions for MSHP’s Future Anterior Journal are due October 1. This special issue of Future Anterior invites writers and practitioners to present papers or visual projects that research, map, describe, and narrate “earthly memorial landscapes” which – like the Amazon rainforest or the ǂKhomani sand formations in southern Africa – are the product of social design entangled with nature. Learn more and submit.

• Faculty Lydia Kallipoliti‘s new book Histories of Ecological Design: An Unfinished Cyclopedia (Actar, 2024) reviewed by The Architect’s Newspaper.

• Dark Space: Architecture Representation Black Identity (Columbia University Press, 2016) by faculty Mario Gooden included in the exhibition, “Artists Making Books: Pages of Refuge,” at the American Academy, Rome on view from September 26–December 7, 2024.

• “Edges of Ailey” at the Whitney Museum features 18-channel video installation by Kya Lou and faculty Josh Begley on view from September 25–February 9, 2025.