August at GSAPP moves into quieter frequencies with less scheduled happenings as preparations unfold for the fall’s upcoming events and arrivals. In the meantime, GSAPP’s ecosystem remains present across public space, exhibitions, and editorial platforms. This month’s news traces a wide global arc through faculty and alumni practices that reimagine the architectures of performance, justice, pedagogy, and more-than-human design.

Pictured: MSAAD final reviews, exploring new formats, materials, and modes of presentation.

LOT-EK led by faculty Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano, collaborate with Brooklyn-based transmedia artist Stephanie Dinkins on the design and build of If We Don’t, Who Will?, a public installation challenging the racialized AI space by highlighting Black ethos and cultural cornerstones. Recently featured in The Guardian, If We Don’t, Who Will? combines AI-generated imagery, community storytelling, and interactive design to reshape technology’s representation of marginalized voices with care and generosity. On view at 300 Ashland Place in Downtown Brooklyn, now through September 28, daily from 12–6PM.

• Faculty Lydia Kallipoliti, one year into her role as Director of the MSAAD program, speaks with Columbia News about her teaching the intersections of environmental systems and architectural practice. She discusses the development of new pedagogical formats, such as the Edible Summits, and the integration of cross-disciplinary methods in design education. The conversation concludes with advice: “Ask questions… that indicate knowledge and know-how of the subject at hand.”

• Faculty Mario Gooden, is featured in Columbia Global Centers’ news for developing Black Holes Ain’t So Black, an installation-performance evolved during his residency with L’AiR Arts in Paris. Fusing Black Studies, architecture, and astrophysics, the work layers archival film, choreography, and oration to explore space as site of memory, violence, and liberation. The piece premieres at Pioneer Works, Brooklyn and will evolve through residencies and workshops.

• Dean Andrés Jaque and faculty Kate Orff are featured in The Guardian’s review of More than Human, at the Design Museum, London. Dean Jaque’s Transspecies Rosette, is a cladding system made of pulverized cork and natural resin, an architecture designed to tune into more-than-human life. Orff presents SCAPE’s Bird-Safe Building Guidelines, showing how understanding the differences between human and avian vision could prevent a billion bird deaths a year, in the US alone.

• Faculty Raven Chacon opens his solo exhibition Conductus on July 30 at Kunstverein Hannover, presenting major sculptural works, films, and installations alongside two new live performances. Moving between sound, notation, performance, and sculpture, Chacon’s practice is shaped by the musical traditions of the Diné (Navajo) and rooted in experimentation across forms, contexts, and methods.

• Kate Orff, Director of the MSAUD program and founder of SCAPE, received the 2025 ASLA Landscape Architecture Firm Award, the profession’s highest honor. From Living Breakwaters in New York to Tom Lee Park in Memphis, SCAPE fuses ecological insight with on-the-ground dialogue, stitching nature back into the city to create durable, socially vibrant public spaces.

• Crosetto Piazzi, led by Rocio Crosetto ’22 MSAAD with Leandro Piazzi and Juan Manuel Balsa, is among the six winners of the 2025 Architectural League Prize for Young Architects + Designers. Based between the U.S. and Argentina, the practice was recognized for a grounded yet expansive approach to architecture, weaving together material experimentation, site-specific building methods.

• The latest edition of Architectural Design Journal, Staged, edited by Ashley Simone ‘07 M.Arch, includes works and words from faculty Mark Wasiuta, Mireia Luzárraga (TAKK), and Bart-Jan Polman. Celebrating theatricality and collaboration, the featured work unfolds through a diverse cast of architectural voices, offering a multifaceted view of architecture’s role in shaping entertainment environments and framing narrative experience.

• Louis Amadeus Arteaga ‘25 MSAAD and Sofia Hernandez '25 MSAAD won second place in the 2025 MOA Design and Build Competition for Arch of Becoming, a conceptual proposal exploring sacred geometry through Platonic solids. Drawing from symbolic geometries and material exploration, the project reimagines entanglements between form, matter, and cosmology.