The capacity of the disciplines of the built environment to engage the accelerating crises—climatic, environmental, social, and geopolitical—resides not in coherent masterplans or totalizing strategies, but in the meticulous choreography of dispersed interventions, stitched into a scalable, perpetually shifting fabric of action. Its potency emerges precisely through dissonance, multiplicity, and a systemic evasion of singular authorship and centralized control.

In recognition of the urgency not merely to observe change but to choreograph it, GSAPP has reimagined its public programming—not as a passive stage for presentation, but as an active platform for coalition-building and alliance-making. In recognition of the need to actively propel these choreographies into being, GSAPP repurposes its public program as an active platform—not simply for presentation, but for building coalitions, and cultivating alliances among individuals and organizations united by shared priorities and overlapping engagements.

This expanded terrain of collaboration—now encompassing over a hundred actors rooted in New York and radiating through GSAPP’s global constellation—brings together architecture and art collectives deploying design as activism (including raumlabor, Floating Museum, and Espace Aygo); practitioners reimagining social and ecological fabrics (from LOT-EK, Jacques Herzog, Mary Miss, and Kate Orff, to WorkAC, TAKK, Ziad Jameleddine, Jorge Otero-Pailos, and Bernard Tschumi); designers recoding objects and technologies as agents of transformation (among them Yves Béhar, Margot DeMarco, Luam Melake, and Nao Tamura); many of the world’s most influential scholars (Desirée Valadares, Jonathan Levy, Beatriz Colomina, Ateya Khorakiwala, Albena Yaneva, and Mabel Wilson); and institutions pooling their capacities in a shared choreography of climate action (including the HBCU Green Fund, Donors of Color Network, ACE Observatory, and Columbia’s Environmental and Climate Justice Project).

Acknowledging that these challenges are inherently transnational—and that the GSAPP community itself is globally distributed—the School is launching the World Actioning Summits: a platform for intensive, action-driven collaboration between scholars, practitioners, and activists from across the world. The inaugural summit will take place in Seoul on November 1, 2025, as a catalyst for collective thinking, strategic intervention, and transdisciplinary collaboration.

Lastly, GSAPP is delighted to launch the Inaugural Terence Riley Summit. Conceived as a gathering of leading voices in architecture curation from across the globe, the Summit honors the enduring legacy of Terence Riley—GSAPP alumnus and the founding director of the School’s Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery. This platform is enabled by the generous support of Elise Jaffe and Jeffrey Brown, whose commitment to the field ensures that Riley’s spirit of curatorial experimentation will continue to provoke, inspire, and convene.