GSAPP returns to Avery with great momentum. Over the break, students, faculty, and our wider ecosystem moved across the globe: some going home, others connecting with one another, many conducting field research for spring projects. Collaborating across time zones, they engaged urgent local realities while tracing the global systems that shape them, bringing this knowledge and energy back to New York for the semester ahead. With two weeks to go before classes begin, this is a good time to take stock of the energy already in motion: awards and recognitions, new grants and publications, collaborations, that expanded our ecosystem over the past year, and to look ahead to the spring semester’s forthcoming programming and announcements.

• Faculty Andrew Dolkart and alumni Ken Lustbader ’93 MSHP, Jay Shockley, and Amanda Davis ’06 MSHP will receive the Preservation League of New York State Pillar of New York Award for their transformative work documenting and preserving NYC’s LGBTQ historic sites. (pictured)

• Faculty Laura Kurgan, co-sponsored by Columbia’s Department of History and GSAPP’s Center for Spatial Research, receives a new grant from the Robert David Lion Gardiner Foundation to expand Mapping Historical New York: A Digital Atlas project across all five boroughs, supporting teaching, student research, public engagement, and the long-term growth of its open-access platform.

• Dean Andrés Jaque, Faculty Sumayya Vally (Counterspace), and Faculty Juan Herreros (Estudio Herreros) are named to the Architectural Digest AD100 list for 2026, recognizing their contributions to contemporary architectural practice.

• Faculty Chloe Munkenbeck, along with alumni Kriti Shivagunde ’23 MSAAD, Niriksha Shetty ’23 MSAAD, Anoushae Eirabie ’22 M.Arch, and Aya Abdallah ’22 M.Arch among others, are the recipients of the 2025 Independent Projects Grant by the Architectural League of New York for their respective projects. (pictured)

• Carolyn Swope, Ph.D. Candidate in Urban Planning, is awarded the Founder’s Prize at the Social Science History Association Annual Conference, recognizing the best article published in the journal Social Science History on The Spatial Configuration of Segregation, Elite Fears of Disease, and Housing Reform in Washington, D.C.’s Inhabited Alleys.

• A team of ’26 MSRED students, Lama Barhoumi, David Ni, and Taylor Lowery, advised by Glascock Associate Professor Christopher W. Munsell, win first place at the Colvin Case Study Competition, hosted by the Colvin Institute of Real Estate Development at the University of Maryland.

• Faculty Galen Pardee and Manuel Cordero ’16 M.Arch (COPA) receive an Honorable Mention in The Architect’s Newspaper Best of Design 2025 Awards for Mr Nancy’s bar project. They are also featured for two adaptive reuse projects. Barnard Barn transforms a barn in Vermont into a studio and library using biomaterials and low-embodied-carbon assemblies, while Narrow Townhouse reworks an old rowhouse in Brooklyn into a compact two-family residence.

• Faculty Eric Bunge and Faculty Mimi Hoang (nARCHITECTS) win Architects Newspaper’s 2025 Best of Design Award, Residential, Single Unit Category, with their CLT House.

• Mahdi Sabbagh, Ph.D. Candidate in Architecture, publishes an article on Building from the Bottom Up, reflecting on the state of architecture and its political, material, and social conditions over the past year.

• Faculty Kevin Hai Pham and Faculty Lucy Navarro are awarded the 2025 Stewardson Keefe LeBrun Travel Grant for their respective research projects examining the intersections of architecture, ecology, and cultural landscapes.

• Walter Cain ’15 M.Arch (Cain & Nico) is featured in The Wall Street Journal for a low–embodied-carbon residence in São Paulo, Brazil, that calibrates to the local climate. (pictured)

Over the past year, GSAPP convened conferences, lectures, summits, and collaborative projects that activated the School’s intellectual and disciplinary breadth. Students, faculty, and practitioners interrogated architecture, urbanism, preservation, and design, testing frameworks, generating knowledge, and expanding critical discourse. From Coalitions and Actioning Summits to The Library Is Open and program-led lecture series, the School made visible the processes through which ideas are collectively produced.

This coming spring, that work continues, building on last year’s momentum, deepening inquiry, fostering experimentation, and advancing the conversations that make GSAPP a hub of critical, inventive practice in New York and beyond.

This fall, GSAPP transformed into a semester-long choreography of coalitions. The semester opened with the Columbia GSAPP Real Estate Development Conference, which assembled global practitioners to interrogate how real estate shapes the contemporary city through design, policy, and financial infrastructures. Simultaneously, LOT-EK’s Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano, during the Open House Lecture, activated the space through student-led, open formats, foregrounding experimentation and cross-program exchange.

The first three Coalitions facilitated direct dialogue with the practitioners reshaping the conditions of contemporary spatial practice.

Coalition 1: Collectives convened Espace Aygo, the Floating Museum, Raumlabor, and others to examine how design operates through shared authorship and situated engagement.

Coalition 2: Designers, developed with PIN–UP Magazine, recast the role of speculation, aesthetics, and experimentation in shaping contemporary architectural imaginaries.

Coalition 3: Curators, the Inaugural Terence Riley Summit, invited international curators—including Paola Antonelli, Martino Stierli, Noura Al Sayeh-Holtrop, Justin McGuirk, Maria Nicanor, among others—to GSAPP to articulate how exhibitions, archives, and institutions can act as agents in a rapidly transforming landscape.

The Library Is Open continued its transformation of Avery’s central staircase into a civic auditorium, with open book talks on the New Design Museum with Beatrice Leanza, Rooted Transience with Nawaf Bin Ayyaf and Faysal Tabbarah, Archigram Facsimile with Beatriz Colomina and Bernard Tschumi, Buildings for People and Plants with Amale Andraos and Dan Wood.

Other programs have also been engaged with various happenings, including The Historic Preservation Program’s Fitch Colloquium, Fragments of the Imagination, and the Lecture in Planning Series (LiPS) that placed preservation, housing, infrastructure, and inequality at the center of GSAPP’s shared concerns. This focus was further extended through the Urban Design lecture Shaping Civic Futures, underscoring how these questions resonate across GSAPP’s programs.

The semester closed with the inaugural GSAPP Review Summit, in which all Advanced V studios assembled with critics for a day of collective synthesis. Avery reconfigured as a temporary landscape of exchange, the Summit materialized GSAPP’s ethos of producing knowledge that is collective, critical, and deeply embedded in the urgencies of the present.

Spring 2025 was anchored by the Actioning Summits, which structured the School’s most visible cross-disciplinary platform.

Three summits addressed urgent methodological questions shaping the built environment today.

Actioning Summit 5: How to think through/as more-than-human intelligence convened James Bridle, Michael Marder, Laura Tripaldi, and Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing to examine intelligence beyond the human.

Actioning Summit 7: How to project disability forward, co-curated with Ignacio G. Galán, addressed disability not as an accommodation framework but as a forward-looking design methodology. Speakers included Edmund Asiedu, David Gissen, Aimi Hamraie, and Ignacio G. Galán.

The spring summits concluded with Actioning Summit 8: How to repair, which brought together Ron Daniels, Marjetica Potrč, and Paulo Tavares to address repair as a political, cultural, and spatial practice.

Running alongside the summits, The Library Is Open continued as a recurring spring forum centered on books as instruments of architectural discourse. Spring 2025 sessions included Bernard Tschumi on Event-Cities 5; Florian Idenburg and Jing Liu (SO–IL) on In Depth: Urban Domesticities Today; Kate Yeh Chiu and Jia Yi Gu on Material Acts; and Feifei Zhou on Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene, developed with Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Jennifer Deger, and Alder Keleman Saxena.

Program-led lecture series formed a major strand of Spring programming. The Lecture in Planning Series (LiPS) invited speakers including Justin Steil, Lauren Andres, Desiree Fields, Jennifer Tucker, Kevin Lujan Lee, Josh Campbell, Jamie Wang, and Gabriella Carolini into conversation around housing, infrastructure, governance, and inequality. In parallel, the Historic Preservation Lecture Series featured Rosa Lowinger, Dylan Yeats, Pilar Bosch, and Sevince Bayrak, alongside the Paul S. Byard Memorial Lecture by Ricardo Flores, foregrounding questions of heritage, repair, and material practice.

Additional Spring events extended critical discussions across GSAPP’s constellation of spaces. The Buell Center hosted lectures by Brian Goldstein, Yasmina El Chami, and Sophia Roosth; the Arguments Lecture Series featured Stan Allen, Behnaz Farahi, Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, Michael Young, Areti Markopoulou, Ersela Kripa, and Stephen Mueller; and the Computational Design’s Conversations with Practitioners included Jose Sanchez, Yehwan Song, Trebor Scholz, Tiri Kananuruk, Sebastián Morales Prado, and Francis Tseng.