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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 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 spacess. 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.

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, Beatrice Galilee, 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.

The Historic Preservation Program’s Fitch Colloquium, Fragments of the Imagination, and LiPS 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: Urban Design Interventions from Jaipur, 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.