At GSAPP, this month gathers voices from across the globe in Avery Hall for the culminating edition of the ACTIONING SUMMITS, it will also welcome back The Library is Open, and the spring lecture series. We also inaugurate the first Kenneth Frampton Endowed Symposium, a new platform for rethinking housing and domesticity in a time of urgent spatial transformation.

The 2025 PhD in Urban Planning Lecture, “The Trouble With Land and Housing Justice: Views From a Settler Colony” will be delivered by Libby Porter (RMIT), with a response by Tom Slater (GSAPP).

Libby Porter is Director of the Centre for Urban Research at RMIT University where she researches and educates on planning and urban geography. Motivated by social and ecological injustice, her work is about how urbanization creates forms of dispossession and displacement and what we might do about it. Her research aims to sharpen our understanding about the relationship between land and housing justice, the displacing effects of urban renewal, critical questions of urban governance and the politics of property. As someone living on stolen lands and benefiting from the dispossession of First Peoples, her work grapples with displacement and dispossession processes in cities.

The eighth and ultimate ACTIONING SUMMIT will discuss the expert knowledge and methodologies that surround questions of repair, with several key experts on the topic of reparations: Dr. Ron Daniels (NAARC), Marjetica Potrč, Paulo Tavares (autonoma, University of Brasília), and Mabel Wilson (GSAPP, AAADS).

The ACTIONING SUMMITS are an unprecedented effort to affirm how architecture, planning, development, and preservation are anticipating desirable and alternative futures.

The ACTIONING SUMMITS are curated by Andrés Jaque, Dean, and Bart-Jan Polman, Director of Exhibitions and Public Programming and Curator of the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery.

The Library is Open 18 invites GSAPP’s FeiFei Zhou to discuss her recent book Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene: The New Nature (Stanford University Press, 2024) that she co-wrote with Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Jennifer Deger, and Alder Keleman Saxena.

Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene takes stock of our current planetary crisis, leading readers through a series of sites, thought experiments, and genre-stretching descriptive practices to nurture a revitalized natural history. This Field Guide shifts attention away from knowledge extractive practices of globalization to encourage skilled observers of many stripes to pursue their commitments to place, social justice, and multispecies community.

The Library is Open is a lunchtime series featuring recently published works and their authors, curated by Bart-Jan Polman, Director of Exhibitions and Public Programming and Curator of the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery.

The inaugural Kenneth Frampton Endowed Symposium, brings together faculy from across GSAPP programs to discuss housing and its relation to domesticity.

With Amale Andraos (GSAPP, WorkAC), Michael Bell (GSAPP, Bell-Seong Architecture), Anthony Clarke (GSAPP, BLOXAS), Mario Gooden (GSAPP, Mario Gooden Architects), Laurie Hawkinson (GSAPP, Smith-Miller + Hawkinson), Juan Herreros (GSAPP, estudio Herreros), Eric Bunge (GSAPP, nArchitects), Steven Holl (GSAPP, Steven Holl Architects), Dean Andrés Jaque (GSAPP, OFFPOLINN), Adam Lubinsky (GSAPP, WXY), Ada Tolla & Giuseppe Lignano (GSAPP, Lot-EK), Mireia Luzzáraga (GSAPP, TAKK), Alessandro Orsini (GSAPP, Architensions), Rachely Rotem (GSAPP, MODU), Hilary Sample (GSAPP, MOS), Galia Solomonoff (GSAPP, SAS), Bernard Tschumi (GSAPP, Bernard Tschumi Architects), Marc Tsurumaki (GSAPP, LTL)

The Emilio Ambasz Lecture Series: Architecture as Poetry at the CU Department of Art History will feature architect Kengo Kuma on the topic of “The Materials and Structures of a Poetic Practice.” Kuma was invited by faculty Barry Bergdoll to speak for the inaugural lecture in this new series. Reception to follow. Monday, April 7, 2025, 5–6 PM at the Lila Acheson Wallace Auditorium at the Asia Society Museum. RSVP required.

• The American Academy of Arts and Letters names Dean Andrés Jaque and Dean Emeritus Mark Wigley as recipients of the 2025 Awards in Architecture. Jaque will receive an Arts and Letters Award for his distinctive architecture characterized by a strong personal direction, while Wigley is recognized for his exploration of architectural ideas through diverse mediums of expression.

• Artist Grace Atkinson sites “Deserts are Not Empty” (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2022) by Samia Henni as ‘the best book’ she’s read in the past year in Financial Times interview.

• Faculty Philippe Rahm will exhibit the work of his firm, Philippe Rahm Architectes at “Stop Drawing” on view at MAXXI in Rome from April 18–September 21, 2025

• Faculty Hiba Bou Akar co-organized and moderated “Art in Times of War: Threading Spaces of Displacement, Exile and Genocide” for her residency at The Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination.

• Faculty Mireia Luzárraga (TAKK) opens three installations at the 2nd Solar Biennale at the MUDAC Museum, Lausanne. One of the scenes was also acquired by the museum’s permanent collection.

• Justin Garrett Moore ‘04 M.Arch MSAUD was named one of “The Curious 100,” a celebration of 100 courageous leaders and creative minds across the US presented by the Eames Institute of Infinite Curiosity.