This month, GSAPP activates its global mesh of critical encounters, stretching from New York to Venice.

In the lead-up to the end of the term, final reviews unfold in and around Avery Hall. Through performances, installations, and situated presentations, students surface urgent questions and speculative frameworks—advancing architectural proposals shaped by inquiry and experimentation. Invited jurors from around the world join to reflect, challenge, and push these provocations, marking a culminating moment in the year’s evolving critical discourse.

As final reviews finish, the academic year concludes with the GSAPP Graduation on May 17 and the momentous opening of the End of Year show. Celebrating the achievements of GSAPP graduates, students, and researchers from across the academic programs, the End of Year Show mobilizes Avery Hall into a scaffolding of over 1,000 student works—articulating the School’s present commitments and sites of engagement. On the occasion, the End of Year Show will kick off with a live performance by the cosmic disco ensemble, Midnight Magic.

Also this month, more than 18 faculty and 15 alumni contribute to the 2025 Venice Biennale of Architecture through national pavilions, exhibitions, and research projects.

The 19th Venice Biennale of Architecture, opening May 10, 2025, brings together contributions from GSAPP faculty and alumni, across installations, national pavilions, curatorial projects, and collateral events. Through these works, the GSAPP ecosystem investigates the entanglements of architecture and climate; transspecies and collective intelligences; digital geographies and post-extractive material cultures; water governance and informal systems; the politics of data and its storage; infrastructural justice; sensory and atmospheric urbanism; and metabolic environments as frameworks for rethinking planetary coexistence.

On view through November 23, 2025. View the full list of GSAPP participants.

From May 17 to May 23, the studios, corridors, and online platforms of the school will become a public site for the 2025 End of Year Show, gathering over 1,000 works from across GSAPP’s programs. The exhibition reflects the School’s commitment to architecture as a tool for inquiry and intervention—engaging questions of ecological crisis, material politics, technological accountability, and territorial justice.

The exhibition will expand into an online platform (launching May 17), making accessible the works of GSAPP on a planetary scale. This is a landmark collaborative effort to mobilize the disciplines of the built environment as crucial sites where the conflicts of the present can be both studied and intervened.

Advance registration is required for non-GSAPP affiliates to attend the May 17 opening or to view the exhibition by appointment. Please email exhibitions@arch.columbia.edu to register.

• Dean Emeritus Bernard Tschumi presents Event-Cities 5: Poetics (MIT Press, 2024), the fifth and final volume in the landmark Event-Cities series, at the Center for Architecture. Tschumi unfurls the thematic “poetics,” addressing both the rational elaboration of work and the irrational eruption of inexplicable elements in his architectural projects. Situating over 30 projects, the publication advances Tschumi’s longstanding interest not only in producing conceptual clarity, but also in questioning architecture itself. Tuesday, May 13, 2025, 6–8 PM at the Center for Architecture. RSVP.

• Building on her Spring Clinic co-taught with Daniel Miller, faculty member Marina Otero Verzier presents “When Pixels Wash Ashore” (pictured) with e-flux Architecture. The lecture examines the case of the island nation of Tuvalu and its plans to become a fully virtual and digitized nation. Otero explores the tensions between digital custodianship and the data storage industry, engaging questions of preservation, proliferation, and decay. The work expands on the Clinic’s focus on Tuvalu’s imminent physical disappearance due to rising sea levels and the frameworks shaping its potential futures as a dispersed community. Thursday, May 15, 2025, 7 PM at e-flux. RSVP.

• As part of the ongoing discourse on energy and architecture, faculty Mireia Luzárraga (TAKK) joins Rufei Wang (Parsons) and Jochen Eisenbrand (Vitra) for a timely conversation on architecture’s position in the global energy shift. “Transformers: Architecture and the Energy Transition,” hosted by the Vitra Design Museum and the Goethe-Institut New York, asks critical questions surrounding energy consumption, human-technology interaction, and self-sustaining building practices. Monday, May 19, 2025, 6:30 PM at the Vitra Showroom. RSVP.

• Architect Ada Karmi-Melamede—who taught at GSAPP from 1969 to 1984—is the focus of Ada – My Mother the Architect , a new film by Yael Melamede that traces the entanglements of academic life, civic architecture, and motherhood. Opening Thursday, May 8, and runs through the month at the Angelika Film Center. Learn more.

• a+u’s April issue, “More-Than-Human Architecture” is guest edited by Dean Andrés Jaque, presenting OFFPOLINN’s investigations of a transscalar architecture. Dean Jaque builds critical inquiry and conversation through a network of architects, including many GSAPP faculty: Mireia Luzárraga (TAKK), Mio Tsuneyama (Studio mnm) and Fuminori Nousaku (Fuminori Nousaku Architects) aligning through the conviction that architecture’s agency results from its intrinsic entwining with the processes and interconnectedness of life.

• Faculty Mabel O. Wilson alongside Louis P. Nelson (UVA Press), Irene Cheng (CCA), and Charles L. Davis II (UT Austin) are the editors of University of Virginia Press’s architecture series, Race, Place, and Justice, a new series examining and addressing how aspects of the built environment derive from and perpetuate dissonance, inequity, and subordination, and will highlight individual and community responses to such oppression.

• New publication, 8 Minutes, 20 Seconds: Housing After Banking, Encrypting the Sun (Actar, 2025) by faculty Michael Bell and Eunjeong Seong ‘02 M.Arch imagines an architecture based on renewable energy, caching forms of energy that are inexhaustible, persistent, and virtually non-denumerable in quantity. Analyzing foundational premises in housing over the last 100 years the book reveals a history of policy and economics that is more fragile than it often appears.

• Curated by faculty Philippe Rahm, The Versailles Biennale of Architecture and Landscape, titled “4° Celsius entre toi et moi,” explores architectures shaped by heat, intimacy, and planetary thresholds. Framed around the projected rise in global temperatures, the biennale investigates how climate change alters not only environments but also spatial and social proximities. Dean Andrés Jaque (OFFPOLINN) and faculty Mireia Luzárraga (TAKK) are among the invited participants.

• This year, 22 GSAPP alumni from the Historic Preservation program are among the honorees of the New York Landmarks Conservancy’s Lucy G. Moses Awards, recognizing their significant contributions to safeguarding New York’s architectural heritage for future generations.