As many faculty, alumni, and the wider GSAPP ecosystem return from a week of awards, accolades, and shared presence at the Venice Biennale, this week marks a crucial milestone for the Class of 2025—as their work, alliances, and spatial commitments are shared across final reviews, the End of Year Show, and the Commencement Ceremony. The GSAPP Graduation Ceremony will take place on Saturday, May 17, 2025, at 5:45 PM. All graduating students are invited to participate and mark this moment with their peers, families, and communities. See the 2025 GSAPP Graduation FAQ for details on graduate registration, guest tickets, ordering of caps and gowns and more.

The End of Year Show opens on Saturday, May 17 in alignment with GSAPP graduation and university Commencement and will be on view through May 23. The EoYS showcases GSAPP’s commitment to critically expand the spectrum of the possible through the work of the School’s researchers, faculty, and students, with over 1,000 student works. The exhibition also expands into an online platform. This marks a momentous collaborative effort to mobilize the disciplines of the built environment as critical sites for studying and intervening in the now.

With over 35 GSAPP-led projects, the school shaped a wide arc of the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale—through installations, curatorial frameworks, and performances embedded across the main exhibition, national pavilions, and collateral events throughout the city.

The opening week concluded with a series of awards, many recognizing contributions from across the GSAPP ecosystem, including:

The Golden Lion, for best participation, was awarded to Canal Cafe, by Charles Renfro ’94 AAD and the late Ricardo Scofidio ’60 B.Arch of Diller Scofidio + Renfro. The installation purifies water from the Arsenal lagoon for made-on-site espresso for passersby and offers a new public space.

Special Mention, National Pavilion was awarded to the Holy See Pavilion, Opera Aperta co-curated by faculty Marina Otero Verzier ‘13 MSCCCP, reactivates a deconsecrated church as a space of collective labor and cultural care. The pavilion negotiates the practices of good and collective care as sites for cultural exchange.

Special Mention was also awarded to Elephant Chapel by 2023 Dean’s Visiting Assistant Professor, Boonserm Premthada. This open-air sanctuary is constructed with elephant dung, making tangible a bio-architecture of interspecies solidarity and ecological ethics in the Biennale atmosphere.

Just announced today: faculty Laura Kurgan, faculty Dan Miller, and Assistant Director of the MSCDP Program Adam Vosburgh ’22 M.Arch, were awarded the Bee Award at the 2025 Triennale Milano, Inequalities, for their project Two Sides of the Same Coin, included in We the Bacteria co-curated by Dean Emeritus Mark Wigley and Beatriz Colomina. Presented as two oversized circular structures, their work illustrates the evolution of the human microbiome over 12,000 years. As urbanization accelerates, biodiversity shrinks within and without, shedding new light on our current predicaments, widening our perspectives and revealing new geography of biodiversity as precious resources.

• 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” 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.