This summer, GSAPP’s ecosystem performs as a porous assembly: of texts in circulation, installations negotiated across geographies, and civic prototypes materializing in labs, classrooms, and biennials. Through faculty practices, research platforms, and public programs, architecture is less a discipline than a set of tools—prototyped, reprogrammed, and mobilized to engage climate urgencies, political frictions, and shared imaginaries.

The MSCDP Conversations with Practitioners Lecture Series returns this summer, directly complementing the program’s coursework. This series brings together a diverse group of practitioners from across the field of computational design whose work engages with pressing environmental, political, and social challenges. Through an exploration of how computational practices and technologies offer new perspectives on design, technology, and architecture, the lectures investigate the field’s growing involvement in broader environmental, technological, and representational alliances, solidarities, disputes, and controversies.

July speakers include: Jose Sanchez, Yehwan Song, Trebor Scholz, MORAKANA, and Francis Teng

The MSAAD Arguments Lecture series returns this summer, linking directly with the program’s coursework. Each invited guest shares a critical text in advance, setting the stage for deep engagement. The series convenes a diverse group of speakers whose work addresses urgent environmental, political, and social challenges. By examining how architectural practices and devices gain collective significance, the lectures explore architecture’s participation in broader environmental, technological, and representational alliances, solidarities, disputes, and controversies.

July speakers include: Areti Markopoulou, Ersela Kripa + Stephen Mueller, and Dennis Pohl

GSAPP’s Columbia Books on Architecture and the City presents two forthcoming titles that interrogate the frameworks of architectural authorship and erasure, now available for preorder. Faculty Mark Wasiuta’s The Archival Exhibition: A Decade of Research at the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, 2006–2016 both records the possibilities of the archival exhibition as a mode, method, and problem of architecture, and is itself a record of a decade-long curatorial project that sought to reframe the documents, authors, and environments produced by and producing architecture. Also forthcoming, V. Mitch McEwen’s Erasure by Design: Racial Protocols of Displacement, Demolition, and Extraction examines spatial tools of architecture as mechanisms of racial displacement and extraction.

Two new videos from GSAPP’s Natural Materials Lab trace the development of Earthen Rituals, a multimedia installation led by Lola Ben-Alon and a team of researchers on view at the 19th Venice Architecture Biennale. Earthen Rituals is both a research inquiry and a built installation: bricks printed from a lightweight earth-fiber mix—composed of excavation waste and agricultural byproducts—form a structural system that resists extraction and embraces cyclical, embodied forms of making. Together, this documentation unfolds the evolving relationship between ancient earthen construction techniques and contemporary computational tools.

• Faculty including Alessandro Orsini, Hilary Sample (MOS), and Amaia Sánchez-Velasco + Jorge Valiente-Oriol (Grandeza Studio) are among the participants in the upcoming edition of the Chicago Architecture Biennial. Titled SHIFT: Architecture in Times of Radical Change, this year’s edition explores “new grounds for the interpretation and design of our built environments.”

• Columbia GSAPP and Columbia Engineering are leading the University’s role in Gotham Foundry, a city-backed hub for sustainable materials innovation supported by a $45M commitment from the New York City Economic Development Corporation (NYCEDC). Conceived as a consortium of academic institutions, community labs, and civic actors, the initiative activates research into regenerative materials and green industry, aiming to contribute to more just and climate-resilient urban futures. GSAPP’s Kate Ascher, former EVP of NYCEDC, led the strategic expertise in infrastructure and public-private partnerships to help position the Foundry as a major force in New York’s climate economy.

• The Graham Foundation’s 2025 Grants to Individuals will support the research, publications, and exhibitions of many GSAPP affiliates. Projects include “Black Holes Ain’t So Black” led by faculty Mario Gooden with Thuto Durkac-Somo, Jonathan González; “We the Bacteria: Notes Towards Biotic Architecture” led by Dean Emeritus Mark Wigley and Beatriz Colomina; and “Against the Denial of Wetland” led by adjunct faculty Farah Alkhoury ‘21 MSAAD with Ameneh Solati.

• TAKK, led by Mireia Luzarraga Alvarez and Alejandro Muiño, received Spain’s prestigious 2025 FAD Award, in the category Ephemeral Architecture. The award honors Seasonal House, a continuous, climate-driven experiment that transforms a 400 m² industrial space into a fragmented home composed of recycled-material “domestic devices.” By rejecting conventional climate control and linking spatial organization to shifting seasonal conditions rather than inhabitants, the project challenges traditional domestic models, advancing a resourceful and adaptable architectural response to ecological limits.

• Faculty Christopher Munsell is awarded Columbia University Provost’s SOLER Seed funding for his ongoing research: “Assessing Graduate Student Attitudes Toward ChatGPT and its Effectiveness as a Teaching Tool in Real Estate Finance.”

• nARCHITECTS, led by Eric Bunge and Mimi Hoang, was featured in Abitare and The Architect’s Newspaper for recent projects that combine climate-resilient design with public space—from a CLT house upstate to flood-adaptive pavilions in Manhattan and Hoboken.

• WORKac, led by Dean Emeritus Amale Andraos and Dan Wood, is featured in the NY Times for their new residential project in rural Rhode Island, a contemporary second home aligned with Passive House standards.

• Faculty Ziad Jamaleddine’s firm L.E.FT Architects is awarded Azure Magazine’s Merit Award in the category “Temporary and Experiential Installation,” for Djerba: Prototype 366. Installed at the Islamic Arts Biennale, the piece is a one-to-one scale mosque, designed for one person, comprised of a mound of basalt rocks with three steel structures as its edges: a seat, washbasin for ablutions and a mihrab (prayer niche) for prostration.

• Columbia Magazine highlights the work of 21 GSAPP alumni in its recent feature on 13 LEED-certified buildings designed by Columbia graduates. The projects span a wide range of building types—from major infrastructure developments and cultural institutions to concert halls and residential towers—demonstrating the global impact of the GSAPP ecosystem on sustainable design.