This week, GSAPP convenes speakers exploring spatial justice, borders, cooperative ownership, and environmental entanglements, sparking conversations that inscribe themselves within the school’s wider investigations across studios.

Trebor Scholz is a professor at The New School, a Faculty Associate at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, and a Visiting Researcher at the Berlin Social Science Center. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Plymouth and focuses on cooperative entrepreneurship in the digital economy. Scholz is widely known for developing the concept of “platform cooperatives,” worker-owned digital platforms that promote economic, social, labor, and environmental justice. Today, there are more than one million workers around the world employed in platform cooperatives, reflecting the growing scale and impact of this alternative model.

Organized by the MS in Computational Design Practices program for the Conversations with Practitioners Lecture Series.

Ersela Kripa is a Professor and Associate Vice Provost at Texas Tech University, where she is also the Director the Huckabee College of Architecture – El Paso, and Director of Projects at the research center POST (Project for Operative Spatial Technologies). Stephen Mueller is an Associate Professor at Texas Tech University and Director of Research at POST.

They are registered architects and founding partners of AGENCY, located on the US/Mexico border. AGENCY engages emerging publics in conflictual contexts by developing methods to identify and subvert subperceptual urban and atmospheric phenomena that endanger human rights. AGENCY’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Hong Kong–Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale, the Venice Biennale, the Berlin Biennale, and Storefront for Art and Architecture.

• Dean Andrés Jaque and faculty Kate Orff are featured in The Guardian’s review of “More than Human,” an exhibition now on view at the Design Museum, London. Dean Jaque’s Transspecies Rosette, is a new cladding system made of pulverised cork and natural resin, an architecture designed to tune into more-than-human life. Orff presents SCAPE’s Bird-Safe Building Guidelines, showing how the differences between human and avian vision could be turned to advantage with the potential to prevent a billion bird deaths a year, in the US alone.

• Kate Orff, Director of the MSAUD program and founder of SCAPE, received the 2025 ASLA Landscape Architecture Firm Award, the profession’s highest honor. From Living Breakwaters in New York to Tom Lee Park in Memphis, SCAPE fuses ecological insight with on-the-ground dialogue, stitching nature back into the city to create durable, socially vibrant public spaces.

• The latest edition of Architectural Design, Staged: Architecture for Performance, Exhibition, and Fiction, edited by Ashley Simone ‘07 M.Arch, includes works and words from faculty Mark Wasiuta, Mireia Luzárraga (TAKK), and Bart-Jan Polman. Celebrating theatricality and collaboration, the featured work unfolds through a diverse cast of architectural voices, including curators, artists, performers, digital intelligences, fabricators, and writers, offering a multifaceted view of architecture’s role in shaping entertainment environments and framing narrative experience.