Desirée Valadares (University of British Columbia) will deliver the Detlef Mertins lecture on the Histories of Modernity. With an introduction by Mabel Wilson and a response by Ateyah Khorakiwala.

Desirée Valadares is a landscape architect and assistant professor at the University of British Columbia-Vancouver in the Geography Department and a Faculty Affiliate in Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies. Her research, writing and photography centers on the cultural memory, infrastructural imaginaries, and heritage politics of Pacific War landscapes in Canada, Alaska and Hawai‘i.

The Detlef Mertins Lecture on the Histories of Modernity is an annual lecture in honor of the life and work of Detlef Mertins (1954-2011), endowed by Elise Jaffe + Jeffrey Brown. Previous speakers include Lucia Allais, Craig Buckley, Zeynep Cęlik Alexander, Ayala Levin, Anthony Acciavatti, and Sophie Hochhäusl.

Faculty Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano, LOT-EK followed by a conversation with Dean Andrés Jaque.

LOT-EK has achieved high visibility for its sustainable and innovative approach to construction, materials and space, through the upcycling of existing industrial objects and systems not originally intended for architecture. LOT-EK is also recognized for the use of technology as an integral part of architecture, for addressing mobility and transformability in architecture and for working across art and architecture. LOT-EK’s projects have been published in national and international publications, magazines and books, including The New York Times, The London Times, Herald Tribune, The Wall Street Journal, Domus, A+U, Wired, Metropolis, Mark and more.

*Resilient Coastal Communities: Development and Displacement Along the New York / New Jersey Bight convenes local leaders, researchers, students, and professionals to address the urgent challenges of sea level rise, intensified storms, and pressures of development on waterfront communities. The workshop presents best practices for participatory planning, explores how goals for resilience and adaptation are shifting in a changing political context, and considers how evolving risk data informs decisions about investment and development. Columbia GSAPP Urban Design and Penn Design Landscape students contribute speculative design scenarios for the region’s coastlines, alongside research from the Megalopolitan Coastal Transformation Hub (MACH), culminating in an open public dialogue on displacement, adaptation, and community resilience.

Organized by MS Architecture and Urban Design and GSAPP’s Center for Resilient Cities and Landscapes.

Organized and curated jointly with PIN-UP Magazine, this coalition will bring together numerous designers active in New York, and will discuss the role the city plays in and through their work. Designers Margot DeMarco, Luam Melake, Sam Stewart, and Nao Tamura will present their work, and will be joined by PIN-UP’s Felix Burrichter for a conversation.

Margot DeMarco is an artist, designer and educator based in New York City. Her work exists in many forms, including: sculpture, furniture, housewares, video, puppetry, photography, window displays, props, illustration and writing. Despite working across disparate mediums, Margot’s art contains a consistent thread of shrewd irreverence towards the world of objects.

Luam Melake creates handwoven sculptures and furniture using material combinations that reference her interdisciplinary interests in craft, industrial design, fine art and architecture as well as research in the fields of anthropology and psychology. Exploring the psychological impacts of objects is the central focus of her work.

Sam Stewart is a self-taught furniture artist and designer. He is an aspiring member of the Chapel Hill Woodturners Association. His work resembles and functions as household furniture and domestic objects. As sculptures, they often take on animistic qualities that border on the absurd and whimsical, but also the slightly perverse. He is interested in design that elicits a heightened simplicity and exaggerated satisfaction of looking, as much he wants to draw out awkward, more anecdotal encounters with the designed object.

Nao Tamura is a designer whose practice spans product, lighting, furniture, and spatial design. Drawing from both Tokyo and New York’s creative cultures, her work explores the balance between nature and technology, emotion and function, and Eastern and Western sensibilities. Through her studio, Nownao Inc., she collaborates with international brands such as Issey Miyake, Porro, Artek, and Lexus. Tamura’s work has been exhibited at the Palais de Tokyo, Salone del Mobile, and the Kyocera Museum, and has received numerous international design awards.

The COALITIONS series is organized by Bart-Jan Polman, GSAPP’s Director of Exhibitions and Public Programs and Curator of the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery. In recognition of the urgency not merely to observe change but to choreograph it, GSAPP has reimagined its public programming not as a passive stage for presentation, but as an active platform for coalition-building and alliance-making among individuals and organizations united by shared priorities and overlapping engagements.

• Faculty Andrew Dolkart in conversation with Michael Kimmelman, New York Times architecture critic about the reissue of his book, Biography of a Tenement House in New York City, which traces the architectural and social history of 97 Orchard Street as a lens on immigrant life and the evolution of Lower Manhattan. Wednesday, October 8, 6:30–9:00 PM. Learn more.

• Faculty Jorge Otero-Pailos moderates “Transformation of the Villa: the Thieleck Estate in Berlin (1927–1931),” a seminar by Sebastian Meyer-von Köckritz for the Italian Academy at Columbia University’s Fellow Seminar Series. October 1, 1–2:30PM. Learn more.

• Faculty Mario Gooden presents “Black Holes Ain’t So Black” at Atelier 11 in Paris as part of the 2025 Journées Nationales de l’Architecture. Developed during his research residency at Atelier 11, the work is a three-channel video installation that juxtaposes archival images, film, and video to explore the spatial praxes of liberation in historic and contemporary Black life and architecture. Drawing on Stephen Hawking’s concept of the black hole and Tina Campt’s theory of practicing refusal, the project reflects on systemic oppression and the possibilities of reimagining space.

• UP PhD candidates Samantha Saona, Mauricio Rada, and Daniela Ugas, together with faculty Hugo Sarmiento, Anthony Vanky, and Tom Slater, were awarded the Urban Studies Foundation Seminar Series Award. Their project, “Land commodification and housing affordability under capitalist urbanisation: Global dynamics and local resistance in Peru, the United Kingdom, and the United States,” examines how global forces of urban development intersect with local struggles for housing and spatial justice

• Faculty Marina Otero Verzier ‘13 MSCCCP and Dan Miller present When Pixels Wash Ashore, a video installation developed within GSAPP’s Data Mourning Clinic, at the Lisbon Architecture Triennale. Focused on Tuvalu’s imminent disappearance due to rising sea levels and the frameworks shaping its potential futures as a dispersed community, the work extends the Clinic’s investigations into climate, sovereignty, and digital archives. The project will also be featured in the main exhibition of the REFRESH Festival in Zurich, where Otero Verzier will also deliver the keynote lecture.