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In Fall 2025, GSAPP transformed into a semester-long choreography of coalitions, where Avery Hall and its adjoining ecosystem functioned as a civic organism. Corridors, stairs, studios, seminar rooms, and galleries became platforms in continuous activation—hosting publics, disciplines, urgencies, and frictions. The semester opened with the Columbia GSAPP Real Estate Development Conference, which assembled global practitioners to interrogate how real estate shapes the contemporary city through design, policy, and financial infrastructures. Simultaneously, LET-EK re-scripted GSAPP’s interior landscape, staging open, student-led interventions that blurred disciplines and turned study spaces into platforms for architectural experimentation. These activations made visible the School’s capacity to host emergent publics and new pedagogical alliances.

Across the semester, COALITIONS provided the architectural backbone of GSAPP’s public life, unfolding through three gatherings that brought the School into direct dialogue with the practitioners reshaping the conditions of contemporary spatial practice. A coalition of collectives convened Espace Aygo, The Floating Museum, Raumlabor, and others to examine how design operates through shared authorship and situated engagement. A coalition of designers, developed with PIN–UP Magazine, recast the role of speculation, aesthetics, and experimentation in shaping contemporary architectural imaginaries. COALITION culminated in the GSAPP Inaugural Terence Riley Summit, where international curators—including Paola Antonelli, Martino Stierli, Beatrice Galilee, Justin McGuirk, Maria Nicanor, among others—gathered in Avery to articulate how exhibitions, archives, and institutions can act as agents in a rapidly transforming landscape.

Running in parallel, The Library Is Open continued its transformation of Avery’s central staircase into a civic auditorium. Books, publishing, and public speaking generated a recurring moment of collective attention through the New Design Museum with Beatrice Leanza, Rooted Transience with Nawaf Bin Ayyaf and Faysal Tabbarah, Archigram Facsimile with Beatriz Colomina and Bernard Tschumi, Buildings for People and Plants with Amale Andraos and Dan Wood. Each session crystallized GSAPP’s commitment to treating publishing as an architectural act.

The Historic Preservation Program’s Fitch Colloquium, Fragments of the Imagination, and the Lecture in Planning Series placed preservation, housing, infrastructure, and inequality at the center of GSAPP’s shared concerns. These programs articulated how heritage, governance, and environmental justice structure the possibilities—and limitations—of contemporary urban life. This focus was further extended through the Urban Design lecture Shaping Civic Futures: Urban Design Interventions from Jaipur, underscoring how these questions resonate across GSAPP’s programs.

The semester closed with the inaugural GSAPP Review Summit, in which all Advanced V studios assembled with critics for a day of collective synthesis, allowing questions, methods, and positions to circulate across studio boundaries. With Avery reconfigured as a temporary landscape of exchange, the Summit materialized GSAPP’s ethos of producing knowledge that is collective, critical, and deeply embedded in the urgencies of the present.

Spring 2025 was anchored by the ACTIONING SUMMITS, which structured the School’s most visible cross-disciplinary platform. Three summits addressed urgent methodological questions shaping the built environment today: more-than-human intelligence, disability futures, and repair. Speakers included James Bridle, Michael Marder, Laura Tripaldi, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Edmund Asiedu, David Gissen, Aimi Hamraie, Ron Daniels, Marjetica Potrč, and Paulo Tavares, situating architecture, planning, development, and preservation within broader ecological, social, and political debates.

Alongside the summits, The Library Is Open continued as a recurring public forum centered on publishing and discourse. Spring sessions featured Bernard Tschumi, Florian Idenburg and Jing Liu, Kate Yeh Chiu, Jia Yi Gu, Feifei Zhou, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena, Bert De Jonghe, and Elise Misao Hunchuck, activating Avery Hall as a site where books functioned as active instruments of architectural and cultural debate.

Program-led lecture series formed a second major strand of Spring programming. The Lecture in Planning Series (LiPS) brought speakers including Justin Steil, Lauren Andres, Desiree Fields, Jennifer Tucker, Kevin Lujan Lee, Josh Campbell, Jamie Wang, and Gabriella Carolini into conversation around housing, infrastructure, governance, and inequality. In parallel, the Historic Preservation Lecture Series featured Rosa Lowinger, Dylan Yeats, Pilar Bosch, and Sevince Bayrak, alongside the Paul S. Byard Memorial Lecture by Ricardo Flores, foregrounding questions of heritage, repair, and material practice.

Additional Spring events extended these discussions across GSAPP’s programs. The Buell Center hosted lectures by Brian Goldstein, Yasmina El Chami, and Sophia Roosth; the Arguments Lecture Series featured Stan Allen, Behnaz Farahi, Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, Michael Young, Areti Markopoulou, Ersela Kripa, and Stephen Mueller; and the MS CDP Conversations with Practitioners included Jose Sanchez, Yehwan Song, Trebor Scholz, Tiri Kananuruk, Sebastián Morales Prado, and Francis Tseng. Together, these platforms positioned Spring 2025 as a semester defined by sustained, cross-program public engagement.