This month at GSAPP begins with the intensity of final reviews, turning classrooms into sites of shared inquiry and collective testing. Surrounding this momentum, a set of exhibitions, recognitions, and public programs expands the School’s reach. Projects led by faculty and alumni in Venice, Florence, Germany, and Chile show how design and research operate trans-locally, producing encounters and tensions that keep reconfiguring the GSAPP ecosystem.

Final reviews unfold across all GSAPP programs over the next two weeks, activating studios and seminar rooms with the dense accumulation of a semester’s research, design experimentations, and spatial inquiries. Students from MARCH, MSAAD, MSAUD, MSUP, MSRED, MSHP, and MSCCCP present work that extends across scales and formats, mobilizing the School’s wide ecosystem of practices. Guests and faculty gather throughout Avery Hall and its neighboring studios, joining conversations that frame the close of the academic year as a moment of collective reflection and recalibration.

The Review Summit, convening on December 10, serves as the synthesizing event of all Advanced Studio Reviews. It assembles the full intellectual fabric of GSAPP—alongside invited external critics—into a single, curated space of exchange. The Summit foregrounds the semester’s shared investigations and stages a platform for contemporary debate, disciplinary friction, and critical design thinking.

GSAPP is profoundly saddened by the passing of Robert A.M. Stern, whose long and formative association with the School shaped the very character of architectural debate, preservation culture, and design education here for almost three decades. A 1960 graduate of Columbia College, Stern returned to the University in 1970 as a young architect of formidable promise and quickly became one of the defining voices who helped the School rethink the future of architecture, reconsider the place of history within architectural thought, and reaffirm the discipline’s responsibilities to the life of the city. He remained a member of the GSAPP faculty until 1998. His legacy endures across Columbia, the city, and the many architects he taught.

Student work from the summer workshop Celebrating the Monsoon in Bengaluru, led by Faculty Sonal Beri and Faculty Sandro Marpillero is on view in Avery 200. A presentation and reception will take place on December 5 in Avery 100.