Dear GSAPP Alumni, I wanted to personally invite you to what promises to be a memorable closing moment for this year’s Open House: a landmark crossover between our very own Steven Holl and Mireia Luzárraga, which I’ll have the pleasure of moderating. Few architects have shaped contemporary architecture with the intensity of Steven. Emerging from the charged cultural and critical milieu of 1970s New York, where architecture brushed against conceptual and performance practices, his work has expanded the discipline’s capacity to operate as a perceptual and atmospheric medium, turning light, matter, and time into instruments of thought. Widely recognized as one of the most influential living architects, his practice has produced landmark buildings across four continents and has consistently demonstrated a rare ability to reconcile conceptual ambition with a profoundly sensorial architecture. Mireia, in contrast but also in resonance, has staged one of the most striking recent ascents in architectural culture. Her radioactive ecoqueer constructions are at once addictively beautiful, unapologetically discursive, and insurgent. Through them, she has opened new terrains for architecture as a site of environmental, political, and bodily activism. Her series of installations, con-vivere, now literally taking over MAXXI in Rome, has just opened, further amplifying that momentum internationally. Bringing them together feels less like a panel and more like a rare planetary alignment of two distinct yet equally potent ways of architecture-makers who are rethinking what architecture can do today. A true crossover. And a defining moment for our school. It also could not be a better ending to what is shaping up to be an exceptionally intense Open House. We already have more registrations than in previous years, and the energy in the building is palpable. I would love to see you there. Warmly, Andrés