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Faculty

Karla Rothstein

Karla Rothstein is an architect and educator whose work operates at the intersections of design, research, teaching, and building. She has taught graduate architecture studios and seminars at Columbia GSAPP since 1997 and is founder and director of DeathLAB, a transdisciplinary research and design initiative focused on reconceiving how we live with death in the city. She is also co-chair of Columbia University’s interdisciplinary Seminar on Death.

Rothstein’s research explores mortality, ecologies, urban space, and the agency of design. Through DeathLAB, she investigates evolving practices of corpse disposition and remembrance and their potential to catalyze new forms of civic-sacred space. Working across scales from the corporeal and microbial to the architectural and metropolitan, her work brings design into dialogue with science, ecology, ritual, and culture.

Together with Christina Staudt, Rothstein is co-author of the forthcoming Post Mortem: Reimagined Rituals, Sustainable Disposition, and Innovative Spaces of Remembrance (Columbia University Press, 2027) and co-editor of The Future of the Corpse: Changing Ecologies of Death and Disposition. Her writing on mortality, urbanism, and design includes “The New Civic Sacred: Designing for Life and Death in the Modern Metropolis” in MIT Design Issues; “Democratizing Death” in MONU; “Mortal Agency” in the Canadian Centre for Architecture’s A Section of Now; and, with Staudt, “Living Death: Confronting Mortality and Associated Practices of Care” in The Architectural Review.

In parallel with her academic research and teaching, Rothstein is co-founder and design director of LATENT Productions, an architecture, research, building, and development practice. LATENT realizes projects spanning housing, adaptive reuse, urban regeneration, hospitality, and civic infrastructure, integrating architectural design with material experimentation, development, construction, and long-term engagement with place. Current work includes Greylock WORKS, the ongoing transformation of a 240,000-square-foot former cotton-spinning mill and nine-acre remediated brownfield in North Adams, Massachusetts, into a mixed-use campus where living, making, gathering, food, and culture intertwine.

Rothstein has been a visiting professor at the International Summer Academy of Fine Arts in Salzburg and CEU San Pablo in Madrid, as well as a Fellow in Architecture at MacDowell. She has presented research at conferences across the globe and at the MoMA R&D Salon in NYC. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including the solo exhibition DeathLAB: Democratizing Death at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa; ON SITE: Karla Rothstein at Art OMI; and A Section of Now at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. Recent work includes HartLine, commissioned by Data Through Design and exhibited at BRIC in 2026. She was a Jacob K. Javits Fellow in Fine Arts, a William F. Kinne Traveling Fellow, and a recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Architecture.

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Recent Work

GreylockWORKS

Verboten

Runner & Stone

Dean Carlton

Woodbury

Orbicciano

Ballston Lake

Death Lab, Constellation Park

Publications

Columbia Books on
Architecture and the City

The New Civic-Sacred: Designing for Life and…

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Living Death

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Constellation Park in Pasajes Arquitectura

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Process Is the Pollywog

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Courses

Course	Semester	Title	Student Work	Instructor	Syllabus	Requirements & Sequence	Location & Time	Session & Points	Call No.
ARCH4441‑1	Fall 2026	Interlaced Existence: Death, Life, Liminality		Karla Rothstein	Syllabus	ALL GSAPP Design Seminar Architecture Elective	200 Buell North TU 11 AM - 1 PM	Full Semester 3 Points	15503

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Karla Rothstein

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