Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (Columbia GSAPP) is thrilled to announce that Lydia Kallipoliti has been appointed as the new director of the School’s Advanced Architectural Design program, AAD. She joins GSAPP’s faculty in September 2024 as Associate Professor of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, with tenure. Internationally known as a platform for architectural innovation and criticality, the post-professional Advanced Architectural Design program is consistently ranked among the top in the world, attracting applicants who represent over 50 nationalities. Previously under the direction of Dean Andrés Jaque, the AAD program is a site for architectural invention and criticality through a transscalar approach that interrogates and projects the politics of how architectural devices operate ecologically across scales of space and time.

Lydia Kallipoliti is an internationally recognized architect, engineer, scholar, and educator dedicated to exploring and influencing how architecture operates ecologically and environmentally, through work that critically interrogates how design, science, technology, and politics interact. Her scholarship has specifically addressed theories of waste and material flows, as well as closed and self-reliant systems and urban environments. Employing her concept of “immersive scholarship”, Professor Kallipoliti’s work often takes the form of exhibitions or interactive digital platforms that allow her to engage with a wide audience. This expanded practice includes her design and research think tank ANAcycle, through which she produces curatorial projects, installations, and publications that draw from, and expand on accumulated knowledge. Professor Kallipoliti’s arrival at Columbia GSAPP reinforces the School’s leadership in developing new tools and approaches to addressing urgent contemporary challenges and impacting society and ecosystems through design.

In addition to her articles and research papers that have been published in numerous journals, magazines, and books, Professor Kallipoliti is the author of The Architecture of Closed Worlds: Or, What is the Power of Shit (Lars Muller Publishers, 2018), Histories of Ecological Design: An Unfinished Cyclopedia (Actar Publishers, 2024), the History of Ecological Design for Oxford English Encyclopedia of Environmental Science (2018). She is the recipient of awards recognizing both her writing and design, and her work has been exhibited widely including presentations at the Venice Biennale, the Istanbul Design Biennial, the Shenzhen Biennial, the London Design Museum, and others. In 2022, she served as Head Co-Curator (with Areti Markopoulou) of the Tallinn Architecture Biennale with the theme “Edible, Or, The Architecture of Metabolism.”

Prior to joining Columbia, Kallipoliti was Associate Professor at the Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of the Cooper Union in New York, where she also served as a Senior Associate at the Institute for Sustainable Design, and as the Feltman Chair in Lighting. She has taught at Princeton University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Syracuse University, the University of Technology Sydney and served as a Visiting Fellow at the Canadian Center of Architecture and the University of Queensland in Australia.

Lydia Kallipoliti holds a Diploma in Architecture and Engineering from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece, a Master of Science [SMArchS] in design and building technology from MIT and a PhD in history and theory of architecture from Princeton University.