This week, GSAPP welcomes a special edition of The Library is Open, sharing critical perspectives on Arctic futures, alongside lectures from the MSCDP and MSAAD programs exploring the entanglement of natural and digital ecosystems.

MORAKANA is a New York-based studio founded by Tiri Kananuruk and Sebastián Morales Prado. Their work is characterized by experimentation, development of custom tools, and scientific and artistic inquiry. By leveraging scientific principles and challenging the role of technology in our lives, MORAKANA invites us to think critically about plausible means for Nature to reclaim the physical and digital ecosystems we are part of.

They teach at the School for Poetic Computation (SFPC) and Collaborative Arts (NYU). Their work has been supported by CultureHub, Autodesk Pier 9, Mana Contemporary, and Tropical Futures Institute, among others.

Organized by the MS in Computational Design Practices program for the Conversations with Practitioners Lecture Series.

Dennis Pohl is director of the Flanders Architecture Institute. As a postdoctoral researcher, he was a member of the Design, Data and Society group at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) and worked as research coordinator at The New Open. He frequently publishes on the relationship between energy, politics and architecture in the post-war era. In his recent book ‘Building Carbon Europe’ (Sternberg Press, 2023), he analyses how architectural design influenced political planning in post-war Europe. Dennis was a research associate at the DFG research group ‘Knowledge in the Arts’ at the University of the Arts in Berlin (2015-2018), DAAD Fellow at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation at Columbia University in New York (2018) and received a fellowship for the LOEWE project ‘Architectures of Order’ at Goethe University Frankfurt (2022).

Introduction and response by Shane Reiner-Roth & AAD Students

Bert De Jonghe and Elise Misao Hunchuck, join the Library is Open Summer Special, to discuss their book Arctic Practices: Design for a Changing World.

Arctic Practices: Design for a Changing World emerges at a critical juncture wherein the very stability of Arctic ecosystems hangs in a precarious balance induced, almost entirely, by humans. This volume assembles forty-six contributors—designers, educators, artists, photographers, filmmakers, some Indigenous, some residents, and some visitors to the Circumpolar North—to create a polyvocal assembly of Arctic practices.

• Faculty Raven Chacon opens his solo exhibition Conductus on July 30 at Kunstverein Hannover, presenting major sculptural works, films, and installations alongside two new live performances. Moving between sound, notation, performance, and sculpture, Chacon’s practice is shaped by the musical traditions of the Diné (Navajo) and rooted in experimentation across forms, contexts, and methods.

• Dan Shannon ’86 MSAAD, former president of the GSAPP Alumni Board, talks with Crain’s New York Business about reimagining aging buildings as vital, contemporary assets. As founder and Managing Partner of MdeAS Architects, Shannon combines preservation with inventive design strategies that honor the past while activating spaces for today’s urban life.

• Robert Edwards, PhD candidate in Historic Preservation, is featured in The Art Newspaper for his ongoing transformation of a 1947 Greyhound bus into a mobile museum on the Great Migration in Cleveland. Edwards’s project moves preservation into public space, activating memory and archival material using memory and material to surface new stories.