The 2026 PhD in Urban Planning Lecture, “End of Empire, Planning Education, and Promise of Humane Urbanism” will be delivered by Faranak Miraftab (UIUC), with a response by Faculty Hiba Bou Akar.

In 1930, the Croatian art historian Ljubo Karaman theorized the “freedom of the periphery” as a highly dynamic space of syncretism and geopolitical interrelation. Karaman and his theories, though, have themselves remained peripheral to the Anglo-American academy, whose discourse on peripherality has been shaped largely by world-systems theories. In Immanuel Wallerstein’s 1974 The Modern World-System, for example, the globe is partitioned according to unidirectional exchanges between a core and periphery, and cultural hegemony is merely contingent on economic domination. Poet and thinker Édouard Glissant would reject such a reduction two decades later. Challenging the West’s empirical imperative to render the world legible and transparent, Glissant called for our “right to opacity,” wherein knowledges are entangled, irreducible, confluent, and relativized. Considering opacity as a precondition for cultural freedom, how can architectural historians engage the periphery on its own terms and with its own methods?

While easily conceived economically and geographically, we propose a lingering in the periphery, putting pressure on capitalist temporality and liberal epistemologies. While architectural historiography has treated the peripheral in diverse ways, what themes, events, sites, and actors remain at the edge of its discourse? How can architectural history imbricate itself in questions of the temporal and knowable? Recent turns to indigenous knowledge and post-secular reevaluations of modernity are starting points for re-interrogating the periphery. Aware of our position within the American academy, our ambition for this symposium is to foster dialogue on how we can attend to, uphold, research, study, and understand each other opaquely.

Keynote Lecture by Ijlal Muzaffar Tracing the Anti-archive: Architectural History and the Problem of Political Memory

Not every structure of recording is or should be called an archive. Archive produces the structure of historical time as it is read by particular interpretive categories that rest on it. Other figures of remembrance exist outside the archive, making their presence felt within its gaps and haunting the narrations emerging from it. How should we give them veracity without trading in idealized subjects and opaque objects—the indigenous, the sacred, the mythic—that are often flattened through circumscribing respect? Architectural history has often avoided this challenge by projecting on these figurations the phenomenological idea of deep time. This othering mutes their political dynamics, reasserting modern historical time as the only legitimate duration of political imagination, and modern political imagination as the only legitimate form of resistance. Exploring histories of land settlement and displacement in colonial India, Muzaffar would attempt in this talk to articulate political imaginations that resist and assist in blurring the borders of historical time and its many narrations.

Ijlal Muzaffar is a Professor of Architectural History at the Rhode Island School of Design, in Providence, Rhode Island. He is the author of Modernism’s Magic Hat: Architecture and the Illusion of Development without Capital (University of Texas Press, 2024) and the co-editor of the volume Architecture in Development Systems and the Emergence of the Global South (Routledge, 2022). His work has been published widely in academic journals, museum and biennale catalogues, and edited volumes.

On the Edge of Legibility is generously sponsored by the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture. Organized by Kian Hosseinnia and Zachary Torres, students in the Ph.D. in Architecture Program at GSAPP.

In 1930, the Croatian art historian Ljubo Karaman theorized the “freedom of the periphery” as a highly dynamic space of syncretism and geopolitical interrelation. Karaman and his theories, though, have themselves remained peripheral to the Anglo-American academy, whose discourse on peripherality has been shaped largely by world-systems theories. In Immanuel Wallerstein’s 1974 The Modern World-System, for example, the globe is partitioned according to unidirectional exchanges between a core and periphery, and cultural hegemony is merely contingent on economic domination. Poet and thinker Édouard Glissant would reject such a reduction two decades later. Challenging the West’s empirical imperative to render the world legible and transparent, Glissant called for our “right to opacity,” wherein knowledges are entangled, irreducible, confluent, and relativized. Considering opacity as a precondition for cultural freedom, how can architectural historians engage the periphery on its own terms and with its own methods?

While easily conceived economically and geographically, we propose a lingering in the periphery, putting pressure on capitalist temporality and liberal epistemologies. While architectural historiography has treated the peripheral in diverse ways, what themes, events, sites, and actors remain at the edge of its discourse? How can architectural history imbricate itself in questions of the temporal and knowable? Recent turns to indigenous knowledge and post-secular reevaluations of modernity are starting points for re-interrogating the periphery. Aware of our position within the American academy, our ambition for this symposium is to foster dialogue on how we can attend to, uphold, research, study, and understand each other opaquely.

April 2, 2026, Symposium Keynote, 5PM Avery 114

������ Ijlal Muzaffar” (Rhode Island School of Design)

April 3, 2026 Avery 114

Opening Remarks 9:00

Translations (9:20-10:40)

������ Rami Kanafani (UPenn), “Track II Architecture and the Cold War Politics of the New Age”

������ Man Joong Kim (SUNY Binghamton University), “The Architect as Social Organizer: Transpacific Exchanges Between South Korea and the United States During the Cold War”

������ Yixuan Yang (Newcastle University), “Opacity, Mediation, and the Socialist Periphery: Architectural Knowledge between the USSR and China”

������ Panel Respondent: Reinhold Martin, GSAPP

Coffee Break (10:40-11:00)

Epochs (11:00-12:20)

������ Marco Salazar-Valle (UPenn), “Dealing with Inka evidence: Indigenous erasure and resistance at the margins of the Empire”

������ Alican Taylan (Cornell), “Environmental Modernity from the Periphery: The Architecture of Sokoto circa 1804”

������ Sam Hellmann (Columbia), “Culture-Worker: Architects and the Great Leap Forward”

������ Panel Respondent: Lucia Galaretto, GSAPP

Lunch Break (12:20-1:20)

Revelations (1:20-3:00)

������ Clarisse Figueiredo de Queiroz (UPenn), “Shells, Sand, and Spirits: The Church of Almofala in Brazil’s Northeast”

������ Sam Rosner (University of Technology Sydney - UTS), “Artesian Modernities: Bores and Pastoral Stations on the Periphery (1890 – 1945)”

������ Nicholas Lin (University of California, Los Angeles), “The Hieroglyph of Teeth: Paleoanthropology, Myths, and Sovereignty of Human Origins in Republican China”

������ Panel Respondent: Elena M’Bouroukounda, GSAPP

Coffee Break (3:00-3:20)

Inscriptions (3:20-5:00)

������ Jenny Ni (Columbia), “Presence Through Absence: Tipis, Rock Art, and the Re-Making of Place”

������ Henry Osman (Brown), “Southern Circuits”

������ Andrea Molina (University of California, Los Angeles), “Air as Periphery: When Enclosure Fails”

������ Panel Respondent: Kian Hosseinnia, GSAPP

On the Edge of Legibility is generously sponsored by the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture. Organized by Kian Hosseinnia and Zachary Torres, students in the Ph.D. in Architecture Program at GSAPP.

Join us for a conversation with Andrea Bagnato, who will present his latest book Terra Infecta during the Library is Open 27.

In Terra Infecta, Andrea Bagnato tells an unfamiliar story about a well-known place. Since the early days of tourism, the cities and landscapes of Italy have been bywords for beauty and grandeur. But, at home and abroad, the same places have also been haunted by associations with disease and uncleanliness, often more to do with politics than conditions on the ground.

In this gripping narrative study, Bagnato shows how the modern quest for sanitation shaped Italy’s urban and rural landscapes, propelling major transformations from the draining of the wetlands around Venice, to demolitions and replanning in Naples, to the expulsion of the inhabitants of ancient Matera. He argues that current north–south inequalities are founded on spurious medical narratives, and focuses on the real impact on the people caught in their ministrations.

Ranging from Italian unification to the aftershocks of Covid-19, and drawing on architectural records, medical history, and the author’s own travels, Terra Infecta reveals the lived realities of grand schemes, traces of vanished communities, and forgotten histories of collective organisation and resistance.

The Library is Open is a lunchtime series featuring recently published works and their authors, curated by Bart-Jan Polman, Director of Exhibitions and Public Programming and Curator of the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery at Columbia GSAPP.

Join us for a lecture by Iñaki Echeverria (GSAPP; Iñaki Echeverria), followed by a conversation with Kate Orff (GSAPP; Climate School; SCAPE).

Iñaki Echeverria is an architect and landscape urbanist based in Mexico City. His eponymous firm, founded in 2008, has been awarded high profile commissions, both public and private, such as the Parque Ecologico Lago Texcoco (35,000 acres), the Parque Atlacomulco, the Papalote Verde Children´s Museum and the architectural image for Liverpool stores.

His multidisciplinary approach provides unique and specific solutions to complex conditions: from environmental remediation & reclamation projects and territorial strategies to landscape & city design, architecture and project-production design. The practice extends its research into process & concept design and art installations. Iñaki Echeverria holds a Master’s degree from the GSAPP at Columbia University and a Professional degree from UNAM. He is a professor of design at Universidad Iberoamericana, the Aedes Network Campus Berlin and a juror and lecturer in Mexico, the US and Germany. His work has been published and exhibited in the Venice Biennale, Berlin, Hamburg, Hannover, Stuttgart, Lisboa, Torino, Durban, Shanghai, Beijing, Philadelphia, NYC and Mexico.

What is planetary media? Bridging space, time, and discipline, this symposium assembles scholars, artists, designers, and thinkers to examine the significant possibilities of representation in the climate crisis and the crisis of technological imagination. Rather than regard the planetary as an object to be grasped in its totality, the planetary is rather a condition and a partial, mediated perspective.

What new graphical, informational, and aesthetic potentials might arise from cross-contaminating medial techniques writ large across architecture, art, film, games, photography, and visual culture? What does it mean to ground acts of imaging, modeling, and rendering “the environment” as fundamentally material relations that bridge scales of perception, experience, and action? Adopting situated perspectives on technologies of representation, and asking many questions along the way, Planetary Media weaves critical relations between image and material, graphical and elemental, media and matter toward a renewed technological imagination of/in crisis, against the grain of extraction.

10:00am - 12:30pm Morning Session: Media Infrastructures

Alenda Y. Chang (UC Santa Barbara) Tega Brain (New York University) Daniel Jacobs (University of Houston, HOME-OFFICE) Gökçe Günel (Rice University)

12:30PM-1:30PM Lunch, Avery 100

1:30pm - 4:00pm Afternoon Session: Planetary Sensibilities Macarena Gomez-Barris (Brown University) Ainslee Alem Robson (media artist) John Palmesino and Ann-Sofi Rönnskog (Territorial Agency, AA)

4:00PM-5:00PM Public Reception, Avery 100

Respondents include Anthony Vanky, Ateya Khorakiwala, Catherine Griffiths, Mireia Luzzaraga (Columbia GSAPP), Debbie Chen (RISD), Stephanie Choi (RISD), and student respondents

Organized by Amelyn Ng (Columbia GSAPP)

RSVP by Monday, April 6th for Campus Access

The Library is Open 28 welcomes Ignacio Galán for a conversation on his latest book, Architecture’s Kinships.

Architecture shapes and embodies complex social and environmental articulations. It is not the container and representation of pre-packaged relationships, but a medium for motley associations. In advancing this proposition, this book explores diverse alliances and permeations of knowledge across media, bringing together arguments and projects that result from multiple conversations and collaborations. It contains an invitation to work in critical, even if messy, coalitions with the hope of questioning exclusionary forms of affiliation and contributing to the imagination of alternative platforms of relationality through the exploration, discussion, activation, and transformation of the built environment.

With texts and projects by Emanuel Admassu, Lluís Alexandre Casanovas Blanco, Architensions (Alessandro Orsini + Nick Roseboro), Neeraj Bhatia / THE OPEN WORKSHOP, Matilde Cassani, Future Projects (Khoi Nguyen + Julie Tran), Ignacio G. Galán, David Gissen, Kevin Gotkin, Andrés Jaque, Karen Kubey, Jesse McCormick, Carlos Mínguez Carrasco, Iván L. Munuera, Alejandra Navarrete Llopis, O-F Architects (Alvaro M. Fidalgo + Arantza Ozaeta), Marina Otero Verzier, Joel Sanders, Ivonne Santoyo-Orozco, Hashim Sarkis.

Ignacio G. Galán is an architect, historian, and educator. His work is concerned with the way in which architecture mediates power, participates in the articulation of societies, and is entangled in processes of inclusion and exclusion—attending to questions of residence, belonging, citizenship, and kinship. These interests manifest in design projects as much as in diverse scholarly and curatorial endeavors concerning nationalism, colonialism, migration, and disability cultures. His work operates across media and is continuously informed by different collaborations.

His first scholarly monograph, titled Furnishing Fascism, has been published by the University of Minnesota Press (2025). His research has been published in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, the Journal of Design History, the Journal of Architecture Education, modernism/modernity, Journal of Architecture and ARQ among other academic journals and edited volumes. He has presented his work at the Center for Architecture AIA in New York in 2022, in the international selection of the Venice Biennale in 2014 and 2021, and at the Lisbon Triennale 2013. He is a co-editor of the edited volumes Radical Pedagogies (MIT Press, 2022) and After Belonging (Lars Muller, 2016) and was the co-curator of the Oslo Architecture Triennale 2016.

As a designer, the projects of his office [igg-office for architecture] bring to the fore questions of belonging, diversity, and access. His work is included in the permanent collection of the Pompidou Center and has been awarded in several competitions. The office has recently designed and built a number of residential projects that engage diverse forms of kinship, hospitality, and care.

He teaches at the Department of Architecture at Barnard+Columbia Colleges since 2016, and in 2024 he received the Tow Award for Innovative and Outstanding Pedagogy. Galán has also taught studios and seminars at Columbia GSAPP and PennDesign. Galán studied Architecture at ETSAMadrid and TUDelft, he graduated with Distinction from the MArchII program at Harvard GSD, and has a PhD in Architecture History and Theory from Princeton. He has been a pre-doctoral Fellow at the Spanish Academy in Rome, a Fulbright Scholar, a MacDowell Fellow, and a Research Fellow at the CCA.

The Library is Open is a lunchtime series featuring recently published works and their authors, curated by Bart-Jan Polman, Director of Exhibitions and Public Programming and Curator of the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery at Columbia GSAPP.

Co-curated with Ivan Lopez Munuera (Bard College), as a collaboration between Columbia GSAPP and Bard College.

This COALITION of Filmmakers will discuss New York City cinematographically and architecturally as an urban constellation where public life, storytelling, and collective imagination continually reshape the built environment. It does so with people who use film in a variety of ways to discuss New York City.

Participants include artist and cultural producer Zackary Drucker, whose projects include the documentary film The Stroll; curator and critic Ed Halter of Bard College and Light Industry; and Sophie Cavoulacos of MoMA.

Moderated by Ivan Lopez Munuera (Bard College) and Bart-Jan Polman (GSAPP).

Join us for a conversation on on recycling, repurposing, and re-use through a discussion on projects with and by GSAPP faculty Emanuel Admasu (GSAPP, AD-WO), Amale Andraos (GSAPP; WorkAC) Eric Bunge and Mimi Hoang (GSAPP; nArchitects), Harold Fallon (GSAPP; AgwA), Laurie Hawkinson (GSAPP; Smith-Miller + Hawkinson), Steven Holl (GSAPP, Steven Holl Architects), Nahyun Hwang (GSAPP; NHDM), Ziad Jamaleddine (GSAPP; L.E.FT), Dean Andrés Jaque (GSAPP; OFFPOLINN), Kaja Kuehl (GSAPP; youarethecity), Jing Liu (GSAPP; SO-IL), Adam Lubinsky (GSAPP; WXY), Mireia Luzárraga (GSAPP; TAKK), Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano (GSAPP; LOT-EK), Robert Marino (GSAPP; Robert Marino Architects), Alessandro Orsini (GSAPP; Architensions), Jorge Otero-Pailos (GSAPP; Otero Pailos Studio), Michaeljohn Raftopoulos (GSAPP; AREA, Architecture Research Athens), Rachely Rotem (GSAPP; MODU), Karla Rothstein (GSAPP; latent), Hilary Sample (GSAPP; MOS), Galia Solomonoff (GSAPP; SAS), Bernard Tschumi (GSAPP; Bernard Tschumi Architects), Marc Tsurumaki (GSAPP; LTL), and others.

This Academic Year’s John Foerster ‘64 Fund Lecture will be delivered by Jacques Herzog (Herzog & de Meuron), who will be in conversation with Dean Andrés Jaque.

Jacques Herzog studied architecture at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETHZ) with Aldo Rossi and Dolf Schnebli from 1970 to 1975. Together with Pierre de Meuron, he established Herzog & de Meuron in Basel in 1978. In 1983, Jacques Herzog was a visiting professor at Cornell University College of Architecture, Art and Planning (AAP), USA. Both Founding Partners were visiting professors at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD), USA, in 1989 and from 1994 to 2014, and have been professors at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH) – Department of Architecture, Network City and Landscape, from 1999 until 2018. They co-founded the ETH Studio Basel – Contemporary City Institute, a research program with a focus on the processes of transformation in the urban domain. In 2016, both were given Honorary Doctorates from the Royal College of Art; in 2018, from the Technical University of Munich; and in 2000 they were awarded Honorary Doctor of Political Science degrees from the University of Basel.

In 2001, Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron were awarded the Pritzker Architecture Prize, stating during the acceptance speech their aim to ‘reject classifications in architecture and to keep ourselves open to approach architecture in as many ways as we can.’ In 2007, they were awarded the RIBA Royal Gold Medal from the Royal Institute of British Architects and the Praemium Imperiale from the Japan Art Association, both in recognition of their work and its international influence. In 2015, they were given the RIBA Jencks Award. In addition, Herzog & de Meuron has received numerous awards for specific architectural projects.

In 2015 they co-founded the non-profit foundation Jacques Herzog und Pierre de Meuron Kabinett, Basel, comprising three sub-Kabinetts — architecture, art and photography — with the aim to keep these holdings intact as a cultural asset and to work with them in their specificity.

• Faculty Mireia Luzárraga‘s (TAKK) installs con-vivere at MAXXI Museum in Rome.

• Faculty Joseph Zeal-Henry named Chief of Arts & Culture of the city of Boston.

• Faculty Bernard Tschumi’s new building in Switzerland is featured in Architectural Digest’s March 2026 issue.

• Faculty Jayden Ali (JA Projects) designs an installation for salon MATTER and SHAPE 2026.

• Faculty Xiaoxi Chen, Faculty André Barros Santos, and Alum Lily Chishan Wong gather at Storefront for Art & Architecture to present their ongoing project “Ta-Chim: Weighing a City’s Colonial Legacies”.

• CBAC presents “Erasure by Design: Racial Protocols of Displacement, Demolition, and Extraction” V. Mitch at Head Hi.