Fatina Abreek-Zub (TAU Lab of Spaces-in-Transition) delivers the Detlef Mertins lecture on the Histories of Modernity, with an introduction by Faculty Ateya Khorakiwala (GSAPP) and a response by Ralph Ghoche (Barnard).

Fatina Abreek-Zub is an architect, architectural historian and Assistant Professor. She is the founder of the Lab of Spaces-in-Transition, which investigate the relational intimate power between humanitarian and aid developmental regimes in conflict zones of the Global South, with a focus on the spatial materialization of forced migration and cross-cultural mobilities of people, knowledge and commodities.

Jack Halberstam presents his latest book, Anarchitecture After Everything: A Trans Manifesto, with an introduction by Sarah Haley and in conversation with Claire Bishop, Julia Q. Bryan-Wilson, and Faculty Mabel Wilson.

Anarchitecture, a radical aesthetic practice of unmaking the built environment, staged a vigorous confrontation with urban renewal and gentrification projects in the 1970s. In Anarchitecture After Everything, Jack Halberstam identifies a powerful lexicon of transformation within anarchitecture, joining the movement’s practices of cutting and splitting with the destabilizing power of transness to detonate acts of formal violence in our time.

Marcos Zotes ‘12 MSAAD is an architect and partner at Basalt Architects, an Icelandic practice operating at the threshold of architecture and landscape, where he has led the design of key geothermal baths, hospitality projects, and exhibitions. Zotes is the curator for Iceland’s entry at the 20th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2027.

The first WORKS session discusses the HIGH LINE with its key contributors: James Corner (Field Operations), Elizabeth Diller, (DS+R, Princeton), and several others.

WORKS is a new series that throughout the upcoming semesters will discuss a selection of projects that have contributed to the production of realities through the mobilization of resources, agendas and constituencies; by connecting distant scales and actors; and as active components within broader social, ecological, cultural, and political transformations.

How are the disciplines of the built environment being called upon to participate in some of the most consequential transformations of our time? How can we address rapidly changing conditions across ecological systems, technological infrastructures, economies, forms of governance, and modes of collective life through which the built environment is produced?

Underlying WORKS is a question of growing urgency: What is the most meaningful use of our disciplines, our practices, and our forms of knowledge today? What capacities must architecture, preservation, real estate and urbanism cultivate if they are to participate substantively in addressing the challenges that define the present? And what enables our fields to earn a meaningful place within the processes where realities are negotiated, assembled, and made consequential?

Faculty Ziad Jamaleddine (GSAPP, L.E.FT Architects) reflects on At the Edge of Where God Built, a critical examination of L.E.FT Architects’ diverse body of work from the past decade, with speakers Waleed Arafa (DAA), Nebahat Avcıoğlu (Hunter College), Iheb Guermazi (USC), Nasser Rabbat (MIT), Kishwar Rizvi (Yale), Avinoam Shalem (Columbia Department of Art History & Archaeology), and Faculty Sumayya Vally (GSAPP, counter-space).

Hito Steyerl, Thomas Keenan, and Faculty Mark Wasiuta discuss the role of “the document” in their work. This event takes place on the occasion of the launch of Mark Wasiuta’s book, The Archival Exhibition: A Decade of Research at the Arthur Ross Architecture Gallery, 2006–2016, published by Columbia Books on Architecture and the City.

Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu of Amateur Architecture Studio discusses their Ningbo History Museum as part of WORKS.

WORKS is a new series that throughout the upcoming semesters will discuss a selection of projects that have contributed to the production of realities through the mobilization of resources, agendas and constituencies; by connecting distant scales and actors; and as active components within broader social, ecological, cultural, and political transformations.

How are the disciplines of the built environment being called upon to participate in some of the most consequential transformations of our time? How can we address rapidly changing conditions across ecological systems, technological infrastructures, economies, forms of governance, and modes of collective life through which the built environment is produced?

Underlying WORKS is a question of growing urgency: What is the most meaningful use of our disciplines, our practices, and our forms of knowledge today? What capacities must architecture, preservation, real estate and urbanism cultivate if they are to participate substantively in addressing the challenges that define the present? And what enables our fields to earn a meaningful place within the processes where realities are negotiated, assembled, and made consequential?

Emanuel Admassu and Olalekan Jeyifous delivers this year’s Fall Open House Lecture, followed by a conversation with Dean Andrés Jaque.

Emanuel Admassu (’12 MSAAD, ’13 AAR) is an assistant professor at GSAPP and a founding partner, with Jen Wood, of AD—WO, an art and architecture practice based in New York. As a practicing architect, urbanist, and educator, Admassu’s work explores the intersections of spatial justice and urbanism, with a special focus on the African continent and the African diaspora. Prior to joining GSAPP, Admassu taught at RISD and Harvard GSD. He is also one of the founding board members of the Black Reconstruction Collective.

Olalekan Jeyifous received a BArch from Cornell University and is a Brooklyn-based artist whose work reimagines the intersections of architecture, community, and the environment through inventive visual storytelling. By merging physical and digital elements with both historical and speculative contexts, his practice offers critical reflections on existing systems while imagining alternative ways of relating to each other and the spaces we inhabit. His art has been exhibited at major institutions including the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Vitra Design Museum, and Guggenheim Bilbao, and is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and SFMOMA.

In addition to an extensive exhibition history, he has spent over two decades creating large-scale public installations and was co-commissioned to design a monument to Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm for New York City’s She Built NYC initiative.

His distinctions include the 2024 Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, the Silver Lion at the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, the 2021 United States Artists Fellowship in Architecture and Design, the 2021 J. Irwin and Xenia S. Miller Prize, and two NYFA Fellowships. He has also been awarded residencies at MacDowell, The Drawing Center’s Open Sessions, and the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, and he currently serves as the 2026 Brooklyn Botanic Garden Heidi Nitze Fellow.

• GSAPP Ph.D. Candidate Beril Sarisakal co-curates the Türkiye Pavilion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture 2027.

• Dean Andrés Jaque and Faculty Galia Solomonoff participate in the Buenos Aires International Architecture Biennial.

• Faculty Mireia Luzárraga (TAKK) designs the commissioned installation for The Architectural League’s Beaux Arts Ball 2026: Home Sweet Home.

• Faculty Lola Ben-Alon publishes the essay, “Sun-Developed Matter, or, The Raw Transformations of Soils and Plants,” in the A–D VOL 96.3 The New Heliomorphism. (pictured)

• Director of M.Arch Marc Tsurumaki publishes the essay, “Straw Tectonics,” in the A–D VOL 96.3 The New Heliomorphism.

• Faculty Dimitra Tsachrelia Holl delivers a lecture in conversation with Hannah Feniak, Architizer’s Editor in Chief, September 29.

• Faculty Ziad Jamaleddine delivers a lecture on his book, “At the Edge of Where God Built,” at the Columbia Global Center’s Amman Week, September 30.