Architecture and discourse are inseparable, and architecture, and its discourse, are always evolving. As a fundamentally collective endeavor, the work e-flux Architecture has published over these past 10 years can be read as a map of how the discipline has transformed, where it is today. Not without its blind spots, it has given insight to and helped shape the direction of the discipline.

This event brings together some of the key contributors to e-flux Architecture of the past decade for a critical reflection and celebration. It is organized by Nick Axel and Nikolaus Hirsch (e-flux Architecture); Jean Im, Dean Andrés Jaque, and Bart-Jan Polman (GSAPP); and will bring together: Emanuel Admassu (GSAPP, AD-WO), Lucia Allais (GSAPP), Erin Besler (Princeton), Beatriz Colomina (Princeton), Peggy Deamer (Yale), Keller Easterling (Yale), David Gissen (Yale), Catherine Griffiths (GSAPP), Brooke Holmes (Princeton), Nahyun Hwang (GSAPP, NHDM), Lydia Kallipoliti (GSAPP), Ateya Khorakiwala (GSAPP), Laura Kurgan (GSAPP), Sylvia Lavin (Princeton), Iván López Munuera (Bard), Mae-Ling Lokko (Yale), Reinhold Martin (GSAPP), David Eugin Moon (UPenn, NHDM), Amelyn Ng (GSAPP), Jorge Otero Pailos (GSAPP), Spyros Papapetros (Princeton), Elizabeth A. Povinelli (Columbia), Enrique Ramirez (Pratt), Hilary Sample (GSAPP), Felicity Scott (GSAPP), Meredith TenHoor (Pratt), Julia Van Den Hout (Art Omi), Anton Vidokle (e-flux), Mark Wasiuta (GSAPP), Mark Wigley (GSAPP), Mabel Wilson (GSAPP, AAADS)

John Lopez (UC Davis) and John Davis (OSU) presents “American Environmental Machines, 1500-2026,” followed with a response by Buell Fellow Frederik Braüner.

Human efforts to engineer ecologies and landscapes in the Americas have long required massive amounts of labor and machinery. John López tracks the import of Dutch flood-control techniques to Renaissance Mexico City, where they faced the aquatic consciousness of Aztec Tenochtitlán. John Davis uncovers an unrealized project to redesign the American landscape after Reconstruction, leveraging the US Army Corps of Engineers to produce the largest ever swath of agricultural land reclaimed for freedpeople.

Faculty Lola Ben-Alon discusses her edited book Material Variance, followed by a conversation with Felecia Davis, Mae-Ling Lokko, Director of MSHP Jorge Otero-Pailos, and Jonsara Ruth.

Convening material researchers, building scientists, architects, and artists, Material Variance aims to collectively expand architecture and design’s material lexicon and unsettle its disciplinary boundaries. The book interrogates the assumptions of refinement, standardization, and technocratic control to advance alternative fabrication practices, alchemical processes, and methods for working with indeterminate matter.

Fernando Luis Martínez Nespral (IAA) presents “Ibero-American Patterns,” followed with a response by Faculty Ziad Jamaleddine.

Orientalizing patterns, building elements, and tropes have suffused Latin American architecture since the Early Modern period. Fernando Nespral’s comprehensive new study shows that these designs were primarily channelled through Spain, demonstrating how deeply this longstanding imperial legacy is imprinted on the hemisphere.

CONSTRUCTING (unorthodox) PRACTICE traces the trajectories of emerging firms from around the globe that are critically engaged with contemporary design challenges.

The symposium focuses on the transition from education to professional practice and on the idea that one’s own practice can be understood as a project in itself—designed, built, and sustained—necessarily shaped by meaningful commitments in today’s contradictory and increasingly complex climate.

Speakers include Mahsa Malek and Alex Yueyan Li (11x17), Laurens Bekemans (BC Architects), Anna MacIver-Ek and Axel Chevroulet (Maciver-ek Chevroulet), Martinez Barat, Benjamin Lafore, and Florian Jomain (MBL Architects), dz A Ardy Hartono (DUA Studio), Gigi Shukakidze* (Wunderwerk), **Dechophon Rattanasatchatham, Pongsatorn Swadchatchwan and Rungroj Tansukanun (Yangnar Studio), Nguyễn Hà (ARB Architects + Material Matters),Juliana Ayako, Carlos Zebulun, Anna Jankovic and André Bonnice (SIMULAA), Alkistis Thomidou andBerta Gutiérrez Casaos (Forty-Five Degrees), Igor Bragado and Miles Gertler (Common Accounts). Introductions by Dean Andrés Jaque and Faculty Juan Herreros, moderations by Faculty Marc Tsurumaki, Mireia Luzárraga, Lola Ben-Alon, and Director of MSAAD Lydia Kallipoliti.

Brian Goldstein discusses his latest book Max Bond: The Life and Work of the People’s Architect, the first biography of a preeminent postwar architect who championed the cause of freedom through architecture and transformed Black history and modernism, followed by a conversation with Shelley Hayreh and Shawn Rickenbacker.

• Faculty Catherine Griffiths‘s video piece, Sandy Flats Lane, examines motion capture datasets of domestic labor in the home and is on view at the KB National Library of the Netherlands.

• Director of MSAAD Lydia Kallipoliti delivers a lecture at the conference, “Unstable Models – On Typology and Climate,” at the Bauhaus Aula in Dessau, Germany.

• Director of MSHP Jorge Otero-Pailos revisits The Ethics of Dust Dust: Westminster Hall, reflecting on preservation, memory, and changing histories.

• Faculty Juan Herreros is interviewed by M de Milenio magazine about SOLO CSV.

• Faculty Ateya Khorakiwala delivers a lecture, “On Famine Codes, Relief Camps, and the Making of Rural Poverty,” at Columbia University’s Center for Comparative Media.

• Faculty Karla Rothstein contributes to the article, “Trump’s arch would cast shadow on Arlington Cemetery.”

• Faculty Emanuel Admassu and Jen Wood ‘12 MSAAD (AD-WO) are commissioned by the Carnegie Museum of Art to reimagine the Heinz Architectural Center.

• Faculty Hugo Sarmiento, doctoral candidates Samantha Saona and Mauricio Rada, and doctoral student Daniela Perleche collaborate in organizing and presenting at the International Conference on Housing and Land Commodification in Lima, Peru.

• Faculty Nahyun Hwang (N H D M) participates in an exhibition and panel at the Knowlton School at The Ohio State University.

• Doctoral candidate Lucia Galaretto receives the 2026 Carter Manny Award Citations of Special Recognition.

• The Avery Review: Issue 78 accounts for and recounts how and
  where—and through which politics, practices, and policies—destruction is manufactured and staged across geographies and generations.

• Faculty Mireia Luzárraga (TAKK) delivers a lecture at the Oslo Architects Association, November 4.

• Faculty Maksym Rokmaniko presents the Great Meadow Atlas, a collaborative mapping platform built by the Advanced V Studio, Soil Histories, with the Center for Spatial Technologies, November 5.