College Announces 2025 Fall Lecture and Exhibit Series
The College of Architecture and Design is honored to bring architects, designers, and leading industry professionals from around the country to participate in our 2025 Fall Lecture and Exhibit Series.
Critical Matter and Emotive Environments, Behnaz Farahi, August 25
Behnaz Farahi is an award-winning designer and critical maker. She is an assistant professor at MIT Media Lab, where she leads the Critical Matter research group. She holds a PhD in Interdisciplinary Media Arts and Practice from USC. Her work addresses critical issues such as feminism, emotion, perception and social interaction. Farahi has won several awards including the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum Digital Design Award, Innovation By Design Fast Company Award, World Technology Award. She is a co-editor of an issue of AD, ‘3D Printed Body Architecture’ and ‘Interactive Design: Towards a Responsive Environment’.
Farahi’s presentation addresses the notion of ‘critical matter’ and explores how emerging technologies can be used to address social, cultural, and political issues. By demonstrating a series of interdisciplinary projects, the attempt is to show ways in which materials of the environment can be imbued with intelligence and life-like behavior in order to interface with human emotion. The goal is to address the possibility of an empathetic relationship between human beings and their environment in order to augment human intelligence, awareness, sensory experience and influence social interactions.
Housing, Schools, Greenhouses, Clinics, Hilary Sample, September 23
Hilary Sample is an American architect, educator, and author. She is the co-founder of award-winning architecture firm MOS Architects in New York City, and Professor at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation and holds the inaugural IDC Foundation Professorship in housing design and culture.
Architecture in the work of MOS Architects is defined as economical, refined and repetitive to create unconventional buildings. This lecture presents ideas about the design of public spaces as they intersect this architecture. Exploring themes of gathering, tending, and maintenance in built works will also be discussed.
Souths is a transdisciplinary symposium that challenges reductive narratives and amplifies untold stories across urban, suburban, and rural contexts. Through dialogue spanning geography, politics, foodways, storytelling, and infrastructure, this gathering seeks to uncover counterlandscapes revealing hidden truths and imagining transformative futures for the region and beyond.
Paper Architectures, Jack Murphy, October 20
Jack Murphy is executive editor of The Architect’s Newspaper (AN) and AN Interior. He received an Honorable Mention for the Pierre Vago Journalism Award 2020 from the International Committee of Architecture Critics. He earned degrees in architecture from MIT and Rice University.
This lecture will introduce the audience to Murphy’s practice as an editor of architecture publications. He will provide context for the origins and growth of The Architect’s Newspaper and AN Interior, its interior architecture magazine, and give an overview of the current editorial agenda for both titles; share his journey from working as a designer to leading design publications; and deliver observations about the intertwined history of architecture and media and its current state.
Ecologies of Care: Designing Within Conflict, Malkit Shosan, October 27
Malkit Shoshan is a designer, researcher, educator, writer, and the founding director of FAST (Foundation for Achieving Seamless Territory). Her work explores the relationships between architecture, urban planning, and human rights, promoting social and environmental justice through collaborative initiatives and design.
In this lecture, Malkit Shoshan will draw on two decades of design research and practice to discuss how, through their projects, FAST engages with complex challenges facing conflict-affected regions, such as displacement, spatial violence, and the preservation of cultural heritage and knowledge, utilizing collaborative and cross-disciplinary methods.
The presentation will highlight FAST’s impactful projects, including collaborations with internally displaced communities, UN agencies, and international policymakers. Shoshan will also delve into FAST’s current focus on climate and conflict-induced migration, examining how these trends are reshaping demographics, landscapes and typologies of human habitation.
Through case studies and analysis, this lecture will explore how architecture, urban planning, and design thinking can be employed to develop spatial strategies that support affected communities and institutions, particularly in the Sahel region. By viewing displacement both as a challenge and an opportunity, we can reimagine future habitation and reshape the discipline of spatial design.
Ecologies of Memory, Sara Zewde, November 10
Sara Zewde is founding principal of Studio Zewde, a design firm practicing landscape architecture, urbanism, and public art. Named to Time Magazine’s TIME 100 Next, Architectural Digest’s AD100, and United States Artists Fellow, her practice is celebrated for its design methods that sync culture, ecology, and craft.
In the context of a changing climate, clarified social and political tensions, and rapid urban development, an understanding of ecologies of memory can offer creative departures for contemporary design practice. Sara Zewde will share recent design work of Studio Zewde across a range of geographies in view of this framework.