The College of Architecture and Design is honored to welcome architects, designers, artists, and scholars from across the country, as a part of its 2026 Spring Lecture Series, for a semester of public lectures exploring contemporary design practice, theory, and culture.

Oblique Experiments, Igor Siddiqui, February 16 

Igor Siddiqui is an architect, design scholar, and associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin, where he serves as director for interior design. 

Based on Siddiqui’s recently published book Oblique Experiments: Claude Parent’s Architectural Installations (1969-1975) (Applied Research and Design, 2025), this lecture explores the significance of a series of temporary interventions that Parent designed in an attempt to convert his theory into practice. 

Architecture and the Construction of Identity, Kai Franz, February 23 

Kai Franz is an artist working at the intersection of art, architecture, technology, and digital culture. Franz, born in Cologne, Germany, is an associate professor at the Rhode Island School of Design.  

Franz collaborates with machines, chance and entropy as well as code and seriality to produce works that function as residue, offerings, and traces of collective presence. In recent years, Dada, costume-making and performance, grounded in the carnivalesque, have entered his artistic practice. Together these bodies of work ask us to reconsider what it might mean to co-create, belong, and co-exist. 

From Fallow: Past, Present, and Future of Abandonment, Jill Desimini, March 16 

Jill Desimini is a landscape architect, program director and associate professor of landscape architecture at the University of Connecticut. 

As cities evolve and resources shift with time, spaces within those cities are often left fallow and abandoned. This talk posits a fundamental role for spatial design practice in transforming abandoned urban landscapes over time. It argues for approaches that promote the specific affordances of the land itself (hydrology, vegetation, topography, geology, infrastructural capacity, occupation potential); the importance of cyclical and reciprocal change; and the particularities of the cultural, political, and physical context. 

S.W.I.M. or Someone Who Isn’t Me, Timothy Arment, April 6 

Timothy Arment is an artist, animator, and currently serves as the Digital Futures Fellow at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville’s College of Architecture and Design. 

Through games, books, and code, this lecture and accompanying body of work explores the absurdity of reverse-engineering the human mind, how collaborative input can create singular output, how contemporary online technology melds the minds of its users, and the nature of the “being” that results from this amalgamation. 

Unless otherwise noted, lectures are held at 5:30 p.m. in McCarty Auditorium, room 109, in the Art + Architecture Building. All lectures are free and open to the public. 

Support for the College of Architecture and Design’s lecture series is championed by the Robert B. Church III Memorial Lecture Fund.