Architecture Lecture Series: Architecture Fellows Lecture

Abstract

Join the 2024 Architecture Fellows, Sydney Maubert, Imani Day, Eduardo Cilleruelo Terán, Il Hwan Kim, and Catherine Wilmes for a lecture and panel discussion about their experience and work.

Biographies

Sydney Maubert is an architect, artist, muralist, scholar, and teacher.  She directs Studio Maubert, an architectural, artistic, and scholarly practice exploring Black, Latin, Indigenous, and Fem modes of cultural and spatial production.

She holds post-professional and professional degrees in architecture from Yale (2022) and the University of Miami (2020), with double minors in writing and art. She is the founder of Sydney R. Maubert LLC, her art and mural practice. Studio Maubert is Maubert's interdisciplinary architectural, artistic, and scholarly practice researching questions at the intersection of architecture, geography, and policy — including urban morphologies and racialized habitation patterns in Miami and New York, and their intertwined legacies with colonialism and genocide. The work is largely animated by Black studies, decolonial studies, fugitive practice, history, and cultural geography. 

A recipient of Cornell's Strauch Fellowship, she will teach and produce research (Fall 2022–ongoing) interested in questions surrounding housing, race, geography, and unruliness. She worked as an intern at Bernheimer Architecture (2021–22) and  Trelles Cabarrocas (2018, 2019). She has received several awards including the Yale Moulton Andros Award (2022) and the University of Miami Alpha Rho Chi Award (2020).

Her writing can be found in Yale's Paprika! and she was published as an editorial research assistant to Dr. Victor Deupi in Transformations in Classical Architecture (2016–2018). 

She assisted teaching courses with Dark Matter University, Yale University, CCNY, and Morgan State University under Jerome Haferd, Curry Hackett, and Justin G. Moore, as well as at the University of Miami's School of Architecture where she also worked in the Dean's Office (2015–2020).

Imani Day is a licensed architect, writer, and founder of RVSN Studios. Originally from Montclair, New Jersey, she graduated from Cornell University's School of Architecture in 2011 and spent her early career in New York working with Robert Stern and Diller Scofidio. In 2015, Day moved to Detroit at the height of the city's bankruptcy to focus on community-oriented work, designing and building socially inclusive spaces across multiple different scales of impact. Her interests and advocacy efforts support the equitable evolution of under-resourced neighborhoods, the authenticity of culturally grounded spaces, and revising design processes to focus on tangible social progress. Day has previously taught with Florida A&M University and the University of Detroit Mercy and held an editorial fellowship with Columbia University's Avery Review. 

Eduardo Cilleruelo Terán is a New York/Madrid-based architect and educator. Since July 2023, he has held the position of Design Teaching Fellow at the College of Architecture, Art, and Planning at Cornell University. As part of his research and practice, he has been committed to the analysis of infrastructural relationships under the canopy of data management and its consequences in the architectural realm. Recently, he was awarded with the Prize of Excellence (Space Group, Seoul, November 2022) for his studies of data civicness and urban possibilities in vertical public connectors in New York City. In collaboration with Associate Professor Jesse LeCavalier, he cocurated a public exhibition and symposium, "Data Clouds," in Berlin (June 2023) addressing the domains of technology intersecting with architectural typologies. In parallel, he investigates museum institutions and inter-infrastructural dimensions through the lens of politics and history. Recently, he presented the paper "A Phantom Museum?" in the AMPS Congress (Prague, June 2023) following those premises.

​He graduated from Cornell University, College of Art, Architecture, and Planning in 2022 after completing the Master of Science, Advanced Architectural Design, where he received the Award for Outstanding Performance in Architecture at AAP, Cornell University in December 2022. In addition, he earned a Master and Bachelor in Architecture from Universidad de Alcala (Madrid, 2017, 2016, respectively). Before joining Cornell University, he previously held an appointment at Montana State University, where he taught studio courses on the study of spaces in-between private and public in local typological buildings in the city of Bozeman.

​In combination with his academic career in the exercise of practice, he collaborates with international and multidisciplinary professionals. Cofounder of ACT (Architecture, Construction Technology—young architecture practice) and coeditor of Momentum Magazine, a physical publication on sharing architectural manifestos. His work has been exhibited and published at the Venice Biennale, Chamber of Architecture of Madrid, Spanish Royal Academy at Rome, and Cornell University. 

Il Hwan Kim is a Cornell Architecture Design Teaching Fellow for 2023 and a founding member of the art and architecture practice Ø-Lingual Studio. He is dedicated to bridging the gap between construction and design through the use of alternative design and manufacturing processes. His main areas of focus include material-based design and fabrication. Prior to joining AAP, he worked as a research assistant at the Self-Assembly Lab at MIT. He also gained practical experience in architecture at Link Arkitektur in Oslo, Kjellander Sjöberg Arkitektkontor in Stockholm, and BIG in NYC. Kim holds a Master of Science in Architecture Studies degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Catherine Wilmes is an architectural designer invested in thinking about the discipline's relation to art and photography. Her designs are often derived from a photographic inquiry of the built environment and are informed by material experimentations at the scale of the model. This allows her to construct an iterative design process that translates photographic media into three-dimensional objects imbued with materiality.

She practiced in various architectural offices in New York City with an emphasis on residential and educational projects at the master plan, building, interior, and furniture scales. Her area of expertise lies in adaptive reuse with projects in the United States, South America, Africa, and China. She is currently working on multiple projects of post-industrial adaptation in Texas and New York.

Recently, her research in architectural media was exhibited as part of several group shows such as the In The Round, On the Flat (2022) and Aesthetics of Prosthetics (2019) exhibitions at Pratt Institute's Siegel Gallery.