An Open Invitation: AAP's Spring 2025 Semester Highlights

From new classes and exceptional faculty to special exhibitions, field trips, and events, the upcoming semester at Cornell's College of Architecture, Art, and Planning (AAP) offers myriad opportunities to explore new possibilities and expand horizons. Whether you're based in Ithaca, New York City, or Rome this semester, you have an open invitation to explore and engage. So before the weeks fill with obligations and deadlines, be sure to check out all that AAP has planned so you don't miss out on an opportunity that could shift how you see your world and your work in it. 

Showing Up: Lectures, Exhibitions & Events

The Struggle for Liberation Today: A Conversation with Angela Davis (2/3)
Cornell's annual Martin Luther King Jr. Commemoration will feature activist, writer, and lecturer Angela Davis, who will speak on the intersectional struggle for liberation today. The event is co-sponsored by the AAP Office of Diversity + Inclusion.

AAP Launchpad (3/19)
This annual book launch event showcases recent publications by Cornell AAP faculty. Hear brief, informal talks from each of the authors followed by the opportunity to meet them, as well as browse and buy their books. This semester's event will feature:

Architecture

• Professor Milton S. F. Curry: CriticalProductive
• Associate Professor Pamela Karimi: Women, Art, Freedom: Artists and Street Politics in Iran and Alternative Iran: Contemporary Art and Critical Spatial Practice
• Assistant Professor Peter Robinson: "The BlackSpace Manifesto: 'Living' Black Liberatory Futures," a chapter in Spatial Futures: Difference and the Post-Anthropocene

Art

• Professor Michael Ashkin: There will be two of you
• Assistant Professor Leeza Meksin: Painting Deconstructed
• M.F.A. in Image Text Codirectors Nicholas Muellner and Catherine Taylor: Orange Blossom Trail
• Chair and Professor Paul Ramírez Jonas: Labels

City and Regional Planning

• Professor Sara Bronin: Key to the City: How Zoning Shapes Our World
• Chair and Professor Sophie Oldfield: High Stakes, High Hopes: Urban Theorizing in Partnership and Knowing the City: South African Urban Scholarship from Apartheid to Democracy
• Professor Mildred Warner (participation pending): Community Development and Schools: Conflict, Power, and Promise

Design Tech Open Studio (3/24–4/10)
Mounted in the Bibliowicz Family Gallery, this exhibition will feature work by the 2024–25 Design Tech Innovation Fellows, select Design Tech faculty, and Design Technology students, including drawings, models, material studies, 3D prints, interactive devices, prototypes, and video screens. The inaugural issue of Design Tech Volumes, an annual publication of work by Design Tech faculty and students, will be launched in tandem. The exhibition will then travel to Cornell Tech for the NYCxDESIGN festival (5/15–5/21).

Climate Resiliency in New York City (4/24)
The Cornell Mui Ho Center for Cities will host a symposium at Cornell Tech this spring. The event will convene scientists, thought leaders, city government, civil society, and private industry to discuss what actions can be taken to make New York City more resilient to climate change hazards.

Lectures
1/23: Nader Tehrani, Gensler Visiting Critic (ARCH)
2/4: Tiffany Cheng, Design Tech Assistant Professor (DT)
2/4: Florian Idenburg, Architecture Professor of the Practice and cofounder of SO – IL, and Sebastian Mendez, cofounder of Tankhouse (Gensler Family AAP NYC Center)
2/11: Alumni Panel: JJ Manford (B.F.A. '06), Cecilia Lu (B.F.A. '22), and Laura Nova (B.F.A. '96) (ART)
2/13: Isidoro Michan-Guindi (B.Arch. '15), Visiting Critic (ARCH)
3/4: Trevor Paglen, American artist (ART, co-sponsor)
3/12: Skylar Tibbits, Associate Professor of Design Research at MIT (DT)
3/14: Lynn Ross (M.R.P. '01), planner, policymaker, and founder of Spirit for Change Consulting (CRP)
3/18: Dan Kaplan, Senior Partner at FXCollaborative Architects (Gensler Family AAP NYC Center)
3/20: Tamar Ettun, Teiger Mentor in the Arts (ART)
3/21: Thomas Gillespie, Lecturer in Global Urban Development at the University of Manchester (CRP)
4/8: Jared Della Valle, cofounder of Alloy (Gensler Family AAP NYC Center)
4/8: Marirena Kladeftira, Design Tech Innovation Fellow and Visiting Instructor (DT)
4/17: Karl Mistry (M.P.S. RE '04), Executive Vice President of Toll Brothers (RE)
4/18: Daniel Agbiboa, Associate Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University (CRP)
5/1: Douglas Gensler ('90, B.Arch. '91), Director, North River Company in Boston (RE)
5/2: Marisa Turesky, Theodore B. and Doris Shoong Lee Chair in Real Estate Law and Urban Planning at the University of California–Berkeley (CRP)
Spring 2025: Guest entrepreneurs to be announced (AAP Entrepreneurship Sessions)

Exhibitions

1/20–1/30: Fall 2024 Cornell in Rome Student Exhibition
1/27–2/6: Marissa Cote (M.F.A. '26) and Savannah Flores (B.F.A. '25) — A Case Study and Hereditary Collision
2/10–2/20: Lauren Greene and Zeiad Amin (both M.S. MDC '25) — Textiles, Decoded
3/3–3/13: Josephine Cosmosse (B.F.A. ’25) — Invisible Hands
3/17–3/20: Stephanie Lee (Architecture Strauch Fellow) — Alterlife
3/24–4/10: Department of Design Tech — Design Tech Open Studio
4/14–4/19: Ryan Whitby (Architecture Design Teaching Fellow) — Exquisite Corpse: Dialogues in Material and Machine
4/21–4/28: Manuel Bouzas (Architecture Design Teaching Fellow) — RetroScena: On the Making of the Spanish Pavilion at the 19th Venice Architecture Biennal

Local to Global: Classes, Field Trips & Learning

The Department of Art will offer LAND: Art, Ecology, and Environmental Activism, a new course led by Associate Professor Jen de los Reyes which will survey artists' engagement with land from a material, historical, spiritual, and political perspective. This class will participate in the cultivation and maintenance of a mini-forest and develop installation, collaboration, fieldwork, and social practice skills through hands-on projects. They will also gain a familiarity with a wide range of international artists addressing land-based practices, including issues of biodiversity and climate crisis.

Professor Sara Bronin will return to the Department of City and Regional Planning following her two-year appointment chairing the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation as part of the Biden administration. This semester, Bronin will lead a field trip, Building Capital: Law's Impact on Washington, DC, in the nation's capital, offering AAP students the opportunity to engage with her expertise and networks. In addition, Isabel Boggs-Fernández and Zac Boggs, two leading upstate New York urban designers, will involve students in an examination of public space and urban design in Puerto Rico, with fieldwork in the commonwealth in late February. CRP Associate Professor of the Practice George Frantz will teach a new course, Sustainable Cities and Towns, which offers students first-hand engagement with key planning practices and implementation in Tompkins County. He will also teach a workshop through a partnership with the Seneca Nation of Indians that engages in questions of sovereignty and indigeneity in planning.

As announced last year, architect and educator Billie Faircloth joins Cornell's faculty this semester as Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture as well as a Cornell Atkinson Scholar and Senior Faculty Fellow at the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability. Her option studio Building Life Studio: Caring to Adapt, Adapting to Care will travel to Philadelphia in March, and Architecture Professor Milton S. F. Curry's Reparative Urbanism: TULSA option studio will include a trip to that city in mid-February.

Rome expects to welcome approximately 35 million pilgrims from all over the world for the Vatican's 2025 Jubilee Year. This will present a remarkable opportunity for Cornell in Rome students to participate in special events happening throughout the city this spring. In addition, they will make planned overnight trips to Siena, Urbino, Bologna, Torino, Matera, Paestum, Pompeii, and Naples.

Each year, the Baker Program in Real Estate's master's degree students apply their knowledge, deepen their understanding of the global real estate business, and challenge their expectations during domestic and international treks. This spring first-year students will explore San Francisco, while second-year students will journey to Singapore.

The first season of The Good City, a Cornell Mui Ho Center for Cities podcast about wicked urban problems and actions across scales, will be released later this spring and will feature episodes on topics including deconstruction, informal settlements, and traffic.

Welcoming: Faculty & Guests

Building on last semester's architecture and planning studio's work in Nairobi and the MacArthur 100&Change proposal submitted last fall (finalists will be announced in spring 2025), the Cornell Mui Ho Center for Cities will host three colleagues from this collaboration on campus this spring to give guest lectures and seminars, as well as to meet with AAP students and faculty. They include: Professor Thomas Gillespie in Global Urban Development at the University of Manchester and a core team member of the African Cities Research Consortium (ACRC) (3/19–3/22); Smith Ouma, a postdoctoral fellow with ACRC and long-term collaborator with Slum Dwellers International–Kenya (SDI) (2/27–4/1); and Shiela Muganyi, Projects Officer for the Dialogue on Shelter Trust for SDI–Zimbabwe (2/24–3/10).

This semester, Assistant Professor Tiffany Cheng joins the Department of Design Tech as its inaugural tenure-track faculty member, and Design Tech Innovation Fellow and Visiting Instructor Marirena Kladeftira joins the department for the spring and fall of 2025. The Department of Art's M.F.A. in Image Text program welcomes another exciting cohort of faculty, including Meg Onli, curator of the 2024 Whitney Biennial.

Announcing: Awards & Funding

The new Ratan Tata Distinguished Alumni Award announced last semester recognizes the decades-long global and philanthropic impact of the late Ratan Tata ('59, B.Arch. '62). Tata, a former Cornell trustee, longtime AAP Advisory Council member, and renowned business leader, is the inaugural recipient of the award, which will be presented posthumously in Milstein Auditorium on April 16.

AAP will distribute its second set of Engagement Impact Grants this semester. Applications opened on January 15 and will close March 7. Funding is available to AAP faculty and students located in Ithaca, New York City, or Rome in three areas: research and creative work, convenings, and curricular innovation.

During the spring semester, the Center for Cities will also send out a call for "seed proposals." Previously awarded grants have supported faculty research on cities and urban issues across a wide range of approaches.

Growth & Renewal: Capital Projects

The renewal of AAP's historic Sibley Dome is underway in Ithaca with major demolition work completed and planned infrastructural updates currently in process. Work will continue in the space throughout this calendar year and, when finished (target January 2026), will offer much-needed learning locations, including an auditorium, studio, and collaborative commons for students, as well as provide a home for the Cornell Mui Ho Center for Cities and the multicollege Department of Design Tech.

In New York City, the first-floor maker space at the Tata Center on Cornell Tech's Roosevelt Island campus is complete and ready for use, and the fourth floor is nearing completion. After ten years at their 26 Broadway location in Lower Manhattan, The Gensler Family AAP NYC Center will relocate to Tata's fourth floor at the conclusion of the spring semester. Their new 13,500-square-foot home features studio space with 120 student workstations, a crit room, lecture rooms, workshops, offices, and common areas.

More news and event information is added to the AAP website throughout the semester. Sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter and follow us on social media to get involved and stay up to date.

Learn more about all upcoming AAP lectures and exhibitions