2025—2026 Programming: Lectures & Exhibitions

LECTURES

Lecture Series: Planetary Imaginaries 
Fall 2025—Spring 2026 

Planetary Imaginaries was an expansive series of public engagements for the 2025-2026 academic year. The theme explored the “planetary” as a framework for reconsidering our relationship with the environment, calling for a reimagining of our ethical and ecological responsibilities in the Anthropocene — a world ecology beyond human-centered boundaries, mapped territories, and the habitual rhythms of our disciplines. Here, the environment is more than a background; it is a dynamic and cultural project — one that demands imagination, urgency, and new modes of engagement.   

Throughout the year, the series convened distinguished speakers whose work interrogates planetary conditions through diverse modes of design and knowledge inquiry, representation, practice and theorization.  

In Fall 2025, public lectures included Toshiki Hirano of Theoretical Hole Design (THD) and the University of Tokyo; Anthony Acciavatti of Somatic Collaborative and Yale University; Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi of Weiss/Manfredi; Bryan C. Lee of Colloqate Design; Rob Holmes of Auburn University; Nader Tehrani of NADAAA and the Cooper Union; a conversation between Eve Blau of Harvard University Graduate School of Design and Eric Mumford of Washington University in St. Louis; and Faranak Miraftab of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.   

In Spring 2026, we welcomed photographer Iwan Baan; Erik L’Heureux of Monash University and Equator Works; Carla Chávez, Carolina Rodas, and Felipe Donoso of RAMA Estudio; Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby of Dunne & Raby; a conversation between Sue Ann Kahn, daughter of Louis I. Kahn, and Kevin Alter of UT Austin; Paola Viganò of The École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and Studio Paola Viganò; Virginia San Fratello of San Jose State University and Rael San Fratello; Luis E. Carranza of Roger Williams University and Columbia University; and Emiliano López Matas of Emiliano López Mónica Rivera Arquitectos. 

Interior Provocations: WEATHER Symposium
November 7, 2025 

The symposium Interior Provocations: WEATHER invited design practitioners, historians, educators and theorists to challenge traditional definitions of atmosphere within interiors. Hosted by the Interior Design Program in collaboration with Pratt Institute — where the annual symposium was founded to advance scholarship in interior design practice, history and theory — the 2025 edition embraced weather as its prompt. The symposium aimed to reflect upon the interconnected nature of atmosphere as both a social and environmental condition, exploring the potential of interiors as spaces of design speculation and experimentation in the age of planetary change. 

Weather is a situated state of atmosphere: an event marked by place and time. As a term, atmosphere refers not only to the gaseous layers that envelop astronomical objects, but also to mood, affect, and other spatial and social phenomena. Following this expanded definition, the symposium considered how weather might similarly stretch beyond meteorology to permeate other facets of living environments, past, present and future. What roles and responsibilities do fields engaged in shaping the atmosphere of interiors assume in the age of extreme weather events? How do shifting patterns signal the urgent need for rethinking interiors and interiority as a composite space that engages multiple forms of life, mixed realities, evolving urbanisms, and emerging material conditions with profound social and environmental consequences? How do we, in other words, forecast changes in the field’s atmosphere? 

The symposium keynote speaker was Paris-based architect Philippe Rahm, known globally for his multi-scalar explorations of the built environment in the age of climate change.   

EXHIBITIONS

Anomalies & Order: Grammars of Anonymous Architectures
Curated by Patrick Danahy
September 5—October 10, 2025 
Tracing the tension between irregularity and regulation, the exhibition framed anonymous architecture not as the absence of authorship but as the presence of collective, iterative, and often accidental design. Objects materialized the latent predictions of AI, transforming neural inferences into physical structures and imagining what architecture might look like when shaped by computational intuition.  

From Las Vegas to Rome
by Iwan Baan 
January 23—February 23, 2026 
Iwan Baan explored dialogue between the cities of Las Vegas and Rome through architectural photography, observing the spectacle of improbable buildings and infrastructure with a nod to Denise Scott Brown and Robert Venturi’s 1972 text “Learning from Las Vegas.”   

Simulating Democracy: Housing and Computation in Modern Latin America  
Curated by Michael Moynihan 
February 23—March 13, 2026 
Presenting media produced by government agencies in Mexico and Argentina to promote two state-funded development programs during the 1970s, this exhibition demonstrated how early computerized systems models translated military computation into tools for global development discourse. 

Bundle Up!  
Curated by Andy Bako
April 3—May 7, 2026 
Collectively produced by Andy Bako's Spring 2026 Advanced Design-Build Studio, "Wastecoats for the Bodies We Wear," this exhibition framed architecture as a wearable, mutable ecology, rethinking the building envelope as a thickened, layered interface that mediates between bodies and their environments. 

INDEX. 
Designed by Jeremy Atticus Smith (M.Arch ’26) and Evan Altenburg (M.Arch ’26) 
May 7—July 31, 2026 

After a year of creating images and abstractions, this end-of-year show grounded student work in a space of reflection and contemplation. The smell of wood, a glow of warm light, and the uninterrupted volume of open space transformed Mebane into a place for students to become embodied again; to emerge from final reviews and remember that the world is real.