We support students to become discipline-defining designers and thinkers in global contexts.
Carnegie Mellon Architecture educates students in the discipline of architecture, emphasizing the role of creativity in architectural design; understanding architecture’s historical, social, and environmental contexts; critically engaging technology in architectural innovation; and working ethically to achieve social progress and justice in the built environment. We aim to produce discipline-defin
02/23/2026
Join us for our final film screening for the year! małni – towards the ocean, towards the shore (2020) by Sky Hopinka introduces us to indigenous cosmologies and temporalities that refuse linearity, pointing toward relational, pluriversal futures.
Venue: Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry
Time: 5:30-8:15pm
02/17/2026
This Thursday, February 19th, from 6 to 7 PM, .nomas will have their Women of Color Panel. Amazing professionals will join us to discuss their experiences navigating architectural practices as women of color in the profession.
02/17/2026
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s Theory of Water (2025) is a genre-melding exploration of water - ice, snow, rain, breath - as both guiding metaphor and political force. Rooted in Nishnaabeg origin stories and personal memories, Simpson asks: what does it mean to truly listen to water? She invites us into water’s temporal and relational scales, revealing how this “lifeblood of the earth” moves across intimate and global spheres. By weaving together Indigenous storytelling, art, and ecological reflection, she crafts a radical “Theory of Water;” a vision for transformative coexistence, healing, and Indigenous internationalism that re‐imagines collective futures.
When: Wednesday, February 19, 11:30am-1pm.
Where: MM307, Margaret Morrison Carnegie Hall
In a wonderful and sharp conversation, Gloria, Lucas, and Leslie guided the audience through ideas surrounding the art of appearance vs. disappearance, the tyranny of speed, power to control vs. power to grab, the politics of firsts, and AI. Thanks to them and to the audience for the breath of ideas that were so richly covered!
02/03/2026
In ‘Politics of the Very Worst: An Interview with Philippe Petit’ (1999), Paul Virilio investigates how speed, technology, and real-time communication reshape politics and perception. He argues that globalization collapses distance and time, producing a constant “now” that erodes the temporal space needed for democratic decision-making. Events can no longer remain localized; accidents become instantaneous and global. Virilio introduces “gray ecology,” a pollution of information and perception that confines societies within virtual immediacy rather than expanding their horizons. These chapters frame his warning that the acceleration promised as progress may instead generate paralysis, disorientation, and a profound loss of historical continuity.
Speakers: Neal Lucas Hitch, Gloria Chang, and Leslie Liu
Time: 11:30am-1pm.
Where: MM103, Margaret Morrison Carnegie Hall
02/03/2026
On Tender Radicalism - To Hope, My Students, and Found Kin in Architecture
The Wednesday, Tommy Yang will have a conversation with students Ryan Shen, Morris Mingqian Zhang, and Allen Chen, around his selected readings that he’s curated around the theme of Tender Radicalism, following stories that consider how practices of care, repair, and attention to the everyday can transform how we read, write, and build as people(s). The readings span architectural manuals, Indigenous philosophies, abolitionist frameworks, and poetry. While at a glance, they do not sit neatly within “architecture”, they propose tools and practices of world-making where our bodies, materials, and relationships are inseparable.
Conversants: Tommy Yang, with Ryan Shen, Morris Mingqian Zhang, and Allen Chen
Time: 12-1pm.
Where: CFA200 South Foyer, College of Fine Arts Building
Reading List:
- Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019)
- Ocean Vuong’s The Emperor of Gladness (2025)
- Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass (2013)
- Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s As We Have Always Done (2017)
- Mariame Kaba’s We Do This Till We Free Us (2021)
- Mariame Kaba’s Hope is a Discipline (2018)
- bell hooks’s All About Love (2000)
- Momoyo Kaijima and Yoshiharu Tsukamoto’s Made in Tokyo (2001)
- Yoshiharu Tsukamoto et al.’s How Is Life? (2021)
- John Lin and Sony Devabhaktuni’s As Found Houses: Experiments from Self-Builders in Rural China (2021)
- Fuminori Nousaku’s Urban Wild Ecology (2023)
- Christina Soontornvat’s A Wish in the Dark (2020)
- Diane Taylor’s ¡Presente!: The Politics of Presence (2020)
New York Turkish-American architect Koray Duman (), in his talk ‘Spaces of Generosity: Practicing Architecture in a Fragmented World,’ showed us a breadth of work that seeks social dynamism and interconnectedness in how it is engaged with and experienced. Across scales, mediums, histories, methods, and vehicles, the work demonstrate communal strategies that insist on robust ideas of publicness that can hold a range of conflicting ideas, people, beliefs, and practices together.
Koray will return to Pittsburgh in a few short months to finalize his contributions to the 59th Carnegie International that will be hosted by our neighbor and collaborator institution, the Carnegie Museum of Art ().
01/26/2026
Join us for the lecture by Koray Duman titled Spaces of Generosity: Practicing Architecture in a Fragmented World, where he’ll show us how to identity and recognize design principles that promote social exchange and belonging, demonstrate how social issues can be addressed in various scale architectural projects from small scale interventions to large scale institutional projects, demonstrate community engagement strategies and it’s impact on design development and space use, and identity design strategies that activate public spaces for diverse cultures, classes and social backgrounds.
When: Wednesday, January 28, 2026
Time: 5:30-7pm
Venue: Kresge Theater
In Kabage Karanja’s drawing workshop, straddled between joy and disturbance, and when shifting our drawing medium to a natural entity, a rock, it shifted the sense of gravity to our mark-making as a profession whose primary role is to inscribe.
Through the process, drawing is realised as an interdependent, socializing, and geological act: a negotiation between living bodies. We were left asking how much we take, how much we leave, and when our mark-making becomes a warning, a conversation, evidence, memory, instruction, or a tool.
Kabage Karanja of Cave Bureau’s public lecture traced a horizon beyond Eurocentric universals toward what Souleyman Bachir names a horizontal or geo-versal thinking—where architecture, geology, cosmology, and ancestral science are inseparable.
From caves to stars, basalt pillars to the British Pavilion, his work insists that architecture is never neutral: it is an earth practice, a site of resistance, and a poetic laboratory where repair, refusal, and planetary memory converge.