This workshop is an extension of my research on race gender and the dynamics of power in the built environment in the Black city Editions. Shifting the focus from mapping the past to projecting alternative futures, the workshop will be followed by a Fall 2027 studio to further explore and test findings. The workshop brings together key insights from Black feminist and spatial feminist thought to explore design solutions to femicide, sexual and reproductive violence and housing insecurity. Through readings and design exercises on post-human socio-spatial alternatives that revisit the dominant hierarchies of dominance, extractive and corporate values and methods we will explore the question “What might a Black Feminist City look like?”

Inspired by the work of Professor Shatema Threadcraft on Black femicide in The Labors of Resurrection: Black Women, Necromancy and the author, Toni Morrison’s account of home as the site of justice, the workshop brings community focused activism for birth justice, anti-violence and the right to housing into the design of housing and cities.

The course is structured in three sections, the first outlines and encourages debate about the most pressing issues to be addressed in a city attuned to race, class and gender through the lens of Black community projected by Black feminist authors and through contemporary Black feminist activism around femicide and the rise of the Black maternalist housing justice movement.

The second section couples the investigation of feminist and womanist authors on home, and community with an exploration of contemporary feminist housing and urban planning designs within the context of communitarian housing and city designs. Models range from Dolores Hayden’s “non-sexist city,” to the Vienna based urban planner, Eva Kail’s work in the Frauenbüro (Women’s office) in which neighborhood design centers caretakers to accommodate the “mobility of care” to Mayor Claudia López’s “Manzanas del Cuidado” (care-blocks) in Bogotá and their adaptation in the informal settlement Susan's Bay in Freetown, Sierra Leone led by Mayor Yvonne Aki-Sawyerr.

The third section examine home in relation to alternatives for property and land ownership. We will review home and land ownership alternatives such as the urban law and policy professor, Sheila Foster’s “Co- Cities” model of community stewardship. To explore answers to the question “What might a Black Feminist City look like?” we will use the ideas discovered in each section to project additional alternative models for housing and communities attuned to race, class and gender.

By the end of the course students will have an awareness of contemporary activist and municipal responses to the disproportionate care and burdens related to access and safety that (Black) women face. They will also understand the debates within the housing justice and spatial feminist movement, and of social and spatial alternatives for the design of housing, and cities.

Each of the three sections will feature thematic presentation and invited speakers or recordings. Required readings will be assigned for each class, and questions from the readings will be posted in Canvas the Monday before class. Each section ends in student presentations that encapsulate an analysis of the theme and key ideas.

This course is conceived in conjunction with a course taught by Professor Threadcraft, Associate Professor of Gender and Sexuality Studies, Philosophy, and Political Science at Vanderbilt University in Nashville Tennessee. Enrolled students will have opportunities to speak and collaborate with fellow students and invited guests as they analyze and explore social and spatial values and practices.

This course is open to students in the following programs: MArch, BSA/BSAD, SMArchs, DUSP, African & African Diaspora Studies, and Women's and Gender Studies.

GEO—DESIGN asks how design might learn to think with the Earth rather than seek to neutralize it or contain its forces. Against a narrow lineage of geodesign as quantitative optimization — the computation-engineering-planning stack associated with GIS and scenario modeling — the seminar reclaims the term for a wider field of practice: one that returns design to the deep temporalities, elemental forcefulness, and dynamic stratification of the Earth. In place of the view from nowhere, we search for representational modes through which air, water, rock, soil, ice, and life become available to design thought — a planetary literacy grounded in trans-scalar material encounters.

The seminar situates earth practices within geophilosophy, environmental humanities, and feminist situated knowledges as a transdisciplinary mode of planetary design. Five units — atmosphere, lithosphere, hydrosphere, cryosphere, biosphere — pair readings with talks by guests from Earth and Planetary Sciences, anthropology, and STS. Each student adopts one Earth force — lightning, ocean currents, monsoon winds, volcanic eruption, sediment transport, permafrost thaw, fire weather, among others — and develops a three-part dossier: the process and how climate change is altering it; the apparatus through which it was made knowable; and the design practices that engage it otherwise. Student projects are assembled into a single collective artifact — a chronogram of the Earth that holds multiple temporalities, scales, and geographies within one drawing.

Undergraduates welcome.

How can a drawing capture architecture’s movement, and how have movements in architectural thought transformed the ways architects draw? Since the 1960s, architects have experimented with representational techniques that challenge the image of architecture as a fixed and finished object. From the social and technological imaginaries of radical architecture to the spatial dynamism of avant-garde painting, the sequential narratives of comics, and the hybrid images of the post-digital, architectural drawings have proposed different ways of understanding buildings, bodies, materials, and societies in motion.

Drawing Movements surveys the movements, media, and cultural conditions that have shaped architectural representation over the past six decades. Through lectures, readings, and discussions, the course examines how architectural images have both reflected and contributed to the aesthetic, social, and political ambitions of their time. We will consider how drawing conventions have been challenged and reinvented through encounters with popular culture, cinema, computation, and contemporary image culture, and how these experiments have expanded what architecture can imagine and communicate.

Alongside the survey, students will develop critical and technical representational skills through a series of cumulative drawing exercises. Working with a building, building fragment, event, or spatial arrangement, students will experiment with ways of representing movement, change, and relationships across different scales and durations. Through exercises in observation, projection, collage, notation, sequence, and graphic composition, they will investigate how different drawing techniques construct different understandings of the same subject. Students will consider what their images make visible, but also what they omit, whom they address, and how their representational choices construct future projections of the world.

Undergraduates welcome.

Research and project activities, which cover the range represented by the various research interests and projects in the department. Students who wish a letter grade option for their work must register for 4.URG.

Research and project activities, which cover the range represented by the various research interests and projects in the Department.

Practical experience through summer and January IAP internships secured by the student in the field of architecture, urbanism, digital design, art, or building technology. Before registering for this subject, students must have an offer from the organization and complete the Department of Architecture application with their advisor's signature. Upon completion of the internship, students must submit an evaluation form available from the departmental academic office. Students are limited to a total of three approved experiences.

Practical experience through summer and January IAP internships secured by the student in the field of architecture, urbanism, digital design, art, or building technology. Before registering for this subject, students must have an offer from a company or organization and complete the Department of Architecture application signed by the advisor. Upon completion of the internship, students must submit an evaluation form available from the departmental academic office. Students are limited to a total of three approved experiences. 

Note: More detailed description will be posted here closer to the start of the Spring 2027 term.

Offers a broad range of advanced-level investigations in architectural design in various contexts, including international sites. Integrates theoretical and technological discourses into specific topics. Studio problems may include urbanism and city scale strategies, habitation and urban housing systems, architecture in landscapes, material investigations and new production technologies, programmatic and spatial complex building typologies, and research centered studies. Mandatory lottery process.

Note: More detailed description will be posted here closer to the start of the Spring 2027 term.

Offers a broad range of advanced-level investigations in architectural design in various contexts, including international sites. Integrates theoretical and technological discourses into specific topics. Studio problems may include urbanism and city scale strategies, habitation and urban housing systems, architecture in landscapes, material investigations and new production technologies, programmatic and spatial complex building typologies, and research centered studies. Mandatory lottery process.

Note: More detailed description will be posted here closer to the start of the Spring 2027 term.

Offers a broad range of advanced-level investigations in architectural design in various contexts, including international sites. Integrates theoretical and technological discourses into specific topics. Studio problems may include urbanism and city scale strategies, habitation and urban housing systems, architecture in landscapes, material investigations and new production technologies, programmatic and spatial complex building typologies, and research centered studies. Mandatory lottery process.