"x-change" Exhibition: What’s for Lunch? discursive dining around three grand challenges

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Carnegie Mellon Architecture invites you to the exhibition "What’s for Lunch? discursive dining around three grand challenges," on view in the College of Fine Arts Great Hall from Monday, August 24 through Friday, September 4, 2026.

Exhibition Team

Director & Coordinator: Tuliza Sindi
Exhibition Design: Jessica Adenuga, Sanjana Bandaru, Abby Feldmann, Gabby Ferrari, Ana Oliveira Furtado, Mikayla Gee, Boone Lewis, Sydney Mansavage, Sarah Molina, Ashanti Ramirez, Julia Twardzisz, Shirley Xie, Tuliza Sindi
Graphic Design & Visual Identity: Lisa Maione, Asad Pervaiz
Installation: Natalie Brown, Kate Pirilla
Student Installation Team: Jessica Adenuga, Boone Lewis, Ashanti Ramirez, Julia Twardzisz, Shirley Xie
We are grateful for all consultants, service providers, and faculty, staff, and students whose insights and labor made this exhibition possible.

Curatorial Statement

This year's "x-change" exhibition rejects the standard chronological survey. While the accompanying publication acts as a formal record offering a year-by-year retrospective, this physical display of the 2025-26 academic year's curricular outputs serves a different purpose: it is a forum where pedagogical shifts meet broader architectural discourse.

The curation intentionally breaks down the traditional formality expected of architectural exhibitions, using "What’s for Lunch?" as a playful foundation to encourage communal gathering around student work and questions, both in the context of the exhibition, as well as daily student life. The work is delineated into five themes that act as conceptual lenses and codified to correspond to the Pedagogies 2020 three grand challenges (artificial intelligence, climate change, and social justice) that the courses are directly or indirectly addressing through the work. Core questions being examined by each course are highlighted through the exhibition's layout and organization, to offer a dynamic and participatory framework for the exhibition as it houses the everyday lunch furniture used by students, faculty and visitors of the CFA Great Hall. The frequent use of this space as a lunch area is the inspiration for this year's "What’s for Lunch?" theme, which aims to foster low-stakes, collegial discourse about the pedagogical ambitions of the school's many offerings, its three grand challenges, and the culture of discourse itself.

Prioritizing the banquet of research questions offered by faculty and students from each course transforms the exhibition into both a laboratory and cocktail that allows students, faculty, and the public to observe shared methodologies, and, perhaps more importantly, identify where research concentrations are heavy or where gaps in the curriculum exist. Ultimately, the exhibition attempts to move beyond the mere "display of work," toward an active and robust co-production of thought and knowledge. For that purpose, and grounded in the theme's intent of breaking bread, the grand challenge themes are reframed as the following questions:

Climate Change: What remains after the table gets cleared? (addressing shifting ecologies and the reality of resource scarcity)
Social Justice: Who gets a seat at the table? (examining how the intersections between politics, culture, and the built environment might dismantle systemic inequity)
Artificial Intelligence: Who gets to derive order and who gets dictated order? (which investigates the impact of machine intelligence on authorship and the boundaries of form)

Menu

The thematic menu for the exhibition was inspired by the questions gathered from both faculty and students regarding what their courses are attempting to address at their core. These themes operate as five conceptual lenses through which to read the breadth of work produced across the department. Rather than categorizing the courses into five discrete areas of architectural inquiry, they identify recurring ways of thinking, questioning, and making that emerge across otherwise distinct projects and pedagogies. Taken together, they suggest an architecture that is produced through different modes of relating, connecting, translating, seeing/situating, and making: relating to people and communities; connecting buildings to larger social, ecological, technological, and cultural systems; translating peripheral forms of knowledge and data; seeing through situated, embodied, and lived experience; and making through materials, tools, and techniques that themselves become instruments of discovery. The themes therefore do not describe five kinds of architectures, but five ways through which the work asks what architecture can know, do, and become. 

1. RELATING (Empathy / Community)
   This theme gathers work that asks architecture to understand its responsibilities to people, communities, and the social worlds in which buildings operate. Rather than treating occupants or communities as recipients of architectural decisions, these courses consider them as active participants in the production of space. Questions of care, empathy, social mobility, shared resources, creativity, and collective life become architectural questions, asking what it might mean for buildings and environments to support forms of belonging, agency, and mutuality. Here, architecture is understood not simply as something we make for others, but as something that can be shaped with others.
2. CONNECTING (Interconnectedness / Systemic Thinking / Intersectionality / Integration)
   These courses challenge the idea of architecture as an isolated object by examining the relationships between buildings, people, ecologies, infrastructures, technologies, cultures, and natural systems. They ask what becomes possible when architecture is understood as part of larger and interdependent systems, where environmental, social, technological, and political conditions continually act upon one another. From climate and geological processes to urban resources and ecological repair, this work shifts attention from individual buildings toward the networks, exchanges, and consequences through which architecture participates in the world.
3. TRANSLATING (Knowledge, Data & Translation)
   This theme considers the many ways architectural knowledge is created, sourced, collected, interpreted, transformed, and made spatial. Data may take the form of environmental measurements, maps, histories, drawings, material properties, cultural traditions, technological information, or speculative narratives. Across these courses, sourcing knowledge is inseparable from the question of how that knowledge is translated: into drawings, buildings, systems, images, technologies, or new forms of architectural imagination. The work therefore treats representation not simply as a means of communicating architectural ideas, but as an active process through which information is interpreted, transformed, and made consequential.
4. SEEING / SITUATING (Ways of Seeing / Lived Experiences)
   These courses begin from the premise that architecture is never encountered from a singular or neutral perspective. They explore how individual and collective perception, memory, culture, embodiment, ritual, history, ideas of time, cosmologies and worldviews, relational beliefs, and lived experience shape how architecture can be understood and what it can be. Drawing, observation, storytelling, revisiting histories, archival work and personal experience become ways of discovering and legitimizing, on top of ways of recording. Together, these inquiries ask what architectures emerge from situated ways of seeing and knowing, and how spatial practices can reveal experiences and perspectives that conventional architectural practices are not always equipped to recognize.
5. MAKING (Materiality & Tool-Making)
   This theme explores architecture through the materials, technologies, techniques, and instruments through which ideas become spatial realities. Here, materials are not passive substances waiting to be shaped, but active agents with histories, properties, environmental consequences, and possibilities of their own. Likewise, tools, from freehand drawing to computational technologies and environmental systems, are understood as capable of generating architectural knowledge rather than simply executing predetermined ideas. Across these courses, making becomes a form of inquiry: a way to test, discover, transform, and imagine new relationships between matter, technology, environment, and architectural form.