School News

Welcome back for another academic year! In this newsletter, we welcome back our students, faculty and staff and introduce our new focus for the year: the CM—A student experience. We talk to Jeremy Ficca, Associate Head for Design Fundamentals, about our newly refreshed undergraduate studio curriculum. We also hear from the student recipients of last year's travel awards who have shared images from their trips. Finally, don't miss some updates and save the dates for upcoming events with the school.

Carnegie Mellon Architecture's annual awards program supports summer travel for our students. Winners of the fall 2025 Gindroz Prize, Luther S. Lashmit Traveling Scholarship and Louis F. Valentour Traveling Scholarship share images and reflections from their travels.

Carnegie Mellon Architecture (CM—A) is proud to announce the launch of the 2026 edition of "x-change," our annual publication showcasing work from first-year students to Ph.D. candidates. Inaugurated in 2017 as "EX-CHANGE," the publication has since evolved into "x-change" to more pointedly reflect its role as a platform for critical discourse and reflection. The "x-change" book launch is on October 30, 2026.

Carnegie Mellon Architecture (CM—A) announces the Fall 2026 Public Programs series, architectures After. Through 10 interrelated and entangled sub-themes, this year's events series is attempting to identify critical architectures that are already rehearsing alternative futures toward justice, repair, and liberatory futures, in efforts to make tangible expansive spatial futures beyond the collapsing assumptions that have long governed the discipline.

Carnegie Mellon Architecture is accepting applications for the Fall 2026 Awards. Applications are due on Saturday, October 31, 2026, at 11:59pm ET. Up to more than $93,000 in funding is available to support projects, internships, research and travel for undergraduate, master's and Ph.D. students, and faculty.

Carnegie Mellon Architecture announces faculty appointments and promotions and welcomes our 2026-28 Joseph F. Thomas Visiting Professor.

In this edition of the newsletter, we congratulate and bid farewell to our 2026 CM—A undergraduate, master's and Ph.D. graduates. We interview our 2026 Architecture Diploma Ceremonies alumni speaker Rachel Zsembery (B.Arch '00) and share memories from the diploma ceremony celebrations. We also share a video of this year's final reviews and thesis show.

Carnegie Mellon Architecture is proud to announce the recipients of our 2026 Carnegie Mellon Architecture Graduation Awards, which were announced during the 2026 Diploma Ceremonies on Friday, May 8, 2026. These annual awards recognize the outstanding achievements of our graduating bachelor’s, master’s and Ph.D. students.

The College of Fine Arts at Carnegie Mellon University on April 24 received a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Research Lab Grant, which is a highly visible national recognition of institutional leadership in arts research.

Each year, Carnegie Mellon Architecture’s graduating students elect a member of both the undergraduate and graduate graduating classes to speak during the diploma ceremony. We’re proud to announce this year’s undergraduate and graduate student speakers: Aayush Saxena, B.Arch ’26 and Suzy (Zekun) Li, PhD-BPD ’25.