Public Programs: Spring 2026
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All events are free and open to the public.
World Map Extract: Cave Bureau’s Counter Imperial Federation Map of the World. Image credit: Cave Bureau.
Spring 206 Public Programs: HyperNormalisation and portals to normals otherwise
Last semester, we explored the phenomenon called HyperNormalisation – a condition when the sociopolitical complexities of a society grow so sprawling, contradictory, and totalizing that its population stops trying to make sense of them, and adapts to them until they become norms. HyperNormalisation today describes the everydayness of crisis, many of which are facilitated by architecture and spatial design, as it ritualizes us into into accepting environmental devastation as a part of our food or building production processes, carceral expansion for profit-making, or privatized breath as ordinary facts of life. We are numbed to disaster, and are lulled into perceiving injustice as both natural and inevitable, or at times, an intellectual debate or inquiry.
This semester, we delve into spatial practices otherwise, or at least, how to create avenues/portals to get there. Practices “otherwise” comes from a rich sociological intellectual history, and describes practices that fall outside dominant Western definitions. Rolando Vázquez’s work on "epistemic disobedience" and decolonial aesthetics provides great foundations for thinking “otherwise” as a refusal of Western hegemonies. Such spatial thinking is also introduced in the works of Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, and José Esteban Muñoz, who continue to influence how architects and spatial thinkers articulate non-normative, fugitive, or care-based practices.
With these frameworks, we ask:
What do/could the next worlds look like; the ones that can lead us out of the trap of HyperNormals? What are the portals to next worlds? And how do we make them?
Let’s time travel.
Let’s swim in dreams.
Lectures & Workshops
Symposia & Public Conversations
CM-A Thinks Allowed
CM-A Thinks Allowed is a discursive series that brings faculty and students together to explore a single shared text. Each participant offers their interpretation through the lens of their own practice, research and worldview, before opening to a moderated dialogue. The series invites the CM-A community to witness how one text can refract into many, revealing points of connection, contrast, and curiosity, with the aim to cultivate a culture of exchange where ideas get sharpened and challenged collectively.
Normals Otherwise: Reworldings
CM-A Bookshelf
CM-A Bookshelf is a new event series inviting Carnegie Mellon Architecture faculty to share the readings that shape their worlds. Each session offers a glimpse into their relationship with reading; understood broadly, from books and essays to folklore, films, songs or family archives. In conversation with a guest of their choice, they reflect on the texts that linger, unravel their imagination, anchor their sense of belonging, or spark their practice. From nursery rhymes to government documents, philosophy to fantasy, each Bookshelf becomes a portrait of reading as a living, evolving practice.
Book Launches
PLOTLINE
PLOTLINE is Carnegie Mellon Architecture’s film series, curated to run in parallel with our public programs. Each season of PLOTLINE extends the themes explored in our lectures and exhibitions into a cinematic register — using film as another mode of critical inquiry, reflection and conversation.
Computational Design Event Series: Zones Unseen
The Spring 2026 CM-A Computational Design Event Series Zones Unseen brings researchers and practitioners across architecture, data visualization, robotics, visual studies, and cybernetics to illuminate contemporary blind spots in design practice and culture. From interrogating the socio-technics of AI in architecture and time-based media to diffracting the nature of data and of scientific practice, the speakers will shed light on contemporary technologies’ unfolding within the social, material, and visual worlds of design.
Carnegie Mellon Architecture’s public programs are organized by Tuliza Sindi, Curator for Public Programs and Director of Publications, in consultation with a committee. The committee includes: Jared Abraham, Niloufar Alenjery, Sarosh Ankelsaria, Mary-Lou Arscott, Christi Danner, Matthew Huber, Meredith Marsh, Vernelle A.A. Noel, and Tommy CheeMou Yang.
Carnegie Mellon Architecture’s public programs series is generously sponsored by the Alan H. Rider Distinguished Visiting Lecturer in Architecture Fund, the William Finglass Practice Lecture Series Fund, the Watson Chair in Architecture Fund, and the Hans Vetter Memorial Lecture Fund.