Public Programs: Fall 2026

Fall 2026 Public Programs: architectures After

The almost reclassification of Architecture in the U.S. as a non-professional degree, under the passing of Public Law 119–21 (i.e., the Big Beautiful Bill) has prompted, for some, anxieties about the future of the profession, and for others, an opportunity to reimagine Architecture as a more publicly engaged, socially embedded, and collaborative field of practice. But, within such questions on Architecture after de-professionalization (which is happening in other parts of the world as well, including but not limited to the U.K., France, Germany, Sweden and Australia), "otherwise architectures" persist, rehearsing alternative futures into being in attempts to redress our waning carbon, colonial, and capitalist present — systems that have long been enforced by the rigid boundaries of professionalization. Historically, the formal field has limited what architecture can become, in part, through its entanglement with extractive real estate economics, strict legal liability that disincentivizes temporality or circularity to prioritize permanence, and building codes that marginalize organic material use and de-industrial production methods.

This year, architectures After is attempting to elucidate two concepts, as demonstrated in its title. The lowercase "a" for "architectures" articulates the already-existing plural spatial practices that exceed the disciplinary boundaries of capital "A" Architecture. The capitalized "A" for "After" attempts to name the present as a condition of "Afterness," or a state of aftermath of extractive modernity that we already inhabit, that alternative/otherwise architectures — conceived as distributed practices and disparate modes of spatial production — are already coexisting in and/or with. Here, "after" is less a temporal marker of a future horizon, but an ethical or methodological orientation rooted in imaginaries beyond Architecture's inherited disciplinary norms founded on extractive infrastructures, histories, and political economies. The lineup of this year's events, therefore, isn't structured around an anticipated "after," nor planning for it. Through 10 interrelated and entangled sub-themes, it 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.

The sub-themes include:

1. After Carbon / After Comfort: In the face of accelerating climate change, terms such as decarbonization, carbon neutrality, embodied carbon, and carbon capture have become central to architectural discourse. Yet the thermal and climatic norms of Architecture, from mechanical conditioning and hermetic enclosures to contemporary green buildings and eco-enclaves, continue to naturalize comfort as a universal good while leaving intact the political economy of fossil capital. If bodily and collective comfort, like buildings, is a construct, what architectures become possible when comfort itself is reimagined?
2. After Erasure / After Demolition: If a critical part of Architecture's history is one of spolia, repair and reuse, the past century of routine demolition may have been the anomaly rather than the norm. To demolish is, in Anne Lacaton's words, an "act of violence," erasing material, memory, and the social lives embedded in buildings. Rather than just moving between the poles of preservation or destruction, this theme explores what an ethics of intervention looks like when demolition is not assumed as Architecture's default response to a necessity for change.
3. After Borders / After Territories: Architectural sites are conventionally defined through measurable conditions such as property boundaries, topography, climate, zoning, and adjacent buildings, reducing "place" to a stable context for design. This theme asks what happens when sites are understood as contested geographies produced through colonial cartographies, territoriality, property lines, migration, governance, logistics, ecology, memory and indigeneity, opening architectural practice to fundamentally different ways of constructing and imagining conditions of "place."
4. After Ownership / After Property: Private property has been one of Architecture's foundational assumptions, shaping not only how land is divided but also who has the authority to build, inhabit, and determine its futures. Yet Indigenous custodianship, commons-based governance, cooperative ownership, and other relational practices remind us that ownership is but only one way of organizing space. What architectures emerge when stewardship, reciprocity, and collective responsibility displace possession as our primary or exclusive relationship to land?
5. Afterlives: The abolition of slavery, the end of formal colonial rule, and the closure of prisons did not bring their resulting spatial logics to an end. Rather, the infrastructures of racial and gendered capitalism, dispossession, incarceration, and environmental injustice continue to organize present spatial frameworks and knowledges. This theme considers Architecture not only as a medium through which these afterlives persist, but also as a practice capable of repair and reconstruction.
6. After Authorship: If the decades surrounding the turn of the millennium were defined by the figure of the starchitect, the profession today is increasingly challenging both its spectacular forms and its market allegiances. Cooperatives, unions, worker-owned offices, and collective models of practice are redefining not only how Architecture is produced but also who it serves. What forms of architectural agency become possible when authorship is understood as collective, and not exclusively individual?
7. After the Anthropocene: For centuries, Architecture has been organized around the assumption that the built environment exists primarily to serve human needs, while nature appears as either a resource, a backdrop, or a constraint. As ecological collapse increasingly exposes the limits of this worldview, architects, landscape practitioners, and environmental thinkers are reimagining buildings and cities as participants within broader multispecies worlds. What forms of practice emerge when humans are understood as only one actor within a larger web of living things?
8. After Digitalism: The digital revolution transformed Architecture's methods of drawing, modeling, fabrication and representation, and today, a new condition marks an increasingly accelerated threshold: "hyperdigitality." This is how computation appears as a seemingly inevitable condition of practice, while AI-generated images, algorithmic decision-making, and automated workflows conceal the vast infrastructures, extractive economies, invisible labor, and systems of surveillance that sustain them. This theme asks what forms of architectural practice become possible once the digital is understood as political, material, and environmental conditions that are not neutral.
9. After Bigness: The collapse of NEOM's The Line, perhaps the most literal expression of Rem Koolhaas' "Bigness," may signal the limits of the belief that limitless capital can manufacture urbanity from nothing. In its place, Robin Evans and Michael Meredith argue for a Smaller Architecture: one that is more local, radically inclusive, anarchist, concentrated, attentive and deliberate. Yet the infrastructures of artificial intelligence, from data centers to power grids, reveal a new form of bigness that remains almost entirely invisible to its users. How do we develop a critical language capable of understanding both conditions at once?
10. After Speed / After Time: Modern Architecture has long been governed by the temporal logics of industrialization, development, and economic growth, where faster construction, greater efficiency, and constant productivity have become measures of progress. Yet movements centered on craft, maintenance, repair, care, Indigenous temporalities, and ecological cycles suggest other ways of inhabiting time and envisioning futures. What architectures emerge when speed (and its resulting associations) is not treated as the profession's foundational, unquestioned and inevitable value, and when a myriad of temporalities form the basis of practice?

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: Sarosh Anklesaria, Gerard Damiani, Christi Danner, Jeremy Ficca and Nida Rehman.

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.

Public Programs Archive

• Spring 2026 Public Programs: HyperNormalisation and portals to normals otherwise
• Fall 2025 Public Programs: HyperNormalisation and portals to normals otherwise
• Spring 2025 Public Programs: Artificial (and Othered) Intelligences
• Fall 2024 Public Programs: Artificial (and Othered) Intelligences
• Spring 2024 Public Programs: Resolutions