PJ Dick Innovation Fund Teaching Grant: Intermundium: Labyrinth of Invisible Narratives
Image credit: Niloufar Alenjery.
Intermundium: Labyrinth of Invisible Narratives
Instructor: Niloufar Alenjery, Special Faculty, Carnegie Mellon Architecture
This advanced elective repositions architectural representation as a critical cultural practice at a moment when the field is being reshaped by climate instability, social fragmentation, and the accelerating influence of artificial intelligence. Rather than treating representation as visualization or stylistic output, the course enables students to use drawing, speculative world-building, artefact construction, and counterfactual narrative as methods for thinking, questioning, and imagining otherwise. Through these approaches, students develop representational agency and conceptual clarity while cultivating the ability to articulate architectural ideas grounded in memory, identity, and cultural meaning.
This funding request supports the continued development of the course through three targeted enhancements that directly serve the school’s pedagogical challenges:
- Climate Change: addressed through student-selected themes and speculative design prompts responding to planetary rupture, ecological loss, displacement, extinction, and environmental memory.
- Social Justice: centered through counternarratives, belonging, erased communities, and cultural memory, enabling students to articulate spatial agency beyond dominant frameworks.
- Artificial Intelligence: positioned as a critical apparatus of memory, distortion, and imagination, prompting students to question authorship, representation, and technological power.
Image credit: Niloufar Alenjery.
About the Project Lead
Assistant Teaching Professor
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Established in 2023 by PJ Dick Trumbull Lindy Group, the Faculty Grants Program will award a total of $400,000 over four years beginning in 2024. The program supports faculty research and teaching innovations that address the School’s three pedagogical challenges of climate change, social justice and artificial intelligence. The proposals were assessed on their impact in furthering a faculty member’s research and teaching, their contribution to interrogating the School’s challenges, and their viability to garner further research support, make an impact on the discipline and expand the pedagogy of the School.