Alumni Updates
1960s
1970s
Caples Jefferson Architects, founded by Everardo Jefferson (MArch ’73) and Sara Caples (MArch ’74), has been selected to design Bluestone Farm, the satellite campus of Copland House. The institution is a center for American music and arts based in the landmarked home of composer Aaron Copland. The new campus “will enable Copland House to substantially extend its artistic support, audience reach, public presentations, educational engagement, and programs that uniquely embrace and champion the entire creative process.”
The Class of 1974 celebrated its 50th reunion in October. Spearheaded by Bill Odell and Sara Caples, the group took a campus tour with classmate Patrick Pinnell, who wrote The Campus Guide: Yale University, an Architectural Tour (Princeton Architectural Press, 1999) and met with current students to compare experiences.
1980s
Bay Cottage, a renovation led by Jacob Albert (BA ’77, MArch ’80), a founding partner of ART Architects, was featured in New England Home Cape & Islands. The firm was named one of America’s Top 200 Residential Architects by Forbes. Its restoration of the Harvard Lampoon Castle, led by founding partner John Tittmann (BA ’81, MArch ’86), was recognized with Ludowici Project of the Year and Cambridge Historical Commission Preservation awards. Managing partner J. B. Clancy (MArch ’96) appeared on the “Building Tradition” podcast to discuss zero-energy building. The firm’s Ledgesyde Passive House has been designated a Phius ZERO Design Certified project.
Winstanley Architects and Planners, led by design director Michael Winstanley (MArch ’83) and principal Leejung Hong (MArch ’04), received a Merit Award from the Society of American Registered Architects (SARA) for its Torpedo Factory Arts Center Re-envisioning Plan. This project recasts the iconic Alexandria, Virginia, arts center as a vibrant, inclusive hub by expanding artist spaces and embracing diverse forms of artistic expression. The firm’s design for the Whitman Walker Foundation’s Max Robinson Center, a LEED Gold–certified health-care facility in the District of Columbia’s Ward 8, received a Special Recognition Award from the AIA Potomac Valley Chapter. Its renovation of the 10,000-square-foot National Ready Mixed Concrete Association (NRMCA) was honored by AIA Miami; the Sycamore and Oak has been recognized with the Wood in Architecture Award from Woodworks Design Awards; the mixeduse Retail Village at Sycamore & Oak, a project in which the firm served as architect-of-record with design architect Adjaye Associates, was recognized with the Wood in Architecture Award in the Woodworks Design Awards; and its restoration of the Campagna Center in Alexandria, originally built in 1888, has received the Historic Preservation Award of Excellence at the Best of NAIOP Awards.
Blair Kamin (MED ’84) has funded a three-year grant to support the restoration of architecture criticism at his former newspaper, the Chicago Tribune. He also served on the committee to select the design team for the planned Fallen Journalists Memorial, to be sited on the National Mall, in Washington, D.C.
Weiss/Manfredi, led by partner and cofounder Marion Weiss (MArch ’84), received a 2025 AIA New York Merit Award for its design of the University of Toronto Schwartz Reisman Innovation Campus. This new academic building is an incubator for AI and the humanities. With flexible loft-like offices, labs, classrooms, conference rooms, and event spaces, the building is “designed to increase the possibility of connections, collaboration, and interaction, as well as the flexibility of the program.”
Peter MacKeith (MArch ’85) is one of the chairs of the U.S. Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, titled PORCH: An Architecture of Generosity. The exhibition is curated by the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design at the University of Arkansas (where MacKeith is dean) in collaboration with DesignConnects and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. It presentation “explores the timeless architectural and cultural significance of the American porch, showcasing its continued relevance as a space for connection, inclusivity, and civic engagement.”
Gray Organschi Architecture, led by principals Lisa Gray (BA ’82, MArch ’87) and Alan Organschi (MArch ’88), received AIA Connecticut Excellence Awards both in Architecture: Encompassing Art and in Commercial, Institutional, Educational, or Multi-family Residential Design (Under 25,000sf) categories for the Starlight Park Facilities.
The exhibition LC150+: The RT+Q Private Collection of Le Corbusier Models, curated by Rene Tan (BA ’87) and shown at YSoA in Spring 2024, is being exhibited in Dallas at UT Arlington. Two other sets of models are touring the globe, including one that appeared at a symposium at Tongji University, in Shanghai.
Li Wen (MArch ’88) has authored several articles for Common Edge, including reviews of the Paris Olympic Games and Marseille’s Le Cours Julien.
In October, the Yale School of Architecture Class of 1989 celebrated its 35th reunion organized by Christine Wolfe Nichols and Bob Tucker. Classmates were joined by Alec Purves (BA ’58, MArch ’63) and Linda Brouard in New Haven, as well as long-distance alumni on Zoom. In addition to hosting Six on Seven for current students, the group visited their BP project in Bridgeport and commemorated the reunion with the creation of the Class of 1989 Endowed Scholarship Fund.
1990s
Yael Melamede (BA ’88, MArch ’93) has completed the documentary film Ada: My Mother the Architect, about Ada Karmi- Melamede, who taught design studios at Yale in 1985 and 1993 and curated the Fall 2017 YSoA exhibition Social Construction: Modern Architecture in British Mandate Palestine. The film is being screened widely in the United States, with dates listed online at www.adamymotherthearchitect.com.
Johannes M. P. Knoops (MArch ’95) unveiled a new plaque at the true location of the Aldine Press in Venice on June 5, 2024, following eight years of research with residencies at the Emily Harvey Foundation, the Cini Foundation, and the American Academy in Rome and a fellowship from the Bogliasco Foundation. Aldus Pius Manutius was a celebrated Renaissance humanist whose Aldine Press is credited with the invention of the Italic font, the preservation of numerous Latin and Greek classics, the first paperbacks, the codification of the semicolon, and many other achievements that remain with us to this day. The true first location of the Aldine Press in 1495 has been in contention ever since Abbot Zenier erroneously placed a plaque in 1828 in his fervor to glorify famous Venetians. Permission was granted to place a plaque at the correct location in 2020. Knoops’s design is based on the Aldine Press’s stemma and was digitally cut from marble. Damocle Edizioni issued a book on this research, In Search of Aldus Pius Manutius, in 2018.
The Humayun’s Tomb Site Museum, in New Delhi, was officially inaugurated in July after nine years of construction. Designed by Vir.Mueller Architects, cofounded by Pankaj Vir Gupta (MArch ’97), the museum was developed by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture. Built largely below grade at the entrance to the World Heritage Site, the building uses traditional marble screens and masonry construction. It houses more than 700 works from the Mogul period including astrolabes and textiles.
Melissa DelVecchio (MArch ’98), partner at Robert A.M. Stern Architects, led the design for the Schoenecker Center at the University of St. Thomas, in Saint Paul, Minnesota. Designed to foster collaboration between arts and engineering students, the 130,000-square-foot building houses spaces for innovation including a double-height choral performance venue and a high bay with a bridge crane for engineering experiments.
Edgar Papazian (MArch ’99) delivered a talk on the future of the Hamptons in June at PechaKucha Night Hamptons Vol. 40, at the Parrish Art Museum: “Many things go wrong but some solutions are possible.” It is available to view on YouTube.
2000s
Ghiora Aharoni (MArch ’01) was a 2024 Belknap Visitor in the Humanities at Princeton University, where he delivered a lecture on his work. His assemblage sculpture GER: The Stranger was installed at the university in conjunction with his visit.
Andrew Heid (BA ’02) spoke at the Yale Club of New York in November about his book Glass Houses. The publication features early Modernist houses from the 1930s, such as Philip Johnson’s Glass House and Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House, and glamorous mid-century L.A. villas like Pierre Koenig’s Case Study #22, alongside outstanding contemporary examples where new innovations have made even more daring glass structures possible.
Dana K. Gulling (MArch ’03), professor of architecture at North Carolina State University, just authored her second book, Custom Components in Architecture: Strategies for Customizing Repetitive Manufacturing, published by Routledge. It offers architects strategies in the design and manufacturing of repetitively manufactured custom building components and includes 36 case studies of CRM in architecture from around the globe. Custom Components builds upon her previous award-wining book, Manufacturing Architecture: An Architect’s Guide to Custom Processes, Materials, and Applications, featured in the Spring 2019 issue of Constructs.
Rebecca Popowsky (BA ’03) has been named the Wilks Family Director of the Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology at Weitzman School of Design. Housed within the department of landscape architecture, the center funds and broadcasts original scholarly research, convenes students, faculty, and practitioners, and awards the annual McHarg Fellowship.
Frederick Tang (BA ’99, MArch ’03), of Frederick Tang Architecture, and Alexandra Barker, of Barker Architecture Office, have collaborated on the design of Brooklyn Free Space, an early childhood education center inspired by the Reggio Emilia approach to learning, which is collaborative and student-centered.
Amber Wiley (BA ’03) has been named director of the Institute for Quality Communities, at the University of Oklahoma Christopher C. Gibbs College of Architecture. The institute leads community engagement for the College of Architecture and hosts the nationally recognized annual Placemaking Conference.
Adam Sokol Architecture Practice, founded by Adam Sokol (MArch ’04), received a 2025 AIA New York Citation for Adaptive Mixed-Use Housing for the Allen Apartments, a residential project in Buffalo, New York.
Pyramidion, a sculpture by Dream The Combine, founded by Tom Carruthers (MArch ’05) and Jennifer Newsom (BA ’01, MArch ’05), was featured in the Met exhibition Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now, November 17, 2024–February 17, 2025. The installation forms a dialogue with “Egyptian pyramids, obelisks, pylons, and other tapered, body-like forms whose directional shapes and strong metaphoric resonances mark the passage of time, commemorate life and death, and communicate power.” Pyramidion was supported by a 2024 Graham Foundation exhibition grant.
Brandon Pace (MArch ’05), founding partner of Sanders Pace Architecture, received the 2024 AIA East Tennessee Gold Medal. The firm was named Knox Heritage Preservationist of the Year and was included on the Forbes list of America’s Top 200 Residential Architects.
Christopher Beardsley (BA ’02, MArch ’06) and Russell Greenberg (BA ’02, MArch ’06) have generously hosted events for alumni and current students at Stickbulb, their sustainable lighting company in Long Island City.
Julia M. Leeming (BA ’99, YSoA ’06) recently celebrated 11 years as an independent architect in Stonington, Connecticut. She specializes in custom-built homes with simple, elegant designs that foster meaningful connections to their exterior landscapes. In late 2021 Leeming completed her most important project yet: her family’s home in Stonington. Together she and her family spent six months tending, hiking, and camping on the land while she developed the design. The result is a private yet connected family compound that sits gently on and relates deeply to its bucolic setting.
Peterson Rich Office, led by Nathan Rich (MArch ’08) and Miriam Peterson (MArch ’09), completed the Pruzan Art Center at Wesleyan University to house the university’s Davison Arts Collection as well as to form a connection between the Olin Memorial Library and the Public Affairs Center, both designed by McKim, Mead & White.
GRT Architects founders Rustam-Marc Mehta (MArch ’08) and Tal Schori (MArch ’10) were the subjects of a profile in Hospitality Design magazine’s July 2024 issue focusing on their restaurant work with Quality Branded. The firm’s mixed-use complex in Jersey City, 66 Monitor, was recently completed. The building, which includes 39 residential units, a restaurant, and a café, takes the form of four stories in white brick constructed on top of early twentieth-century warehouses. 66 Monitor received a 2024 Architect’s Newspaper Best of Design Award in the Adaptive Reuse– Residential category. GRT Architects is currently working on a new mixed-use building for the Amant Arts Campus that will include a restaurant and event space.
2010s
Chat Travieso (MArch ’10) has been appointed the new Tepper Family Endowed Chair in Visual Arts at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University.
FORMA, founded by Daniel Markiewicz (MArch ’11) and Miroslava Brooks (MArch ’12), is the recipient of a 2024 AIA Connecticut Design Merit Award for Playscapes, an early education and community center in Stamford, Connecticut, shaped around a series of interior and exterior playgrounds.
Tyler Survant (MArch ’11) has received a 2024–25 Fulbright U.S. Scholarship to conduct applied architectural research in Nepal. Rapid development in the Himalayas risks being environmentally unsustainable and culturally erosive. Survant’s research project, Conscientious Construction in Urbanizing Nepal, aims to compare the methods of the country’s contemporary construction sector with its rich architectural traditions and propose models for merging local knowledge with principles of modern building science. The research is supported by his host institution, the Pulchowk Engineering campus of Tribhuvan University, in Kathmandu, and Montana State University (MSU), where he is an assistant teaching professor in the College of Arts & Architecture. In his professional practice with Building Bureau, a nonprofit he cofounded in 2022 with Passive House consultant Anna Leshnick and structural engineer Arun Rimal, Survant has engaged local partners in Nepal to design public projects including hospitals and clinics, school dormitories, and a wildlife conservation center. His Fulbright will expand on Building Bureau’s research as 2024 Visiting Scholar at MSU’s School of Architecture into construction supply chains in Montana, from the extraction of raw materials through production to their end use in the built environment. This work was the subject of the exhibition Construction Ecologies, displayed from August to October 2024 at the Imagine Butte Resource Center in Butte, Montana.
Outpost Office, an architectural practice founded and led by Erik Herrmann (MArch ’12) and Ashley Bigham (MArch ’13), has created Color Block No. 2, a temporary installation that activates various in-between spaces both inside and outside the Wexner Center for the Arts. It consists of four large-scale modular furniture units composed of exaggerated and clunky proto-architectural elements like columns, plinths, and walls. Both incremental and mobile, this colorful installation forms an intense graphic landscape that challenges institutional boundaries conceptually and physically while offering practical space for gathering and repose.
David Tasman (MArch ’12), collaborated on the design of TELFAR’s residency in The Corner Shop at Selfridges, in London, to launch the return to in-person shopping. Part television studio and part store, the installation carves out public space for the TELFAR community in a commercial environment. A stage with a built-in photo and DJ booth allows customers to create video content that is merged at times with TELFAR TV’s media stream. The TELFAR bag is also a star, featured on podiums fitted humorously with selfie equipment that projects onto screens wrapping the space. For use as a TV set, racks are raised out of the way. A recursive approach guides the project’s display and critique of the colonialist overtones in the department store’s neoclassical architecture: facsimiles of Selfridges’ iconic columns are toppled over to become displays, podiums, and props for one of the largest Black-owned fashion brands in history.
Schiller Projects, founded by Aaron Schiller (MArch ’13), received 2024 AIA Connecticut Design Excellence Awards in the Adaptive Reuse and Residential Architecture categories for Brooklyn Mass Timber House.
The Yale School of Architecture Class of 2014 celebrated its ten-year reunion in September. More than 40 members of the class attended the festivities, traveling from as far as China. The event was organized by Sheena Zhang with help from AJ Artemel, Vivienne Jing Han, Charles Hickox, Hochung Kim, Britton Rogers, Xiaodi Sun, Ian Svilokos, and Alice Tai. Alumni shared notes on new firms and new babies while reminiscing about apartment crawls of yore at picnics and lunches, hosted by classmates who stayed local or returned to New Haven, at Farm River Farm and the Chetstone. Other activities included meeting with Dean Deborah Berke, several rounds of badminton, and a tour of the Hotel Marcel.
Jas Bhalla Works, an architecture and urban planning firm founded by Jas Bhalla (MArch ’14), was named RIBA London Practice of the Month for September 2014.
With the support of a NYSCA Individual Project Grant, critic Violette de la Selle (MArch ’14) and Wes Hiatt (MArch ’17) curated the exhibition Changing Change, which opened in January 2025 at Citygroup, in New York. The article “Patterns of Change,” by de la Selle and Hiatt and drawn from the exhibition, is published in AA Files 80.
Ian Svilokos (MArch ’14), an architect and founder of PIE, a research-based design and fabrication studio located in Venice, California, presented his research as part of the event Rooted: A Biophilic Design Forum. Svilokos recently published the article “(re)learning,” on the detrimental effects of colonization on natural resources, in The Last Straw, a magazine on natural building and alternative design.
Brittany Utting (MArch ’14) curated the exhibition The Sixth Sphere, shown at the Rice School of Architecture, in Houston, on October 28, 2024–February 14, 2025. Supported by a 2024 Graham Foundation grant, the show investigated the technosphere— the sixth sphere surrounding Earth. Coined by geologist Peter K. Haff, the sixth sphere is composed of all the human-made buildings, infrastructure, logistics networks, systems of political relations, and cities. The other five spheres are the atmosphere, biosphere, cryosphere, hydrosphere, and lithosphere. The exhibition gathers projects from 18 practices around the world to explore how design can participate in systems of planetary interdependence and reciprocity.
Michael Robinson Cohen (MArch ’15) contributed “Housing-as-Housing,” a series of nine embossed prints, to the Fall 2024 exhibition Architectural Drawing III, at a83, in New York. Cohen recently published the book Housing-As-Housing (Black Square, 2024), which claims that housing is not real estate, to be held as property or exchanged for profit, but is meant to be used. The declaration goes beyond the conventional call for the provision of more affordable dwellings; it demands the decommodification of housing and the advancement of domestic models beyond the single-family home. In addition to making this statement in words, the book presents the concept of “housing-as-housing” through architectural drawing and design. The mantra-like refrain is announced in plans, elevations, sections, and axonometric projections that describe a series of housing prototypes exemplifying domestic space not bound by the dictates of real estate.
Adam Wagoner (MArch ’15), founder of Denver-based firm High, Low, Buffalo, was named 2024 AIA Colorado Architect of the Year.
Shivani Shedde (MED ’16) received a 2024 Carter Manny Award Citation of Special Recognition from the Graham Foundation for her Princeton dissertation “Projections of Possibility: Architectural Imaginaries of Afro-Asian Solidarity 1947–1977.”
Azza Aboualam (MArch ’18) has been selected to curate the UAE pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale.
Davis Butner (MArch ’19) organized “Resurgens Requiem,” an immersive choral performance in Atlanta’s Krog Street Tunnel, as part of the national conference on Creative Placemaking, for which he served as creative director. The performance featured the Spelman College Glee Club and a speech by Butner about the potential for infrastructure to unite as much as divide. He also presented drawings and findings from his yearlong research project into historic synagogue architecture in the American South, which was supported by a Kyle D. Taylor Memorial Scholarship for Architectural Studies, offered through the Southeast Chapter of the Institute of Classical Architecture & Art.
B. Jack Hanly (MED ’19) received a 2024 Carter Manny Award Citation of Special Recognition from the Graham Foundation for his MIT dissertation “The Environmental Professionals: Architecture, Regulation, and the American Landscape.”
The research project and exhibition On Deck: Architectural Production after PowerPoint, has been selected to receive an Architectural League of New York and New York State Council on the Arts 2024 Independent Projects Grant. Proposed by Christina Moushoul, Matthew Wagstaffe (BA ’10, MArch ’19), and Brunno Douat (MED ’23), the project addresses the overlooked impact of slide presentations on architectural production. Drawing from media, design, and communication theory and focusing on a selection of New York–based practices over the past four decades, it seeks to demonstrate how this ever-present medium—often employed in private or confidential settings—has influenced contemporary architectural conceptualization and communication.
Spencer Fried (MArch ’18) and Sam Zeif (MArch ’18) have founded the company Remsen, “a new lifestyle brand that’s redefining aging through thoughtfully designed everyday essentials.”
2020s
Sarah Saad Alajmi (MArch ’20) received a 2024 Carter Manny Award Citation of Special Recognition from the Graham Foundation for her UPenn dissertation “Between Nomadism and Settlement: The Architectural Transformation of the Arabian Desert, 1940s–1970s.”
Gary Huafan He (PhD ’20) is the author of the forthcoming monograph Ornament and Class: Modern Architecture and the Rise of the Bourgeoisie, to be published by Routledge in 2025. He also cowrote the article “The Heuristics of Heroism: Lebbeus Woods Notebooks (1988–1997) at the Getty Research Institute Special Collections,” with Yanzi Huang. This paper introduces the previously unpublished trove of handwritten notes and more than 300 drawings contained in Woods’s notebooks held in the Getty archives.
Adare Brown (MArch ’22) was recently awarded the Steedman Fellowship in Architecture for architectural research abroad. Brown cowrote the articles “Building Solidarity,” with Katie Lau (MArch ’20), published in Urban Omnibus; and “Our Best Organizer,” with Jack Rusk (MArch ’22, MEM ’22), in the Avery Review.
Mila Samdub (MED ’22) authored the article “Technocracy and Hindutva: The Architecture of Governance in the New India,” for New Silk Roads, a project by e-flux Architecture in collaboration with the Critical Media Lab at the Basel Academy of Art and Design FHNW and Noema Magazine (2024) as well as Aformal Academy with the support of Design Trust and Digital Earth (2020).
