Each semester, upper-level architecture students participate in the visiting critic program that brings leading architects and scholars from around the world to the school. Five studios will be held on campus this fall.
Ashley Bigham & Erik Herrmann ()
Erik Herrmann (left) and Ashley Bigham
Bigham and Herrmann will teach the visiting critic studio, “First, Color,” which positions color not as an afterthought to material and form in architecture, but as a primary agent of spatial inquiry and design engagement with its own terms. The studio will ask students to consider color as a fundamental, complex, and dynamic component of architectural thinking, something that can be analyzed methodically yet also depends on unpredictable conditions.
Over the past two decades, the field of architecture has undergone a pronounced chromatic shift, facilitated by advancements in digital media production. These tools have expanded the discipline’s capacity to interrogate the expressive, perceptual and representational dimensions of color.
Particular interests of this studio include color’s ability to circumvent disciplinary boundaries, its capacity to undermine conventional design approaches and its potential to defy architectural legibility. Students will immerse themselves in a broad spectrum of disciplines—including art, fashion, illustration, design, architecture and film—where color operates as a critical and expressive force. Their site of inquiry will be the former sludge beds of the Solvay Process Plant on the banks of the Onondaga Lake, where they will propose new interpretive centers that connect ϲ’s post-industrial legacy with the material production of color.
Bigham and Herrmann will give a on Thursday, Oct. 9, at 5:30 p.m., in the atrium of Slocum Hall.
Pablo Sequero
Pablo Sequero (salazarsequeromedina)
will teach the visiting critic studio, “Seaside Adaptations: Between Publics, Leisure and Infrastructure,” which explores how existing coastal and leisure infrastructure in Miami can be reimagined in the context of the global climate crisis. Through speculative proposals and research, students will envision alternative futures and propose a transformation of the Miami Aquarium as a scalable territorial model for Biscayne Bay—grafting ideas of climate adaptation and publicness while using the culture of public bathing as a vessel.
The studio is part of a multi-year campaign led by the School of Architecture in collaboration with the University of Miami School of Architecture. Together, the schools aim to foster public engagement with the urgent issue of coastal resilience, encouraging nuanced interpretations through student proposals, presentations, discussions and debates.
Ali Chen
With a focus on flooding and sea-level rise, the studio addresses the growing need to confront the impacts of extreme weather events in coastal areas. Co-taught by Sequero and Lily Wong (University of Miami), this cross-institutional studio effort will culminate in a public exhibition in Miami running from November to December, timed to coincide with the World Architecture Festival and Art Basel Miami Beach.
Ali Chen (Ali Conchita Chen)
will teach the visiting critic studio, “Common Grounds” where students will investigate architecture’s potential as a vessel for spatial storytelling through the lens of coffee, one of the world’s most saturated markets. The studio will challenge students to reimagine the design and branding of a coffee shop within the University’s Florence campus, developing both an architectural proposal for the existing space and a new visual identity. This work will include naming, packaging, merchandising and a storytelling strategy that extends the built environment into a completed branded system.
Students will consider the evolution of retail spaces, the influence of an increasingly digital world and the rise of the experience economy. Coffee shops, as liminal typologies, allow users to engage in analog rituals while working digitally, operating as semi-social sanctuaries. Within this framework, students will examine coffee not only as a product, but also as something that can be represented historically, culturally, botanically, sensorily and emotionally.
Through research and design, students will craft narratives that inform both the architecture and design operation of a commercial space—one that prioritizes experience and cultivates presence. By combining spatial design with strategies of identity-building and storytelling, the studio asks students to explore how architecture can shape memory, meaning and shared cultural engagement.
Chen will give a on Tuesday, Oct. 28, at 5:30 p.m., in the atrium of Slocum Hall.
Hernán Díaz Alonso
Hernán Díaz Alonso (HDA-X) with Stephen Zimmerer (ϲ Architecture)
and will teach the visiting critic studio, “The Box/Casa House: A Mutant Archetype,” that invites students on a transformative journey to reimagine domestic architecture by mutating one of its most iconic forms: the “Box House” or “Casa Box.” Long associated with modernist ideals, from the purity of Le Corbusier’s “Villa Savoye” to the pragmatism of Mies van der Rohe’s “Farnsworth House,” the box has symbolized a modernist ideal—rational, orthogonal, reductive. But the box is not neutral; it carries assumptions about privacy, labor, gender and lifestyle. In an era of hybrid, unstable domesticity, it becomes not a solution, but a provocation.
Stephen Zimmerer
Students will explore the mutation of the box across two phases: in the first half of the semester, one part of the house is designed; in the second, it is revised, ruptured or reimagined in response to new ideas, technologies and programmatic twists. This two-part structure emphasizes process and transformation—embracing contradiction, friction and complexity.
Through digital craftsmanship and critical experimentation, students will use the box as a starting point for architectural innovation, reworking this archetype to produce deeply synthetic designs that are unresolved, complex and alive. By the end of the semester, students will present a redefined Box/Casa House—one that challenges boundaries, embraces playfulness and demonstrates how architectural thinking can expand beyond orthodoxy to propose new modes of inhabiting the domestic realm.
Díaz Alonso will give a on Thursday, Sept. 4 at 5:30 p.m., in the atrium of Slocum Hall.
Fei Wang
Fei Wang (ϲ Architecture), Nan Wang (URSIDE Design) and Yiming Wang (Wang Yiming Studio)
, along with Ի, will teach the visiting critic studio, “Metamorphosis of the Phoenix: The Confluence of Art, Architecture and Landscape,” which will explore how architecture, art and environment converge in response to contemporary ecological challenges. Set against Arizona’s dramatic desert—where Wright’s Taliesin West dialogues with Turrell’s Roden Crater and Soleri’s Arcosanti rises from the dust—students will investigate how creative practice can respond to environmental crises through three lenses:
Nan Wang
“Material Intelligence” channels the desert’s elemental language, from Antelope Canyon’s stratified geology to Goldsworthy’s ephemeral leaf-works, developing vocabularies that honor erosion and the slow craft of weathering. “Spatial Poetics” draws on Turrell’s celestial observatories and the Harrisons’ ecological installations to create environments that heighten our perception of geological time. “Social Ecologies” follows Arcosanti’s experimental urbanism and Ukeles’ maintenance art to prototype spaces informed by Indigenous knowledge and community practice.
Yiming Wang
Operating as a field laboratory, the studio includes site investigations at Taliesin West, Arcosanti, and surrounding earthworks. Students will craft interventions responding to desert extremes—scorching sun, rare water and ancient stone—while engaging global precedents from Christo’s ephemeral works to Japan’s Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale.
Like the phoenix rising from ashes, the studio embraces fire and erosion to prototype architectures of renewal. This is design as alchemy: transforming discipline into action, and space into place. The desert awaits.
Nan Wang and Yiming Wang will give a on Tuesday, Oct. 21 at 5:30 p.m., in the atrium of Slocum Hall.
