Fall 2023 Alumni News

Alexander Tzonis (MArch ’63) curated the photographic exhibition Shacks: Catastrophe and Creation (Παράγκες: Καταστροφή και δημιουργία) at the Canadian Institute in Greece (June 22–July 12, 2023). The show chronicles the dwellings built along the Ilissos River in Athens by refugees from Asia Minor. Tzonis documented these makeshift structures in photos and watercolors when he was a teen.

The Louis Armstrong House Museum, designed by Caples Jefferson Architects, a firm led by Sara Caples (MArch ’74) and Everardo Jefferson (MArch ’73), opened on July 6. Located in Corona, Queens, it includes a home for the jazz musician’s archive, a 75-seat performance space, and exhibits, all within a two-story building that matches the scale of the surrounding neighborhood.

Andrés M. Duany (MArch ’74) and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk (MArch ’74) were awarded honorary doctorate degrees at Yale’s 322nd commencement ceremony, on May 22, in recognition of their decades of leadership in architecture and city planning. Duany and Plater-Zyberk are best known for leading the Congress for the New Urbanism, an influential city-planning movement focused on placemaking and alternatives to suburban sprawl. Based in Miami, Duany and Plater-Zyberk cofounded the firm Arquitectonica and, later, DPZ CoDesign. Plater-Zyberk was dean of the University of Miami School of Architecture from 1995 to 2013.

Jala Makhzoumi (MED ’75) delivered a keynote lecture at the 2023 New Zealand Institute of Landscape Architects Firth Conference, in Whakatū Nelson.

Louise Braverman (MArch ’77) delivered the lecture “Architecture of Art + Conscience” on March 9, 2023, at the National Arts Club in New York, on configuring our material world to create ethical built environments.

Michael Kostow (MArch ’81) was recently featured in Interior Design magazine with a career-spanning interview touching on his 35 years as a professional architect. He discusses projects that set the standard for preservation as well as workplace and Broadway theater upgrades. He also discusses how being a jazz musician might make him a better architect. A recent project was the $47 million restoration and expansion of the Cort Theatre on Broadway, which was officially renamed the James Earl Jones Theatre in honor of the iconic award-winning actor. The Shubert Organization, a client over many years and projects, engaged Kostow Greenwood Architects to design and build a new contemporary annex to expand accessibility, increase public space, add dressing rooms and rehearsal spaces, and enhance the beauty of the 110-year-old theater. Recent award recognition for the Annex includes being named a finalist in the NYCxDESIGN Awards and a Special Mention honoree in the Architizer A+Awards.

Brent Sherwood (BA ’80, MArch ’83) leads the development of space architecture for Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’s space company. As senior vice president of Space Systems Development for the past four years, he grew a 50-person, $30 million operation into an 1,100-person, $1 billion enterprise that created new business units for Lunar Transportation (which won a $3.4 billion contract from NASA) and for Space Mobility. The team is developing Orbital Reef, a commercially owned and operated space station for research and tourism.

Weiss/Manfredi, cofounded by Marion Weiss (M.Arch ’84), received two Merit Awards in the 70th Annual Progressive Architecture Awards: for the Longwood Gardens West Conservatory and the La Brea Tar Pits project.

Peter MacKeith (MArch ’85), dean of the Fay Jones School of Architecture and Design at the University of Arkansas, has been selected to chair the advisory panel for a new memorial on the National Mall, in Washington, D.C., which will honor those “who have served and sacrificed in the ongoing war on terrorism.”

Richard W. Hayes (MArch ’86) received a fellowship from the Society of Architectural Historians (SAH). He published a new essay on E. W. Godwin in Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens and spoke on the subject at New College Oxford, the British Institute for Interior Design, and the universities of Paris, Tours, and Toulouse. Hayes was a featured speaker at a roundtable for recipients of the Brunner Grant at the AIA New York Chapter. He also gave the keynote talk at Kean University’s annual conference “Thinking Creatively” and the Peter Blundell Jones Memorial lecture at the University of Sheffield.

Newick Architects, founded by Craig Newick (MArch ’87), received a 2022 AIA Connecticut Design Award in the Commercial, Industrial, Educational, and Multi-Family Residential Design category for the ‘r kids Family Center, in New Haven.

Craig Copeland (MArch ’89) has been elevated to the AIA College of Fellows in the Object Two category.

A renovation to the Bruce Museum, in Greenwich, Connecticut, was recently completed by EskewDumezRipple, where Steve Dumez (MArch ’89) is principal and design lead. The project includes a 42,000-square-foot wing providing expanded collection storage, permanent and changing exhibition space, and a new public entrance lobby and lecture hall.

Thomas Frechette (MArch ’89) has been promoted to senior associate at Pickard Chilton. He is currently coleader on the design of the CoStar Group’s new campus in Richmond, Virginia.

Patricia Brett (MArch ’90) recently curated the exhibition Sculptural Imprints for the KINK Contemporary gallery, in Cleveland, featuring the work of seven printmakers exploring texture and space. Brett also taught workshops at the Art Students League of New York, Zygote Press, and the Morgan Paper Conservatory. Her work was recently been acquired by MetroHealth Hospitals, in Cleveland, for its permanent collection.

Marc L’Italien (MArch ’90), design principal in the San Francisco office of HGA Architects and Engineers, has won a 2023 AIA Committee on the Environment (COTE) Award for the Westwood Hills Nature Center, in St. Louis Park, Minnesota. The project also earned a Zero Energy Certification from the International Living Future Institute in 2022. The building’s flexibility and ability to handle visitor flow allowed it to open safely in 2020, when most museums were still closed.

Juan Miró (MArch ’91), a professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture, delivered lectures at the 2023 AIA Conference on Architecture, the Dallas Architecture Forum, AIA San Antonio, and in Mexico City this spring. He published an article in Architect’s Newspaper advocating against windowless dorm rooms, prompted by increased use of this room type at UT Austin. His firm, Miró Rivera Architects, received a Texas Medal of Arts Award, a 2023 Design Award from the Texas Society of Architects, and an AIA Austin Design Award.

Mo Zell (MArch ’98) has been named president of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) for 2023–24. Zell was also appointed interim dean of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s new College of the Arts and Architecture in April. She has served as interim dean of the School of Architecture and Urban Planning, which is now part of the College, since 2022.

Edgar Papazian (MArch ’99) has accepted an appointment as vice president of AIA Peconic for 2023.

Khoury Vogt Architects, cofounded by Erik Vogt (MED ’99), is a recipient of an ICAA’s 2023 Arthur Ross Award for Excellence in the Classical Tradition.

Grace Ong Yan (MArch ’00), together with Andrew Hart, and Elena Nestico, all faculty members at the Thomas Jefferson University College of Architecture and the Built Environment, won a $75,000 grant to create a public art piece celebrating Black history in Huntington, New York. The piece, “Redemption,” will be composed of three steel panels laser cut with quotes from prominent Black figures from the town, including Jupiter Hammon, John Coltrane, Booker T. Washington, and others.

Ron Stelmarski (MArch ’00) was elevated to the AIA College of Fellows in 2022 in the Object One category, focused on design. His work has been recognized for inventive responses to culture and context, elevating the public realm, and galvanizing communities with architecture of enduring aesthetic, environmental, and social value. Throughout 26 years of practice, the last 10 as design director of the Perkins & Will studio in Dallas, Stelmarski has worked with the goal of building new projects that honor the past, such as the award-winning Pittman Hotel, an adaptive-reuse project in Dallas. His work on the 277-acre Fair Park Master Plan, in Dallas, inspired his vision for the city that was included in Watershed Urbanism, at the European Cultural Centre’s exhibition at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2021. His Singing Hills Recreation was recently called “The Best New Building in Dallas” by Mark Lamster, architecture critic of the Dallas Morning News. Other recent projects include the Eastside El Paso Recreation Center and the Baylor Scott & White Health Administration Center.

MAD Architects, the office of Ma Yansong (MArch ’02), recently completed Timeless Beacon, an installation in Guangdong. The China Philharmonic Concert Hall, in Beijing, is nearing completion, and the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, in Los Angeles, is expected to be completed in 2025 The firm has unveiled renderings of its first project in South America, Qondesa, which will be the tallest building in Quito, Ecuador, and won an international competition for the design of Changchun Longjia International Airport Terminal 3, in China.

Dream the Combine, founded by Jennifer Newsom (BA ’01, MArch ’05) and Tom Carruthers (MArch ’05), received a 2023 Emerging Voices award from the Architectural League of New York. The practice also received a 2023 Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome.

Max Worrell (MArch ’06) and Jejon Yeung (MArch ’07) were profiled in T Magazine for their Springs Artist Studio in Long Island. Their firm, Worrell Yeung, received the Interior Design NYCxDesign Award in the category Social Impact, for Canal Projects, an art space in a landmarked cast-iron building on the corner of Canal and Wooster Streets, in SoHo, Manhattan.

Molly Wright Steenson (MED ’07) has been named president and CEO of the American Swedish Institute, in Minneapolis.

Andreea Ion Cojocaru (MArch ’10) was recently featured on the panel “Placemaking Across Realities,” hosted by Spectra Cities at Cornell Tech.

Members of the class of 2013 were thrilled to return to campus at the end of April for their ten-year reunion. The weekend featured a series of events planned by Altair Peterson (MArch ’13) and lecturer Antonia Devine (MArch ’13) that included sponsoring a Friday 6 on 7 for current students; a conversation with Dean Berke on the school’s evolution and priorities; a fierce badminton tournament; and dinners and drinks at old favorites including Rudy’s and Bar pizza. More than half of the class came, from as far as Berlin, London, and the West Coast, as well as Brooklyn. Everyone may or may not have ended up at the Pink House for a Paprika! party on Friday night. The class of 2013 is already looking forward to the 20th reunion.

London-based firm Neiheiser Argyros, cofounded by Xristina Argyros (MArch ’13), completed the renovation of a Victorian terrace house, including the addition of a basement-level stepped courtyard.

Rob Bundy (MArch ’13) relaunched Bundy Architecture, in Raleigh, North Carolina, in November 2022.

Owen Howlett (MArch ’13) has been promoted to associate principal at Pickard Chilton. He is currently leading the design teams for several large-scale, mixed-use master plans, including significant developments such as Le Coeur, a complex repositioning of existing and new buildings on one of the most prominent sites in Düsseldorf, Germany, and CoStar Group’s new corporate campus in Richmond, Virginia.

Melissa Shin (MArch ’13), founder of Shin Shin Architecture, shared her experiences in the profession with AIA Los Angeles in honor of AAPI Heritage Month. Shin Shin Architecture received the 2022 AIA|LA Presidential Honor Emerging Practice Award and a 2022 AIA|LA Residential Architecture Award.

Brittany Utting (MArch ’14) and Daniel Jacobs (MArch ’14), of HOME-OFFICE, presented the lecture “Time Machines for a Future Climate” at the Cooper Union on March 23.

Elisa Iturbe (BA ’08, MEM ’15, MArch ’15) and Stanley Cho (MArch ’15), in collaboration with Alican Taylan, curated the exhibition Confronting Carbon Form, shown at the Cooper Union from March 21 to April 16, 2023. It featured original design work by the curators exploring the spatial roots of the climate crisis. Iturbe and Cho contributed the essay “Transgressing Immutable Lines,” on the potentials of community land trusts for addressing social and political challenges, to In Common, a collaboration between e-flux Architecture, the Chicago Architecture Biennial, UIC College of Architecture, Design, and the Arts, and Arc en Rêve Centre d'Architecture, in Bordeaux, France.

Madelynn Ringo (MArch ’16), founder of retail and experience design firm Ringo Studio, was featured in a profile in AN Interior focusing on her career trajectory and work for cookware company Our Place.

Skender Luarasi (PhD ’18) and Gary Huafan He (PhD ’20) edited the book Contemporary Perspectives on Architectural Organicism: The Limits of Self-Generation (Routledge, 2023), offering a variety of critiques of the Modernist idea of endless growth in the fields of architecture, literature, philosophy, and the history of science.

Tara Marchelewicz (MArch ’18) served on the jury for the 2023 Mississauga Urban Design Awards.

Zelig Fok (MArch ’19), assistant professor of architecture at Ohio State, received the Charles E. MacQuigg Award for Outstanding Teaching from the Ohio State University Knowlton School of Architecture, part of the College of Engineering.

Maia Adele Simon (MED ’19) presented the talk “Breaks and Continuities: Spatializing Transition in Astana,” at Citygroup in New York on February 4, coinciding with the exhibition Aesthetics from the End of History: Liberalization, Privatization, and Other Ghosts of the ’90s. Simon is currently a PhD student in the history, theory, and criticism of architecture at MIT.

Andrew Economos Miller (MArch ’20), Schidlowski Emerging Faculty Fellow at the College of Architecture and Environmental Design at Kent State University, curated the exhibition Refuse // Repose, shown at the school’s Armstrong Gallery.

Laura Pappalardo (MED ’21) received a Gruber Fellowship in Global Justice from the Yale School of Law. She will be working with the Partindo do Chão Coletivo research platform, a research collective formed by non-Indigenous and Guarani researchers and architects, coordinated by professor Glória Porto Kok at Escola da Cidade, in São Paulo, to improve the quality of housing in Tekoá Pyau village, one of six Guarani villages at the foot of Jaraguá peak. The project will research and document traditional construction techniques of the Guarani Mbya: map Tekoá Pyau village housing conditions and the need for basic infrastructure such as sanitation and access to water; provide technical guidance for São Paulo zoning laws and produce a document as an instrument of negotiation with the city to prevent further real estate expansion on the Jaraguá Indigenous territory; build two housing prototypes; and launch a fundraising campaign to renew existing houses in the village.

Gustav Kjær Vad Nielsen (MArch ’22) participated in the UIA World Congress of Architects in Copenhagen on July 5, as part of the panel “Next Gen: Transition into Sustainability Practices.”

Juanita Castaneda Norena (BA ’23) won the Library Map Prize for her senior thesis in urban studies, “The Myth of Solidarity: The Formalization of Segregation and Externalization of Class through the Estate System in Cali, Colombia,” advised by Joyce Hsiang (BA ’99, MArch ’03). The prize “recognizes students whose senior essays or projects make use of one or more maps or charts in substantive ways.” The selection committee noted that this “exceptionally creative essay” skillfully integrated archival and newly created maps, scholarly research, and collage to examine social issues. Estrato, a housing-based socioeconomic stratification system in Colombia, was intended to create solidarity by distributing utility costs based on income. As the jury noted, Castaneda Norena’s “visual methodology” enables the reader to understand the history of Cali, its present-day issues, and how estrato has instead furthered inequality and segregation.

Clare Fentress (MArch ’23) received the Avery Review Essay Prize for her article “Staff Needs: The Spaces of Hospice,” which uses the Southern Connecticut Hospice, in Branford, as a case study to examine the architectural aspects of care.

Josh Greene (MArch ’23) and Christina Chi Zhang (MArch ’23) were nominated for Metropolis magazine’s Future100 Architecture Graduate Cohort. Chi Zhang was also named the Harry der Boghosian Fellow at the Syracuse University School of Architecture for the 2023–24 academic year. The fellowship allows early career practitioners the opportunity to spend the year developing a body of design research based on an area of interest while teaching.

Chucho Martínez Padres (BA ’23) curated an exhibition of George Kubler’s archive as part of the Senior Exhibit Fellowship at Yale Library. The Study of Things: George Kubler in Latin America is on view in the Sterling Library Exhibition Corridor from May 1 to October 8, 2023.

Kapp Singer (BA ’23) received Yale’s John Addison Porter Prize, one of Yale College’s major prizes in the humanities, for his senior thesis Media Against the Fire, or How to Save the Forest for the Trees advised by Keller Easterling. Singer graduated summa cum laude from the History/Theory/Urbanism track of the architecture major, and was the only student in Yale College honored with the Exceptional Distinction in the Major award.

Nicole Niava (MArch ’24) received the 2023 John Belle Travel Fellowship. Her proposal was selected from a field of 30 applications by students from 16 schools. Tom Hsu (MArch ’24) was awarded the 2023 Kohn Pedersen Fox Traveling Fellowship. Yale Environmental Humanities grants for the summer of 2023 were awarded to Austin Ehrhardt (MED ’24), for “Black Homesteads of the New Deal”; George Papamatthaiakis (MED ’23), for “Horizons after Tourism”; associate professor Elihu Rubin (BA ’99), for “New Haven Brownfields Opportunities Flyer”; and Kevin Yang (MArch ’24), for “New Haven, Revisited: An Anthology.”

On June 8 more than 100 alumni—residents of the Bay Area and those attending the AIA Conference on Architecture—gathered at the University Club of San Francisco. Representing class years between 1973 and 2023, they heard updates on the school from Dean Berke, including news on recent events and successes in fundraising for scholarships, as well as how the school is adjusting after the pandemic.

The Indigenous Society of Architecture, Planning, and Design (ISAPD), founded by YSoA alumni Anjelica Gallegos (MArch ’21) and Charelle Brown (BA ’20), is a recipient of the 2023 Fulcrum Fund grant cycle for the First Future Project. The annual grant program was created and is administered by 516 ARTS as a partner in the Regional Regranting Program of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The First Future Project encompasses a range of programming targeted to sustaining the endeavors of the ISAPD and expanding on Indigenous architectural principles firmly rooted in the tracking of natural phenomena and celestial events, specifically the fall equinox. Programming includes a built installation, community art contribution, maps and drawings, a public festival, a design competition, and an online community book. The built installation is set to show in New York in the fall in collaboration with the Center for Architecture and partners.

Yale Women in Architecture (YWA) is an inclusive community led by graduates of the Yale School of Architecture that promotes excellence and equity in the field of architecture and related professions. Earlier in the year YWA hosted a general meeting at Sage & Coombe Architects, in New York, bringing together a range of members both digitally and in person to connect. In June YWA hosted a celebration of the Jim Vlock First Year Building Project. Bringing students and YWA members together at Atelier Cue, in New Haven, the event stimulated discussion around future modes of practice and sustainability in the built environment. During the next academic year the YWA hopes to connect and support alumni and current students through an intergenerational exchange of experiences and knowledge. YWA fosters women’s leadership and entrepreneurship in all facets of the ever-evolving profession of architecture and urbanism. Learn more at www.yalewomeninarchitecture.org.