Dialectics of Pedagogy

César A. Lopez

César A. Lopez is a first-generation Mexican-American architectural design researcher, and educator. He draws from his life in the Mexico-United States Border Region as critical knowledge to explore the entanglements between architecture, territory, and the politics that dictate them. César is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of New Mexico, School of Architecture + Planning, where he teaches core and research-based design studios, visualization courses, and seminars on the politics of representation. His pedagogical approaches and innovations were recognized with the 2023 New Faculty Teaching Award by the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture and American Institute of Architectural Students. His design work and research have been exhibited on prestigious platforms, presented at national/international symposiums and conferences, and published in consequential journals such as ARQ, inForma, Bracket [Takes Action], and Pidgin. In 2023, César was awarded the Rome Prize in Architecture by the American Academy in Rome.

Carolina Dayer

Carolina Dayer, ph.d., is an architect and associate professor at Aarhus School of Architecture in Denmark. In addition to her extensive teaching engagements at the master’s level, she is currently working on two research projects entitled: ‘Ingenuity and Humour: Architecture in Times of Global Crises’ and ‘Cultures of Maintenance.’ She is author and co-editor of Material Imagination: Reconnecting with the Matter of Architecture (AADR, Spurbuchverlag, 2023), Confabulations: Storytelling in Architecture (Routledge, 2016) and Activism in Architecture: Bright Dreams of Passive Energy Design (Routledge, 2018). In 2021, she exhibited the artistic-research project: Insiders, Othered Histories at On-Site Gallery in Denmark. She was design associate editor of the Journal of Architectural Education from 2017 until 2021. She will co-chair an upcoming session at the EAHN 2024 international conference in Athens entitled: ‘Cultures of Maintenance: Upkeep and Repair.’

Aki Ishida

Aki Ishida is Interim Associate Director of Virginia Tech School of Architecture and Associate Professor of Architecture teaching undergraduate design studios and courses on building technology and health and built environment. She is also a Senior Fellow of Virginia Tech’s Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology (ICAT) where she collaborates with engineers and artists. She founded Aki Ishida Architect PLLC in New York City, and prior to that, she worked at the offices of Rafael Vinoly Architects, James Carpenter Design Associates, and I.M. Pei Architect.

Aki’s work, in both writing and design, centers around aspects of architecture that are temporal, impermanent, and ever-changing, including maintenance of buildings, production studies of architecture, and mutable readings of glass transparency. She is the author of the book Blurred Transparencies in Contemporary Glass Architecture: Material, Culture, and Technology (Routledge, 2020), which examines material glass in broader cultural and social contexts.

Ephraim Joris

Dr. Ephraim Joris is an architect, researcher and educator. He is a faculty member at Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. He practiced architecture in several countries and co-founded the architectural practice AP-London in 2007. With his work he developed a focus on renovation and restoration strategies in combination with the design of new urban settlements, from South East Asia to the Mediterranean, integrating ideas on rapid urban growth, social sustainability and climate resilience.

His research explores ways in which historical memory is reactivated in the development of contemporary architectural and urban proposals. As an educator he has been teaching architecture design studios at graduate and master level at various institutions around the world.

His teaching meditates architecture as an inescapable political instrument. His studio puts forward images of architecture reading into topics such as post-colonial culture and historical amnesia.

Robert M. MacLeod

Robert M. MacLeod, AIA is a Professor at the University of South Florida School of Architecture & Community Design. He served as Director of the school from 2009-2023. Professor MacLeod's academic research focuses on urban design and community planning issues within the "unfinished project" of the contemporary city, public space infrastructure, conditions of suburban sprawl, and redevelopment strategies for abandoned commercial centers and edges.

MacLeod was the co-director of the University of Florida Hong Kong/China Research Studio from 2004-09 and has developed research and professional work related to the Asian mega-city and podium building type. As an educator, Professor MacLeod's teaching and pedagogical development efforts have received several awards. He has worked with architecture offices in Orlando, Florida and Boston, Massachusetts. He is a partner in Sanders MacLeod Studio, an architectural practice with diverse projects, ranging from residential to urban design works.

Nancy M. Sanders

Nancy Sanders is an Associate Professor at the University of South Florida School of Architecture and Community Design, where she has served as the Coordinator of Undergraduate Studios since 2009, developing and overseeing the school’s foundational curriculum. She was previously a tenured Associate Professor at the University of Florida where she was the founder and co-director of the Hong Kong/China Research Studio. She was also an Assistant Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong from 2000-2003. Sanders received her Master’s Degree from Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where she was nominated by the faculty for the prestigious James Templeton Kelley Prize. She is a partner in the architecture firm Sanders MacLeod Studio in Tampa, Florida. She has previously worked for Office for Metropolitan Architecture Asia and Taoho Design in Hong Kong and for Andrea Clark Brown Architects in Naples, Florida.

Igor Marjanović

Igor Marjanović is the William Ward Watkin Dean of the Rice School of Architecture in Houston, Texas. As a scholar, educator, and curator, he is committed to the discipline of architecture as a critical agent of our multicultural world. His research integrates the teaching of studio and theory with historical scholarship on architectural pedagogy and practice, examining the role of drawings, exhibitions and publications in the emergence of international architectural culture. His collaborative research projects have resulted in critically acclaimed books and exhibitions such as Drawing Ambience, On The Very Edge and a monograph on Chicago’s Marina City, which was featured on PBS Newshour. He holds architecture degrees from the University of Belgrade, Serbia (Yugoslavia), University of Illinois at Chicago and the Bartlett School of Architecture in London.

Robert McCarter

Robert McCarter is a practicing architect, author, and Ruth and Norman Moore Professor of Architecture at Washington University in St. Louis since 2007. He has also taught at the University of Florida, Columbia University, and at six other institutions in the US, Netherlands, Peru, and Italy. During his 38 years in academia, McCarter has taught at least one design studio every semester, and he has taught more than 2,000 students. He has had his own architectural practice since 1982, in New York, Florida and St. Louis, with twenty-five realized buildings. He is the author of twenty-five published books to date, including A Moment in the Sun: Robert Ernest’s Brief but Brilliant Life in Architecture (2023); Louis I. Kahn (2nd edition 2022); Place Matters: The Architecture of WG Clark (2019); Grafton Architects (2018); Marcel Breuer (2016); The Space Within: Interior Experience as the Origin of Architecture (2016); Steven Holl (2015); Aldo van Eyck (2015); Herman Hertzberger (2015); Alvar Aalto (2014); Carlo Scarpa (2013); Understanding Architecture: A Primer on Architecture as Experience (2012, with Juhani Pallasmaa); Louis I. Kahn (2005), and Frank Lloyd Wright (1997). Among other awards and honors, the curators of the 2018 Venice Biennale of Architecture selected McCarter as an International Exhibitor, and his exhibit was entitled “Freespace in Place: Four Unrealized Modern Architectural Designs for Venice; Carlo Scarpa’s Quattro progetti per Venezia Revisited;” and he was named one of the “Ten Best Architecture Teachers in the US” in December 2009.

Franco Pisani

Strongly tempted by the expanded opportunities offered by the ‘contamination’ of apparently distant themes and disciplines, he includes within the profession of architecture research and didactic activities.

He lives and works in Firenze, where he runs his own office FRANCOPiSANiARCHiTETTO, practising design at all scales “from the spoon to the city” and for public and private clients. The office recently completed in Quarrata PT Il Giardino dell’Abbraccio, a memorial park for the victims of Covid.

As an educator, he has taught as both professor and lecturer in different universities and schools of Architecture in Italy and abroad.

From 2016 he is editor-in-chief of Il Quaderno - the Architectural Journal of the International Studies Institute Florence, a peer reviewed topical journal published in Firenze which features and collects original contributions and ideas on architectural education.

In 2021 he wrote the book 20x14.Reflections on Studying Abroad, published by ORO EDITIONS, San Francisco.

Mia Roth-Čerina

Mia Roth-Čerina, PhD, is an architect and professor at the Department of Architectural Design at the Faculty of Architecture, University of Zagreb. Her interests in practice, teaching and research intersect and focus on educational spaces and exploring new modalities in architectural education. From 2010 to 2017 she has served as the Croatian delegate of the international UIA working group Architecture & Children and has been elected as council member of the European Association of Architectural Education in 2018. She has participated in numerous research platforms linking contemporary policies and global concerns to architectural education, the latest one being ‘Architecture’s Afterlife: The multisector impact of an architectural qualification’. Projects designed within the practice she leads with Tonči Čerina have won national and international awards. In 2023 they curated the Croatian pavilion at the 18^th Venice Architecture Biennale.

Nasrin Seraji

Nasrin Seraji AA DIPL FRIBA is an architect and educator, she has taught at many architecture schools including, The Architectural Association, Columbia University, Princeton University. Professor and Head of Department of Architecture at HKU She has served as Dean of École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture Paris-Malaquais, professor and Head of the Institute for Art and Architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna as well as professor and Chair of the Department of Architecture at Cornell University. Saraji’s practice and research concentrates on collective housing as well as new models of urbanism which she calls ‘Integrative Architecture©’. Her Book and Exhibition “Housing Substance of our cities” in 2007 is a critical view on one hundred years of collective housing in Europe, it traces and superimposes the conditions in which collective housing was produced and contributed to the foundation of the modern European cities. Her co-edited book “From Crisis to Crisis: debates on why architecture criticism matters today” examines how reading, writing and criticism can address urgent issues that architecture faces today. Nasrin Seraji has lectured widely, In Europe, North America and Asia and South Africa. She is a fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects and an Officer of the Order of “Arts et Lettres” and the Order of Merit in France. Her forthcoming book on architectural education is to be published by Actar in Fall 2025.

Miron Tee