The School of Architecture welcomed architect, engineer, scholar, and artist Lydia Kallipoliti to participate in the school’s Lecture Series and to serve as a guest juror for the thesis review. She spoke about her wide-ranging work, from using closed worlds to re-conceptualize trans-species wellness, to using archives as “mediums of immersive scholarship” to transform how we engage with ideas of utopia, and more. She brought her extensive knowledge and valuable perspective to the students who presented their early iterations of thesis work to her, and urged them to explore new and unexplored directions for projects with such topics as rural self-builders and reuse, and architectural understandings of memory, aging, and decay. While here, she also paid a visit to Newman Library to view the International Archive of Women in Architecture

Kallipoliti is currently an Assistant Professor at the Cooper Union in New York. She holds a Diploma in Architecture and Engineering from A.U.Th in Greece, a SMArchS in design and building technology from M.I.T, as well as a Master of Arts and a PhD from Princeton University. Prior to teaching at the Cooper Union, Kallipoliti was an Assistant Professor at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, at Syracuse University and an Assistant Professor Adjunct at Columbia University [GSAPP] and at the Cooper Union, where she also served as a Senior Associate at the Institute for Sustainable Design, and as the Feltman Chair in Lighting. Her research focuses on the intersections of architecture, technology and environmental politics and more particularly on recycling material experiments, theories of waste and reuse, as well as closed and self-reliant systems and urban environments.

She authored  the online book History of Ecological Design for Oxford English Encyclopedia of Environmental Science (2017), the editor of “EcoRedux”—a special issue of Architectural Design magazine (AD, 2011)—and the author of the book The Architecture of Closed Worlds, Or, What is the Power of Shit (Lars Muller Publishers/Storefront for Art and Architecture, 2018), which was a finalist for the Cornish Family Prize among all publications in design, art and architecture in 2018 by the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne. “Closed Worlds” was also an exhibition originally commissioned by the Storefront for Art and Architecture in New York and traveled to WUHO Gallery in Los Angeles and the University of Technology Sydney Art Gallery, and exists as a website and online lexicon as well.