Reporting

Reports, Speeches, and More

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Selling Architecture, an article written for the Yale School of Architecture student journal, PAPRIKA!

"the overall picture of the discipline is one of a game without rules: no Five Points, no Beaux-Arts methodologies, no formal intellectual ramifications, no pattern languages. The frameworks that do seem to bind architecture are sustainability, social justice, experimentation. But if that is the full state of the discipline, then isn’t something being lost? Now the question architects must answer is whether the history, theory, processes, concepts, and limitations of architecture can be presented to the public in a way that is as appealing as its ability to break rules and innovate. And in forcing us out of our silos to ask this question, Herda and Grima may ultimately have the largest impact on the discipline."

This article, co-written with Azza Abou Alam, tries to take lessons from

and build on an upsetting event held at Yale in honor of Zaha Hadid.

Valedictorian Speech at Princeton University, June 2015

“This ability to walk around the world with the open eyes of a child and the analytic capacity of a scholar is something that, invoking my mother tongue of Russian, I’d call chuvstvitelnost, a word that means something in between perceptiveness and sensitivity ... We’ve read dozens of textbooks in our time here, but the greatest takeaway of all is the ability to now use the entire real world we are about to enter as our textbook, to perceive both the seen and the unseen, the beauty and significance, the interrelationships and discourses, in everything that surrounds us, to never be bored.”