News

The Spring 2026 Sciame lecture series, The Elephant in the Room: Locating Animal Lives in Buildings, Cities, and Landscapes, takes its title from the expression “the elephant in the room,” which originates in the Russian author Ivan Krylov’s 1814 fable “The Inquisitive Man.” In the story, a visitor to a natural history museum becomes so enthralled with countless “birds and beasts” that he overlooks the largest of them all: a colossal elephant. As the expression gained currency, any reference to real animals gave way to metaphorical ones. The spring 2026 Sciame lecture series takes the idiom literally by addressing the common failure to notice all animals in the built environment. In the lecture series, scholars, designers, thinkers, and activists cast light on imagining, designing, and sharing buildings, cities, and landscapes with other species.

Making space for animals in the built environment often requires diverting attention away from our human perspective and desires, thus troubling our own anthropocentrism and claims about human exceptionalism. More often than not, the built environment creates antagonistic, if not deadly, conditions for animals. Ballooning construction campaigns, invasive resource extraction for building materials, and hermetically sealed structures have all decimated animal habitats and killed countless animals. Given the planetary threats of diminishing biodiversity, the climate crisis, and health emergencies, recentering animal lives and human-animal relationships in the built environment is critical to the survival of all animal life.

All lectures are in-person, free, and held at 5:30 pm at the Spitzer School of Architecture (Sciame Auditorium) unless otherwise noted. For live captioning, ASL interpretation, or access requests, please contact ssadean@ccny.cuny.edu.

We look forward to seeing you in person!

Thursday, 02/19/2026
In Consideration of Neighbors
Joyce Hwang

Thursday, 02/26/2026
Ghosts in the Glass: An Architectural Hauntology of Bird-Window Collisions in the United States
Dr. Richard Fadok

Thursday, 03/12/2026
Animating Construction: Animal Labor and Urban Architectures of Violence
Dr. Yamini Narayanan

Thursday, 03/19/2026
Natural by Design: Creating Spaces for Conservation, Choice, and Connection
Megan Nielsen Hegstad

Thursday, 04/16/2026
A Stone Fallen From the Moon … or Elsewhere
Dr. Martín Cobas

Thursday, 04/23/2026
Paved Paradise: The Impacts of Roads and the Rise of Transportation Ecology
Ben Goldfarb

This Sciame lecture series is made possible by the Spitzer Architecture Fund and the generous support of Frank Sciame ’74,
CEO of Sciame Construction.