Awards & Honors

The 2022 Lisbon Architecture Triennale, “Terra,” which runs from September 29 to December 5, features work by a number of CCNY faculty and alumni.

The main exhibit section Multiplicity taking place in the Museu Nacional de Arte Contemporânea de Lisboa (MNAC) is co-curated by Professor Vyjayanthi Rao in collaboration with Tau Tavengwa, with curatorial assistance by Alden Copley UD ’21.  It includes the exhibition of the Dark Matter University team, co-led by Professor Jerome Haferd (BRANDT : HAFERD), one of only a few installations of its size being exhibited at the Triennale. A student project by Pedro Cruz Cruz M Arch ’22, “The Theater of the People: A Look Into Queens’ Street Vending Culture,” is also part of Multiplicity and is a winner of the Millennium bcp Universities Competition Award.

Pedro’s winning project includes a video — an impressive work of urban ethnography with Street Vendors in Corona Plaza, culminating in an architectural transformation of an old movie theater in Queens — that is a much-revised version of his final studio project in 2020-21. Cruz submitted the project, after updating his research, with a portfolio and a 12-minute video, and was awarded a certificate and a prize of 1,000 euros.

“It was amazing to have the opportunity to have my work exhibited and recognized. Being selected as one of the winners during the event caught me entirely by surprise and felt unreal. It was an incredible experience and made me feel even more proud to represent such an excellent public institution that has given me many growth opportunities,” said Cruz.

Dark Matter University is BIPOC-led counter institutional network of educators, researchers, and practitioners dedicated to anti-racist design education and outcomes. DMUxLisbon is both a living document and a real-time modeling of counter-institutionality within the 2022 Triennale through a collective “constellation” of content co-generated by the network’s many members. This constellation is both a showcasing of DMU’s work and methods and a manifestation of our multiple, situated identities and narratives. Taken as a whole, we propose this real-time constellation is itself a new canon.

Within Multiplicity, DMUxLisbon uses a site-specific installation of print and digital elements, which form constellations of collective knowledge, both embedded within and layered across the Canons gallery and beyond the museum walls themselves. In leveraging the spatial attributes and cultural relations of the Constellation over the Canon, DMUxLisbon models DMU’s ethos of both decentering and infiltrating western institutional spaces and (re)orienting to immense legacies of knowledge systems across our diasporas, toward new forms of collective knowledge production, practice, and community. The elements within these constellations — representing a wide range of practitioners, student work, co-written pedagogy, co-authored texts, and so forth — constitute a live snapshot of the ever-evolving collective knowledge of DMU’s network.

The Lisbon Architecture Triennale is a non-profit organization whose mission is to investigate, stimulate and promote thought and practice in architecture. Terra looks into communities throughout the world to embrace our common home, planet Earth.