Events

Spring 2025 Sciame Lecture Series: Joel Sanders

Building Belonging: Equity, Health and Wellbeing in Public Space

This in-person lecture is part of the Spring 2025 Sciame Lecture Series, "Still Making Space for Gender."

Joel Sanders, FAIA (he/him), is the founding Principal of JSA/MIXdesign, an architectural studio and inclusive design consultancy dedicated to making everyday building types accessible and welcoming to people of different ages, genders, abilities, cultural identities, and religions. In addition to being Principal of JSA/MIXdesign, Sanders is a Professor at Yale School of Architecture and Yale School of Public Health, where he teaches classes that examine the intersection of architecture and mental and physical health. His projects have been featured in international exhibitions and the permanent collections of MoMA, SFMoMA, Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, Art Institute of Chicago, and the Carnegie Museum of Art.

"Building Belonging: Equity, Health, and Wellbeing in Public Space": In his talk, Joel Sanders will discuss the design principles that inform the work of JSA/MIXdesign, an inclusive design studio dedicated to considering the needs of a broad segment of the population that the discipline of architecture has traditionally overlooked. By taking an intersectional approach that prioritizes stakeholder engagement, JSA/MIXdesign develops design solutions that go beyond mere code compliance to create spaces that allow the maximum number of people with different embodied identities to share the same public space. After exploring these principles from a theoretical perspective, Joel will discuss how his office has put them into practice in the context of three different building typologies: restrooms, university campuses, and art museums. This discussion of case-study projects will explore how each typology presents unique challenges as well as opportunities for making spaces that meet the needs of all individuals regardless of their age, gender, race, or ability.

Suggested Reading: Sanders, Joel. "From STUD to Stalled!: Embodied Identity through a Queer Lens 1996-2021." In Queering Architecture: Methods, Practices, Spaces, Pedagogies, edited by Marko Jobst and Naomi Stead, 141-62. New York: Bloomsbury, 2023.

"Still Making Space for Gender" centers women and LGBTQIA+ folk in the built environment. While the discourse framing gender morphs and gender identities broaden and become more intersectional, the predicament remains the same. Women and LGBTQIA+folk continue to struggle against exploitation and fight for equal rights and equity opportunities in the United States, with this situation troubling unrelenting claims of exceptionalism at home and abroad. Although gender politics are ever present, achievements are hard-won and sometimes rolled back in the face of misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and other ingrained expressions of exclusion. Buildings, cities, and landscapes are not only where battles over gender unfurl, but these spaces also foster identities and incite change. In this lecture series, trailblazing women and LGBTQIA + design practitioners, scholars, and activists—working in architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design—insist that gender must remain in sharp focus if we are to shape equitable and just built environments.

All lectures are free, open to the public, and held in the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture Sciame Auditorium. For live captioning, ASL interpretation, or access requests, please contact ssadean@ccny.cuny.edu.

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