Events

Spring 2025 Sciame Lecture Series: Sara Zewde

The Aesthetics of Being

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

Sara Zewde (she/her) is the founding principal of Studio Zewde, a design firm practicing landscape architecture, urbanism, and public art. Named to Time Magazine’s TIME 100 Next, Architectural Digest's AD100, and *Wallpaper’s 300 People Shaping Creative America, her practice is celebrated for its design methods that sync culture, ecology, and craft. In parallel to her design practice, Sara serves as Assistant Professor of Practice at Harvard University Graduate School of Design and is currently writing a book on her research retracing Frederick Law Olmsted's journeys through the Slave South. Sara holds a master’s in landscape architecture from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, a master’s in city planning from MIT, and a BA in sociology and statistics from Boston University.

"The Aesthetics of Being": In the context of clarified social and political tensions, a changing climate, and rapid urban development, bell hooks' notion of "The Aesthetics of Being" can offer creative departures for contemporary design practice today. Sara Zewde will share the recent design work of Studio Zewde across a range of geographies given hooks’ framework.

Suggested Reading: hooks, bell. An Aesthetic of Blackness - Strange and Oppositional

"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.