Permanent Faculty

An Ecuadorian architect, Malu Borja Lopez, joins the school as Professor of Practice in Architecture. Lopez has been a partner and principal at Al Borde Architecture Studio since 2009, an experimental practice built on collective authorship, local materials, and opening the design process to the people who use it. Her work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale, the Sharjah Architecture Triennial, and the Chicago Architecture Biennial, and recognized with the Global Award for Sustainable Architecture and the Schelling Architecture Medal. She is currently studying award-winning collaborative practices across Latin America to understand what makes their design methods distinct. Trained in both architecture and development studies, with a recent fellowship in Spatial Justice at the University of Oregon, Borja Lopez sees design-build teaching and participatory practice as two sides of the same skill: facilitating collective creation.

John Dwyer joins the school as a Professor of Practice in Architecture. Dwyer is currently working with city leadership in Philadelphia to advance housing-first as both policy and architectural typology, tackling youth homelessness through graduate housing along the city's Market East corridor. He hopes to bring that same systemic approach to his work at Tulane and in New Orleans. For Dwyer, the questions guiding that work are simple: who benefits, who is served, and who decides. The return holds personal weight, too, he left New Orleans 18 years ago after a project fell through, and calls this appointment a chance to come home.

Robert Hutchison brings over thirty years of practice as he joins the school as Professor of Practice in Architecture, alongside a career of teaching at the University of Washington and Washington State University. His self-funded research uses architecture to sit with questions it never intends to build: after Memory Houses examined personal loss, his current project, Memory Landscapes, turns to Japan's Tohoku coastline, devastated by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, reimagining its tsunami walls as public space. The project, informed by a five-week, 750-kilometer walk along the coastline, will be published by Park Books this fall alongside interviews with Japanese architects and community members. Hutchison sees New Orleans, shaped by the shifting Mississippi delta, as a similar laboratory for studying the fragile relationship between engineering, ecology, and social resilience.

Magdalena Valdevenito Belmar joins the school as Assistant Professor in Architecture. A Chilean architect and founder of the Santiago-based practice affirma, she works at the intersection of technical detailing and community-making, treating building assemblies as both a design and political act. Her recent work with the nonprofit San Isidoro takes an "acupuncture" approach to school infrastructure across Santiago, small, minimal interventions, like a completed shaded plaza at Politécnico San Luis, that add up to a larger network of social investment. Valdevenito holds degrees from Columbia University and Universidad Católica de Chile, and describes her teaching as horizontal, rooted in radical pedagogy that pushes students to question the architect's role as distant expert. She sees New Orleans' layered history of disparity, disaster, and resilience as fertile ground for that ethically grounded approach.

Fellows and Research Faculty

Xixi Chen is the new Architecture and Asian Studies Fellow. Born in Shanghai and raised outside Chicago, she runs the creative practice XXS–Xixi Studio, which examines diaspora and memory through work recently featured in MIT's Thresholds, MoMA PS1's Greater New York, and the Asia Art Archive's collections in Hong Kong and Brooklyn. At Tulane, she'll continue developing Ghost Houses 记忆念的家, a project reconstructing demolished ancestral homes in Shanghai through oral history, pursuing both a participatory public archive and a manuscript on the city's housing policy, alongside an elective seminar on global Chinatowns. A licensed architect who has practiced at Michael Maltzan Architecture and 2x4, Chen holds degrees from Columbia and the University of Illinois, and hopes New Orleans' own layered history of displacement and memory will inform her research.

Ira Concepcion, AIA, WELL AP, joins the faculty as a Visiting Assistant Professor in Architecture and Principal at Senso Architects. His practice studies how light, sound, material, and atmosphere shape the body, influencing stress, attention, and recovery, while his research through Senso Labs asks how AI can sharpen architectural judgment rather than replace it. A 2019 graduate of Tulane's Master of Architecture program who has taught in the core studio sequence since 2023, Concepcion wants students to treat research and narrative as the beginning of design, not a step before it. As AI reshapes the discipline, he sees his role as helping students stay authors of their own ideas, using new tools without losing the thinking underneath them.

Julia Hedges is the new NASEM Gulf Landscape Fellow and research assistant professor, working within the Gulf Coast Climate Futures Program to study the region's marginal and orphan oil and gas wells. Reading these underground assemblages as, "prophetic views into our environmental futures," she traces relationships across scales and systems to imagine what comes after extraction. That approach, building narratives across processes, histories, and artifacts to generate new architectural knowledge, carries through her work on vacancy Birmingham, and her MLA thesis reimagining the Jewish summer camp as a diasporic, anti-territorial practice. Most recently a Visiting Assistant Professor in Landscape Architecture at Auburn University, Hedges holds an MLA with distinction from Harvard's GSD and a BA in architecture from Yale, and arrives at Tulane eager to read the Gulf Coast's contested landscapes alongside her students.

Pavan Vadgama joins the faculty as Visiting Assistant Professor and Fellow in Architecture and South Asian Studies. Based between Berlin and New York, Vadgama studies how cities draw lines around property, care, and belonging, research that began with his Princeton thesis on Ahmedabad's gaushala, or urban cow-shelters, and has since grown into CattleDAO, a speculative blockchain governance interface for the city's stray cow care network, and the traveling exhibition Holy Cow, Stray Cow! At Tulane, he plans to expand that inquiry into a global mapping of care infrastructures and a multispecies urban shed prototype, while bringing computational and speculative methods into studio teaching. A recent resident at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Vadgama holds degrees from Princeton and the Universität der Künste Berlin, and is eager to see what the Gulf region's own contested infrastructures can reveal in conversation with his research in Indian cities.

Program Leadership Changes & Promotions

Alongside this incoming cohort, the school is marking several transitions among its continuing faculty.

Meghan Saas, previously Associate Director of the Design Program, has been named Director of the Design Program, succeeding founding director Tiffany Lin, who returns to full-time teaching as Favrot V Associate Professor of Architecture and Design.

Margarita Jover, Professor and co-Director of the Landscape Architecture and Engineering Program, has been appointed as the Harvey-Wadsworth Chair in Landscape Urbanism.

Several faculty members have also been promoted this year. Edson Cabalfin, Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs, has been promoted to Full Professor. Wes Michaels (Landscape Architecture), Emilie Taylor Welty (Architecture, Program Director for Architecture and Design/Build Manager at the Albert and Tina Small Center for Collaborative Design), and Chris Meyer (Architecture) have each been awarded tenure, continuing in their roles as Associate Professor. And John Huppi, Associate Program Director for Real Estate Development, has been promoted to Senior Professor of Practice, effective in 2027.

Departing Faculty

Kenneth Schwartz, FAIA, has retired and been appointed Dean Emeritus. Ken's leadership as Dean from 2008-2018 transformed the Tulane School of Architecture into a national model for community engagement, applied research, and social innovation. His decades of teaching and practice have been recognized many times over by NAAB, ASCA and others. Ken was appointed at the founding executive director of the Phyllis Taylor Center for Social Innovation and Design Thinking in 2014 in addition to his involvement at the school. Thank you, Ken, for your leadership and service.

Judith Kinnard, FAIA, has retired and been appointed as Emerita Professor of Architecture. Judith has led an outstanding 46-year career and paved the way for women architects in her years on faculty at Tulane, Syracuse, Princeton and the University of Virginia. While at Tulane, her teaching prowess was recognized with the ACSA Distinguished Professor award in 2018 and her service as past-president of NAAB and ACSA. Thank you for your dedication and passion to teach, Judith.

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