The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture is pleased to announce its Spring 2026 Lecture Series. The focus this semester is on attending to what is built, what is imagined, and what it means for the world we share. With an emphasis on conversation, we ask: What is our agency as architects and designers? This lecture series is presented in collaboration with The Diane Lewis Student Lecture Series, whose mission this year is to honor the ongoing interest in inviting architects whose work represents alternative practices.  

The Eleanore Pettersen Lecture Series
The Eleanore Pettersen Lecture, established through a generous gift to The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture, is dedicated to the voices of women in architecture as a lasting tribute to Ms. Pettersen's significant impact in the world of architecture and her love of The Cooper Union. Pettersen, who had worked as an apprentice to Frank Lloyd Wright and would later design the post-White House home of Richard M. Nixon, was one of the first women to be licensed as an architect in New Jersey, and developed a successful practice there that spanned over fifty years.

Lectures in this series have been given by Toshiko Mori (2005), Phyllis Lambert (2006), Elizabeth Wright Ingraham (2008), Billie Tsien (2009), Francine Houben (2011), Sarah Wigglesworth (2013), and Farshid Moussavi (2014), Mabel Wilson (2020), Lesley Lokko + Sumayya Vally (2021), Samia Henni (2022).  

The Fariba Tehrani Lecture  
The Fariba Tehrani Lecture was initiated in honor of Biba Tehrani, whose decades-long commitment to education has served as a radical alternative to the very models of conventional pedagogies of which she is both beneficiary and victim. Her commitment to discursive interaction, speech, and oratory makes this endowment an apt tribute for her contributions to generations of students.

The YC Foundation Lecture
The YC Foundation, Inc., New York, makes grants for lectures in Architecture that inspire young architects to leadership through the experiences and stories of the lecturers.

The Diane Lewis Student Lecture Series 2025-26
The 2025-2026 Student Lecture Series received a great amount of continued interest in inviting architects with alternative practices, from journalism to set design to civic service. This interest comes from an acute awareness of the global crises impacting us and speaks to a desire to engage with architecture not as a fixed practice, but as a critical dialogue of social, cultural, political, and technological inquiry.

The mission of the Student Lecture Series this year is to honor that in all respects: through the people we have chosen to invite, as well as a concerted effort with the school’s faculty series and Acting Dean Aranda to create more space for intellectual discussion between the students and the lecturers. We aim to work towards this by collecting and circulating student critique on the lectures throughout the semester; by reintroducing the lunchtime lectures to center student-led discussion around the work of recent alumni and the screenings of past lectures; and by grounding these new initiatives in a deeper understanding of how the Student Lecture Series came to be, so that we can collectively ask: how has, how does, and how can architecture respond to the world around us?

The Diane Lewis Student Lecture Series is endowed by Elise Jaffe + Jeffrey Brown.

Current Work
Current Work is a lecture series co-sponsored with The Architectural League of New York featuring leading figures in the worlds of architecture, urbanism, design, and art.