This annual invitation-only event brings together CCNY student scholars and scholarship donors, along with CCNY faculty. This year's presentation:  "Place, Memory & Culture in Harlem" will help guests learn how a just, equitable, sustainable, and beautiful city is designed and how a vision for such a city is formulated.

The Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture, the flagship public school of architecture in New York, is committed to creating a just, sustainable, and imaginative future for a rapidly urbanizing planet. The Place, Memory & Culture Incubator, supported at Spitzer by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is focused on community-based partnerships and projects in Harlem that engage the built environment, preservation, and the humanities through a social justice lens. Spitzer is using the $1.5 million grant from Mellon’s Humanities in Place program to diversify faculty, embed the humanities and the arts in the design studios, and create a new model for university and community partnerships based on reciprocal collaborations. Knowledge about place, memory and culture is being co-produced with community partners and shared with the Harlem community, via exhibitions, a symposium, a digital archive, and other programs in public art and education.

The Harlem Incubator is fostering important shifts in design pedagogy, programs, and faculty and strengthening connections between Spitzer and its neighbors in Harlem. Through the Harlem Incubator, Spitzer is infusing the humanities into design pedagogy and opening a needed critique of traditional approaches to historic preservation. The Harlem Incubator is producing multiple forms of knowledge, especially via insights on lived experiences gained from students who belong to communities that have long been marginalized and ignored. Harlem community partners are taking a reciprocal role in knowledge production, preservation, and design.

About Our Keynote Speakers

Marta Gutman, PhD, an architectural and urban historian, is dean of the Spitzer School of Architecture at the City College of New York | CUNY, the city’s premier public school of architecture. Expert in the history of public architecture for children and in repurposing architecture as a strategy for city-building, she studies ordinary places in cities. Through this work, she tackles power and culture in all walks of life, emphasizes the activism of women especially on behalf of children, and ties local stories to national and international histories. Gutman’s commitment to social justice has been manifest since she started her career as an architect designing housing for the New York City Housing Authority and shelters for battered women, abused children, and homeless New Yorkers.

Jerome W Haferd is a licensed architect, public artist, and educator based in Harlem, NYC. He is assistant professor of architecture at City College’s Spitzer School of Architecture. Haferd is principal of award-winning studio Jerome Haferd Architecture and co-founder of BRANDT : HAFERD Architecture. He is also a core initiator of Dark Matter U (DMU), a BIPOC led network geared towards new models of design pedagogy and practice. Haferd received the 2022 #BlackVisionaries award as part of a DMU cohort. He is co-director for the Mellon funded Place Memory and Culture Incubator at Spitzer School of Architecture beginning in Fall 2023.

Sean Weiss is an architectural and urban historian. He is the Chairperson of the Architecture Department and Associate Professor at the Spitzer School of Architecture. He received a BA from Vassar College and a PhD in Art History from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His essays and reviews have appeared in Casabella, Journal of Architectural Education, Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, Journal of Urban History, Technology and Culture, Log, and the 2019 edited volume, Non-Standard Architectural Productions: Between Aesthetic Experience and Social Action.