Public Programs: Fall 2025
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Scene from British Documentary, HyperNormalisation, directed by Adam Curtis, that articulates the failed Soviet dream for a new society with transformed people.
Fall 2025 Public Programs: HyperNormalisation and portals to normals otherwise
HyperNormalisation — a term coined by Alexei Yurchak and popularized by Adam Curtis — describes how the absurd is orchestrated to become the norm. It’s a sustained shifting of the Overton window. HyperNormalisation names the condition where sprawling, contradictory systems grow so totalizing that we are no longer able to make sense of them, leading us to adapt to and accommodate them.
First used for the Soviet Union’s final years, HyperNormalisation now describes a global state: crisis as everyday life. In this condition, we accept environmental devastation as a natural part of our production processes, and ethically gray profit systems such as carceral expansion or the medical insurance industry or privatized air as norms. We are slowly numbed to disasters, as injustices are made to feel natural, inevitable or even an intellectual debate.
Architecture plays a central role in this conditioning, as it gives form to ideas of empire, it blueprints segregation, it reframes extraction as development, it codifies dispossession, and disguises theft as freedom. Through practices such as gentrification, market speculation, and the like, architecture is able to stage violence as progress as it abstracts and aestheticizes injustice while masquerading as neutral.
If such a discipline is functioning as was designed, can it be reformed? Or must we dream otherwise? To practice "otherwise" is to work outside Western, colonial norms; a lineage shaped by thinkers like Rolando Vázquez (epistemic disobedience), Walter Mignolo (border thinking), and writers such as Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten and José Esteban Muñoz, who trace fugitive, care-based or non-normative practices.
So, this year, and with these frameworks, we ask: what do/could the next worlds look like; the ones that can lead us out of the trap of such HyperNormals? What are the portals to those next worlds, and how do we make them? Let’s time travel. Let’s swim in dreams.
Symposia, Lectures and Workshops
CM-A Thinks Allowed
CM-A Thinks Allowed is a discursive series that brings faculty and students together to explore a single shared text. Each participant offers their interpretation through the lens of their own practice, research and worldview, before opening to a moderated dialogue.
CM-A Bookshelf
CM-A Bookshelf is a new event series inviting Carnegie Mellon Architecture faculty to share the readings that shape their worlds. Each session offers a glimpse into their relationship with reading; understood broadly, from books and essays to folklore, films, songs or family archives. In conversation with a guest of their choice, they reflect on the texts that linger, unravel their imagination, anchor their sense of belonging, or spark their practice. From nursery rhymes to government documents, philosophy to fantasy, each Bookshelf becomes a portrait of reading as a living, evolving practice.
Book Launches
[Book launch] "Time Well Spent: An American Architect in Europe, 1893" by Francesca Torello (editor)
PLOTLINE
PLOTLINE is Carnegie Mellon Architecture’s film series, curated to run in parallel with our public programs. Each season of PLOTLINE extends the themes explored in our lectures and exhibitions into a cinematic register — using film as another mode of critical inquiry, reflection and conversation.
Carnegie Mellon Architecture’s public programs are organized by Tuliza Sindi, Curator for Public Programs and Director of Publications, in consultation with a committee. The committee includes: Jared Abraham, Niloufar Alenjery, Sarosh Anklesaria, Mary-Lou Arscott, Christi Danner, Matthew Huber, Meredith Marsh, Vernelle A. A. Noel and Tommy CheeMou Yang.
Carnegie Mellon Architecture’s public programs series is generously sponsored by the Alan H. Rider Distinguished Visiting Lecturer in Architecture Fund, the William Finglass Practice Lecture Series Fund, the Watson Chair in Architecture Fund, and the Hans Vetter Memorial Lecture Fund.