Conference: Transitioning Worlds

April 20 – April 21, 2026

Transitioning Worlds: A conference organized by Natasha Sandmeier, Kutan Ayata, and Mariana Ibañez

The third program in our AUD60 Celebration

Transitioning Worlds is a two-day conference celebrating sixty years of architectural experimentation at UCLA AUD, bringing together faculty, alumni and guests to explore how design responds to a world in flux. The conference will reflect on the changing global conditions that shape architecture and the evolving pedagogies, practices, and technologies through which AUD continues to engage them.

The conference includes one full day of thematic sessions, gathering panels of designers, instigators, and thought leaders to take up and debate the ground shifting beneath us all, followed by a day of student-fueled presentations and conversations. The entire program is open to the public; please register in advance.

Please bookmark this page and revisit for updates; we will announce a full roster of presenters in March 2026.

As climate, technology, governance, and urban life undergo fundamental transformation, the roles of architects and designers have never been more critical. These transitions demand new forms of thinking, designing, and visualizing our world. Transitioning Worlds examines how architecture engages these shifts through four lenses: experimental practices that push disciplinary boundaries, educational models that inform design research and prepare future designers, building as both intellectual and material pursuit, and Los Angeles as a laboratory for urban futures.

Across lightning presentations and facilitated discussions, the event traces the trajectory of ideas that have defined AUD's intellectual culture while projecting into architecture's next chapter. Transitioning Worlds positions design as an active force in shaping planetary change, celebrating six decades of disciplinary risk while collectively imagining what architecture must become. The symposium is both retrospective and projective, honoring the bold thinking that has defined the department while speculating on what comes next.

The full program includes:

Monday, April 20: MORNING

Welcome & Introduction

Session 1 | EXPERIMENTAL PRACTICES | Lightning Talks
Speculation is central to architectural thinking as a method of inquiry. This session considers how architects construct alternative realities to question existing systems and imagine new spatial, material, and environmental futures.

Session 2 | DESIGNING EDUCATION | Moderated Panel Conversation
Revisiting the role of architectural education in an age of accelerating change, this session asks what forms of knowledge, collaboration, and critical practice will define the next generations of design learning? How can schools remain experimental while addressing social, environmental and disciplinary transformation?

Monday, April 20: AFTERNOON

Session 3 | ARCHITECTURE WITH CAPITAL B | Lightning Talks
Building remains architecture’s enduring medium, yet its materials, logics, and economies are rapidly transforming. This session examines construction as both intellectual and material pursuits: how making, precision, and performance define architecture’s future relevance.

Session 4 | LA LABORATORY | Moderated Panel Conversation
Los Angeles has long been both subject and instrument of design research at AUD. This session explores the city as a site of inquiry where questions of infrastructure, ecology and collective futures converge.

Tuesday, April 21: MORNING

Student Pecha Kucha
Day Two of Transitioning Worlds looks toward tomorrow, and to the designers who will lead architecture and design into that next era. Day Two’s morning session features a Pecha Kucha presentation by a cohort of current AUD students, taking up the theme of this year’s edition of student-run journal POOL: laminar flow, or a state of flow in which fluid moves across parallel, organized streamlines, with minimal turbulence or intermixing. Students will address three conditions in relation to the discipline of architecture, and situate their current thoughts and preoccupations in relation to these conditions.

Tuesday, April 21: AFTERNOON

Afternoon of Making and Unmaking
Tuesday morning’s Pecha Kucha conversations will frame physical making and crafting for Tuesday afternoon. Students will jot thoughts and reflections that will be placed in a time capsule, to be broken apart at AUD’s 70th anniversary in 2036 as a look back at what was on our minds in 2026. As a conclusion to Transitioning Worlds, this “Afternoon of Making and Unmaking” encourages exchange and longevity across the AUD community, probing the past and the present as a gesture toward the future.