Study Architecture 
ProPEL The Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) and the Association of Architecture Schools of Australasia (AASA) are pleased to announce the 2026 International Conference being hosted in Brisbane, Australia. The conference will take place July 8-11, 2026, and will explore:
Planetary Practice
Architectures of a Shared Global Future
Planetary Practice is an international conference that invites architectural researchers, educators, and practitioners to explore how design might respond to the expansive and interconnected questions of our time.
Architecture and urbanism are increasingly called upon to engage with planetary challenges—those that exceed disciplinary boundaries and resist easy solutions. These challenges are cultural, material, environmental, technological, and political; they unfold unevenly across places and communities, and they demand new ways of thinking, imagining, and practicing.
Rather than retreating into crisis or urgency, Planetary Practice encourages approaches that are reflective, generative, and speculative. How might architectural design open up new pathways of inquiry? What forms of practice are needed to engage meaningfully with complex, large-scale conditions? What roles might pedagogy, research, design and built work play in shaping futures at multiple scales?
This conference seeks contributions that examine how architecture can operate as a planetary practice—through design, through research, through teaching, and through the cultivation of new forms of knowledge and collaboration. We welcome submissions that challenge conventional categories, that connect across disciplines and cultures, and that propose new imaginaries for practice in a time of planetary entanglement.
Join us in Magandjin–Meanjin as we gather to share, question, and reimagine the role of design in relation to the shared conditions of our world.
Steering Committee
John Doyle
Conference Co-Chair,
RMIT University
Kirsty Volz
Conference Co-Chair,
Queensland University of Technology
José Gámez
University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Michael Monti
Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture
Conference Themes
At Planetary Practice, we will explore four thematic tracks that foreground architectural design as a critical mode of inquiry into planetary-scale questions. These themes offer distinct entry points while remaining connected through a shared interest in how architecture can respond to complex, interconnected challenges through emerging tools, methods, and ways of knowing.
Scientific Committee
Andrew Burgess
Auckland University of Technology
Deborah Ascher-Barnstone
University of Sydney
Mark R. Olweny
Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University
Mo Zell
University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa
Opening Keynote
Planetary Practice
Elizabeth Bowie Christoforetti is associate professor in practice of architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she directs the Laboratory for Values in the Built Environment, and founding principal of Supernormal, an architecture and urban design studio based in Cambridge, MA. She founded Supernormal to create meaningful and practical change through the intersection of architecture, urbanism, technology, and contemporary culture. Elizabeth directs Supernormal as an engaged design practice that meets the world exactly as it is, and with a glass that is half full.
Read More
Elizabeth Bowie Christoforetti is associate professor in practice of architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, where she directs the Laboratory for Values in the Built Environment, and founding principal of Supernormal, an architecture and urban design studio based in Cambridge, MA. She founded Supernormal to create meaningful and practical change through the intersection of architecture, urbanism, technology, and contemporary culture. Elizabeth directs Supernormal as an engaged design practice that meets the world exactly as it is, and with a glass that is half full.
Elizabeth’s academic research and teaching focus on emerging modes of design practice in the built environment. Her work at the GSD aims to uncover the ethical and cultural potentials of scalable systems of design by daylighting, operating upon, and designing new socio-technical systems – design that is dependent upon a combination of social and technological processes, and collaboration between them. Elizabeth’s work joins a perspective of radical pragmatism with a deep value for the potential of design imagination and architectural intelligence.
Jacob Reidel examines and advances the purpose, value, and potential of architectural practice. His activities—spanning practice, research, publication, and teaching—investigate how architectural practice is designed, how professional institutions shape the built environment, and how the discipline adapts to shifting social, political, economic, and technological conditions.
Read More
Jacob Reidel examines and advances the purpose, value, and potential of architectural practice. His activities—spanning practice, research, publication, and teaching—investigate how architectural practice is designed, how professional institutions shape the built environment, and how the discipline adapts to shifting social, political, economic, and technological conditions.
Reidel is founder and director of Project on Practice, an independent research and advisory platform dedicated to studying and advancing the systems that organize architectural practice—from firms and professional organizations to licensure, regulation, instruments of service, and project delivery models—and the ways these systems shape the capacity of architects to address contemporary local and global challenges. His work approaches architecture not only as a design discipline but as a field shaped by governance, regulation, and institutional structures that condition how buildings are conceived, produced, and maintained.
Reidel’s professional experience spans traditional, interdisciplinary, and technology-startup practice environments, including REX, Ennead Architects, WeWork, and Saltmine. From 2019 to 2025, Reidel served as Assistant Professor in Practice of Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where he taught courses on professional practice exploring new models of practice and examining how architectural organizations operate and deliver projects. While at Harvard he co-guest-edited Harvard Design Magazine 52: Instruments of Service (2024), which examines the hidden mechanics and visible outputs of design practice.
Reidel is co-founder and editor of CLOG, an international publication that since 2011 has explored topics ranging from renderings to brutalism to artificial intelligence to the architectural impact of WeWork. He is also co-editor of OfficeUS Manual (Lars Müller Publishers, 2017), a critical guide to the architectural workplace that documents and interrogates the protocols, policies, and procedures of architectural offices. The publication emerged from the U.S. Pavilion at the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale, where he served on the curatorial team. Since 2023 he has co-chaired the AIA New York Future of Practice Committee, which organizes a regular series of public programs at the Center for Architecture in New York examining the evolving nature of architectural practice.
Closing Keynote
Kaunitz Yeung Architecture
David Kaunitz is an architect and co-founder of Kaunitz Yeung Architecture, an Australian practice internationally recognised for community-led design with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities across remote and regional contexts.
Read More
David Kaunitz is an architect and co-founder of Kaunitz Yeung Architecture, an Australian practice internationally recognised for community-led design with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities across remote and regional contexts. Over more than two decades, his work has focused on health, aged care, housing and cultural projects that integrate architecture with Country, culture and community governance. David is also an Associate Professor of Practice at the University of Sydney, where he teaches Indigenous-led co-design and socially responsive architecture. Kaunitz Yeung Architecture has received numerous national and international awards, including the UIA Vassilis Sgoutas Prize for architecture serving impoverished communities.
Ka Wai Yeung co-founded Kaunitz Yeung Architecture to create socially responsible, culturally sensitive and humane architecture. At the heart of her work is a deep commitment to co-design and co-building with local communities. Together with her team, she has demonstrated how architecture can empower people, sensitively integrate with Country, and maximise social impact at every stage of the process.
Read More
Kawai co-founded Kaunitz Yeung Architecture to create socially responsible, culturally sensitive and humane architecture. At the heart of her work is a deep commitment to co-design and co-building with local communities. Together with her team, she has demonstrated how architecture can empower people, sensitively integrate with Country, and maximise social impact at every stage of the process. She has had the privilege of working with Indigenous communities across Australia and throughout the Pacific. Kawai is dedicated to supporting the continuation of heritage and culture, and to bridging social gaps, with a particular focus on health and aged care, cultural and arts centres, schools, and housing. The practice’s work has been recognised with numerous national and international awards. In 2021, she and co-founder David Kaunitz jointly received the Vassilis Sgoutas Prize from the UIA for their contribution to improving living conditions for underprivileged communities, and she serves as a juror for this triennial prize this year.
Marni Reti is a proud Palawa and Ngāti Wai woman, born and raised on Gadigal, D’harawal and Bidjigal Country with ties to Redfern, Waterloo and wider inner-city/inner-west Aboriginal communities. She is a registered architect and Associate at Kaunitz Yeung Architecture, alumni and previous Master’s Design Studio Lead at UTS and currently holds a position as Senior Lecturer at USYD.
Read More
Marni is a proud Palawa and Ngāti Wai woman, born and raised on Gadigal, D’harawal and Bidjigal Country with ties to Redfern, Waterloo and wider inner-city/inner-west Aboriginal communities. She is a registered architect and Associate at Kaunitz Yeung Architecture, alumni and previous Master’s Design Studio Lead at UTS and currently holds a position as Senior Lecturer at USYD. She has long been an advocate for the respectful incorporation of Indigenous knowledge into architectural education and practice, with an academic and professional career dedicated to participatory design with community and Country to amplify culture. Her dedication to Designing with Country and Communities has led her to be considered an expert in this field with lived experience as both a community member and an architect. Marni has committed her professional and academic career to engaging Indigenous epistemology into architectural practice and education.
Conference Partners
Questions
Michelle Sturges
Conferences Manager
202-785-2324
msturges@acsa-arch.org
Eric W. Ellis
Senior Director of Operations and Programs
202-785-2324
eellis@acsa-arch.org
