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(Geraldine Forbes Isais. Image credit: University of New Mexico)

The architectural education community is mourning the loss of Geraldine Forbes Isais, a visionary leader, educator, and tireless advocate for equity and inclusion. Forbes Isais broke historic barriers when she was elected as the first Hispanic president of ACSA for the 2003–04 academic year. She will be remembered by many for championing underrepresented voices and mentoring generations of faculty and students.

Her enduring commitment to the discipline reached another milestone when she was named an ACSA Distinguished Professor in 2006 and later served as chancellor of the ACSA College of Distinguished Professors in 2016–17. She helped found the ACSA Women’s Leadership Council, part of her efforts to build vital international networks to support and elevate women and young scholars across academia. Her legacy as a transformative leader and compassionate mentor remains deeply woven into the fabric of ACSA and the entire discipline.

To read more about her remarkable life, career, and lasting contributions, please visit the full obituaries published by the and .

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Architects Against Housing Alienation (AAHA) has launched a new public website bringing together student work from END HOUSING ALIENATION NOW!, a cross-Canada architecture Superstudio that mobilized students and faculty to imagine alternatives to the country’s current housing system.

Running from September 2025 to May 2026, the Superstudio brought architecture schools across Canada into a shared pedagogical project focused on one of the country’s most urgent challenges: how architecture can meaningfully contribute to ending housing alienation.

Rather than approaching the housing crisis simply as a problem of increasing housing supply, participating studios examined the deeper forces shaping housing today—including land ownership, financialization, displacement, colonialism, the climate crisis and the organization of collective life. Students developed architectural proposals that explored decommodified forms of tenure, such as cooperative and co-housing, community land trusts and collective ownership; as well as locally engaged forms of building and urbanism such as adaptive reuse and infill housing.

The newly launched website creates a national archive and public exhibition of this work. Visitors can explore projects by school and studio, or move across the exhibition through shared themes and demands. Together, the projects demonstrate the breadth of architectural possibilities that emerge when housing is understood not primarily as a financial asset, but as the physical foundation of individual and collective and ecological life.

“The Superstudio began with a simple proposition: a challenge as large as the housing crisis requires us to work collectively. By bringing students and faculty across the country into conversation, we wanted to multiply the possibilities for what housing could become. This website makes that collective body of work public—not as a single solution to the housing crisis, but as an expanding field of alternatives.”
—Adrian Blackwell, AAHA Co-founder

The Superstudio connected individual courses through common resources, lectures, discussions, and exchanges while allowing each school to develop its own approach to the shared theme. The result is not a single vision for the future of housing, but a diverse collection of architectural propositions emerging from different cities, regions, pedagogies, and forms of inquiry. The studio involved 12 universities: Athabasca University, British Columbia Institute of Technology, Carleton University, Laurentian University, OCAD University, Toronto Metropolitan University, Université de Montréal, University of British Columbia, University of Calgary, University of Manitoba, University of Toronto and University of Waterloo, with more than one studio from a number of schools.

The Superstudio was supported by Canadian Council of University Schools of Architecture (CCUSA), and the website was designed by Ali Qadeer.

Projects now presented on the website range from the adaptive use of underutilized church lands and cooperative housing to community land trusts, transformations of existing housing towers, alternative methods of housing manufacture, and new relationships between housing, ecology, public space, and collective life.

The project extends the work of Architects Against Housing Alienation, the national collective that represented Canada at the 2023 Venice Biennale of Architecture. AAHA was formed in 2021 around the proposition that Canada’s housing crisis is fundamentally connected to the treatment of land and housing as commodities. Its work brings together architects, advocates, activists, researchers, and communities to develop alternatives that reconnect housing to land, community, and creative selfdetermination.

The Superstudio shifts that work into architectural education. By coordinating studios across the country, it asks a generation of emerging architects not only to respond to the housing crisis, but to reconsider the systems, assumptions, and forms through which housing is produced.

EXPLORE THE SUPERSTUDIO��

About Architects Against Housing Alienation

Architects Against Housing Alienation (AAHA) is a collective of architects, activists, and advocates working to end housing alienation in Canada. Formed in 2021, the collective develops architectural proposals, research, exhibitions, advocacy, and pedagogy aimed at creating socially, ecologically, and creatively empowering alternatives to commodified housing. AAHA represented Canada at the 2023 Venice Biennale of Architecture.

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Published two times each academic year, the journal is widely distributed in hard copy and online as a benefit of institutional membership in ACSA and via Taylor & Francis. Each issue features double-blind peer-reviewed contributions, currently presented under multiple categories: Essay, Design, Narrative, and Image. A portion of published content is solicited by editors, including opinion essays, translations, interviews, and reviews. The executive editor has primary responsibility for ������’s editorial and graphic content and leads an editorial board.��

JAE is currently undergoing a transformation, one of several in its long history, and the appointment of a new executive editor is the first in a series of steps to reset the journal. These steps include appointing new associate editors and editorial board members with a clarified and revised set of policies and practices. The transformation takes place in the context of a March 2026 report from a Special Committee charged by the ACSA Board of Directors. The ACSA board has adopted a number of recommendations from the Special Committee. These include:��

• Adopting and elevating the visibility of (COPE) standards of practice in ACSA journals, conferences, and other scholarly programs;��
• Creating a standing Ethics and Integrity Committee to oversee ethical reviews arising from ACSA programs;
• Creating a Code of Conduct for Member Programs; and
• Evaluating ACSA’s scholarly programs to be more open and reflective of the full spectrum of scholarly and creative work happening in architectural education worldwide.

The ACSA Board of Directors wishes to examine the JAE’s editorial scope over the coming year in the context of the Association’s mission. The next executive editor is expected to be an active voice in these conversations.��

The executive editor will edit a wholly open issue for JAE Volume 81, Issue 2, Fall 2027. The call for submissions for this issue will appear in fall 2026 with a submission deadline of March 2027.��

Qualifications for the executive editor include:��

• an inclusive vision for JAE’s role in publishing architectural education scholarship of the highest quality;��
• a recognized record of peer-reviewed research and publication;��
• significant editorial experience;��
• active involvement in architectural education; and��
• a keen insight into the broad issues affecting architectural design education, theory, and practice now and in the future.

The term of service is three years, with the possibility of a second, and final, three-year term. The new editor will assume responsibilities as executive editor beginning January 1, 2027.

A search committee drawn from the ACSA Board of Directors and membership will review and evaluate all candidates, and send its final recommendation to the ACSA Board of Directors for approval by the end of November 2026. The members of the search committee are:

Robert A. González, University of New Mexico

Igor Marjanović, Rice University

Dahlia Nduom, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, ACSA at-large director

June Williamson, City College of New York, 2026-27 ACSA president

The executive editor is appointed by the ACSA Board of Directors and reports to the board through its Executive Committee.

TO APPLY candidates must download the cover sheet and submit the following items in a single PDF in the following order by the October 14, 2026, deadline:

• Cover sheet
• A statement of interest that addresses your potential to contribute to the editorial mission of the JAE(2 pages, maximum)
• A current curriculum vitae
• 2-3 examples of past publications (digital)

Send all materials to jae.search@acsa-arch.org. Additional materials may be requested as part of the screening process. Online interviews to be conducted in October and November 2026.

For more information about the journal’s current policies and practices, please visit Questions regarding the search, editorial duties, compensation, or terms of this position can be directed to Michael Monti, Executive Director, ACSA, mmonti@acsa-arch.org.

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AALAAASL

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AALA Column, August 2026

Alisha D. Rall and Barbara Opar, column editors

Column by Maya Gervits

A Retired Librarian’s Advice for Working Better with Your Library

Image generated by ChatGPT from a photograph taken at a freshman information literacy session

It has been a little more than a month since my retirement. Looking back over more than thirty-five years in academia, I find myself reflecting less on what I accomplished than on what I learned. The lesson that stands out most clearly is that a library’s greatest contribution was never simply the collections we built, the technologies we adopted, or the classes we taught. Its greatest strength emerged through collaboration.

In this regard, I am especially grateful to the faculty at the at NJIT for the many years of collaboration, collegiality, and intellectual exchange that made my work both enjoyable and deeply meaningful. Their willingness to share ideas, discuss teaching and research, and involve the library in the school’s academic life enriched my understanding of architecture and design and continually reminded me why the work of an academic librarian does matter.

The most��vibrant and active��libraries are not separate from the��school’s daily academic life; they are woven into it.��The strongest partnerships develop through ongoing conversations between faculty and librarians about teaching, research, and the intellectual questions that shape both. Over the years, I came to realize that librarians are most effective not when they simply respond to isolated requests, but when they are invited to become partners in the educational and research process.

Many of the most rewarding collaborations began with a simple conversation about a new studio, an assignment, or an emerging research interest. Those conversations often became the starting point for discovery.

Teaching students how to search catalogs and databases remains important, but the most valuable part of a research consultation often comes before the search itself. It begins with discussing the project, clarifying its objectives, exploring possible directions, and distinguishing between what students think they need and what they ultimately need to understand. Students may not remember every database they learned to search, but they often remember the conversation that changed how they approached a project.

Research begins not with answers, but with better questions.��For this reason, personal communication between faculty and librarians matters. An email requesting “a library session” a day before class rarely provides enough time to understand an assignment’s goals or develop meaningful instruction. In contrast, conversations held while a course or studio is still being planned allow librarians to contribute in ways that extend well beyond demonstrating databases. Early collaboration enables librarians to identify resources, acquire needed materials, create research guides, develop customized instruction, and anticipate where students are likely to encounter difficulties.

Faculty can strengthen this partnership in several practical ways. Sharing syllabi, assignments, and project descriptions helps librarians understand��a course’s intellectual objectives. Discussing ongoing research can help identify newly published books, archival collections, image resources, specialized databases, and other materials that might otherwise go unnoticed. Inviting librarians to participate in curriculum planning, grant projects, or studio discussions recognizes their disciplinary expertise and allows them to contribute more fully to teaching and scholarship.

The librarian’s role has also expanded considerably. Librarians can help faculty navigate the increasingly complex landscape of scholarly communication, open-access publishing, copyright, digital scholarship, research data, artificial intelligence, and other emerging areas. Most importantly, providing sufficient preparation time enables librarians to develop thoughtful, customized support rather than generic instruction.

At the same time, librarianship in architecture and design differs in important respects from librarianship in STEM disciplines. While many academic library services have evolved around STEM models of research and scholarly communication, faculty and students in architecture, art, and design often rely heavily on visual resources, archival collections, historical documents, material culture, and practice-based scholarship. Studio teaching also creates instructional needs quite different from those of lecture-based courses. Effective library support therefore depends not only on professional expertise but also on continuous dialogue with faculty, whose knowledge of projects, research methods, and learning objectives helps librarians identify the most appropriate resources and approaches.

The relationship between print and digital resources is particularly important in architecture and design education. Architectural reading often involves browsing, moving between text and image, comparing material across pages, and returning to earlier sources. Digital resources have transformed research by greatly expanding access and making searching and discovery faster and easier. Print, however, offers a different kind of encounter: spatial, visual, tactile, and often serendipitous.

An article,��Do Not Throw Away Your Printed Books: A Meta-Analysis on the Effects of Reading Media on Reading Comprehension, published in��,��acknowledges that digital reading is now an unavoidable part of daily and educational life while cautioning against ignoring evidence of a “screen inferiority effect.” The implication is not that libraries should resist digital resources, whose advantages are undeniable, but that the benefits of print should not be discarded in the process. For libraries, the more meaningful question is how each medium can best support different forms of learning, research, and discovery. For architecture and design students in particular, preserving opportunities to encounter both is essential.

Umberto Eco, in his essay��On Unread Books, reminds us that a library’s value lies not only in what we already know but also in what remains to be discovered. Louis Kahn expressed a related idea when he imagined a library where carefully chosen books lay open on large tables, inviting spontaneous discussion among students and teachers. His vision reminds us that the library is not merely a repository of information but a place where conversation generates learning. Carefully curated collections, exhibitions, and displays can invite curiosity, but dialogue among faculty, students, and librarians transforms curiosity into understanding.

Artificial intelligence is now changing how we find and engage with information. Digital tools can retrieve articles, summarize texts, and search enormous collections within seconds. Yet they cannot replace the human conversation that helps place information in context, question assumptions, evaluate sources, and connect ideas across disciplines. Nor should the speed of digital discovery cause us to overlook slower and sometimes unexpected forms of discovery: encountering an unfamiliar book on a shelf, comparing images across pages, or following a reference we did not initially know we needed. Discovery still depends on curiosity, critical thinking, and the willingness to ask better questions together.

Retirement has given me the opportunity to reflect on what more than three decades in academic librarianship have taught me. Above all, I have come to appreciate that a library’s enduring value lies in the relationships it fosters. Collections, technologies, spaces, and services remain indispensable, but they achieve their greatest purpose when they bring people together to exchange ideas, challenge assumptions, and explore new possibilities.

I leave this chapter of my professional life with particular gratitude to the faculty at HCAD. Their collaboration over so many years did far more than help me provide better library services; it made my work intellectually rewarding, personally enjoyable, and genuinely meaningful. I learned as much from our conversations as I hope I contributed to their teaching and research. Those relationships remain among the most valuable and lasting rewards of my career.

The strongest library–faculty partnerships begin with something remarkably simple: a conversation. When faculty and librarians communicate openly, share ideas early, and work together throughout the life of a course, studio, or research project, they create the conditions for discovery, and the conversations that inspire it, to truly flourish.

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