Forum Lecture: Architecture’s Kinships

Monday, November 24, 2025 from 6:00 pm to 7:30 pm

In-person event
The Pit, Architecture Building, Carleton University
1125 Colonel By Drive, Ottawa, ON, K1S 5B6

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2025-2026 Forum Lecture Series

Speaker: Ignacio G. Galán, igg-office for architecture, Barnard College, Columbia University, USA

Free and open to the public

Presented by the Azrieli School of Architecture & Urbanism

This lecture explores how architecture shapes and embodies complex social and environmental articulations — not merely the container and representation of pre-packaged relationships, but a medium for motley associations.

In advancing this proposition, Ignacio G. Galán will discuss research projects, speculative designs, and built structures that result from diverse alliances and permeations of knowledge across media.

The lecture contains an invitation to work in critical, even if messy, coalitions, with the hope of questioning exclusionary forms of affiliation and contributing to the imagining of alternative platforms of relationality through the exploration, discussion, activation, and transformation of the built environment.

Picture of Ignacio G. Galán — Ignacio G. Galán, Courtesy of Imagen Subliminal.

Ignacio G. Galán is a New York-based architect, historian, and assistant professor at Barnard and Columbia Colleges at Columbia University. His work explores and intervenes in the entanglements of architecture, politics, and the making of society, with attention to questions of residence, citizenship, belonging, and kinship.

These interests manifest in design projects as much as in diverse scholarly and curatorial endeavors concerning nationalism, colonialism, migration, and disability cultures. His work operates across media and is continuously informed by different collaborations.

The designs of his office, igg-office for architecture, focus on housing and public space and bring to the fore questions of belonging, care, and disability. The collaborative designs of the office have been awarded in different competitions, including the First Prize for the New Velodrome in Medellín, which is part of the permanent collection of the Pompidou Center. The office has recently designed and built a number of projects exploring new forms of residence, hospitality, and care, including Another Seedbed and Beyond-the-family Kin.

Person viewing architectural models beneath suspended blue signage reading “YOUR RESTROOM IS A BATTLEGROUND.” — Matilde Cassani, Ignacio G. Galán, Iván L. Munuera, Joel Sanders, “Your Restroom is a Battleground.” A research station at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale, How Will We Live Together? Photo by Imagen Subliminal

Ignacio G. Galán and O.F. Architects (Alvaro M. Fidalgo + Arantza Ozaeta), “Beyond-the-family Kin.” A House in Madrid, 2023. Photo by Imagen Subliminal

His work has been included in the international exhibition at the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale (Your Restroom is a Battleground and The Restroom Pavilion), the 2014 Venice Biennale (Cinecittà Occupata), and at the Center for Architecture in New York in 2022 (Aging Against the Machine).

Galán graduated as an architect at ETSAM, holds an M.Arch II from Harvard GSD, as well as an MA and a PhD from Princeton University. He is a licensed architect in Spain.