Future Normals Symposium 2025

Inspired by the Carnegie Mellon Architecture Public Programs 2025-26 theme, HyperNormalisation.

The Future Normals Symposium brings together practitioners, thinkers, and makers to examine how architecture operates as both a tool of perception-management for imperial logics and a vehicle for imagining revolutionary futures otherwise. Across two sessions and a keynote, we ask: how do we dismantle the spatial practice of imperialist logics, and re-member spatial futures that root us in radically reimagined ecologies, socialities, and hypertemporalities?

Welcome and opening remarks by Tuliza Sindi, Program Director and Curator of Public Programs: 9am

Keynote by Prof. Arturo Escobar (Watson Chair 2025–26): 9:15am
HyperNormalisation: Ontologies, narratives, and portals towards relational complexity.

The talk will outline a framework for understanding the entanglement of ontologies, narratives, infrastructures, designs, and practices as a heuristic for dealing with the simplification of the complexity of life and world-making at the center of (hyper)normalization. Restoring to life and worldmaking its insurmountable complexity is fundamental to reimagining the possible worlds to come beyond contemporary HyperNormalisation.

Session I: [Spatial] Technologies at the End of the World: 10:25–11:50am
Architecture as perception-management, ritualizing our sense of normal toward destruction. Moderator: Sarosh Ankelsaria. Keywords: collapse, extraction, HyperNormalisation, ruin, infrastructure, perception-management, rituals, hyperreality, settler futurity, temporal fragmentation

This session explores how architecture operates as a technology of perception-management, not only shaping space, but ritualizing what’s ‘normal.’ Building on Adam Curtis’ translation of HyperNormalisation through a neo-imperialist lens, we ask: what does architecture normalize? Through zoning laws, masterplans, militarized borders, and climate denial embodied in glass towers, architecture has helped choreograph a collective illusion of control, coherence, and inevitability.

Following Charlette Malterre Barthes’ call for a Moratorium on New Construction, we interrogate architecture’s complicity in manufacturing inertia: the inability to imagine a world beyond collapse. As Anna Tsing writes in The Mushroom at the End of the World, we are living among the ruins of “progress without promise.” Meriem Bahia Arfaoui’s framing of political time offers another provocation: what architectures uphold the looping of crisis, and which ones suspend it?

This session surfaces the ways architecture naturalizes systems of violence, and asks: How might we see through the rituals that normalize our acceptance of such, and how do we make the necessary end of some worlds, rather than the end of all worlds?

Speaker I: Miguel Robles-Duran / Speaker II: Nida Rehman / Speaker III: Dana Čupková / Panel iscussion + audience Q&A.

Session II: Re-Membering [Spatial] Futures Otherwise: 12:35 – 1:45pm
Architecture as a resurgent act, design as ontological, imagining infrastructures for futures otherwise. Moderator: Tuliza Sindi. Keywords: re-member, imagination, pluriverse, resurgence, cosmotechnics, ontology, relational infrastructure, time rupture, situated futurity

While Session I asks what Architecture normalizes, Session II asks: what else might be possible, and how can we get ourselves there? This session explores the infrastructures of imagination, or how we make space for futures that modernity has long told us are impossible. 

Architecture here is explored as an ontological act: not just the shaping of matter and form, but the shaping of worlds and cosmologies, time, people, modes of belonging, and futures. Drawing from Arturo Escobar’s Pluriverse, we acknowledge that there are always multiple ways of being, and that these can be made material through design, even within the modern, complicit lives we live. At the heart of it is the question: which ways do we want to ritualize ourselves (e.g., where humanity is a right for all and ideas of aliens no longer apply, ecological relationality is nurtured daily, cosmological pluriversality is the norm, etc.), and what spatial conditions would enable that? 

Lyla June’s work on Indigenous technologies, Rasheedah Phillips’ explorations of time rupture, and other such thinkers and practitioners who imagine resurgence over extraction, are used to guide this session through querying what kinds of worlds are waiting at the edges of the dominant one, what becomes possible when cities are not imagined as engines of accumulation.

Speaker I: Ana Gutiérrez / Speaker II: Tommy CheeMou Yang / Speaker III: Niloufar Alenjery. Panel discussion + Audience Q&A. The symposium will be livestreamed. Learn more on our website.