HyperNormalisation and portals to normals otherwise

Carnegie Mellon Architecture is excited to announce its fall 2025 to spring 2026 public programs theme (and fall 2025 line up): HyperNormalisation and portals to normals otherwise.

HyperNormalisation—a term coined by Alexei Yurchak and popularized by Adam Curtis—describes how the absurd is orchestrated to become the norm. It’s a sustained shifting of the Overton window. HyperNormalisation names the condition where sprawling, contradictory systems grow so totalizing that we are no longer able to make sense of them, leading us to adapt to and accommodate them.

First used for the Soviet Union’s final years, HyperNormalisation now describes a global state: crisis as everyday life. In this condition, we accept environmental devastation as a natural part of our production processes, and ethically gray profit systems such as carceral expansion or the medical insurance industry or privatized air as norms. We are slowly numbed to disasters, as injustices are made to feel natural, inevitable, or even an intellectual debate.

Architecture plays a central role in this conditioning, as it gives form to ideas of empire, it blueprints segregation, it reframes extraction as development, it codifies dispossession, and disguises theft as freedom. Through practices such as gentrification, market speculation, and the like, architecture is able to stage violence as progress as it abstracts and aestheticizes injustice while masquerading as neutral.

If such a discipline is functioning as was designed, can it be reformed? Or must we dream otherwise? To practice "otherwise" is to work outside Western, colonial norms; a lineage shaped by thinkers like Rolando Vázquez (epistemic disobedience), Walter Mignolo (border thinking), and writers such as Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, and José Esteban Muñoz, who trace fugitive, care-based, or non-normative practices.

So, this year, and with these frameworks, we ask: what do/could the next worlds look like; the ones that can lead us out of the trap of such HyperNormals? What are the portals to those next worlds, and how do we make them? Let’s time travel. Let’s swim in dreams.

Carnegie Mellon Architecture’s public programs are organized by Tuliza Sindi, Curator for Public Programs and Director of Publications, in consultation with a committee. The committee includes: Jared Abraham, Niloufar Alenjery, Sarosh Anklesaria, Mary-Lou Arscott, Christi Danner, Matthew Huber, Meredith Marsh, Vernelle A. A. Noel, and Tommy CheeMou Yang.

Most of our events are livestreamed, and their links can be found on our website.

Carnegie Mellon Architecture’s public programs series is generously sponsored by the Alan H. Rider Distinguished Visiting Lecturer in Architecture Fund, the William Finglass Practice Lecture Series Fund, the Watson Chair in Architecture Fund, and the Hans Vetter Memorial Lecture Fund.

Symposium

Future Normals Symposium, with keynote by Prof. Arturo Escobar (Watson Chair 2025–26)
Thursday, September 11

CM-A Thinks Allowed
CM-A Thinks Allowed is a discursive series that brings faculty and students together to explore a single shared text. Each participant offers their interpretation through the lens of their own practice, research, and worldview, before opening to a moderated dialogue.

Histories of HyperNormalisation
Thursday, September 18
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, by Michel Foucault

Thursday, October 2
French Modern: Norms and Forms of the Social Environment, by Paul Rabinow

Ontologies and Narratives
Thursday, November 6
Relationality: An Emergent Politics of Life Beyond the Human (Beyond the Modern), by Arturo Escobar, Michael Osterweil, Kriti Sharma

Thursday, November 20
Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism, by Vanessa Machado de Oliverira

CM-A Bookshelf
CM-A Bookshelf is a new event series inviting Carnegie Mellon Architecture faculty to share the readings that shape their worlds. Each session offers a glimpse into their relationship with reading; understood broadly, from books and essays to folklore, films, songs, or family archives. In conversation with a guest of their choice, they reflect on the texts that linger, unravel their imagination, anchor their sense of belonging, or spark their practice. From nursery rhymes to government documents, philosophy to fantasy, each Bookshelf becomes a portrait of reading as a living, evolving practice.

Wednesday, October 29
Francesca Torello, CM-A in otherwards Imprint’s inaugural editorial board member

Wednesday, November 12
Theodossis Issaias, Co-Editor of CM-A in otherwards Imprint’s inaugural publication, after school

Tuesday, November 25
Stefan Gruber, CM-A in otherwards Imprint’s inaugural editorial board member

Public lectures and workshops

Wednesday, September 10
Prof. Arturo Escobar, Watson Chair 2025–26

The Watson Chair in Architecture invites distinguished scholars, researchers, and practitioners to campus for lectures, seminars and workshops that engage the Carnegie Mellon Architecture community in critical discourse on the built environment and on one or more of the school’s pedagogical challenges: climate change, artificial intelligence and social justice.

Wednesday to Thursday, November 19-20
Peggy Deamer, Architecture Lobby 

Book launches

Tuesday, September 23 
Sustainable Design for Uncertain Futures: Dialogues on Time-Based Architecture, by Joshua D. Lee and Joseph Murray (co-editors)

Thursday, October 9 
Time Well Spent: An American Architect in Europe, 1893, by Francesca Torello (editor)

Thursday, November 13
after school, by Theodossis Issaias (co-editor)

Plotline
Plotline is Carnegie Mellon Architecture’s film series, curated to run in parallel with our public programs. Each season of Plotline extends the themes explored in our lectures and exhibitions into a cinematic register — using film as another mode of critical inquiry, reflection, and conversation.

Thursday, September 4
HyperNormalisation, by Adam Curtis

Wednesday, September 24
Modern Times, by Charlie Chaplin

Wednesday, December 3
Welcome to Leith, by Michael Beach Nichols and Christopher K. Walker