Virginia Architecture Fellows Showcase
April 6–26, 2026
110 Bayly Drive
Charlottesville Virginia 22903
United States
The Virginia Architecture Fellowship is awarded to emerging designer-practitioners and educators whose work demonstrates promise across scales and typologies. In fall 2025, the University of Virginia School of Architecture welcomed its second cohort of Fellows, Ozan Şen and Tuomas Siitonen, who joined as full-time Assistant Professors and developed a year-long creative research and pedagogy project during their fellowship year. The exhibition, on view at the University of Virginia School of Architecture in Campbell Hall’s East Wing Gallery through April 26 2026, marks the culmination of a year-long research and teaching project.
Ozan Şen
Invasive Species: Networks, Gadgets, Commons in the Digitized Landscape
As the technology becomes ubiquitous and the pursuit of greater comfort and control intensifies, the environment is increasingly saturated by digital infrastructures of screens, sensors, and cameras. What once appeared as peripheral technical apparatuses has grown into a dense machinic layer that regulates the environment. Invasive Species is a long-term research project examining how these systems are transforming our cities, homes, and bodies. Through a hybrid assembly of interactive surveillance feeds, analytical system drawings, and speculative physical models, the exhibition, titled Under Control renders the hidden operations of sensing, monitoring, and control visible.
Student Research Assistants: Abigail Alton, Noah Depeyrot, Isabela Rasmussen, Skye Spencer
Contributors: Zeynep Küheylan, Tugce Topada
Funding Support: UVA School of Architecture, Department of Architecture; UVA Center for Global Inquiry & Innovation; UVA Vice Provost for the Arts Grant.
Tuomas Siitonen
A Pedagogical Toolkit
While sustainable design requires long-term, systemic thinking, architectural education often operates within short studio cycles, focused on form, aesthetics, and immediate deliverables. The tension lies in integrating complex environmental, social, and material considerations into teaching methods and assessment frameworks, without overwhelming students or compromising creativity. In this exhibition, Tuomas Siitonen presents an exploration of sustainability as both an architectural and pedagogical question. Through a pedagogical tool kit including a constructed scale model and an accompanying wall diagram based on his on-going doctoral research, the work investigates how ecological thinking can be translated into architectural representation and design methods.
Student Research Assistant: Logan R. Amey Funding Support: UVA School of Architecture, Department of Architecture
About the authors
Ozan Şen is a designer and educator whose work engages contemporary urbanism and architecture through research, theory, and representation. Operating across multiple scales and geographies, he investigates and speculates on urban form, infrastructures, and public space. Previously, he has taught architectural design studios at the University of Houston’s Gerald D. Hines College of Architecture as an Adjunct Faculty member and practiced at SWA Group as an Associate with a focus on public open space frameworks. He was awarded the Patrick T. Curran Fellowship in 2024, through which he formed the foundation of his current research examining the expanding presence of digital infrastructures and surveillance technologies in the built environment.
Tuomas Siitonen is an architect and designer whose practice bridges building, teaching and research. He founded Tuomas Siitonen Office in Helsinki in 2010 with a focus on spatial clarity and sustainable solutions. Since 2019, he has also been a partner in Kombo, an exhibition design firm, collaborating with multi-disciplinary teams for museums and other public projects. In addition to his practice, Tuomas serves in the Chair of Architectural Principles and Theory at Aalto University’s Department of Architecture and regularly gives lectures and leads workshops. His current research focuses on exploring how architectural pedagogy can foster ecological awareness, material intelligence, and new systemic methods for sustainable design education.
