New Orleans LA 70118-5698
USA
The Tulane School of Architecture and Built Environment is welcoming its 2026 cohort of faculty. Bringing expertise in architecture and built environment education, these tenure-track faculty, professors of practice, research faculty, and fellows span various approaches to teaching and research in the fields of Architecture and Landscape Architecture and Engineering.
This latest round of hiring and leadership changes continues efforts to expand the school's already impressive faculty base since 2023, as the school has experienced significant growth in its student population and breadth of academic offerings.
Malu Borja Lopez, joins the school as Professor of Practice in Architecture. Lopez is a partner and principal at Al Borde Architecture Studio, an experimental practice built on collective authorship, local materials, and opening the design process to the people who use it. Trained in both architecture and development studies, Lopez sees design-build teaching and participatory practice as two sides of the same skill: facilitating collective creation.
John Dwyer joins the school as a Professor of Practice in Architecture and the incoming Director for the Albert and Tina Small Center for Collaborative Design, following eight years of leadership under Professor of Practice Ann Yoachim. Dwyer is currently working with city leadership in Philadelphia to advance housing-first as both policy and architectural typology. For Dwyer, the questions guiding that work are simple: who benefits, who is served, and who decides.
Robert Hutchison brings over thirty years of practice and teaching as he joins the school as Professor of Practice in Architecture. His research uses architecture to sit with questions it never intends to build: after Memory Houses examined personal loss, his current project, Memory Landscapes, turns to Japan's Tohoku coastline, devastated by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, reimagining its tsunami walls as public space.
Magdalena Valdevenito Belmar joins the school as Assistant Professor in Architecture. Architect and founder of the Chile-based practice “affirma”, she works at the intersection of technical detailing and community-making, treating building assemblies as both a design and political act. She sees New Orleans' layered history of disparity, disaster, and resilience as fertile ground for that ethically grounded approach.
Xixi Chen is the new Architecture and Asian Studies Fellow. Born in Shanghai and raised outside Chicago, she runs the creative practice XXS–Xixi Studio, which examines diaspora and memory. At Tulane, she'll continue developing Ghost Houses 记忆念的家, a project reconstructing demolished ancestral homes in Shanghai through oral history, pursuing both a participatory public archive and a manuscript on the city's housing policy.
Ira Concepcion, AIA, WELL AP, joins the faculty as a Visiting Assistant Professor in Architecture. His practice, Senso Architects, studies how light, sound, material, and atmosphere shape the body, influencing stress, attention, and recovery, while his research through Senso Labs asks how AI can sharpen architectural judgment rather than replace it.
Julia Hedges is the new NASEM Gulf Landscape Fellow and research assistant professor, working within the Gulf Coast Climate Futures Program to study the region's marginal and orphan oil and gas wells. Reading these underground assemblages as, "prophetic views into our environmental futures," she traces relationships across scales and systems to imagine what comes after extraction.
Pavan Vadgama joins the faculty as Visiting Assistant Professor and Fellow in Architecture and South Asian Studies. At Tulane, he plans to expand his previous research on how cities draw lines around property, care, and belonging into a global mapping of care infrastructures and a multispecies urban shed prototype, while bringing computational and speculative methods into studio teaching.
