Architecture, Planning and Preservation Faculty Tenured in 2024
The Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation welcomed Erica Avrami and Lydia Kallipoliti to its tenured faculty in 2024. Tenure is a distinction that recognizes scholarly excellence, demonstrated capacity for imaginative, original work, and great promise for continued contributions at the forefront of one's field.
Erica Avrami
James Marston Fitch Associate Professor of Historic Preservation
Erica Avrami is a leader in the field of historic preservation. Her work offers a critical appraisal of present-day preservation practice that tends to focus on the physical protection of discrete sites and demonstrates how such an approach is embedded in the dominant culture.
Her forthcoming book, Second-Order Preservation: Social Justice and Climate Action through Heritage Policy, argues powerfully for the need to attend to “second-order preservation,” the broader social and environmental implications of preservation beyond a single site, including the cultural and historical ecosystem, and government policy. Only by doing so can issues of social justice and climate change be addressed. Dr. Avrami has established a powerful presence in the field through her single-authored book, co-edited volumes, journal publications, as well as multiple research reports for NGOs, and a book series that she launched in 2019, Issues in Preservation Policy. She has impacted policy in her 2024 appointment by President Biden as an Expert Member of the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation, a federal agency that advises the President and United States Congress on preservation policy. She also has appeared in the media, including on ABC, BBC, NBC, Forbes AP, and National Geographic.
Dr. Avrami earned her PhD from Rutgers University. She joined the Columbia faculty in 2014.
Erica Avrami's Faculty Profile
Lydia Kallipoliti
Associate Professor of Architecture, Planning and Preservation
Lydia Kallipoliti is an interdisciplinary scholar-practitioner engaged in cutting-edge work on architectural history and theory related to technology, ecology and issues of equity and policy. A polymath trained in engineering, design and the history and theory of architecture, she adopts a multi-faceted and multimedia approach to study the role of architecture in questions of climate change, recycling, and environmental equality.
A primary concern in her work—whether through her publications, exhibitions, or websites—is to examine and experiment with systems of flows, models of circulation of matter and energy, and recycling waste into energy in architecture. Her first monograph, The Architecture of CLOSED WORLDS, Or, What is the Power of Shit, which started as an exhibition and then resulted in a book, features failed case studies of closed ecosystems of the modern world to examine how to repurpose waste into something useful. Her second monograph, Histories of Ecological Design; An Unfinished Cyclopedia was recently published in 2024. Dr. Kallipoliti has also curated exhibitions, with one of her most important being the 2022 Tallinn Architecture Biennale exhibition, which featured the topic of Edible, Or, The Architecture of Metabolism.
Dr. Kallipoliti earned her PhD from Princeton University, her MS from MIT and her Diploma in Architecture and Engineering from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in Greece. She served on the full-time faculty of Syracuse University, Rensselaer University, and the Cooper Union before joining the Columbia faculty in 2024.