Current
Fellows
Nitzan Farfel is a designer, researcher, and educator whose work interrogates adaptive infrastructure, spatial politics, and the representational tools architecture uses to render systems visible. Selected as an architecture design fellow, her projects operate across deployable design, critical documentation, and visual media — mobilizing architecture to expose the material, ecological, and narrative structures that organize contested territories. Her current project, “Amber Wars,” examines illegal amber mining in Ukraine’s Polesia region as both a territorial operation and a representational void. Farfel has practiced in Paris, Athens, Toronto, and New York, contributing to projects with Atelier Tsuyoshi Tane, Workshop-S, and ACDO. At OMA, she co-produced and co-edited Shohei Shigematsu’s monograph for a+u and contributed to partner lectures, exhibitions, and publications. Her design work spans installations and buildings at multiple scales, including the Citizen Watch installation for Baselworld 2018. As visiting assistant professor at Kansas State University, she taught studios and seminars on speculative ecologies, planetary systems, and spatial storytelling. She is currently leading the development of Kansas’ Riley County Fairgrounds and continuing to document fairgrounds across the United States for her project “Supersites.” Farfel holds a Master of Architecture from Princeton University and a Bachelor of Architectural Studies from the University of Waterloo.
Gus Wendel, Ph.D.,’s research explores urban planning’s role in the formation of sexual space, the intersectional use and design of public space, and alternative spatial research methods grounded in the urban humanities. He joins Taubman College as a Fishman fellow. His peer-reviewed work has been published in The Journal of Urban Affairs, The Journal of Public Space, and Technology | Architecture + Design. His dissertation investigates how municipal incorporation and redevelopment helped establish West Hollywood as the “first gay city,” and its broader implications for diverse gender and sexual minorities. He previously served as associate director of the UCLA Urban Humanities Initiative, an interdisciplinary teaching and research program within cityLAB-UCLA that brings together the interpretive, historical approaches of the humanities with the material, projective practices of design to address pressing urban and environmental issues. He is also a founding member of the Urban Humanities Network, the Digital Salon, and the (Un)Common Public Space Group. Wendel earned a doctorate and master’s in urban and regional planning from the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs and a bachelor’s in international relations and Italian studies from Brown University.
