SCI-Arc’s 2026 UG Thesis Students Reimagine Architecture’s Role in the World

SCI-Arc proudly announces the 2026 Undergraduate Thesis Reviews, taking place on Saturday, April 25 on campus. This immersive event marks the culmination of five years of design exploration for SCI-Arc’s fifth-year B.Arch students, led by Undergraduate Thesis Coordinator Maxi Spina.

A hallmark of SCI-Arc’s curriculum, Undergraduate Thesis is a space for inquiry, invention, and critique—a moment when students position themselves within the discipline and propose new architectural futures. With over 80 jurors, critics, and architecture professionals in attendance, the reviews spark urgent discussions about the evolving role of architecture in today’s world.

This year’s thesis projects exemplify the multiplicity of concerns shaping the contemporary moment. Vertical farms nestled within light industrial suburban developments reorganize the territory defined between culture and nature as well as production and consumption. Experiments in circular material systems become part and parcel of speculative responses to our present housing and ecological crises. Acts of repair of remains of a civilization's architecture --ruined over time due to armed conflict, colonization, and displacement- destabilize traditional configurations of power and visibility, making architecture itself a participant in the redefinition of territorial and political agency.

These diverse explorations underscore the discipline’s ongoing entanglement with questions of site, ecology, environment, typology, and tectonics—not as static categories but as mutable constructs continuously renegotiated through design. The projects demonstrate that architecture can produce unexpected spatial relationships: agricultural sites repositioned as active urban hubs; reclaimed materials redistribute equity through alternative development; historical contexts recast as generative constraints for future imaginaries.

“An architecture thesis at SCI-Arc is not about solving a problem but about learning how to live with one—productively, playfully, critically.” explains Undergraduate Thesis Coordinator Maxi Spina. “It teaches students that architecture’s greatest contribution is not the buildings it produces but the questions it refuses to stop asking. And if the thesis succeeds, it leaves behind not closure but momentum: a problem that keeps speaking, and a designer who is now fluent enough to answer back.”

Join us April 25 at SCI-Arc to engage with the boundary-pushing ideas of SCI-Arc’s 2026 Undergraduate Thesis class.