"House/Housed"

Karen Kubey and Menna Agha, Visiting Faculty Fellows in Design for Spatial Justice

Professor Kubey is an urbanist specializing in housing and health. She is the editor of the book Housing as Intervention: Architecture towards Social Equity (Architectural Design, 2018). Kubey co-founded the New York chapter of Architecture for Humanity (now Open Architecture/New York) and co-founded and led the New Housing New York design competition. Kubey was the curator of “Low Rise High Density,” an exhibition and program series at the Center for Architecture in New York on the legacies and potential futures of low-rise, high-density housing. She is a recipient of the Wilder Green Fellowship at the MacDowell Colony and an International Social Economic Environmental Design (SEED) Award.

Professor Agha investigates concepts of public space, the emotional in the built environment, and territoriality of the landless. She focuses on the idea of “active marginality,” and is occupied with questions such as; how to build for, from, like, and within the margin. Agha believes that the critical issue of marginality should be prominent in architecture studio, not only in academic research. Agha is a third-generation displaced Nubian; her inquiry is rooted in a personal and generational experience of spatial injustice. Her research on Nubian displacement has been published in “The Non-work of the Unimportant” and in “Liminal Publics, Marginal Resistance: Learning from Nubian Spaces.”