This studio explores how ancestral and spiritual practices might inform new architectural imaginaries. In an age of ecological collapse and cultural erasure, how might we reclaim rituals of rooting, re-anchoring, and sanctuarization as meaningful design tools? What can we learn from practices that imbue ordinary materials with emotional and cosmological value–practices that sustain relationships between the living and the dead, the domestic and the divine, the ground and what lies beneath?

We propose that while metrics like carbon footprint and material performance remain essential, architecture must also confront the affective and sacred dimensions of care. In a time of profound climate crisis, we need not only greener technologies but a reimagining of modernity itself–one that broadens what truly sustains us. This is an invitation to think beyond sustainability as optimization and toward a “Sacred Green New Deal.”

Students will reimagine six programmatic archetypes–living, learning, playing, working, producing, and contemplating–through the lens of re-grounding, re-anchoring, and sanctuarization.

Projects will be grounded in the richly layered context of New Orleans–a city shaped by African, Caribbean, Indigenous, Arab, Spanish, French, Creole, Cajun, Pacific, and Vietnamese diasporas. These communities have created a complex spiritual landscape where Voudou, Catholicism, Islam, ancestor veneration, Buddhist, and folk practices coexist. The studio will explore how architecture can engage these entangled cosmologies to understand how place, memory, and belief shape the built environment.

The studio includes a research trip to New Orleans, where students will collaborate with local architects, communities, and cultural practitioners to explore material, spiritual, and spatial continuities across time.

This studio is developed in partnership with the RAK Art Foundation in Bahrain, whose collection–rooted in spiritual inquiry, material experimentation, and regional histories–will inform our explorations. While the project site is New Orleans, this collaboration will culminate in an exhibition of student work at the Foundation’s museum next year, fostering a transregional dialogue between geographies shaped by spiritual multiplicity, colonial entanglements, and evolving architectural languages.

This studio is for those ready to speculate across scales–between the intimate and the planetary, the buried and the visible, the remembered and the yet-to-be imagined.