Exhibition Opening Infrastructure in a Time of Flux: Actions in Public

Rahul Mehrotra is the John T. Dunlop Professor in Housing and Urbanization and professor of urban design and planning at the GSD. He is also the founder and principal of RMA Architects, a practice with studios in Mumbai and Boston. His teaching, research, writing, and architectural practice focus on architecture, conservation, and urban planning and design in India, particularly Mumbai.

Dan Borelli is an artist and director of exhibitions at the GSD. His forthcoming public art project, Color Fields, sited across from Linear Park in Cambridge, is slated to open in 2027. His art practice focuses on environmental issues, contaminated communities, and material histories. A graduate of the MDes Publics stream, he has been an Artist in Residence for the National Park Service and received a National Endowment for the Arts: Our Town Program grant. He received an ArtPlace America grant for his project, Illuminating Futures: Ashland and Nyanza, which made public hidden narratives of cancer clusters, human loss, activism, and, ultimately, regeneration surrounding one of the first superfund sites in the United States.

Sarah Whiting has been Dean and Josep Lluís Sert Professor of Architecture at the GSD since 2019. She is also a design principal and co-founder of WW Architecture, based in Cambridge, and served as the Dean of Rice University’s School of Architecture from 2010 to 2019. Whiting obtained a interdisciplinary, self-directed Bachelor of Arts degree from Yale, a Master of Architecture from Princeton in 1990, and a Doctor of Philosophy in the History and Theory of Architecture from MIT in 2001. Whiting’s research and writing is broadly interdisciplinary, with the built environment at its core. An expert in architectural theory and urbanism, she is particularly interested in modern and contemporary architecture’s imbricated relationship with politics, economics, and society, and how the built environment shapes the nature of public life.

Vladimir Yavachev was born in Sofia, Bulgaria in 1973. At 17, he moved to New York City to study film at NYU and work for his uncle, Christo. He has been involved in all of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s major projects and exhibitions for the past 32 years in various capacities in and out of the studio, starting out as a photographer Wolfgang Volz’s assistant on “The Umbrellas” (USA/Japan 1991). He worked on “Wrapped Trees” (Switzerland 1998), and “The Gates” (USA 2005) and was the operations director on “The Floating Piers” (Italy 2016) and the project director on “The London Mastaba” (London 2018). After successfully realizing Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s posthumous work, “L’Arc De Triomphe, Wrapped” (Paris 2021), Vladimir is currently working on realizing their final work “The Mastaba, Project for the Middle East,” which will be the largest and only permanent sculpture of the artist duo.

Antoine Picon is the G. Ware Travelstead Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology at the GSD, where he is also chair of the PhD in Architecture, Landscape Architecture, and Urban Planning. He teaches courses in the history and theory of architecture, cities, and technology. Trained as an engineer, architect, and historian, Picon works on the relationships between architectural and urban space, technology, and society, from the eighteenth century to the present.