WRT
Book
PITTSBURGH: CARNEGIE MUSEUM OF ART
2025

after school

Team
Theodossis Issaias and Alyssa Velazquez
Categories
Architecture, Archive, Collective Equipment, Criticism, Economy, Infrastructure, Movements, Policy, Social movements, Territorial, Theory, Urban

Schools are contradictory places. They are where students are assessed, sorted, and disciplined, and where histories are censored. Yet they are also sites of play and discovery, of solidarity and collective care, where rights have been fought for and standards challenged. after school brings together architects, artists, educators, students, and activists to study the states and stakes of public education. Developed alongside the exhibition of the same name at Carnegie Museum of Art, the publication follows classrooms, corridors, itinerant sites, and cooperative experiments to consider how public education has been shaped, organized, and contested across its buildings as social infrastructures.

Situated within an increasingly uncertain educational landscape in the United States—the culmination of decades of disinvestment and erosion of civic and democratic institutions—after school turns toward Pittsburgh. Here, recent proposals for school closures and consolidations continue longer histories of displacement, segregation, and restructuring. In dialogue with contemporary works, the contributions trace the layered histories of public education in the region—from the city’s first public high school and New Deal–era programs to cooperative school gardens and Black-led Street Academies of the 1970s. These fragments observe cycles of learning, unlearning, and collective praxis across shifting policies, built infrastructures, and forms of refusal and community care.

Drawings, archival photographs, and newly commissioned visual contributions accompany essays, conversations, and case studies attentive to how education takes form in classrooms, streets, policies, and everyday practices. after school attends to the material, political, and social conditions that shape public education today—and gestures toward the possibility of a school not yet here. The publication is structured in three parts—text book, counter index, and lesson plans—which adapt established pedagogical formats to consider how schooling is organized, experienced, and reworked across time.

after school is published on the occasion of the exhibition at Carnegie Museum of Art.
The exhibition and book are curated and edited by Theodossis Issaias, curator, Heinz Architectural Center, and Alyssa Velazquez, assistant curator, with McKenzie Stupica, curatorial fellow. Designed by Corinne Ang, the publication is co-produced by Carnegie Museum of Art and in otherwards, the imprint of Carnegie Mellon University School of Architecture.

Contributors
Essays by: Ujju Aggarwal, Sarosh Anklesaria, Rachel Delphia, Theodossis Issaias, Laura Nelson, Leigh Patel, David Serlin, and Alyssa Velazquez.
Conversations with: Miguel Braceli with Stefan Gruber; Sister IAsia Thomas with Wanda Henderson, Regina Holley, Tamanika Howze, Anthony Mitchell, James Stewart, and William Thompkins (Equity Advisory Panel); and Sala Udin with Dana Bishop-Root.
Testimonies from: Martin Chetlin, Paula & Jolene Elder, Jillian Forstadt, Noah Fritsch, James Hill, Ayanna Jones, Lynn Kawaratani, Justin Laing, Lajja Mistry, and Pete Vitti.
Lesson plans by: Vicky Achnani; Ayanna Jones & Sankofa Village Community Garden and Farms; Gabo Camnitzer; Teddy Cruz & Fonna Forman; Danielle Dean; Toshiko Mori; Ana Serrano; Soul Fire Farm (Lala Montoya, Naima Penniman, and Crystal Clarity); and Leah Wulfman with Jin Meisenberg.
Drawings by: Sharvi Kamal Shah and Nicholas Thies.

Photo: Zachary Riggleman

[Buy online here]

About

Fatura Collaborative – Research & Design Practice, was founded in 2009 and is developing projects across a wide range of scales, from intimate objects and performance, to architecture, urban design and planning. We are interested in architecture as social infrastructure, in developing collective equipments, in the design of spaces of care, empathy and welfare. We design and research expanding new problematics about ecology, the domestic, everyday life and the city.

Members

PLATON ISSAIAS
ARCHITECT

is an architect, researcher, and educator. He studied architecture in Thessaloniki, Greece, and holds an MSc from Columbia University and a PhD from TU Delft and The City as a Project research collective. He is Assistant Professor of Architectural Design at the School of Architecture, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. He is the co-Head of Projective Cities MPhil programme at the Architectural Association, where he is also teaching Diploma Unit 7 with Georgia Hablützel and Hamed Khosravi. His research interests explore urban design and architecture in relation to the politics of labour, economy, law and labour struggles. He has written and lectured extensively about Greek urbanisation and the politics of urban development.

THEODOSSIS ISSAIAS
ARCHITECT

(he/him) is an architect and educator. He serves as Curator, Heinz Architectural Center, at Carnegie Museum of Art and Professor of Practice at Carnegie Mellon University School of Architecture. He studied architecture in Athens, Greece, and holds a Master of Science in Architecture and Urbanism from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research focuses on architecture at the intersection of
human rights, conflict, and the provision of shelter. This interest led to his PhD dissertation “Architectures of the Humanitarian Front” (2021, Yale University), which examined a period around WWI when conflict, displacement, and territorial insecurity provoked the reconfiguration of humanitarian operations –their spatial organization and ethical imperatives.

GIANNANTONIS MOUTSATSOS
ARCHITECT

is an architect based in Lund, Sweden. He graduated in 2010 from the School of Architecture of the National Technical University of Athens and holds an MSc in Energy Efficient and Environmental Building Design from the School of Architecture of Lund University (2015). He has practiced architecture as a freelance architect in Greece and currently in Sweden (eg. Tengbom architects), where he works on a wide range of projects including small houses, larger residential complexes as well as care, educational and industrial facilities.

ALEXANDRA VOUGIA
ARCHITECT

is an architect and an educator. She graduated in 2007 from the School of Architecture of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece. She holds the MSc in Advanced Architectural Design from GSAPP, Columbia University (2008) and a PhD from the Architectural Association – School of Architecture, London (2016). She is currently an Assistant Professor of History and Theory of Architecture at the School of Architecture, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. She has previously taught at the Architectural Association and the University of Westminster and practiced as an architect in New York and Athens.

MYRTO VRAVOSINOU
ARCHITECT

is an architect based in Thessaloniki. She graduated from the School of Architecture of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki in 2015 and holds an MSc in Environmental Architectural and Urban Design from the same institution (2023). Since 2017, she has been collaborating with a group of freelance engineers, working on a variety of residential, workspace, and small-scale digital fabrication projects. Her special interests lie in urban and architectural design practices that promote spatial justice.

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