Lucia Allais
Director
Lucia Allais is an architectural historian who writes about the technical and political history of design in the long twentieth century, with particular attention to global institutions and concepts of temporal change. She is Associate Professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, where she directs the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture. Her 2018 book Designs of Destruction: The Making of Monuments in the Twentieth Century uncovered new archives about the many ways monuments became tools of international governance in the mid-twentieth century. Allais also writes about the history of theory, and about design media in history and in contemporary culture. She is an editor of Grey Room and a member of the Aggregate Architectural History Collaborative.
Elsa Mäki
Assistant Director
Elsa MH Mäki is a designer, writer, and teacher. Her practice includes cartography, model-making, immersive theater, and architectural design. Elsa’s drawing and writing have been featured in volumes including Material Acts: Experimentation in Architecture and Design (2024), Architectures of Care (2024), Architecture of Migration (Siddiqi, 2023), and Non-Extractive Architecture (2021). She has degrees in architecture from Columbia University–where she received the Marcia Mead Design Award–and Harvard GSD. Elsa is an editor with Avery Review and has held design and teaching positions in Minnesota, Massachusetts, and New York.
Michelle Huynh Chu
Program Manager
Michelle Huynh Chu is a writer and researcher; broadly, she studies shifting relationships between landscape and beliefs. Prior to joining the Buell Center, Michelle was a Research Fellow at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, a Teaching Fellow in Art History at Columbia University, and a strategist for sustainable building at Parson’s Healthy Materials Lab. Her recent projects include editorial contributions to The Japan Lectures: A Transnational Critical Encounter (Rajchman, 2024) and A Dark, A Light, A Bright: The Designs of Dorothy Liebes (Brown and Winton, 2023). Michelle holds a BA in History and a BFA in Film from New York University and an MA from Columbia University’s Department of Art History and Archaeology. Her work as a curator and an artist has appeared in exhibitions and festivals, including at the Museum of Modern Art, Anthology Film Archives, and on public television in Britain and Germany.