Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller are registered architects and founding partners of AGENCY, a collaborative, interdisciplinary practice that engages emerging publics in conflictual contexts to identify and subvert phenomena that endanger human rights. At the Texas Tech University Huckabee College of Architecture Research Center, Kripa and Mueller co-direct POST (Project for Operative Spatial Technologies), an experimental, investigative think tank that examines the connections between climate change, desertification, and urbanization as they unfold in the increasingly militarized context of the border and produces models for design research to improve urban lives. 

Kripa and Mueller will discuss their interdisciplinary projects across both practices, informed by their proximity to the U.S.-Mexico border. The presentation will be followed by discussion and audience Q&A moderated by the League’s executive director Jacob R. Moore.

Recent projects include:

• Ultraviole(n)t Exposures This ongoing research and fabrication project by POST, in collaboration with oral historians and activist groups in El Paso and Ciudad Juárez, catalogues histories of injustice and disinvestment in public space in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands.
• Spectral Designed as a protected public gathering space, this installation by AGENCY, commissioned by Exhibit Columbus, alters the thermal signatures of people visiting the space, mediating the public’s relationship with surveillance.
• Simulated Cities Database This ongoing geospatial database catalogues the architectural forms of over 500 urban warfare training sites, located through government contracts, congressional appropriations, military construction documents, and journalistic sources. 

Ersela Kripa is a professor and associate vice provost at Texas Tech University, where she is also the director of the Huckabee College of Architecture – El Paso, and director of projects at the research center POST (Project for Operative Spatial Technologies). Stephen Mueller is an associate professor at Texas Tech University and director of research at POST.

Kripa and Mueller’s awards include the Rome Prize in Architecture, the Architecture Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Emerging Voices award from The Architectural League of New York, and the New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, among others.

Their book, Fronts: Military Urbanisms and the Developing World, published by Applied Research + Design Publishing (AR+D) in 2019, compiles original urban research and analysis to reveal “the geography of codependence between the global security complex and urban morphologies of the developing world, which it increasingly incriminates,” in the firm’s own words.

Support

This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, and by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.